Artist shows the lighter side of ‘Haunted’

It’s probably not a great idea to play poker with Mary Chiaramonte. The 29-year-old artist has knack for projecting a stern exterior even when she’s in a playful mood.

“Murmur,” her 2007 show at U Street’s Nevin Kelly Gallery (since relocated to Columbia Heights) was a harrowing series of images of physical and spiritual confinement. It depicted 11 bruised, scarred figures trapped in wooden boxes, inspired largely by the 29-year-old artist’s anxieties about a then-upcoming surgery.

The 30-plus new acrylics and watercolors featured in her latest series, “Haunted” — which made its debut at Long View Gallery Saturday — retains the avoidance of faces, the heavy shadows and the seeming psychological and erotic complexity of her earlier paintings. But their creator says they’re coming from a happier place.

Consider “No Sleep Sheep,” an image of a young woman in bed, her arms wrapped over her face to block out the horror, the horror, of the ravenous demons who haunt her nightmares. Right? Er, wrong. While Chiaramonte, who lives in Radford, does experience occasional insomnia, she wouldn’t say she suffers from it.

“It’s never for a bad reason, she says. “It’s always when I’m excited about something coming up. I just stay up all night thinking about how wonderful it’s going to be.”

No doubt the new show qualifies. Every piece in it is less than nine months old, evidence of a furious prolificacy that’s had Chiaramonte working in her studio from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m. for weeks on end. Fortunately, the grind hasn’t smothered what appears to be a new, and welcome, sense of humor in work. Witness the little tattoos on the woman’s hands in “No Sleep Sheep,” which Chiaramonte says reminds her of hand-stamp from a bar.

“She could just be really hung over,” she laughs.

“Strawberry,” a medium shot of a woman with a bruised knee, is one of several in the new show for Chiaramonte served as her own model.

“I’m accident prone,” she chuckles, adding that the painting came out of her amusement at the custom of referring to small superficial wounds as strawberries. Curiously, she doesn’t call this one a self-portrait, a term she does apply to “Making Strange.”

Of course, the woman in “Making Strange” is dark-skinned, while Chiaramonte is Caucasian.

“I wanted to bring more imagination into it,” she says, eschewing any notion that her racial makeover was intended as sociopolitical commentary. The woman in the painting wears a necktie over a bra, generating a friction between masculine and feminine.

If “Handsome,” meanwhile, reverberates with a manly, (young) Brando-esque sexuality, well, it should: It’s a portrait of Chiaramonte’s boyfriend, made just weeks after they began dating.

Chiaramone says she’s inspired more by photographers like Loretta Lux or Sally Mann more than by other painters. Music is a major influence, too.

“My boyfriend was making fun of me, because my iTunes said I’d listened to this one song 200 times,” she laughs. (Modest Mouse’s “Here It Comes,” if you’re curious, although “3rd Planet” is actually the Modest Mouse tune from which Chiaramonte has cribbed a title, “Dripping Pitch.”)

One of the new pieces that pleases their maker most is “Speed of Sound,” a visceral acrylic-and-watercolor of a woman standing in the middle of an airfield in a snowstorm. Less than a month old, and larger than Chiaramonte’s typical scale, it’s based on a photo of a classmate Chiaramonte snapped during a visit to a Southerwestern Virgina farm last month.

“It has a lot of movement, and a gestural quality to it that I appreciated,” she says.

Not to mention, an April snowstorm. Wondrous strange, but wonderful.