Like sand through the hourglass, summer is indeed slipping away. The almost imperceptible change in the air comes in an unconscious wave, slowly floating to the surface like a buoyant swimmer come up from the deep. The days of August tick off the calendar, coming closer and closer to the start of school, like a new New Year’s day.
I think this is why August can be such a time for reflection, for assessment. It’s got me thinking about painting.
There’s a particular cool stillness that comes when you can step into the shade of a gallery or museum on a hot summer afternoon. Shut out the sound of the sultry air and come into a temple of controlled conditions and raging imagination. Maybe that’s the contrast that, when done well, so effectively charges the air. The gallery or museum can be a world unto itself, different from outside the doors. Everyone is polite, quiet (unless you’re an enraged lunatic like the woman who again assaulted paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. But I digress…). But isn’t there a difference in the energy, the reserved environment of the space, and the tumult of making that happens in the art? Maybe that’s why it’s so different to see work in museums and galleries, rather than in the general chaos and well-worn nature of homes.
On the subject of this tension among space and object and energy, Inova/Kenilworth is a great place to go. Inside, it’s austere and reserved, the raw industrial-tinged space a deferent host to the work on display. The current exhibition — rather, exhibitions — are engaging in their divergent flavors (for more on the show specifically, here’s my review in the Wisconsin Gazette). But this, and something a friend said, have got me thinking about painting.
Actually, the conversation and question was about the size and scale of paintings, but that’s another topic. What caught my attention was a moment of questioning — what is it that makes painting so appealing? Going back to the Inova/Kenilworth, in her three-dimensional installations, Martha Glowacki whips out some keen chops, like an artist-conductor shaping the rhythm and timbre of objects that become art. These works exist in your physical space — tangible, transformative. Yes, I certainly groove on installations and sculpture.
But there is also the work of Greg Klassen to see, monumental swashes of paint. They cover a lot territory, spatially. The absorbing nature draws me into a realization that must be acknowledged: I have a particular affection for painting. Yes, the thing with brushes or other implements on some surface, usually panel or canvas, often finished off by a frame. Yes, that same thing that’s literally been done for millennia. Love it. Past decades have stirred up headlines by asking the question of doom: is painting dead? I would certainly say not by a long shot, especially now with so many painters on the scene that notion is plain silly.
But to pull a riff on Shakespeare, how do I love thee? I love the concentration of paintings. Everything that needs to be said or implied originates within these boundaries. The edges of the support. I love that term — “support.” The physical foundation of the painting is like another actor whose job is to make sure the lead is able to plunge and soar to the edges of their role. It is a challenge, to make things happen in this given space, through layers of color and gesture and line. The myriad of decisions to be made — how much of a mark to leave, heavy or strong, or fine and nearly dematerialized. It’s all the subtly of language in nonverbal form.
There is a lovely Italian term — pentimento — which refers to a previous mark or part that has been changed, something intended but decided against in the painting process. This earlier direction is altered, changed over, but it still exists within the paintings layers. But sometimes age bring pentimenti out, and the earlier marks show thorough the later layers. That’s a lot like life, is it not? Our earlier experiences and selves may lie buried, only to resurface unexpectedly, but meaningfully later on.
A painting is not just a picture; it’s an arena. There is a lot that happens between it on the wall and one’s own self, as we stop to give the most valuable and irreplaceable thing we have — time. Paintings, and all art that moves you, that draws you in and encourages you to come back. It is generous, giving back moments more richly felt, sending you off more filled than before.
~ Kat Murrell
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