Girl Explorer

The name of Evelyn Statsinger, 26, is becoming an honored one among American abstractionists. Last week her big, pristine drawings were on view both at Chicago's Frumkin Gallery and at Manhattan's Whitney Museum, where her one entry in the Whitney's annual roundup of contemporary watercolors, drawings and sculpture overshadowed most of the 180 other exhibits. Its subject matter was simply a series of unrecognizable, vaguely amoebic shapes. What made the drawing stand out was its haunting mood of calm and mystery, like a sky hung with changing clouds.

Artist Statsinger's drawings are no more unusual than the artist herself. Pretty, proud and painfully shy, she supports herself by working on a secret project at Chicago's Institute for Nuclear Studies. The job has given her a new respect for science, she says, because "these scientists don't know what they'll find next. One problem raises another, and they just keep exploring. That's the artist's way too, or mine at least."

Animals on the Mantel. The apartment where Artist Statsinger conducts her own explorations, near Chicago's crime-blighted Midway, is painted dead white. The low, simple furniture is her own handiwork, and her clothes closet is crammed with carpentry tools. Ranged along the hearth and mantel are geometric little "animals" which she makes of papier-mache and wire for relaxation.

From the start, Statsinger's explorations were in odd techniques. As a student, she made hundreds of "photograms" by arranging bits of string and other objects on sheets of film, exposing the film to the light, and printing the abstract result. She also learned the ancient craft of designing batik, the stuff sarongs are made of. Echoes of the South Seas. The Stat-singer drawings on exhibition last week seemed as relaxed in composition as her "photograms" had been, and the floating shapes that filled them echoed, abstractly, carved idols and amulets of the South Seas. But the atmosphere of an ephemeral, voodoo-haunted world which her art creates is achieved only by the greatest precision and patience.

She has spent as much as six months on a single drawing, plying pen & ink as minutely as an embroiderer does needle and thread. By including endless details in her early works, she achieved great mastery of textural effects. Her most recent drawings are done in half the time and are even more effective. Now she can make a single smudge of graphite do what required 100 pen strokes a couple of years ago. But her major works still resemble tapestries as much as anything; they are not easy to place in a specific tradition.

"What difference does it make," Stat-singer asks, "what school you work in? Who cares if you do something new or obsolete? Who cares if it lasts? I haven't explored enough to know if I'm in any tradition at all. I only know I'm alive today."

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