Joan Erbe, at 84, still wields a mean piece of graphite. Inspired by the art hanging in a sunny space at the Edward A. Myerberg Senior Center in a Northwest Baltimore neighborhood, she casually sketches an odd, square, quizzical little face on a corner of white table paper.
She limits herself to drawing these days because she longer feels strong enough to push her arm across a canvas. But the spark is still there.
She shows off her gnarled hands. "I used to think when my hand went, the art would go too," she says. Then she smiles. "It hasn't."
On a warm, bright Wednesday in February, it's time for "Painting With Joan Erbe," a two-hour studio class with "The Grand Duchess of Baltimore Painting." Petite and preternaturally alert, Erbe casts a playful spell even when she's sitting still. (Her folded wheelchair rests against a wall.) Her students are as keen as X-Acto knives. Some have studied with her for years — and followed her work for decades. They're affectionate toward Erbe and attentive to her every gesture as they lay out tools on the desks that square the room and get cracking on portraits, landscapes and abstractions.
Highly skilled themselves, they've come to perfect their craft with someone who has created wildly original art since childhood. Erbe's paintings, drawings, etchings, collagraphs, sculptures and jewelry flesh out an antic vision of the human — and animal — kingdoms.
In Erbe's oeuvre, a bearded lady trips the light fantastic with a man-beast who looks like a dancing bear (except for the pig's snout). In a recent drawing, a winged man in a sad clown's mask kisses Erbe's version of a mermaid — a fish top and human bottom.
No wonder the Fleckenstein Gallery in Hampden dubbed its tribute show, running at least through the end of March, "Joan Erbe's Characters and Curiosities." The art on view encompasses over a half-century of Erbe's divine madness (some prints of Erbe's etchings date from the 1950s). It takes you on euphoric, funny, imaginative flights in oil, watercolor, and pencil.
But Erbe's acrylic paintings, with their almost Day-Glo colors and sure, vibrant, unpredictable lines, dominate the show and give it heat. Throughout this cold winter, gallery owner Terrie Fleckenstein says, customers would open her door and stop dead in their tracks when they saw the art at the top of the stairs. "They didn't need help climbing the steps," Fleckenstein says. "They were just stunned by the beauty of it."
As her class concentrates on forms taking shape on easels and desk tops, Erbe studies a pin she made decades ago. It boasts two human faces — one with a big clown's ruffle and another, smaller face, with pointy ears — side by side over a thin black bug. "I love bugs!" Erbe exclaims. How about the humans? Are they pals? Parent and child? The artist gives a look of sweet, comical pity. "They're just faces," she says with a laugh. "Both of them could be clowns. Some people complain I have too many circus pictures."
The circus is as central to Erbe's vision as it was to poet e. e. cumming's when he wrote, "Damn everything but the circus! ...damn everything that is grim, dull, motionless, unrisking, inward turning, damn everything that won't get into the circle, that won't enjoy, that won't throw its heart into the tension, surprise, fear and delight of the circus, the round world, the full existence."
The round world, the full existence, the surprise, fear and delight of an unpredictable environment — as well as pure, unadulterated fun — are central to Erbe's vision. Nothing human — or animal — is alien to her. "I didn't go to the circus," Erbe explains, as her class burrows into their art. "I went to the sideshows that came along with the circus. I loved the freaks. My father was a coffee salesman and got around town a lot. He knew a lot of freaks."
Her favorite was Johnny Eck, "the one who lived in Baltimore. He didn't have anything below the waist — no legs. … He was an artist, too. He painted window screens, and he was good at it. He painted wishing wells, birds in the sky, funny little things. He was fun. He was in that movie, 'Freaks.' I really enjoyed that."
"Freaks," which came out when Erbe was 8, in 1934, contains all the classic midway figures that pop up in her paintings and drawings. Erbe sees them as valiant and inventive — not merely marginal or eccentric.
Rebecca Hoffberger, founder of the American Visionary Art Museum, says, "Joan was using such diverse media long before anyone else." She'd clean turkey carcasses to get at "their long, beautiful bones." Erbe's buddy Elsie Fergusson, owner of the Mount Washington boutique Something Else, loved the way Erbe fashioned heads from antique hat-blocks: "She painted them with faces and put in teeth and eyes."
Erbe thinks her ingenuity came from the happy childhood she had growing up in 1930s Baltimore.
She even looks back fondly on the way "my father would put pieces of cardboard in the soles of my shoes so my feet wouldn't get wet." She lets out an uncharacteristic sigh. "I never thought we'd go through times like that again. But I think in a way it taught me to be an artist. Somehow or other, you had to do something, invent something. It was enjoyable. Like the little guy who didn't have legs — everyone had their ideas."
Erbe believes the source of art is mysterious and internal. I ask her where her eye-popping acrylic palette came from. She turns her arm into an arrow and shoots it from her heart into the air — and even mimes a "whoosh!" This marrow-deep connection to color, and her ever-expanding grasp of form and movement, buoyed her during years of struggle.
Erbe married young and had two daughters, Randy and Cee Cee. "But I kept with the art and never stopped. The [Maryland] Institute [College of Art] may not know it, but they let me go there for free. They had all these night classes. They got used to seeing me there."
When people expressed doubt that she could persist with her art, it only stiffened her resolve. She took a job dressing mannequins in the windows at Stewart's department store.
She met her second husband, George Udel, at a double bill at St. John's College in Annapolis. "We saw the three — you know, the ones that are never going out of style — the Marx Brothers! I saw George going across the floor like one of the Marx Brothers. And I thought, 'What a silly man!'"
They married and had a son, Jack. Udell became a bulwark of Baltimore's film community, co-founding the Baltimore Film Forum (a precursor to the Maryland Film Festival) and Cinema Sundays. He also became her agent and manager.
"He really encouraged my art. And he sure made it easier for me to put out all that stuff." (Udel died in 1999; Erbe now lives with her daughter Randy.)
Meanwhile, her students consult each other on their brush strokes. "They will come over when they need me," Erbe says. And they do, responding with instant comprehension and gratitude to a master teacher's succinct counsel.
Suzan Rouse hands her a photo of a sculpted head, done from a live model at another studio. "I wanted to show you how well clay takes acrylic," Erbe says, "but I wouldn't use it on that one — just use it when you have some design for it."
Erbe advises Sandy Butzow, a talented portraitist, not to overemphasize a subject's wide mouth. Betsy Smith, a gifted landscape artist, positions her rendering of a rural expanse right in front of Erbe, who thinks "there's a wonderful orange to it," but suggests cropping the foreground. M.K. Dilli, who does striking paintings of very toothy faces (and also displays work at the Fleckenstein), comes out of her inspection unscathed.
Roger Ebert, who hung out with Erbe and Udel "long ago" at the Telluride Film Festival, recalled her being "so warm and sunny — and so generous with her work. I have an interfolded series of her drawings framed." Hoffberger, who first gave her the "grand duchess" title, remembered thinking, when she met Erbe, "I have never seen lovelier eyes in a human being — they're gray ghost eyes."
Those otherworldly eyes still sparkle as she takes in the output of the students she calls "buddies."
"I tell them as much as I know — anything I've learned. What am I going to do? Hide it?"
If you go
Joan Erbe's "Characters & Curiosities" continues at the Fleckenstein Gallery, 3316 Keswick Road, at least through the end of the month. Hours are 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, noon-5 p.m. Saturdays and by appointment. Information: 410-366-3669 or go to http://www.fleckensteingallery.com..