Marcus Blackwell and Mary Burkhardt engage in conversation at Hayley Gallery

Earlier this year, Marcus Blackwell pivoted from digital art, temporarily setting aside his tablet and picking up brushes, paints, oil sticks, and charcoals – a return to a more tactile approach that coincided with a stretch in which he began to more intently explore his interior world.

“I started thinking about, what’s going on in your head emotionally, physically, spiritually?” said the Columbus-based Blackwell, whose new duo exhibition with the Cleveland artist Mary Burkhardt, “Rooted in Story,” kicks off with an opening reception at Hayley Gallery from 5-8 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 18. “What is your inner landscape? Is it rough terrain? Or is it open vistas? … And I just became more curious about what was going on inside right now, and what was happening with me right now. How are you feeling about the world? How are you feeling about yourself in the world? How are you feeling about your children in the world? How are you feeling?”

As he asked these questions of himself, Blackwell continued to paint, often lingering on the past as he worked – a backwards look fueled in part by his decision to return to the artistic tools he first connected with as a younger man. “When you’re getting paint on your hands, feeling the texture of the canvas, getting charcoal under your fingernails, that connection to the materials is invigorating, and it sort of reanimates some things in you that a screen doesn’t,” said Blackwell, who also began to collage small paintings previously done on paper into the canvases, these past works adding additional layers of meaning even as they were covered and obscured. “Most of the paintings, if not all of them, have three or four other paintings beneath them. … And you can start to see that they’re really textural and bumpy and they have all of these peaks and valleys on the surface.”

Beyond these tactile elements, the collaged-in paintings tease out the idea that we’re all a work in progress – our past selves existing somewhere beneath the surface we present to the world.

One of the pieces on display by Blackwell, for example, is a layered portrait of a female classmate that emerged from a sense of shame he still feels about the way he and others treated her when they were young. At the time, the artist said, this girl was known to frighten easily, so kids would routinely jump scare her and then laugh when she reacted in horror. “And I remember thinking one day, you know, this isn’t right. … And I was a kid, and I’m not excusing my behavior, but that little girl stayed with me my whole life,” said Blackwell, who has created different portraits of this girl throughout his career. “And they’re all about the same thing, and it’s all reminiscent of the time I didn’t treat someone in the best possible way, and the regret I still carry for being careless with another human being.”

As with Blackwell’s paintings, Burhardt’s work in “Rooted in Story” emerged after a stretch in which she didn’t touch her brushes for months following the November death of her mother. Also like Blackwell, the paintings that surfaced in this return felt somehow touched by memory – particularly a series of surrealist works featuring women whose faces are obscured by elaborate cakes, and which the artist said could have emerged subconsciously from her impressions of baking alongside her mom as a child. 

“She was always supportive in letting me bake, in teaching me how to bake,” Burhardt said. “And that’s something I hadn’t really put together, but that could be it. … When I was younger, my parents bought me the Wilton cake decorating set, and I used to bake everybody’s birthday cake and First Communion cake, and I just loved it.”

There was a point in the early spring when Burkhardt wondered if it was a mistake to agree to the October exhibition. She hadn’t really painted for nearly six months, and she began to fear that inspiration wouldn’t return in time for her to fill the space with new work. Fortunately, this creative dam burst in May, the urge to paint returning with such overwhelming force that she would occasionally awake in the middle of the night yearning for the studio.

“I was definitely in this zone where things were just coming, whether I wanted them to or not,” said Burkhardt, who in addition to the cake paintings also continued her ongoing series of women in elaborately rendered dresses shown from behind. “I’ve been doing these dress paintings for a long time, but I recently learned a term, and it’s this German word, rückenfigur, which translates literally to back of figure. … And its purpose is to draw the viewer into the scene, where you’re looking at what the figure is seeing.”

A number of these back-focused paintings show the women striding forward, which Burkhardt attributed in part to a growing confidence she felt developing within herself. One painting in display at Hayley Gallery that emerged under a series of evolving titles – it started as “She Ran Faster Than Her Second Thoughts” before becoming “Beyond Ordinary” – captures the idea of leaving something behind (grief, regret, a lover) and moving toward something better.

Within the exhibition, these motivations can bend and shift in unique ways as Burkhardt’s paintings engage in conversation with those done by Blackwell, the intent the two artists brought to their respective canvases drawing out unexpected meanings in the commingled works. 

“They’re juxtaposed with one another, and now it’s not a monologue, it’s a dialogue,” Blackwell said. “And so, what are they saying? And what kind of conclusions are they drawing? … But there is an agreement level with [the paintings] where they are talking. And I’m intrigued to get into the space and look at them up close to see, okay, this is what they’re talking about.”