THE SAID, THE UNSAID, AND THE UNSAYABLE
The Art of Kathleen Weich
By Donald Brackett
There is a kind of abstraction which encourages us to re-approach the real world with fresh eyes. It also prompts philosophical questions about the limits of our language and our apprehension of that world through the senses, by forcing us to confront what we think we know and how we express what we think it means. The said, the unsaid and the unsayable, are the borders that contain our entire perception of the physical universe.
Painters such as Weich, apart from their stubborn allegiance to the gorgeously analog method of expressing emotion through pigment on canvas, are also engaged in a formal aesthetic agenda. It is one which makes digital thinking beside the point, and it invites us all to reconsider the major pictorial formats of art in the western world. Portrait, still life and landscape, can all be merged as simultaneous motifs in the kind of abstraction which she practices.
In fact, she shows us how the act of “making a picture” can sometimes approach the realm of poetry and music, a pure place where art’s ongoing search for the inexplicable leads us into a direct confrontation with the unsayable. A good example of this is the recent piece called “Wind”. This work appears to have successfully undergone a generational transformation from abstract expressionist to abstract conceptual painting. It really is a painting of the wind.
To say that her work is about colour would not only be an understatement, since colour is both the form and content of the paintings, but also still inaccurate because they are not so much about colour, they are colour. They don’t represent colours the way a Mondrian or a Hoffman did, in space, rather, they present colours unalloyed and as a primary formal subject.
In exactly the same sense, they are not representations, not even highly stylized or abstracted representations, of the landscape. Rather, they are evocations, producing and conveying intensely rich dramas in space which feel like landscapes, both emotionally expressive and coolly minimal at the same time.
The spaces they evoke are instant renderings of the personality of a landscape, just as several are also energetic emblems that function effectively as works in that other classical vernacular , the still life, as well. Works such as her “”Table With Oranges”, or “The Book I” are quite fine examples of latter day still life images. Except this life is not so still. Her deployment of classical motifs in this manner, often lightly supported by equally evocative titles that gently program the eye to recognize the subtle relationships between a table and a landscape, has an ironic twist to it, a very painterly twist. This is moving forward in the art of painting by paying attention to its roots. This is both pulling up and pushing back in the roots, simultaneously and in different locations. Visually speaking.
Several works contain tabletop references with graphically loose gestures suggesting fruit, while many of her landscapes contain existentially challenged trees as well as references to the built environment, but without revealing any actual architecture. By fixing the viewers’ attention on a such a pun-like space, the artist is able to sweepingly refer to art history itself without engaging in any didactic activity in support of the charm of her images. They do their job within the narrative of the program. And the name of the program is good painting.
This frees her, and us, to fully appreciate the fact that a still life painting of objects can contain a landscape painting of the environment, which also contains a portrait of pure colours. One returns to colour, always to colour. It is the charm of colours in carefully considered, if sometimes surprising juxtapositions which creates the ebb and flow, the push and pull of her painted experiences of place. This is the classic push and pull of Greenbergian aesthetics, and I for one am delighted to see it blossoming so nicely into the 21rst Century.
There is a pleasant irony, perhaps even another visual pun, to the fact that her work readily relates to the classic colour field paintings of the early 60’s, while at the same time offering a fresh take on “real” landscape fields with an open expanse of natural spaces. This organic irony makes the images operate on the two levels of head and heart together, on the one hand permitting nature to be the basis for an almost cubist transformation, and on the other hand giving us a new experience of the literal field of vision.
She thus updates two painting traditions simultaneously and reconciles them in the most effective manner: by showing us that nature is abstract and that all abstraction is inherent in nature. Two excellent examples of this paradox are the recent works, “Golden Fields I” and “Cranberry Field”, in which a golden sky hovers above a mottled deep red ground, with only the most minimal suggestion of actual activity occurring in the relationship between earth and air.
Also notable is the absence of any habitation of any kind within these pictorial “places”.
Nature, in her hands, becomes a grand theatre for elaborating human desires and dreams, but without the stage set, actors or script to get in the way of our contemplation. One immediately recognizes these “places”, even though they exist nowhere else but in the painting in front of us. They permit us also to celebrate another charm as well: the ability to depict and appreciate the realm of pure phenomena by presenting visual silence.
Visual silence is not the same as emptiness. On the contrary, full to bursting with mysterious energies, these rich paintings strike me as a kind of retinal bath, a very full and warm bath. There is a kind of elegiac solo happening in each image which provides a calm zone, a territory for the eye and mind to shelter themselves from a world of overwhelming information overload.
Compared to the expressionistic gestures of her predecessors, her painting could be described as having a “low statistical density”, at least relative to the high statistical density of say, a De Kooning or a Diebenkorn. This low information level has an intriguing effect on the viewer, allowing a huge latitude for them to project their own thoughts and feelings into the process-oriented meaning of the picture.
Meaning in painting is an interesting term. Is the “meaning” of a picture behind the painted surface and available for our inspection if we can penetrate that veil, or is it hovering in front of the picture proper, more accurately available to us from our own side through introspection, not in front of our eyes at all, but rather, behind our eyes, in the mind that operates the optics.
This paradox is at the heart of all Weich’s recent work. In her words, what she strives for is not the presentation of a finalized view of a given subject at all, but instead it is an invitation to the viewer to engage in their own contemplative approach and interpretation of the works. She wants us to question what we see: is this the earth and sky or are the shapes which suggest them representative of imagined constructs? Real, abstract, or both?
Part of her intention is to avoid a simple solution or concept, thus creating a kind of “breathing space” (the title of her most recent exhibition) between the work and the viewer. In this breathing space, the viewer can look “past the meaning” and enjoy the immediacy of what the painting is actually about. This of course, is classic modernism at its clearest: what you see is what you see.
In a piece such as “Theme of Green”, we might be looking at farmland, a river’s banks, an aerial view of prairie flatness, or even what we actually see, a balanced distribution of shapes with as many as ten horizons. Similarly, “Yellow Lights”, appears to have a starry starry night sky, but its figure-ground relationships are instantly puzzling, with a deep red foreground and cubes of lights scampering across its surface, reflections from we know not where.
Some things cannot be adequately expressed in words. Thank goodness. That is exactly what paintings like these are for: ways to approach the borderline of saying the unsayable.
The rest is pure silence, and pure colour.