Jim Waid's Stonewall Show At The Tucson Museum Of Art. By Margaret Regan AT LEAST THERE was one good thing about the insurance job Jim Waid had right out of college in the mid-'60s: its location. The job, checking up on the moral character and life circumstances of sundry candidates for insurance, was in New York. In those days the city was the undisputed art capital of the world and the young painter opened his eyes to the art all around him. "I learned a lot in New York," said the affable Tucson artist one afternoon last week as he sat in his backyard studio in Menlo Park. It's not often you can catch Waid sitting. He's the productive artist whose lush paintings right now cover almost every wall in the cavernous Tucson Museum of Art. His masterful show is called Natural Elements, the 11th-annual Stonewall Foundation exhibition. The acrylics on canvas, some as big as 16 feet across, are brilliantly colored, extravagantly layered riffs on plant forms. All were painted in just the last six years. The 54-year-old painter has been in Tucson 28 years, but he still speaks in the slow, friendly drawl of his Oklahoma childhood. Waid went to undergrad art school at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where he did collage work inspired by Robert Rauschenberg. Once in New York, though, falling under the influence of the color-field painters, he turned to color and acrylic paints. He tried out the Helen Frankenthaler technique of staining raw canvas with diluted paint. And, he conceded ruefully, "I was one of a gazillion stripe painters." All that changed once Waid discovered the Sonoran Desert, with its strange, twisted plant shapes, its blinding light, its intense punctuations of vivid color against monochrome. Waid and his family had headed West following three years in the Big Apple. At the University of Arizona, for his MFA thesis, he exhibited color-field paintings on shaped, unstretched canvas. "I was doing big paintings of just one color," he said. "I guess I had to take painting back to zero, doing just one color, then two colors. I was caught up in what was current." But his style changed dramatically after he got a teaching job at the newly formed Pima Community College. "They didn't have the facilities," he remembered. "We were teaching art without running water so I took the class out in the desert to draw. Then I started going out on my own. I had to give up my theoretical ideas, my Clement Greenberg formalist ideas. I said to myself, 'Look how interesting these plants are. If nature can do it, why can't I?' "I date this to the mid-'70s. Since then I've produced a relatively coherent body of work...I was a slow learner. It was close to 10 years before I found my own path." That path has gone in a remarkably consistent direction since then, but it took its time to get to the mature style of the latest works. Early Waid paintings in the Small collection exhibited last winter at TMA--1974's soft "White Tail," 1979's "Elk Springs"--have hues that are almost timid by comparison to the fierce colorations of the Natural Elements paintings, the blazing orange and purple of 1993's "Holus-Bolus," or the dazzling golden-yellows and magentas of 1994's "Skipper." "I want them luminous," Waid said of his colors. "I want them to be radiating back." The vivid black in the new works sometimes covers almost the whole painting, as in 1994's "Pollen Path," pumping up the colors to the high contrast level of stained glass. Sometimes the black moves across the intricate compositions in rhythmic lines--those stripes from Waid's old days gone organic, perhaps--as it does in the explosive "Leaf Hopper," a 1996 piece full of pulsating colors, wavy lines, imaginary plants and undulating insect wings. The paintings in the current show are exuberantly textured, alternating between luscious layerings of paint and thin patches that have been scratched out or scraped back. Waid, who's long been interested in what he calls "process", builds up his surfaces with layer upon layer of paint. Then he takes combs or flooring tools or whatever else is at hand to plough through the thick layers of paint, leaving furrows of luminous color in their wake. And in the midst of all this feverish activity--the fast-drying acrylics force him to work quickly--a picture emerges. As Waid put it, "The imagery happens in the paint." Waid has been painting full time since 1980, and he shows at galleries in Scottsdale, Chicago and New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York owns several of his works, and he recently won a commission for a mural for the new federal courthouse in downtown Tucson. Even so, Waid said he still agonizes over every new piece. "Every painting I think, 'Oh, no, something's gone wrong.' It's an organic process the way they come into existence." Right now Waid is grappling with the problem of space in his compositions. He's aiming "to build authentic space," moving away from the relative flatness of his current style. In "After the Rain," from 1996, Waid painted a path through a lush garden. The path meanders off toward a horizon line, a rare thing in a Waid painting. The work "reads" as a more literal rendition of a landscape, yet the paint itself is abstract as ever, with thick daubs of color on color. Still, Waid doesn't feel himself at a major stylistic turning point. His art, he said, "just keeps going...I don't know where it goes from here. I don't worry about it...I have a curious optimism about my own ideas." Jim Waid: Natural Elements continues through January 19 at the Tucson Museum of Art, 140 N. Main Ave. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday, noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. Closed Christmas Day and New Year's. Admission is $2 for adults, $1 for seniors and students, free for members and children under 12. Free admission for all on Tuesdays. For more information call 624-2333.

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