In the Fivesparks gallery, 15 acrylic paintings wrap around the far end of the room. They are all the same medium size and square shape, and the bold reds, oranges, and yellows carry throughout the works. An animal, fish, or bird appears in each, sometimes with a shamanistic figure—a liaison between the spiritual and human worlds. They evoke connections to Native American spirit animals, Greek nature myths, Biblical stories, figures from folklore. They are old souls. These are the work of Mardie Luppold, a Shirley artist in her late 80s, who did this group of paintings over the past five years. The exhibit is extended through May 24.
The show is titled “Archetypes: Making the Invisible, Visible.” In an artist statement, Luppold writes that these paintings are her responses to some place, experience, or being that triggers an emotion that connects to something deep in the collective unconscious, “what came to me from the well.” She says we all have archetypes, or kachinas—ancient messengers—“deep in the roots of the mind.”
In a conversation with Luppold at Fivesparks, she said this is the most beautiful gallery she’s been in—the high ceiling, the lighting, the space. She is used to hanging her own show, and when she saw what board member Mamie Wytrwal and Executive Director AnaMaria Nanra had done, saw all her paintings hanging together for the first time, she was stunned. “I love the way they arranged it.”
A life of art
Luppold started doing art when she was 2½ years old, and she’s never stopped. Her parents fostered her art, even in the chaotic household in Lowell with nine children (she was the oldest), a grandmother, and a couple of Great Danes. Her father worked as a printer, and he would bring her large rolls of paper to draw on. She drew every day when she came home from school, not her favorite thing, and told her father when she needed a new roll. Every Saturday she went to art lessons at the Whistler House Museum of Art in Lowell.
She was accepted at Rhode Island School of Design, but thinking she might be limited to fashion design, she turned it down. She went instead to Wheaton College, where a course in art history “knocked my socks off,” and transferred to Boston University after two years. She took night classes at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Later, when her three children were all in school, she went to UMass to pursue a master’s degree in painting and color printmaking.
A particular professor with whom she did an independent study affected both Luppold’s philosophy and her work ethic. He instructed her to do five paintings of a certain size. He would critique them and tell her to pick one and do three large versions of it. Then pick one and do smallerversions. The process taught her not to just do one painting and let it become “precious” to her, but to “do the work,” go deeper and deeper to “bypass the personal and get at the collective subconscious.”
Layers of meaning
The current exhibit includes some earlier portraits and still life paintings, the latter from her 10 years’ focus on Cezanne. The images in the most recent body of work are from a coalescence of Native American teachings, which have always interested Luppold, Jungian theory, and objects from Neolithic and Paleolithic excavations, which “give us some understanding of what life was like, who we were—and still are; these are the seeds sown in my imagination that prompted this imagery.”
Each painting has layers of interpretation. One can look at “Shaman Kachina White Buffalo” and appreciate it for the colorful headdress of the Native American figure and the blending of the human with the rare white buffalo. Taking “shaman” and “kachina” into account, one sees it as a spiritual messenger heralding a beneficial outcome. In Pueblo religion, the woman buffalo would come at a time of difficult purging followed by triumph. The story behind the painting offers another dimension. Luppold was driving across North Dakota, over stretches of treeless landscape. On a small rise, she spotted a herd of dark buffalo and, slightly apart from them, a large rock. When the rock rose up, she recognized it was a rare white buffalo and thought of the message of the kachina and its applicability to today’s world.
“Snowy Owl” by Mardie Luppold. (Courtesy photo)
Wild wisdom
She explained the depth of feeling for her subjects by describing a movie in which a man is in pursuit of learning all he can about the Arctic wolf. An Inuit woman, observing his intensity, tells him, “The wolf has taken a bite of your heart.” Luppold identified with this feeling, particularly in her white bear painting. She had heard on a podcast the story of a Himalayan white bear that was in a circus for 10 years and then locked away in a dark shed for years before it was discovered in Ukraine and released. Its growth had been stunted, and it was kept apart from other bears because of its small size. “The bear took a bite of my heart,” said Luppold. She painted it as it must have looked when released and saw blue sky for the first time since its captivity.
An article in National Geographic showed the fossil of a coelacanth, a supposedly extinct fish with limb-like fins that walks on the bottom of the ocean, and, Luppold said, “It did something to me.” She held that image for 50 years. When she read that a fisherman in Madagascar had caught a coelacanth, she was deeply moved. The center painting on the back wall shows a male coelacanth, blue, and a female full of eggs. Not extinct at all.
A whale breeching amid a waterfall of shimmering krill, its one eye making contact with the viewer’s; Mother Earth, Demeter, and Persephone’s return from Hades; the white owl figure, its wings spread wide, its head surrounded in an iridescent glow; the vertical serpent with ancestral script and signs signifying the struggle for wisdom—all these and others stir in the viewer an awareness of our connection to some deep past in which we are connected to these ancient symbols.
Luppold said she wants her paintings to have an impact. If one person is “filled up” by one painting, she will have achieved that. “Perhaps we can still reach this place of wild wisdom, the vein of gold of humanity where imagination and creative power live.”
