"There Are So Many Ways to Say I Love You"

The only sound in Mary Sprague's studio is a soft scritch as she sweeps a pastel stick across rag paper pinned on a drawing wall, her gestures revealing the feathery form of an emerging personality. The rooster's chest puffs in gusty fury, his scarlet comb a plume of belligerent energy. Rarely has a fowl been in such a foul mood.

Or so big. This bruiser is as big as the artist herself--a sturdy five feet tall. Her eyes are soft green and good-humored, framed by blondish hair. The rooster, by contrast, is clearly seething, his eyes narrowed, beady and red-rimmed under great gray tufts of eyebrow.

"Cloaked Hen"

A fixture on the St. Louis art scene for 40 years, 73-year old Sprague has recently turned her attention to chickens--fanciful chickens, angry chickens, chickens at once rollicking and elegant. Why chickens? It's a phase, she says, begun three years ago on a four-oil-change, 16,000-mile, three-month cross-country odyssey by art van, a quest to draw "little animals in big places."

Her chickens--many inspired by exotic breeds in Stephen Green-Armytage's book, Extraordinary Chickens--are an exploration of style and technique. So finely detailed it seems a breath would ruff le their feathers, each starts with a broadbrush swipe that is nothing more than a thought in motion. "Motion is what it's all about," Sprague says.

"Gut Feeling (Striding Hen)"

Brimming with personality, the chickens are "all people I know," says Sprague. But she discreetly declines to identify her human inspirations except for the mad, wet red hen with an Aunt Agatha ruff-- "that's me."

"The human figure--I've never been able to identify with it. I don't do drawings of humans because they don't tell you the truth. They give you all the details and information, but you're just drawing about what genes a person inherited."

"Hen, Wet, Mad"

Because of that aversion, Sprague's subjects have ranged from emotionally wrought interiors to muscular horses sketched with a barely contained energy. The unifying forces are expert draftsmanship, deft coloring and often an ethereal "something" in the atmosphere.

"Whether it be the subject of chickens, trees, horses or dreamscapes, her work has always had a seductive quality that is rich and alluring," says Duane Reed, who has been representing Sprague at Duane Reed Gallery in St. Louis
for years. "There exists a common thread that binds her work, regardless of whether you are looking at something from the 1970s or at current material."

"Pipping Sound"

Sprague's series of domestic interiors from the 1980s seems at first benign. Then details emerge, like the detonation next to a refrigerator in the monochromatic "Little Bomb in the Kitchen," or the wafting spirit escaping from a bedroom drawer in "Almost Certain." At the time, Sprague's marriage was dissolving. "My images usually reflect what's going on in my life, in one way or another," she says.

Sprague landed in St. Louis in the mid-1960s, with a master's degree from Stanford University, a husband, four children and no intention of settling in the Midwest. "I was just going to be here a minute," she says. She taught at St. Louis Community College; her 1968 painting of a frazzled woman in a hat with a red flower foretold the story--"What a Person Would Look Like if She Moved to Missouri and Taught for Thirty Years."

"Illinois Elm"

Sprague paints from a mobile platform in her downtown loft; it moves backwards and forwards, up and down, at the touch of a lever, allowing her to reach the tops of her oversize paintings without balancing precariously on a stool.

She sidesteps the question of influences, saying, "I kind of got over the influence business 20 years ago." She does remember a pen-and-ink tree by German painter Wols "that absolutely knocked me out--I cried. It was just a killer. I haven't seen it since. That was 1952, but I still remember the feeling."

A pen-and-ink tree is the first image in her catalog. Forty years later, she has returned to the theme. Six drawings of trees, so densely
inked the paper seems three-dimensional, are pinned on her display wall. These are small, still pieces. Motion is confined to shifting light.

"Scritch, scritch, scritch," she quips, mimicking the sound of a nib on paper. "I love that repetitive marking with the India ink. You can't get that kind of development with anything else."