KATHLEEN WEICH

THE SAID, THE UNSAID, AND THE UNSAYABLE

The Art of Kathleen Weich

By Donald Brackett

“That which we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence…” Ludwig Wittgenstein

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.