EMILY EVELETH | THE NEW YORK TIMES

By Edward M. Gomez

April 21, 1999

The blue-gray New England spring light sweeps through the huge paned windows of Emily Eveleth's studio and splashes across the white of her 1000-square-foot studio space, large by Manhattan standards but average for an old industrial building, once a hat factory.

Here in this suburban town not far from Boston, Ms. Eveleth, 38, has found the room and the tranquillity she feels she needs to do the intensive kind of portrait painting for which she has become known. This is an environment in which her models, too, can comfortably hold a pose, often for several long weeks at a time. Actually the primary subjects of her portraits are and for many years have been doughnuts: powdered, cream-filled or honey-glazed. Ms. Eveleth has brought to the representation of a junk-food icon all the technical skill and esthetic deliberation of serious practitioners in the grand tradition of oil-on-canvas realism with its inevitable aura of illusion.

''Some people think it's funny,'' Ms. Eveleth said in a recent interview at her studio, ''but the thing they don't understand is that what they're responding to is the fact that it is a painting. It's the language of painting that allows them to respond the way they do.'' Ms. Eveleth's newest canvases, which are being exhibited through April 24 at the Danese Gallery in Manhattan, present her sugary subjects in matter-of-fact but heroic poses. In her monumental images, light glows in the flakes of a doughnut's crisp, translucent glaze, and gently brushes the surface of a powdery specimen's rotund form.

The paintings seem almost abstract, but in reality they are meticulously precise and naturally luscious to look at. With their jelly-filled orifices subdued in shadows or temptingly oozing reddish goo, these works have been found by some critics to be ''sexy'' and erotic.

Ms. Eveleth was born and grew up in Connecticut and studied at Smith College. She comes, she said, ''from a family that was involved in science and art, and maybe my work reflects it.'' Her father was an architect, and her paternal grandfather made wood engravings; her mother was a systems analyst who worked on the Atlas missile project in the 1950's.

Ms. Eveleth said she started out as a landscape painter. In college, spending her junior year abroad in Italy changed the way she looked at and thought about art. Examining Old Master paintings in European and American museums, she was drawn to portraits by the 15th-century Flemish painter Hans Memling and to the dramatic chiaroscuro of Caravaggio and Zurbaran.

Later she studied with George Nick, a realist painter whose work she admired, at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. ''I'm lucky I found my focus early: I knew I wanted to be a painter,'' Ms. Eveleth said. ''In addition to landscapes, in the late 1980's I was doing what Fairfield Porter used to call 'found still lifes' of objects around the house, not studio setups.'' She would ''tweak them sometimes,'' she admitted, by rearranging certain items.

''One day I noticed a doughnut in a kitchen-table still life and in it saw so many things,'' Ms. Eveleth recalled. ''Its beautiful, perfect form. Its rich colors. I realized I didn't need all that other stuff and thought, 'Why not do a painting of just a doughnut?' '' Soon she did, in a small format. By 1992 she had figured out a way to work on a larger scale.

That year, at the Danforth Museum of Art in Framingham, she showed five big pictures that gave the full treatment of Renaissance-derived portrait-painting technique to a select group of the sticky baked goods. Her first subject was a single honey-glazed ring; since then she has painted other varieties alone or in lumpish, looming stacks. Seen in full-frontal views on table tops and set against expansive, mostly solid-color backgrounds, Ms. Eveleth's doughnuts, like Monet's haystacks, undergo a range of treatment in variously changing baths of light. Examples of neither Pop Art nor Photo Realism, whose products were often images of images, Ms. Eveleth's pictures feel both inescapably massive and oddly ethereal. ''They're not ironic or cynical,'' the artist emphasizes. Perhaps only a die-hard post-modernist would insist they were.

Two summers ago she curated an exhibition at the Danforth Museum that displayed her paintings alongside works she chose from the museum's collection. So she placed a picture of a luscious lemon-cream doughnut on a plate between companion 19th-century tableaux of a stolid bourgeois gentleman and his wife by the American artist Erastus Salisbury Field.

Forced to play the central role in the unexpected triptych, Ms. Eveleth's confection held its own against the older portraits' impressive glazing, that is, the classic technique of building up color through multiple thin layers of paint.

''There's a grace in Emily's work, and a sense of a personal relationship with everyday experience,'' said Mr. Nick, her former teacher. ''It reminds me of Chardin.''

Lately Ms. Eveleth has also been painting human subjects, albeit mainly the backs of bald men's heads. And she has begun working on a new doughnut picture with a big brush and broad, sweeping strokes.

Handwritten notes to herself reminding her to paint ''Looser!'' are tacked to her studio walls. ''Everything I have to say about painting is said in paint,'' she mused aloud as she watched midday sunlight flicker across a canvas that movers would soon carry away to New York for her show. ''I'm just grateful that what I'm trying to say in paint, people seem to understand.''

She put on her coat, locked her studio door and stepped out for a lunch break at a local Indian restaurant, leaving her models behind on their pedestals in sugar-preserved, graceful repose.