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.
