When she curtly states that she doesn’t paint much anymore, preferring drawing instead, the implication is that drawing is the less-prostituted medium. Painting is about turning tricks, in more ways than one if you take into account the medium’s long association with illusionism. Presumably, drawing is where something more intimate can happen. Then again, perhaps intimacy is not the issue. Henderson’s drawings are not effusive confessions. They are as staged as any painting could be. What they gain from the economy of the medium is the impulsivity and quick-wittedness of sharp-tongued stand-up comedy.

Nonetheless, for all their wackiness, Henderson’s drawings pack in a wealth of art historical references. Others have noted the connection between her cartoonish style and that of Philip Guston’s late work, but if Guston is the authorial daddy figure, Nancy Spero would seem to be the mommy. And the more distant James Ensor, the grand daddy, and Ralph Eugene Meatyard, perhaps, a great uncle. And let’s not forget the Goya of the “Capriccios.” Indeed, caprice would seem to be the overarching theme of Henderson’s body of graphic work, whose own capriciousness reflects the larger lunacy of a world whose modern pretensions only magnify the grotesqueness of the violent impulses whose grip remains as fast as when Goya decried the gulf between an incipient Enlightenment and the savagery of everyday life under the rule of the Bourbons.

Thus, in Henderson’s world, Wonder Woman makes a sad appearance as “Junkie;” a figure with an enormous schlong supports a tottering human pyramid in “Too Big to Fail;” a casting director pulls and twists the nose of a woman auditioning for the role of Pinocchio in Toronto; and dandies with whips coach dancing half-naked women like circus animals. Pretty much everyone is a clown of some sort, menacing or pathetic or both.

All these figures provide Henderson with endless occasions for gestural studies, to the point where in some instances she dispenses entirely with any suggestion of narrative and, as in “Red—11 Figures,” simply arranges figures in a rhythmical composition.

A number of the drawings here allude to the flooding of New Orleans without actually naming the city, and to the 1955 MGM musical hit, “Kismet,” which was set in a fantastical version of ancient Baghdad. The reference, presumably, is meant as oblique commentary on America’s worst military misadventure since the Vietnam War. Now that the ocean which in 2005 flooded the Gulf coast is itself being flooded with the noxious discharge from the blown-out BP underwater oil well, drawings like the Noah’s-Ark-conjuring “House/Flood,” done in tarry brown, possess an uncanny synchronicity.

In her third show at Rosamund Felsen, Henderson fills the gallery with oil stick drawings and a small selection of tabletop sculptures fashioned of wax, paper, wire, paint and tar. There is much continuity between her new and earlier work but also a bit of change - a firmer sense of place in some of the drawings, an expanded use of materials (more touches of color; and diluted tones complementing the linear forms, acting as off-register or shadows). As ever, Henderson's work has a searing immediacy. It seems simple - I just a few characters, roughly outlined, on each sheet - but its implications and interpretations ripple outward indefinitely.

Verbal or visual threads tie some of the images to familiar events or subjects in the news. It's hard to see any of Henderson's hooded figures without recalling the disclosures about Abu Ghraib, and from there, thinking about torture in general, perpetrators, victims, anonymity and accountability. The phrase "Too Big to Fail" has become shorthand for any number of collapsible giants of industry. Henderson uses it to title a spot-on spoof of testosterone-driven hubris: a scene of four men in acrobatic balance, one standing on the ground and supporting the other three, perched on his thighs and shoulders. What stabilizes the whole? The central figure's enormous penis, extending from his fly to the ground like the third leg of a tripod.

Phalluses make another appearance in the equally satirical "Small Celebrants and the Emergence of a New Poly-phallic God," an image your imagination might be able to conjure, but only if you leave it open to both the outlandish and the mythic, for this new deity is not only multiply endowed in the region you'd expect, but also shares a trait with Samson. His hair is an unusual source of strength. Yeah. Those aren't dreadlocks.

Ring leaders and performers of all sorts cavort across Henderson's pages in strange, incongruous combinations: two dancing showgirls strut their stuff next to a doctor prepped for surgery; a man in tails, poised like a lion tamer with whip in hand, faces us while behind him lies a woman with hands fat as boxing gloves and her legs spread open wide. The world of these drawings is a weird, wicked circus, where private acts of amusement double as public forms of entertainment, and both take on the air of less benign scenarios, power plays involving subjugation and violence.

The pressure of Henderson's line on the page bespeaks a desperation to understand why we are the way we are, why we do the things we do; the line's path is at once committed and halting, bold and uneasy. Her work is far less literal than that of Hogarth, Daumier, Goya or Golub, but it feels driven by the same compulsion to expose vice, injustice, tragedy, vanity. Her "Self Portrait With Family and Friends and Jesus Suffering Christ" brings to mind the barbed humor and relentless social critique of Ensor.

With these new oil stick drawings, figures are finding themselves shadowed by stains and smudges, visually abstracted and isolated even as they, “ begin to function as a narrative element in themselves,” as Henderson herself suggests. Slashes of color offer what may be redemption, or futile repentance.

Surprising, because Henderson’s line carries no aggression. Laid down in densely pigmented oil stick, it has a nervous urgency. It moves in jerks and halts, driven through bare white space by raw, uncalculated energy.

The drawings – more than 40 of them – are reason enough for a visit to Henderson’s first solo show in L.A., at Rosamund Felsen, but the Bay Area artist is also a sculptor, and her work in paper pulp, tar, wire and wax is just as strangely compelling.

Violence seeps through Henderson’s work like poisoned groundwater. There are images of blatant threat – one figure holding a gun to the head of another – and images of fear – a lone figure huddling beneath a folding table. And throughout, there are drawings of that arena of sanctioned violence, the military, that exude unease.

Soldiers march in stiff-legged goose step. Others, walking in sloppy formation, carry rifles against their bare chests. In one drawing, Henderson renders herself in military garb, her figure repeated four times as if constituting her own small brigade. The self-portrait is unusual for two reasons: It is drawn in ocher while the rest are drawn in black or blue; and its subject has an ordinary, exposed human head. In nearly all of the drawings, the figures (who appear male) are masked or hooded.

Benign costumed play? Not likely. References to the military, to latent violence and armed confrontation bring to mind darker purposes for the concealment, something to do with shame and self-protection, detachment from deeds done. The mind leaps to hooded knights of the KKK and the dehumanized torture victims at Abu Ghraib. And yet Henderson’s masks and hoods are not ominous in themselves. They’re more cartoonish. They sport stumpy rabbit ears, eyes too big and round and mouths overfilled with teeth. They have a bit of the abject about them, like Mike Kelley’s stuffed animals.

This oscillation between innocence and danger, childlike simplicity and innate human brutality electrifies Henderson’s drawings. Even those with tender subjects, such as a figure stroking a lamb, have a disturbing edge. The figure’s hands extend like dumb paddles, his fingers too fat and long, and his hood’s googly eyes registering an un-evolved blankness. In Henderson’s BB-like issue, there is something of the toy but definitely also something of the weapon.

Her sculptures exude a similar crude, primal energy. One hundred small bird heads look as if they were worried into being by nervous fingers. Black as the tar they’re made out of, the little faces (some no bigger around than a thumbprint) poke out from one long wall, beaks gaping, distended or bent. They are to birds what the drawn hooded figures are to humans: caricatures that capture something of the essence of the beast.

Many of the sculpted figures are injured, presumably war victims, their wounds wrapped in thin strips of white fabric. One tabletop figure hovers on crutches, each hand bandaged, and his chest cut off abruptly beneath the neck and wrapped like a severed stump. The crutches support a bare trace of a man, damaged and incomplete, topped by an uncomprehending rabbit head.

The attenuated lines of Henderson’s sculptures recall the forms of Giacometti, but mostly they resonate with their own starkly powerful drawings, those blunt scrawlings, sketchy indictments, unsettling war-time laments.

The upcoming exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery will be:

Kathleen Henderson

February 10 – March 10, 2007

A shove, a shrug, a kiss, a kick, a nod, a handshake, these are the starting places. Winners and losers stand in a row and embrace and grope and strangle. The smallest of gestures can intimate the greatest of transgression. Stupidity, complicity, arrogance and greed offer up a small joke. Her part is to pay homage to the folly of it all.

In making art, one has to offer up two things: something you know and something you don’t. Drawing is the most direct way of locating that moment of the unpredictable, sometimes unacceptable, place of recognition. Moving so quickly with limited means (a line on a page) it’s easier, perhaps, to be brave, or maybe it’s harder to stop. Presently, the public and private foibles of the corporate class suggest innumerable possibilities. And like the mighty Meatloaf once said, “if it’s not funny, then it’s just not funny anymore.”

If you lean into Kathleen Henderson’s voice you can hear the echo of both her mother’s Gaelic and her father’s Boston Irish. From this Irish family and community Kathleen has taken both the pragmatic and can-do aspects of her roots and a large dose of mythological faeries, eccentric and deeply held beliefs, a treasure trove of stories, and most noticeably a deep well of creativity and imagination. If you take the time to pause even briefly in front of her work, you will also see her substantial understanding and training in the formal aspects of art. She has been drawing her whole life and has honed both her imagination and training with a ferocity that does not falter. Upon this foundation she has amassed the years of teaching in New York, working in Italy restoring frescoes, and painting backdrops for theater, film and opera. She has been recognized for both her innate talent and prodigious productivity in shows in Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Please join us for the artist’s reception on Sat. February 10, 2007 from 5-7pm.

Gallery hours are 10-5:30, Tuesday-Saturday.

For more information please contact Edward Sterr

Since the days of Constable and Turner, painters have found in skies pretexts for the study of light and display of color and a ready symbol of nature de-deified.

Like Ruscha's skies, Goode's evoke the generic visuals of billboards or movie titles as much as the real firmament. He makes the irony plain in early works such as "Cloudphoto Triptych" (1969). But Goode has none of Ruscha's quizzical play with words or with skies as projections of mental space.

The most persuasive painting on view, "Acid Digestion (Cause & Effect Series CEp 87) (2000), which looks rained-on, is so nearly abstract that it encourages a reading of Goode's early cloud pieces as L.A. rejoinders to the color field painting celebrated in New York in the mid-'60s.

Anyone who knows the late drawings of Philip Guston will inevitably think of them when looking at the work of Kathleen Henderson at Wirtz.

Whereas some of Guston's figures wear -- or are -- Ku Klux Klan hoods, Henderson's sport Mexican wrestlers' masks or baggy animal heads. The topical economy of Guston's symbolism being unavailable now, Henderson evokes the general fact of social disguises so fervently embraced that they end up wearing their wearers.

Henderson falters when she takes tableaux from famous photographs, such as the one of Muhammad Ali (then known as Cassius Clay) taunting the felled Sonny Liston.

But her stuttering oil-stick lines have a tightly sprung quality that makes the drawings forceful and strange. Perhaps they baffle her as much as anyone.

In "Business" (2002), four figures gab at each other through masks, as if at cross-purposes, while their limbs nearly meld into a single tentacled entity.

Hyewon Yoon’s small, square paintings of belly buttons are certainly quiet, with their subtle, mottled flesh tones, but her subject ultimately comes across as quite daring, largely because of the obvious care and attention that she lavishes on this highly individual, somewhat intimate, but not quite erogenous zone. Yoon’s other frequent subjects are nipples and anuses: all private parts and all portals, in a sense, for fluids and secretions, nutrients and wastes.

The belly button in particular also has strong maternal associations. There isn’t any discernible theme to this show, but a maternal or domestic view does seem to characterize much of the work. Marie Van Elder prints her wide-eyed daughters, for instance, and Chris Thorson paints her feminine bedroom. Laura Ball’s paintings and drawings show young girls at play. Captured as if in a time-lapse photograph, they seem almost intent on hurting each other, with twisted faces and arms flung out angrily.

Kathleen Henderson contributes a selection of drawings and sculptures of rabbits. Her sculptures are shriveled and black, like pieces of charcoal or victims of a horrible fire. Her black-and-white line drawings show similarly wizened animal characters in more detail, in a style reminiscent of political cartoons. They engage in strange interactions, such as holding an ass, or holding guns on each other, sometimes wearing masks or suits. Seemingly an attack on the artifices of politics, medicine, business, the street – but mysterious and nonspecific – Henderson’s satire comes off more as an all – encompassing invocation against the evils of the world at large. Her sculptures in particular are like voodoo totems to put in your pocket and fondle late at night.

Joshua Pieper’s drawings are unpretentious and humorously subtle, recalling the work of such other local artists as Simon Evans and Tucker Nichols. Pieper works in pen and ink, and occasionally paint, on plain, white, unframed pieces of paper. Objects Drawn with Fangs, for instance, is just that: a paint roller, a screwdriver, a traffic cone, and a few dozen other items drawn in simple black lines, in a neat and organized grid, each with a set of small fangs attached. Peiper’s artworks might seem to come straight from the artist’s head, but at the same time they are clearly very carefully wrought. The deliberateness and focus behind his musings gives them their disingenuous charm.

The only artist in the show who works in an abstract mode is Laura Paulini, and even in her case, the titles of her paintings refer to the real-world instruments of their making: Chopstick, Dental Pick or Cardboard. Each canvas is the product of a single sitting. Using a pointed object, Paulini carefully and patiently stipples the surface of a swath of modified oil paint. While it might seem a bit obsessive at first, her process is much more an exercise in not-controlling, but rather allowing a rhythmic, methodical, unconscious process to take over the body.

Jason Mortara’s Job Site is also noteworthy: on of a series of five “proposals” for yet-to-be-funded artworks, constructed in miniature on a pedestal. The other featured artists were Kent Alexander, who paints self-portraits, and Christopher Peterson, who contributes examples of his graphic design work and paintings in the American realist tradition.