“I’ve known for years that artist Anne Scheid is good, but it becomes hit-over-the-head obvious when you walk into her new show at Gallery 25. Scheid’s new show, “Earthbody,” is a moody and moving combo of virtuoso drawing talent along with a potent ability to connect emotionally with a viewer.

With Scheid’s show, it’s like you’re immediately sucked into a charcoal world. As she explains in her artist’s statement, her drawings begin in nature. She’s attracted to places where change is paramount: scouring glaciers, flooding water, falling trees. Then she disassembles and reconfigures these captured landscapes, in the process integrating elements of the human body.

Some of the works resemble Chinese scroll paintings in shape and temperament. Tall and skinny, there’s a strong downward flow to these works. This whoosh of movement of movement brings to mind the tremendous forces of nature. When I first walked in the gallery, I was immediately reminded of the mudslides that plagued the mountains of Santa Cruz County when I was in High School.

In Scheid’s “Maelstrom (San Joaquin River),” you can sense the sheer brawn of the environment. There’s a hint of a waterfall, of downward flow, and there’s an almost somber feel of gesture and movement. Maybe weight, as in gravity. And then amid all this earthy turmoil, there is a glimpse of a body part: a foot with toes.

In another gripping work, “Arcanum (Caves, Pismo Beach), also in charcoal, you can pick out another human element: a fragment of arm and hand, complete with fingers.

There was potential for Scheid to become too gimmicky with this technique: to turn her works into clever hide-the-image exercises. But this doesn’t happen here. You often don’t see the human forms until you look closely, but even when you do, they don’t pop out with exaggerated impact – they simple just are. It suggests to me how easy it is for human beings no-matter how they rape the environment – to be subsumed by the landscapes they long to control. Sure, we can conquer the world, but give the world a few million years and there’ll be little trace of us left.

Donald Munro
The Fresno Bee Friday, September 14, 2007