By Kevin Nance
Contributing Writer/Photographer

The title of painter Joyce Garner’s current exhibit at New Editions Gallery, “Narratives,” is well-chosen. Most of the lushly colored, often large-scale works here are clearly intended to tell — or rather imply — stories: about family gatherings and the interactions between people and, sometimes, pets; about encounters with nature, including the animal kingdom; about memory and the passage of time. The stories are neither linear nor complete, requiring a bit of participation on the part of the viewer to construct their meanings. Considered together, however, they build a densely populated world of incident, activity and color into which we can enter at will and be glad to visit.

The show’s monumental magnum opus, “Tulip Poplar” (above), is overstuffed with discrete, overlapping stories that may or may not add up to a novel. The oil painting’s sheer size (about 6 x 18 feet) is matched by its narrative density, with nearly every square inch of pictorial space stuffed with figures, trees, flowers, grass, water. In the background is a flowing river with boats, which feels at least art-historically related to the Seine in Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” (Garner’s bio describes her as a self-taught artist, but she clearly has learned a great deal from European modern art and its avatars, Gauguin, Picasso and Matisse in particular.) Two rabbits — one somewhat realistically rendered, the other rather ghostly — dash through an Edenic garden in a way that suggests the racing hare of Aesop’s fable; time is passing quickly but erratically. A naked figure in the left foreground seems fixed on the river, yearning for it, maybe drifting toward the bathers there, or are they having a baptism? Two furtive figures (Adam and Eve after eating a certain apple?) hide behind a tree, perhaps spying on another nude figure lost in an ecstatic reverie. Anchoring the painting, at the base of the foreground, is what at first looks like a corpse but upon closer inspection reveals itself as a pair of post-coital lovers. Love, sex, death, time and transfiguration: this myth-making painting has it all and then some. Do all these elements come together into a coherent whole? It’s a question that viewers must decide for themselves.

Slightly less ambitious, and perhaps more accessible, are the paintings centered on people seated at tables. Chief among these here is the raucous “Lazy Susan,” in which we find ourselves trying to piece together what’s happening in various corners of the room (if it is a room; it might also be outdoors). There are at least two couples on the right side, both perhaps a bit troubled, their expressions searching. Is the woman on the right, dancing with her dark lover, jealous of the seated couple? Is the upturned face of the other woman adoring? Fearful? Both? On the painting’s left half, three adults contend with rambunctious children and pets (those bunnies again!), while in the center, two older figures, a woman with a bowl of fruit in her lap and a man in a blue striped shirt, seem pensive, removed from the action, looking inward. Each figure is specific, up to a point; they’re at once clearly related but independent of one another, lost, to varying degrees, in their own thoughts — in short, a family.

Elsewhere, the gatherings are staged in colorful, well-appointed settings (the interiors in “In Laws,” “Kitchen Table” and “Wallpaper” owe debts to Vuillard, van Gogh and other post-Impressionists) that nonetheless crackle with tension. “In Laws,” the show’s most legible painting in terms of story, depicts an argument in progress between two women, with two male figures nervously hovering nearby and a third ducking behind the table (to pick up a fiddle? to get out of the line of fire?). In “Kitchen Table,” another fraught conversation plays out against an oddly distorted background that recalls the expressionist interiors of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” The point, I think, is that every conversation is, on some level, an argument, and that one or the other of the participants always has the upper hand.

This slightly foreboding music runs through several of the other paintings here, including “Dock,” in which a woman holding what might be a paintbrush (hmmm) is helped, precariously, into a small and wobbly boat — a trust exercise with a dubious outcome; “Waterfall,” in which a woman seems to be daydreaming of a river flowing past what might be a gravestone; and “Worried Woodpecker,” in which the bird of the title seems to be concerned by the great haul of fish being harvested from a river.

At least that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.