Painting Experience/Painting Perception: Jil Evans and Margaret Wall-Romana at Bethel
By Christina Schmid
Painting, writes art critic Roberta Smith, “seems to be becoming the art medium that dare not speak its name.”[i] In light of this dire assessment, encountering an exhibition devoted to painting alone deserves notice. But what makes the work on view in “Movement—Process—Reflection” truly remarkable is not only the medium that does speak its name, loudly and clearly, but the way the paintings by Jil Evans and Margaret Wall-Romana dare reflect on the very purpose of making art: why do we look at art? Or, more specifically, at painting? What, if anything, makes the experience meaningful?
“With nothing can one approach a work of art so little as with critical words: they always come down to more or less happy misunderstandings,” wrote poet Rainer Maria Rilke in 1903.[ii] What his words on the limitations of critical language imply is symptomatic of a particular moment in the history of art: they capture the still intact belief in meaning, the one true understanding that, though hard to grasp, was trusted to exist. While the quest for meaning has typically been associated with Modernist preoccupations, Postmodernism declared all such endeavors impossibly flawed and doomed from the start. Meaning, like painting, was declared dead, always deferred, impossible to pin down, and plainly idiotic.[iii] Aside from occasional bouts of nostalgia, attempts to make meaning in art have, for decades, been “artificially disguised, denied, trivialized, ignored, or banished.”[iv] Not only do Evans and Wall-Romana return to this much maligned idea of meaning-making through their work, but they explore it through the putatively obsolete medium of painting.[v]
The paintings by Evans and Wall-Romana are not to be mistaken as stubborn quests for elusive ultimate answers. Instead, they are preoccupied with the manifold and idiosyncratic processes and perceptual feats involved in meaning-making. The paintings in “Movement—Process—Reflection” that directly engage with 17th-century Dutch still-life painters epitomize this project: they are literally reflections on painting, its history and process as well as individual, sometimes canonical works. While critics of painting have, time and again, observed that painting cannot help but “be about” the history of painting, Evans and Wall-Romana turn this implicit necessity into an explicit dialog with the painting’s past that viewers are invited to join.[vi]
Trained in the fluid gestures of Abstract Expressionism, Evans and Wall-Romana share a profound appreciation for the ways these artists from centuries ago handled light, compressed space, and composed densely populated picture planes. They both describe the creative process as a journey of discovery, directed by their responses to the materiality of paint, to individual lines, images, or to visual vignettes that “happen” on the canvas. Yet underneath this premeditated sort of spontaneity, there is a fierce determination to create opportunities for experiences that allow for the making of meaning, that is, for open-ended, indeterminate encounters with the work.
Consider, for instance, Margaret Wall-Romana’s Still Life with Walnut Boat. Framed by the arch of a cavernous enclosure, a view of a distant, majestic landscape opens up. On a ledge, poised in between the earthen walls and the illusion of vast space, a lavishly decorated cup offers a mysterious array of objects and scenes: a bird’s nest, leaves and grasses, fungi, grapes—and a waterfall. Rather than a realistically arranged still life, the artist presents an assortment of intricate details that resemble the impressions the mind registers when the eye roams freely across a landscape. What is on offer here are memories of moments, scenes, and objects distilled from the experience of nature. Those ephemeral glimpses combine to create a fabric of memory, a narrative that strings together experience. Precious but slightly wilted rose petals on a thread dangle from delicate roots. The eponymous walnut boat looks simple, like a child’s toy, really, but suggests how little it takes for the imagination to begin transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary.
Fig. 1. Margaret Wall-Romana, Still Life With Walnut Boat. (2009) 46″ x 81″
The painting itself, too, is a type of walnut boat. While it easily seduces us into looking, absorbing us into its intricate details, as an artifact it is nothing but oil on a panel, an object created to inspire an imaginary journey. Thus, Wall-Romana not only engages with the history of still-life painting but the role of the imagination in art: viewers are invited to complete the painting, to set sail, in a manner of speaking, in a makeshift walnut boat of their own. What this work insists on, then, is the value of a particular way of looking, of imaginatively entering the world, of making meaning on your own. Significantly, not only the artist is an agent in this creative transformation. Spectators are invited to enter into the space of the work and embark on their own imaginative journeys.
The painting tempts us to “go out there,” to experience a pleasurable but temporary de-centering that reminds us that we do not have to always, habitually, put ourselves first.[vii] This relocation, though, eventually reiterates the interminable interval between us and what we find ourselves absorbed by. Wall-Romana’s habit of breaking the picture plane multiple times in each composition asserts a deliberate uncertainty, as if to warn us not to get too comfortable just yet. Thus, her work reiterates the distance, the very worlds that lie between passive consumption of moving imagery that leaves little to the imagination and, on the other hand, the animated, independent way of looking these paintings advocate.
The act of looking and transformation plays an equally prominent part in Evans’ work. The paintings included in “Movement—Process—Reflection” stem from two different bodies of work, the Dutch Opera series (2007) and Breaking Light (2010).[viii] While the Dutch Opera series resulted from Evans’ encounter with the work of Willem Van Aelst, Simon Verelst, and Jan Weenix, seventeenth-century Dutch still-life painters, the Breaking Light paintings take photographs as their starting point. In both series, the artist’s aesthetic encounter with an image is complemented by what Evans calls “the kinesthetic qualities of paint:” the movement of the brush, the viscosity of the oils, the pace of painting all contribute to the process of getting inside the source image and transforming it in the act of reaching an understanding.
Fig. 2. Jil Evans, Dutch Opera V (2007) 80 x 60
In the Dutch Opera series, this transformation unearths what Evans calls a “Baroque energy.” Her pictorial translation bridges centuries and makes putatively stale still-life paintings come alive. [ix] In Evans’ hands, the figurative still-life paintings turn into abstractions filled with drama and turbulence. Nonetheless, they still reveal, and revel in, an unmistakable discipline: the compositions seem to demand each line, each shape, each color, to be just so. As fleshy protuberances give way to arrows of flame, Evans’ process emphasizes the value of understanding something by hand, through touch.[x] But Evans’ work invites another transformation: namely, the viewer’s own perceptive reflection that in turn is bound to result in a different understanding, a movement toward a new meaning.
Breaking Light’s engagement with photography, a medium seemingly so much more at home in the 21st century than painting, returns to the question of the very role of painting—indeed of art—in today’s world. As the Dutch Opera Series, this new work is filled with a volatile energy but is no longer constrained and channeled by the carefully considered compositions of Baroque painters. Rather than translate history, this body of work questions the way we have gotten used to looking at the world: on glowing screens, pixilated surfaces devoid of depth. This body of work is not “about” the transformation of Baroque paintings; it is about the process of transformation itself.
In Breaking Light we encounter scenes from the water’s edge, where light is bent and broken: branches, sticks, and leafy matter hint at the knotty entanglements of experience and perception. Pieces of wood appear to bend upon entering the water, solid objects turn into quivering reflections, mirror-images abound, and the interplay of transparency and opacity complicates the act of looking, of, quite literally, making sense of what it is we are looking at. The line between water and land is rich with processes of organic transformation, sedimentation, rotting leaves and fungal growth.
Each painting imbues the photographic source image with a unique character. The paintings, as if shifting phase, range from the fleeting, airy, and ephemeral to the vaguely ominous and earthy. Filled with dynamic brushstrokes and dancing line work, they convey, in their fixity, a maximum of movement. And yet, at the same time, the paintings serve as tangible reminders of the labor and patience involved in slowly layering paint, a process reminiscent of quasi-organic sedimentation. In the words of T.J. Clark, painting allows for “a structuring and sedimentation of experience” itself.[xi]
This sedimentation of experience appears out of sync with the rapid speed of the digital age. And yet, it is precisely the rise of the virtual world that has spawned a desire for depth and for an aesthetic of the haptic, of the senses, of touch. When Wall-Romana says that she wants her work to be sensational, it is not sensationalism and spectacle she is after; instead, she intends her work to appeal to the senses in a way that unites intellectual, aesthetic appreciation with the tactile, material appeal of the work.[xii]
“Movement—Process—Reflection” offers a rare opportunity to reflect upon the process of imaginative transformation that animates all art. Devoid of both authoritative declarations on true understanding and the vacuous insistence on art’s meaninglessness, Evans’ and Wall-Romana’s paintings invite us to linger, look, and pay attention to our own curious processes of meaning-making: which putative certainties do we rely on? Which image, line, or visual vignette do we respond to—and why? Which labels are we tempted to affix to the work in front of us—and do these designations help us engage with the work or, instead, impede our imaginative access to it? Looking at painting, slowly, allowing for the experience of perceiving painting to sediment, settle, layer, and build up, is thus transformed itself and becomes an exercise in reflection, self-awareness, and, ultimately, meaning-making.
[i] Roberta Smith, “Post Minimal to the Max”. The New York Times, February 10, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/arts/design/14curators.html. Accessed September 8, 2010.
[ii] Rainer Mari Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet. Rev. Ed. Trans. M.D. Herter Norton. New York, London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2004, 15.
[iii] Douglas Crimp, “The End of Painting.” October, Spring, 1981 vol. 16, 69-86.
[iv] Ellen Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus. Where Art Comes From and Why. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1992, 42.
[v] Recently, curator Peter Eleey, in his essay “Thursday,” noted that “a number of recent exhibitions have more generally encouraged a reengagement with life’s big questions and mystic truths, seeking to recover for art a broader realm of reference” (The Quick and the Dead, Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2009, 33). The quest for meaning, it seems, is back.
[vi] Art historian T.J. Clark admits that he “cannot bear accounts of painting that always end up triumphantly discovering that the painting’s true subject is painting itself” (The Sight of Death, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006, 236).
[vii] T.J. Clark, relying on philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, writes that “no doubt part of the magic of seeing… is the feeling it offers you of ‘going out there’ with a part of your body, effortlessly and immediately … but the very metaphor of outsided-ness we use to describe the sensation—of moving in vision toward a place we don’t physically occupy—reinstates the distance, the interval between us and what we are seeing” (The Sight of Death, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. 237f.) The idea of de-centering and its ethical implications is fully developed in Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just. (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1999, 109ff.).
[viii] This exhibition does not include work from Evans’ series Galapagos Cactus Wars (2008), the first time the artist used photographs of vegetation as her starting point.
[ix] The term ‘translation’ deserves special attention here: derived from the Latin verb transferre, to carry across, it implies a spatial and temporal re-location.
[x] Henri Focillon describes this phenomenon as “the mind in the hand.” (Quoted in Robert Storr, “Dear Colleague,” Art School. Ed. Steven Henry Madoff. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009, 64.)
[xi] Art historian T.J. Clark goes on to observe that the slow pace of this sedimentation of experience is at odds with the dominant speed of perception in today’s world, where it is “increasingly invaded—interfered with, overtaken—by the different rhythms and transparencies of visual array.” (The Sight of Death, 175.)
[xii] Peter Halley, in a paper delivered at the College Art Association’s annual conference in 2010 Chicago, made this very point when he discussed painting’s twofold appeal, intellectual and tactile.
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