Confronting Harlequins Hawthorne Gallery opens in new space with a provocative exhibition of 33 mixed-media works by a local legend

Although its name remains the same, Hawthorne Gallery is no longer on South Hawthorne Road in Ardmore, its original home. Last November the gallery and Idlewild House, the interior-design firm with which it is affiliated, moved into a restored historic home on West Fourth Street.

Worth a special visit in itself, the sprawling, Mediterranean-style house adjoins the northwest corner of the West Fourth Street bridge over Business 40. Designed by Charles Barton Keen, also the architect of Reynolda House, and completed in the early 1920s, it was originally a private home, but only for about 10 years. Most longtime residents of Winston-Salem know it as the former Dorminy Dance Studio, which was in it for 40 years until 1990.

The atrium, its open stairwell and the adjoining rooms are furnished with period pieces and reproductions, including desks and office chairs. The "gallery," as it were, consists of available wall space, shelving and tabletops, where works by a number of different artists are typically on display.

Until the end of March the gallery is highlighting the art of Robbie Tillotson, a native of Denton. Tillotson (1949-1987) began making a name for himself as an artist in the 1970s but died tragically young, of AIDS, according to the gallery owner, Ramelle Pulitzer. He received a bachelor of arts degree from Appalachian State University and a master of fine arts from UNC Greensboro. Soon afterward, around 1975, he moved to New York and began to build an art career -- an endeavor at which he was more successful than many aspiring artists. His work was shown and collected widely during the late 1970s and the 1980s, and examples are in a number of private collections in Winston-Salem.

Probably the largest collection of Tillotson's work, at least locally, belongs to Bruce Anderson, the owner of Idlewild House, and pathologist James McCool, who share a home in Clemmons. They recently decided to sell some of their mixed-media works on paper by Tillotson, including the 33 that make up the exhibition. Its title, "Colored People" -- borrowed from the title Tillotson gave one of his shows during his lifetime -- alludes to his practice of using bold colors for the skin of his human subjects, not to mention for the flamboyantly patterned clothing they typically wear.

Tillotson based his drawings on people whom he knew or had observed closely, if only in photographs. But rather than being "true" to his subjects and trying to depict them naturalistically, he seems to have preferred transforming them into harlequins, as it were. The images are flat and loosely linear, and the faces and hands of the people in them are alternately red, orange, green or other high-key hues, in most cases, as if their skin had been painted. The same kinds of colors are used to render the plaids, checks, stripes, grids, dot patterns and curvilinear forms that decorate the clothing worn by these figures.

The selection spans Tillotson's entire career of roughly 15 years, beginning in 1974. The earlier drawings are relatively small, uniformly 22-by-30 inches, but those he made in later years are considerably larger, ranging up to 7-by-4 feet in a couple of cases. A few are limited to single figures, usually rendered as head-and-shoulders portraits, but most depict groups of two to four figures either interacting with one another or staring back at the viewer.

Tillotson's self-acknowledged artistic influences -- German expressionism, Japanese woodcuts and American folk painting -- are evident in his work, particularly in the stylization of his figures. The intricate, rhythmic patterns that are ubiquitous in his drawings indicate an affinity with the pattern-and-decoration movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, whose constituents worked abstractly. The typically riotous color schemes were derived by a process of random color selection, according to Winston-Salem artist Billy McClain, who, as a friend and colleague, talked with Tillotson at length about his art.

The whimsical and decorative aspects of Tillotson's individual and group portraits are countered by their psychological dimension, reflected in the postures of the figures; their physical relationships to one another; their sometimes veiled, mask-like faces and, especially, their eyes, typically outlined as if they're wearing heavy eyeliner. In the individual portraits they tend to have a somber or thoughtful look about them, but in those that include two or more figures the eyes often seem to reflect wariness, furtive calculation and/or harsh judgment. These outrageously decked-out harlequins often seem to be simultaneously sizing us up and freezing us out, and in that respect Tillotson's drawings stand as social commentaries of a sort, meditations on the psychological consequences of vanity, narcissism and competitive social exclusivity. They're simultaneously playful and critical, appealing and vaguely unsettling.

The show marks a rare opportunity to see a substantial selection of work by an artist who once ranked as something of a local legend. It's clear that Tillotson was an intensely engaged, highly dedicated artist, and it's too bad he didn't live long enough to fulfill the promise he showed during his 15 years of formidable creative activity.

■ "Colored People: Works on Paper by Robbie Tillotson (1949-1987)" is on view through March 31 at Hawthorne Gallery, 1281 W. Fourth St. For more information, call 336-724-1022.