LOVE OF ART REPLACES MEDICINE

Lee Spalt's art imitates his life -- a da Vincian sojourn into teaching, fatherhood, manufacturing, a little farming, medicine and now art.

His ardent search for new stimulation is reflected in an experimental approach that often combines colors and mediums that aren't supposed to go together, and sometimes results in what he calls "happy accidents."

"I like to go from one thing to another, which might not be too good for someone who's interest in being a commercial success," says the 57-year-old retired neuropsychiatrist from Cobden, Ill.

Spalt will be at Cape Girardeau's Gallery 100 from 2-4 p.m. today for the opening of his new show, titled, "CONtrastinG ELEmenTs."

As a young adult, Spalt certainly had an art interest. He taught the subject along with chemistry as a high school teacher in Carterville, Ill. He also was an assistant football and basketball coach.

Eventually he earned his master of fine arts degree from SIU-Carbondale. Indirectly, it was having children that led him to begin a second career, says Spalt in a voice that rides a roller coaster of enthusiasm.

"When I had children and started to pay off those medical bills, I said, I think I'll go to medical school."

By that time, he had become a project director for a manufacturing company.

He started out studying surgery but says "I was uncomfortable making life and death decisions, sometimes on the spur of the moment."

Eventually he chose psychiatry, because "I didn't flunk any of the courses."

Like his show, Spalt is a study in contrasts. On one hand, he never takes himself or his artwork too seriously.

If they want to, people who come to the show can touch his artwork, some of which is heavily textured with wax or caulk. "If they deface it any it might help it some," he says.

On the other hand, this is a man who has never met a hole in the ground too large -- a 4-by-5-foot painting of the Grand Canyon is one of the centerpieces of the exhibit -- or a subject too famous -- he offers his own view of Monet's garden at Giverny -- to paint.

He delights in finding new ways to make art, and in doing it with found materials. Given a supply of lacquer, for instance, he discovered a way of controlling the process as it eats into polystyrene.

Native Americans wearing eyeglasses, cows in a field just north of Cape Girardeau, or a pig in the shape of a balloon all have intrigued him enough to commit them to canvas.

Most originally were captured by his camera, and painted back at his studio.

His latest excitement is for a newly acquired machine used in industrial painting. It employs positive and negative electrical charges to paint appliances, a technique he thinks could create art as well.

Trained more in the organic medical approach to psychiatry than in the theoretical dictums of Freud and Jung, Dr. Spalt came home and created art "Mostly to relieve the pressure," he says. "All day long I was making sure the decimal point was in the right place."

Finishing his residency in 1972, he worked as a psychiatrist at the student health center at SIU for 20 years. He quit medicine when the job became repetitious, a decision spurred on by a heart attack a few years ago.

"I had so many other things I was excited about doing," he says. "I had to get doing them or I wasn't going to get them done."

They include flower gardening and publishing in medical journals, but primarily an art career initiated through small Midwestern galleries. His work also has been shown in Florida and Phoenix.

The release he felt as a psychiatrist still exists even though now he spends 14 hours a day making art at the 27-acre farm shared with his wife Ellen, also an artist and an art educator.

"I get into the studio at 8 or 9 in the morning, and at 10 in the evening I'm still not wanting to quit," he says. "I quit because I know I have to eat and sleep."

In their workshop, he stretches his own canvasses and builds his larger frames. He has a number of the latter ready to go. "I'm anticipating a long, cold winter."

Though Spalt seems to be living out a universal fantasy, already he has discovered that being an artist is about 75 percent promotion.

"There are so many things that need to be done. It's almost a luxury still to paint."

His show includes some abstract pen and ink drawings that resemble maps of the brain, but he doesn't think a talent for art is to be found in any particular hole in the head.

"I think everybody has talent," he said. "Maybe some people haven't had a chance to express it."

He knows many artistic people who don't think of themselves as artists. "But if you look around them at the kind of things they have, the way they arrange their belongings, paint their buildings, arrange the junk in their attic, every place you look is a picture."