Arkansas artist Donna Phipps Stout tries to create visual poems by obscuring lines and objects, always looking for something provocative that might suggest more than the setup.

When you hear Donna Phipps Stout talk, you're not certain if she's a poet or painter--that is, until she unveils one of her works in progress. She loves poetry and her favorite poets are Emily Dickinson, John Ciardi, and Howard Nemerov. "Ciardi's comments on poetry have had a strong effect on me," she says. "He was a meticulous craftsman and I like that. I agree with Ciardi's statement, `Everything that gets into a work of art gets in by an act of choice. There may be luck, but the luck of the artist has to be earned.'"

She adds, "Ciardi also said, `A good poem is emotionally precise.' I like that idea applied to painting. I want to create a painting that is stunningly clear, as precise as possible, and beautiful enough so I can live with it for a long time. I want the parts of a work to fit like the pieces of a puzzle--and I want the painting to exude light that holds everything together. This sounds a bit pretentious, I suppose, but the painting is only finished when this wholeness produces a rich, heightened sense of reality, a heightened color sensation. It's this sense of reality that makes a painting significant to me. EmilyDickinson, in sending her poems to her minister, kept asking, `Have I said it true?' That's what I want to do--say it true."

Stout, a slight, brown-haired woman who exudes Southern charm, lives in a three-story hillside home in Winslow, Arkansa, with her husband, Ken, himself a noted artist. She was born in 1944 in McCracken County, Kentucky, to Curtis and Ella Phipps, who are both still living. Her father and mother were teachers and encouraged her to draw and paint. Stout says that as a child she was "quite a tyrant," often making her father stop the car so she could pick wildflowers or weeds, or take home a stray kitten.

A field of yellow-flowered weeds might have led to her love of color.

"I was just a toddler," she recalls, "so the feeling of being almost the same height as those ordinary weeds was overwhelming. The color was rich, like cadmium yellow. It made a big impression on me, and later, in first grade, I pressed down on my Crayolas as hard as I could--I wanted the colors to be juicy and bold. My first-grade teacher told my parents I was a `visual' child. This may have helped them decide to buy me my first oil paints."

Stout drew her way through grade school (some of the drawings are still in her mother's possession) and had a pivotal experience in third grade when her teacher brought into class a book with color reproductions of paintings. "She would show us a painting by Rembrandt or Rubens and tell us a story about it," Stout recalls, laughing. "I loved it--and I was hooked for good."

By high school, Stout was displaying a marked talent, although she recalls ruefully that nobody ever systematically taught her how to draw. A highlight was being selected to attend a week's art seminar at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, where she studied with Walter Quirt and Ralston Crawford.

Her real launching point came with summer study at the Maryland Institute's College of Art in Baltimore in 1965. She earned a B.A. degree in painting and drawing in 1966 at Georgetown College in Kentucky and an M.F.A. from Indiana University in Bloomington in 1969. She then began her long painting and teaching career. She's currently a full-time painter and an adjunct professor of art at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

"The year 1986 was a turning point for me," Stout says. "It marked my twentieth year as an artist, but instead of feeling accomplished, I was unhappy. Painting was no longer pleasing me. I had always loved painting and everything associated with it, including the smells, but I had drifted into producing primarily small and dark landscapes. I was trying to create light and atmosphere, but I wasn't achieving what I wanted. In desperation, I decided to `indulge' myself by working on a project in which I could control the subject and the light. I spent 1986 painting a series of folding screens--five of them. They were made of three vertical panels, each with a predella, and on all the surfaces I painted detailed pictures of items I had brought in from outside, such as flowers, weeds, butterflies, and even dead birds. I had been inspired, in part, by a Durer painting of a plant.

"At first, I wanted to make the panels decorative," she continues, "but I found myself getting involved in the particulars--in the parts of the landscape that don't appear in landscape paintings." By year's end, Stout had decided to focus solely on still lifes consisting of weeds, flowers, and other natural items found in her yard or by the roadside. "I had always painted landscapes," she wrote shortly after, "but I began bringing elements of the outdoors indoors to more closely observe the intense, almost jewellike microcosm of the landscape. My aim was to encapsulate the intimacy of a particular place and time."

Stout begins a painting by first assembling plants, flowers, and household fabrics--whatever evokes the particular day, season, or event. The motifs for her paintings are often suggested by her memories of Southern rural life. "Sometimes I want the seemingly random arrangement of these imperfect objects to hint at the presence of someone or something just beyond view," she says. "The motive for setting up the still life is important. It jump starts the painting, with its suggestion of time and place acting as a ballast. After that, the real business begins in earnest how to find the best solution to the puzzle, one that couples counterpoint (many themes flowing together) with an effortless appearance.

"I make perhaps two or three quick sketches or a diagram on a piece of throwaway paper to see if I can find any uncomfortable passages in the still-life setup," she adds, "but I don't make any finished preliminary drawings. At this point, if I find something that doesn't work, I might rearrange the skill life. I never paint from photographs. Not long ago, some clients asked me to include their cat in the painting they had commissioned and they sent me a photograph of the cat. What they got in the picture was the photograph of the cat."

Working as quickly as possible to establish configurations of light and dark, Stout often obscures lines and sometimes objects. She is looking for the gist of the painting as well as anything provocative that suggests more than what's in front of her. After applying a number of preliminary washes to the canvas, she reaches a point where she feels she's ready to begin.

"I try to determine where the extremes in value and where the convergence of lines and shapes will likely occur," she says, "and then I establish the front and back planes as quickly as possible in order to define a deep enough space in which objects can exist." She says she then searches "for credible colors that suggest an atmosphere." Stout believes that one difference between a painting and a simple representational picture of flowers is atmosphere--similar, she believes, to the overall statement of a good poem. To her, good painting and good poetry have much in common.

"I admire technical skill," she says. "The poet Robert Frost was once asked by a woman, `Surely when you write one of your lovely poems, you are not thinking of technical tricks?' Frost replied, `I revel in them!' And T.S. Eliot remarked that good poetry was written to combat the `general mess of imprecision of feeling.' Good painting, like good poetry, should be emotionally precise. What painter, for instance, could fail to see and feel these lines from Elizabeth Bishop's poem `The Fish?'

I looked into his eyes which were
far larger than mine but shallower,
and yellowed, the irises backed
and packed with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses of
old scratched isinglass.

"The poem is loaded with images--you could almost paint from it--and Bishop's talent and precision of technique make it possible."

Stout "loads" her paintings in a similar manner, conscious that a painting, like a good poem, should allow for study, not just viewing. A painter chooses color carefully, just as each word in the Bishop poem was chosen. In the poem, even the word "isinglass" has significance as more than simply an image: Isinglass is made from fish bladders. Stout's paintings search for this type of elusive yet critical meaning.

In the almost Spartan plainness of her lower-floor studio, Stout shows what she means by "controlled subject and light." Banks of studio lights are suspended from rails so she can experiment with angles of illumination. A simple worktable contains a bouquet of brushes and various still-life objects. Jeweled splotches of paint are set on the glass tabletop, and hanging from a wall are numerous postcards of flowers, weeds, and paintings by the Old Masters. The windows open onto the superb beauty of the Ozark countryside.

Stout designed her own palette table. "It enables me to be organized," she says. "It has two shallow drawers. One drawer holds paint tubes in the order of my palette, and the second contains brushes, most of them hog-bristle rounds with a few small sables mixed in. Paper, drawing materials, small prepared panels, and a selection of monographs about artists whose work I'm studying are stored on two pull-out shelves. The tabletop functions as a palette--white paper topped with glass--and measures 2 1/2' x 4'."

The artist says she has always preferred smooth surfaces to paint on and has recently tried some primed fine-tooth Claessens linen canvas: "It allowed the paint to skate, which I liked, but I decided to return to Masonite, prepared with orange shellac or gray or white gesso or sometimes with an English red wash. Masonite panels seem to be more forgiving than linen: A passage of paint can be scraped off even after it's dry--a welcome option when you discover that an area should have been a different color all along!"

Stout uses very little, if any, medium. "If I do, it's simple and lean, three or four parts turpentine to one part linseed oil," she says. "But usually I just use turpentine. Since the paint doesn't flow much without medium, I scumble, a method I began experimenting with in college when I was interested in Abstract Expressionism." If, as she's been told, some of her paintings have a pastel quality, Stout attributes it to the scumbling.

Her husband has had a strong influence on her work. "He taught me a lot about structuring a painting and how to learn from the past," Stout says. "I look at everything, from ancient Egyptian portraits and Roman wall paintings to Chinese brush drawings and Renaissance paintings, plus, of course, recent work."

Her husband says of her work, "Donna doesn't add; she takes away. She's a ruthless editor. I've seen her wipe out several beautiful stages of a painting and start over--passages I'd have kept and developed. Also, she has dropped most of her earth colors from her palette, which is unusual, but by doing so she enhances the ethereal quality of her paintings. And although there isn't much body to her surfaces, her pictures are still very painterly."

He says, "Another thing: She treats a still life like a landscape. Some of her tables, for instance, give the illusion of going on and on. Somehow, she makes a small space into a vast one."

Stout's work, with its intimacy, color, and jewellike precision, shares an artistic exactness with the poets of whom she's so fond. In a statement she wrote for a show at the Valley House Gallery, her Dallas, Texas, representative, she sums up her intent: "My goal is to bring so much rigorous. investigation and formal order to the painting as to create an image that has greater presence than just the tangible object...to make a visual poem. That poem must consist of a balance between imagery and the feel of the paint, so that the whole painting appears to have happened effortlessly."