Earnest C. Merritt III
By Fred Camper
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The central object in Particular Road is a crow perched on a paintbrush, two elements that seem to recapitulate the painting’s formal dualism: the crow suggests flight, an escape from materiality, while the brush reminds us we’re looking at a painting. Similarly, at first the crow and paintbrush seem to be hovering above the road, but both their shadows indicate they’re on the ground. A tiny ladybug under one of the crow’s feet and a worm in the bird’s beak– like other details Merritt adds–not only remind us of nature’s living presence but inject some humor. There’s no real self-deprecating irony here, yet Merritt seems to acknowledge the overt romanticism of his little narratives of transformation.
Merritt, who was born in 1970 and has lived all his life in the Cleveland area, did traditional landscapes and still lifes when young, often painting with his father, a watercolorist. At a certain point, he told me, he realized that his work had become too much an exercise in literal depiction: “I became so interested in representing what I saw that I couldn’t just sit down and observe things anymore.” After graduating from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1993, he stopped painting entirely and concentrated on poetry; when he resumed making art, his works centered on text. Indeed, there’s a literary quality to a series of eight small watercolors here, “Various Observations of a Brick.” In each painting a strangely round-edged brick with three visible holes is almost anthropomorphized, as if it were the protagonist of a picaresque tale: it’s tossed about in space or has burning matches placed in its holes to warm it. Bringing the brick to life, Merritt reveals the connections he sees between the animate and inanimate, the material and the spiritual.
Another, darker piece includes both rough abstract brushwork that projects outward and thick lines where the paint has been partly scraped away. To this mix Lange adds several “objects,” among them a gray box partly outlined in white near the top. Thicker white lines that seem to wrap the box like ribbons create a three-dimensional illusion, as if suddenly this flat surface could be entered. Small triangles occur throughout the composition, always paired–black triangles hover just above green ones–introducing a different kind of depth.
