The World of Helen Siegl

Helen Siegl is a most promising artist. Her woodcuts in particular are engaging, highly imaginative, and technically splendid; she portrays an intriguing world of children's fantasy with a vitality and boldness of style that make her worthy of far more attention than she has received till now.

An Austrian artist living in Pennsylvania, Miss Siegl is currently displaying some sixty of her woodcuts and several watercolors at the Paul Schuster Gallery on Mt. Auburn Street. The exhibition will run through April 21.

The theme of this present group seems to be stated in a remarkably attractive little print entitled "The World Upside-Down." In this woodcut, a small boy stands with his hands wrapped around his ankles, his head and shoulders dangling upside-down between his wide-spread legs, his eyes carefully studying the world in inverted perspective. This seems to be exactly the sort of world Miss Siegl attempts to reveal in the rest of her woodcuts, and she is throughly successful.

The fantastic sphere of a child's imagination--a world upside-down--offers ample material for an artistic enterprise but is rather difficult to make appealing to an adult mind. Miss Siegl's triumph is to achieve this feat with highly pleasing results.

In one of the woodcuts, a boy in a flowered nightshirt with his curious but faithful dog beside him stares in wonder at a baroque blue moon; in another a very simply represented little girl sits with an alert-looking cat in a high-back chair, tilts her head ever so slightly; and glances mischievously at the viewer. Wildly fanciful creatures, some with extra pairs of legs, romp nonchalantly through several more. In short, the artist has done many woodcuts but each is the very distinctive creation of an apparently inexhaustable imagination.

Besides being a master of romantic intrigue, Miss Siegl is also a talented draftsman and has made excellent use of color. She applies very subtle shadings against heavy black lines and almost never do her colors become cluttered.

With the more than reasonable prices which accompany them, the Siegl woodcuts strongly suggest a trip to Mr. Schuster's gallery. To those who have been suggesting that the woodcut is a dying genre, Helen Siegl's work is a refreshing rebuttal.