Galleries: Frank Bramblett, going where he chooses

Retrospectives generally reveal the trajectory of an artist's career as a horizontal path with a few zigs and zags here and there and a recognizable "signature" style settling in at some point, usually when the artist is in his or her 30s, occasionally much earlier or later.

The career of Frank Bramblett, on the other hand, whose retrospective at the Woodmere Art Museum, "Frank Bramblett: No Intention," offers four decades of his art, follows no such pattern. Looking at the stylistic shifts in his work from 1968 to the present, it's obvious that his painting has developed largely through curiosity rather than any set agendas. He's recognized the possibilities offered by chance occurrences and followed his intuitions. Apparently, even the places he's lived and worked - an 18th-century farmhouse in Lansdale, a loft in Old City, a barn next to his house in Plymouth Meeting - have strongly influenced his work. The exhibition also never loses sight of the fact that Bramblett, for all his sophistication, is still the impressionable youngster from Wedowee, Ala.

As sometimes happens, an early work can seem eerily prescient.

A surreal-looking seascape painted on a shaped canvas, Image Scape, made in 1968 when Bramblett was a student at the University of Georgia (and before he received his master of fine arts degree at the Yale School of Art), contains a variety of elements common to his later works. It's painted in pinks and blues, colors that reappear in his paintings even as they change in other ways; it has a foreground made up of round pink forms surrounded by blue, not unlike the pink forms surrounded by blue that eventually make up an entire large abstract painting in 1999, titled Téte-a-Téte.

By 1973, the year after he begins what will become a 38-year stint as a painting professor at Temple University's Tyler School of Art, Bramblett has launched his own form of Process Art, pouring paint into plywood and cardboard frames and letting it dry. A few years later, he's painting on unstretched canvases and develops an unconventional method to mount the stiffened canvases to stretchers, freezing them outdoors in the snow, then snapping the edges off the paintings to make them fit the stretchers. He's started using a blowtorch to bend edges and manipulate corners of works, the end result being a painting such as Highboy (1973), a steeply vertical brown and dark-red painting that suggests an abstraction of a tall chest of drawers.

Bramblett arrived at his next body of work purely by chance, noticing that a board that he had been using to scrape excess paint off a palette knife had itself morphed into a painting. That realization led to a series of elegant paintings on two-foot-long sections of various woods. He based his paint colors on colors he saw in the woods and applied the paint in the width of a diagonal from one corner to the other, giving the works a multifaceted appearance.

The most stylistically - seemingly almost unprecedented - change in Bramblett's oeuvre comes in 1982. Simultaneously chronicling his knowledge of art history and making hundreds of tiny drawings that he says came from "an inventory in my head that I've seen in newspapers and other sources," he sets to work on a monumental, multi-panel painting whose images make reference to Matisse, Picasso, rock music, and the assassination of John Lennon - among other things - and employing such materials as floor tile, silicon rubber, mirror, glass, and enamel paint. Oh No, Yoko! Where What Where is an encyclopedic, remarkable work and the star of this show, even considering Bramblett's fluency with materials.

The installation of this exhibition does not do Bramblett's works of the later 1980s through the 1990s any favor by placing them so close together. In this period, he devotes himself to large abstract paintings, almost all of the same dimensions and made up of repeated lines and forms. Dots, continuous maze-like lines, and even real 25-cent pieces populate these works made with paint, encaustic, graphite and a range of other materials. He also produces a multitude of very small, endearingly quirky abstract works on panels incorporating his own photographs. There are too many of both of these bodies of work in his show. An enormous painting such as Endurance (1992), which juxtaposes a blown-up version of a section of Bramblett's grandmother's wrinkled skin next to his own vastly enlarged fingerprint, should not have had to share a wall with two other similarly sized paintings. Likewise, his sublime, mostly black Pietra Dura (1998), depicting an allover composition of doodle-like lines made with acrylic paint, charcoal powder, marble dust, and graphite, could have had a wall to itself. One cluster of the small works with snapshots would have sufficed.

Wisely, though, Bramblett - also a lovely writer - seems to have had a large hand in the text labels accompanying each work. Next to a painting titled Normally Peculiar (2001) is his memory of a visit back to Wedowee, confiding to the father of his best friend that he recalled the behaviors of his fellow townspeople as curious. "Doctor Israel smiled and said, 'Frank, what you need to understand is that the people in Wedowee are just normally peculiar. The rest of the world tries to conform to be alike and be liked.' After a pause, he said, 'I prefer when people are normally peculiar.' "

Last year, Bramblett put together a series of drawings, "Accomplished," consisting of his obsessively written "to-do" lists, each one's completed chores rigorously inked out with markers in an assortment of Lifesaver colors. It's an insight into his mind, his way of working, and his keen sense of humor.

Frank Bramblett: No Intention

Through June 21 at Woodmere Art Museum, 9201 Germantown Ave.

Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays to Thursdays and Sundays; 10 a.m. to 8:45 p.m. Fridays; 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays,

Admission: $10; 55 and over, $7; children and students, free.

Information: 215-247-0476, woodmereartmuseum.orgEndText