Wendy Jane Bantam serves up a brilliant mixture of color

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L. KENTWOLGAMOTTCOLUMN

I've been writing about Wendy Jane Bantam's paintings since 1999 and, in doing so, have chronicled the development of a promising young artist who has come fully into her own with "Tall Tales from a Tinkertoy Heart,"her current exhibition at Kiechel Fine Art.

Always prolific, Bantam produced more than 30 large paintings for the show, which fills the gallery with an explosion of color - an almost overwhelming effect that hasn't occurred in any of her previous exhibitions that I've seen. That trademark brilliant mixture of colors, combined on her palette and layered on to canvases with a palette knife, works perfectly in tandem with imagery that is lifted from dreams and taken from life and given hyper-reality.

The most obvious dreamlike images are "Little Man and Big Bird," which depicts a tiny figure hanging onto the back of a bird that is flying across the canvas above a snake crawling in the opposite direction toward a boat. Such images are also in "Take Me With You," which repeats the same flying imagery, this time with a smaller figure grasping onto a veiled adult swooping downward toward the viewer.

A series of fantasy pictures also is rooted in similar sensibility with a rabbit swinging on a flying trapeze with dogs on tightropes against a cityscape in "Lost Rabbit at the Circus of the Lost Rabbit"; a scale tipped to favor one large heart against multiple smaller hearts with small creatures scoring the event like a gymnastics meet in "Judge's Score: Love More"; and a foxlike creature driving a car around a castle with an entrance marked "Dungeon" and "For Sale" signs in the yard in "Real Estate Agent at the Play Family Castle."

The castle is one of Bantam's brilliantly imagined, childlike views of architecture that include "Swingsets at the Coliseum,"in which a simplistic version of the famous Rome landmark sits on one of her checkerboard patterns, the canvas bisected by a blue/white/green combination color field on the left and a red/orange/yellow combination on the right.

She also captures some Lincoln landmarks with three smaller paintings that also display her quirky sense of humor. They're "Sub Zero at the Topper Popper," "Zesto Zesto," in which ducks frolic in the parking lot in front of the ice cream shop, and "Spies at Tastee Inn & Out," where rabbits surround the building and one is on the roof holding binoculars.

And there are also more ordinary dwellings, given Bantam's extraordinary spin, such as "Queen Palm on Pagosa Street," a hyper-real picture of a house that is covered with buttery layers of paint.

Bantam then goes in the house for interior views, such as the ornately patterned "Over the Kitchen Table," and pictures that depict pets, another ongoing theme in her work. In "Chew Toy, " for example, a dog sits on a chair with toys and a little chicken, an odd element that complements the equally unusual purple-and-yellow color scheme.

"Chew Toy" also illustrates two continuing elements in Bantam's paintings.First, her colors don't necessarily correspond to reality. Instead, for example, the light blue road of "Blue Road" traverses yellow ground. Second, her renderings of objects and figures, whether animals or people, are exaggerated and simple and certainly not tightly done "accurate" renderings.

But that almost crude drawing style is deliberately naive.That's given away by the primitive mask that hints at Picasso that dominates the lower right corner of "Paris Hilton," a "portrait" of the celebrity party girl that is contained in the scratching of her name on the fuselage of a rocket in the painting's deep background.

That use of text, generally a word or two or a small phrase, is a new feature which is emerging in Bantam's work.The words, sometimes cryptic, sometimes enigmatic, are cut into the thickly layered paint with a nail or similar tool and give the pictures a cartoonish, entertaining spin. But the words never detract from the image and tend to heighten their effect, often adding a new level of contemplation to the images.

All of the elements that are found in Bantam's larger works also can be seen in the two dozen or so small works that fill one of the gallery walls. The 5-by-5-inch or 4- by-4 inch paintings work like pieces of the larger pictures.But they also stand on their own and because of their size, they're charming and instantly accessible.

Classifying Bantam is as difficult as precisely determining the meaning of her paintings.She's clearly a colorist and works with reality and the symbols she takes from her dreams and the broader culture.But she's also concerned with issues of paint handling and surface that have as much to do with abstraction as they do the paintings' subject matter.

Perhaps the painting that best sums up the exhibition is "Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain," a piece in which the looming heart-shaped face operated by the Oz-like magician dominates the canvas, while a line is titled "thread to off-stage attendant."

In that piece, Bantam's theatricality, playfulness, wit, intelligence and painting skill are made obvious. But it would be hard to miss those qualities in the other pieces in the best show from one of Lincoln's best painters.

"Tall Tales from a Tinkertoy Heart" is on view at Kiechel Fine Art, 5733 S. 34th St. Suite 300 in Williamsburg Village through March 31. Don't miss it.

Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or at kwolgamott@;journalstar.com.