Interview

Nan Deressa's paintings each carry a little bit of herself in them.

Anything you learn, she pointed out, impinges on everything you do. All of life connects.

So Deressa's paintings carry a little bit of the African sun. They reflect her interest in anthropology and the logic of computers. They grow with the pulse of the northern woods.

She could be called a visionary artist rather than a realist or abstract artist. In fact, the two often coexist. Recently, she said, a 70,000 year old site in southern Africa yielded both realistic and symbolist carvings in the same location.

When Deressa started working with rocks, it was to carve them. Fruitlessly. "After four hours of hammering...I realized this was not a medium I could handle," she recalled.

Then as her husband silversmith Manuel Colunga-Hernandez began to use stones in his jewelry, she decided to learn about them; what different stones look like, what they mean in different cultures, what they are used for.

It was a natural extension to do a series of oil studies.

When she began to paint the patterns she saw on the rock faces into some of her large oil works she was startled to see that the patterns had form. "There were people in those rocks!" she said.

That's when the "aha!" feeling came.

Now she has painted hundreds of rocks, many in pastels. And she has developed the ability to see the layers of pattern and color below the surface.

Her paintings are full of color. It's a major focus, she said. But it wasn't always that way. In fact she had little faith in her ability to use color until she visited a well-known Ethiopian painter while living in that country. When she did a quick portrait of him, he was pleased. But why not use more color? Didn't she prefer some colors over others? Use those.

It was all she needed. After a year of work, she mounted a solo show, was on television, and--to her surprise--sold some of her work.

After returning to the United States and finding herself unable to return to Ethiopia because of an unstable political situation, she put aside art for a number of years until the mid 1980s when she began to paint seriously again while living in the Twin Cities.

She began a series based on the female figure. But how to paint a figure that represented "everywoman;" one with no ethnicity or time period? Color, clothes, even hair style would take it out of a universal mode. She finally chose to paint the figures in blue, gray, any color but "flesh color" and to remove hair entirely. Such questions are typical, she said of the soul-searching that goes into art. Painting should be a sheer joy, she says. And it is, but at the same time is it a wrenching experience. There's always the question, did you accomplish what you wanted? ...And just what was that, anyway?

In 1990 Deressa and Colunga-Hernandez moved north to the Inger area. Deressa was delighted. She needed to go to a place that was congenial for painting, and she found it so.

The tradeoff is that there is little opportunity to exhibit her work. "You have to be willing to do this because you do it," she explained. She is part of a group that put together an annual Northern Trails Studio Tour which opens artists' workplaces to visitors in July. Brochures for this year's tour will be available in the summer at the Macrostie Art Center.

Living in the northwoods has brought new rewards. It has brought a deepened understanding of nature and growth. She has learned abut medicinal herbs and edible wild plants. And even in a remote location, she is out in the cyberworld bringing her design and computer skills together to design web pages.

She's connected by her art. Not only to the digital community of the present but to her high school teacher in Pennsylvania who taught her how to draw portraits, to the Yale University graduate program that allowed her insights into anthropology, to the hot shadowless African sun that brought out color in vivid light, and to the earth through her interpretations of its rocks.