Looking at their art, one thinks of medieval manuscript illuminators or mystics like Bosch, quietly fragmenting and reassembling the universe to fit a uniquely personal vision.

That's a bit less true for Schmidt, the least problematical artist of the trio. Schmidt is a representational painter who organizes still life landscapes out of antiquarian debris - old tools, scales, bits of junk, the works of a piano. His paintings - 10 in gouache, two in oils - might have been inspired by any number of Old City storefronts, but they are made in the studio, from objects found and saved.

Schmidt's pictorial style is very illustrative, down to the dabs and splashes of bright color accents, but it's also very formal. His mood is quiet and prescient, like that in the work of John Frederick Peto and William Michael Harnett, although his work is less spiritual.

Schmidt alternates between two basic arrangements, one in which the space is illusory and another in which the objects he paints are flat against the picture plane. In both cases, the objects are not grouped to form a compactly integrated structure, as they would be in a still life, but are viewed as if on a field. The flat arrangements, like "Malachite," in which Schmidt emphasizes pattern and color, are the more successful.

Sorrels, the youngest of the three, is a draftsman of saintly patience, dexterity and control who could illustrate Creation on the back of a postage stamp. All but one of his nine drawings and watercolors would fit neatly in the palm of your hand, but they are only dimensionally miniature.

Each is a surreal peek into the less-accessible crevices of human memory, where latent passions are stored. A lattice of dense foliage sections each drawing into visual phrases - the moon in a cloudy sky, a view into a field, and tantalizing glimpses of voluptuous body parts and suggestive crevices.

A measure of Sorrels' control and ability to concentrate is his working in both silver- and copperpoint, exacting drawing media that do not permit revision (the silver or copper stylus lays down a deposit that darkens as it oxidizes, the silver to gray-black, the copper to green).

In confining himself to a small field - the smallest piece here is about an inch square - Sorrels is not simply flaunting his manual skill. The tiny image represents both philosophical and psychological considerations - that content is irrelevant to scale and that reduction intensifies its power by forcing us to concentrate.

Anliker is the most mystifying and, one intuits from both his images and his method of constructing them, the most hermetic of the three. Like Schmidt, he works in gouache, and like Schmidt, his paintings exhibit dry, tight surfaces that imply detachment and concern more with content than with effects that result from manipulating the medium.

But they are crowded with ambiguous images and obsessive de-tails that hint at the transience of joy and pleasure in the natural world, contrasted with the permanence of memory and the optimism of dreams. Looking at Anliker's 15 paintings is like trying to decipher one of Joseph Cornell's constructions.

They are not without clues, like spent milkweed pods, party streamers and noise-makers, and dolls' heads, but some of them are too arcane or personal for general understanding - the legend "chording to Vladimir Nabokov" is one.

Anliker is best when he throws himself headlong into free association, mixing feathery, swirly shapes with more oblate ones that look like trilobites. His tour de force is a celestial maze of myriad dots and interlocking, nearly subliminal patterning that echoes the indecipherable complexity of the cosmos.

Anliker, who has taught at Tyler for 20 years, hasn't had a solo show in Philadelphia since 1966, although he exhibited regularly before that. People who have admired his work undoubtedly will welcome his return to the gallery scene; he is certainly an intriguing artist whose work appeals as much to the mind as to the eye.

Anliker, who has taught at Tyler for 20 years, hasn't had a solo show in Philadelphia since 1966, although he exhibited regularly before that. People who have admired his work undoubtedly will welcome his return to the gallery scene; he is certainly an intriguing artist whose work appeals as much to the mind as to the eye.

The exhibition will continue through March 13, Wednesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 5.

Reprinted with permission from the:

Philadelphia Inquirer

February 16, 1983