Barbara Rogers is not ashamed of making beautiful paintings.

She paints “to evoke the sublime, to reaffirm the existence of
beauty and the critical importance of cherishing the earth,” she writes
in a statement for her show at Azora Gallery.

On a mini art tour of the foothills in gorgeous spring weather, I
found the gallery filled with her 10 large oils on canvas and three
small paintings, all of them sleek and glistening. Delicately painted
natural elements float over shimmering swathes of color. Seed pods,
leaves, webs and latticeworks trace their tendrils over ambiguous
geometric spaces that suggest architecture or gardens or even infinity.
The colors are as lovely and serene as the canary-yellow palo verdes
blooming outdoors on Orange Grove Road: sunshine yellow, sky blue,
earth green, terra cotta.

A delicious rusty orange occupies the central panel of the gigantic
triptych “Spice Garden,” 11 feet across and 6 feet high. Sage green
takes up the two side segments, interrupted here and there by a
vertical stripe of that spicy orange. The background paint is layered
and glossy, not exactly thick, but textured. Puffballs and pods from
the garden are like painted drawings drifting across this
meditation-scape.

A retired professor of art at the UA, Rogers has shown her work over
the years around the United States and in Korea, Germany and the United
Arab Emirates. She has a master’s degree in painting from the
University of California at Berkeley, but Richard Diebenkorn was one of
her teachers earlier at the San Francisco Art Institute. Diebenkorn,
the quintessential California painter of light, fractured his canvases
into geometric bands of color.

Rogers’ work likewise is heavily inspired by place, particularly her
frequent travels—her most recent trip was to India, and some
Indian design patterns show up in a few smaller works. But unlike
Deibenkorn, Rogers never paints the physical reality of the place. Her
geometries, most of them vertical bands, distill a place into pure
color.

The artist has also been experimenting with encaustic—colored
wax—in the busy two years since she retired from the UA. The
“Improvisation” series thickly embeds the encaustic with the oil on
panel, pink-orange in no. 2, mint green and black in no. 3. Rogers’
fondness for the vertical comes out in these jazzy pieces, too. All of
them are organized around straight up-and-down bands, each with spirals
curling out, either leaves or musical notes.

Azora is a newish art outpost in the foothills, showing contemporary
work at Campbell Avenue and Skyline Drive in the ghastly faux-Mexican
plaza just south of La Encantada, and catty-corner from Gallery Row at
El Cortijo, another architectural failure. Gallery director Faitha
Lowe-Bailey is bravely pursuing a program of Mexican and contemporary
American art. She’s trying to survive in a quarter where the art that
thrives runs the gamut from expertly painted landscape and cowboy art
to the cactus schlock of Diana Madaras. Lowe-Bailey says the cheerful
abstractions of Jeffrey Jonczyk are up next.

A few miles to the west, Tohono Chul Park has a disappointing
colored-pencil show. Colored pencil is a wonderful medium, at its best
combining the pigmented virtues of paint with the pleasures of the
spare line. There is nothing spare about the work in Pencil
Persuasion; its pieces are by and large overworked and dense, with
little of the negative space that makes the drawings of, say, Maynard
Dixon so mouth-watering.

To be fair, a few of the artists in the juried show, all of them
from the Colored Pencil Society of America, Phoenix Chapter, produced
some interesting work amid all the dogs and flowers and deer. Helen
Rowles’ “Peeled Apples” had a pleasing off-center composition, and a
nice circular line to the assembled green apples, all of them shining
in the light. First-prize winner Kare Williams drew an imposing bank
building in extreme perspective, its pillars and lanterns crazily
askew. Likewise, Virginia Carroll took a snake’s-eye view of a “Soaring
Saguaro.” Its fat green arms punch up into a sky that meanders from
cerulean to ultramarine. Rose Moon had fun with “White Sugar,”
picturing a brigade of gumball machines marching in a sharp V.

Down the mountain and east along the river, the Tucson Jewish
Community Center on River Road is in the last days of the Elliott
Heiman solo show, The Vibrancy of Life.

Heiman is an unabashedly old-fashioned painter who has absorbed the
lessons of the dark Expressionists and the colorful Fauves. He’s almost
as wild as those French beasts with his crayon-bright colors, but
they’re hemmed in, shadowed, by the black line of the Expressionists.
Painted with a loaded brush that’s relatively dry, Heiman’s work is
matte, with no sheen at all. The brushstrokes are short and energetic,
jumping all over his canvas and paper in bursts of color.

A retired psychiatrist, Heiman is a figurative painter who pays
attention to human relationships, and his works are about life and love
and families. Grandmothers and grandfathers and mothers and kids tumble
through his joyous desert landscapes. In the most powerful works,
though, the faces have no features; the love of a mother for her
babies, of a father for a nearly grown son, is drawn in gesture. “Play
on Mom” is a near-abstraction of the seated mother’s green dress
swooping around her bouncing kids; her long arms and legs enfold them.
In “Man to Man I,” 2008, one of the best of the roughly 40 pieces, a
father is dressed in old-fashioned shorts, suggesting a father from
long ago. He leans back and listens intently to his son, while the boy
reaches toward the older man. Their faces are quick studies devoid of
expression. It’s their body language that speaks the loudest about
their connection.

Heiman trained in his native Philadelphia, studying at the
Philadelphia Art Museum as a child. While he was in college and medical
school, according to a catalog essay by guest curator Dan Leach, he
took the free lessons on offer at the Fleischer Art Memorial in Italian
South Philly. Early works from medical school days, especially “Dead
Baby” and “Hospital Teaching Rounds,” are eerie and original. During a
stint as a military psychiatrist at a field hospital in Saigon, Heiman
even painted on cardboard, making jumbled apocalyptic images of war and
the wounded.

It’s a pity there’s a gap between these promising early works and
the bulk of the paintings, done in the last year or two. Unlike Barbara
Rogers, a full-time artist, Heiman had another occupation, teaching
from 1970 on at the UA College of Medicine, and serving poor patients
in the community at El Rio, La Frontera and elsewhere. In his
retirement, he’s turned all of his attention to art, working under
fellow Philadelphia transplant Bailey Doogan, another retired UA
prof.

Some of the dark themes of Heiman’s early years have resurfaced.
“Insomnia,” 2007, is a terrifying nightmare in bold strokes of white
and yellow and gray on black, of a monster emerging from the darkness.
The helpless dreamer, barely recognizable as human, cowers in a lower
corner. “Man in Wheelchair,” 2003, about the painter’s father, now
sadly reduced from the robust man in shorts, is a reminder of
mortality.

More often, Heiman sticks to the sunny side, which is where a
psychiatrist hopes to lead a despairing patient. In “Family Melody,”
2008, two fathers stand on either side of the painting, their bodies
bending toward the center, forming a protective triangular frame around
their children. Inside this composition (the “Golden Triangle” in
academic art), a gaggle of kids play in the garden, their dresses and
shirts matching the brilliant red of the flowers and the yellow of the
grass, the very picture of happiness and harmony.

This article appears in Apr 9-15, 2009.