Today is World Art Day!
I've put together some art works by Salt Spring artists. These are works that evoke a particular feeling or thought, or pose a question. My aim is to get closer to an understanding of art as an expression of the artist's imagination -- of his or her imaginative engagement with the world. Is my own engagement with the works an imaginative act? 

LANCASTER (FALLING OUT WITH LOVE AGAIN) by J. Robert Moss

What does it say to me? : "I want to create a shape that evokes and at the same time obscures its referent in the real world." 
The first time I saw this piece, several images began to form in my mind: first a bridge, then a gun (did I see a trigger on the right-hand side?). A closer look revealed a mask, some facial features, a cartoonish drawing of a face. I was quite disappointed with my inability to see more complex and interesting figures in this mesmerizing work. Why do I find it mesmerizing, I wondered? Even slightly disturbing in its refusal to be explained easily. Is it because I can't really see anything that points to an object in the real world? As it happens, there is a referential point, but the artist has manipulated perspective and composition in such a way that, when we find out what this object is, we only catch a brief glimpse of it before it disappears once again. The question that emerges then is not "what am I looking at and not seeing?" but "What am I not looking at and seeing after all?" And there is no answer to this question, or no single answer, just the question of perception and how our intellect wants to find a point of reference while our imagination seeks finer textures and concatenations.  

 Representation or imagination? A dialogue, an oscillation between the two.

What about the title? How does the title, "Lancaster (Falling out with Love Again)" bear any relation to the painting? Is this a work about "love" or about what it feels like to "fall out" with the idea of love? Maybe, like the object that inspired the image (an object that shall remain hidden…), the title was inspired by a specific event in the artist's life, a break-up perhaps. If this is the case, we can think of this break-up as the reference point around which to construct an interpretation of the work. After all, nothing in the piece itself  says that it isn't "about" love; nothing in it says that it is, either. The title is a playful reminder that art, as Susan Sontag tells us, cannot be easily explained or paraphrased. To interpret a painting or a poem we need to cut out content— life details, historical context, technical explanations or artists' statements— "so that we can see the thing at all." My background is in literature and textual analysis. I could, if I put my mind to it, offer a more or less convincing interpretation of the relationship between the title and the painting that would demonstrate that love is its central theme. But, would that illuminate the painting any more? Would it make its meaning intelligible for the viewer? J. Robert Moss's painting raises interesting and relevant questions about the importance of meaning, reference and the value of interpretation in art. And it does it quietly, by being nothing more and nothing less than what appears to us when we finally realize that what we see is not necessarily what we are looking at. 

Now, what do you see?

AFTER THE CURFEW by Shelby Johnstone
Acrylic on panel.

After the curfew comes freedom, a release. Emergent shapes and shades of colour. If I read the canvas from left to right, like a piece of writing, I see lines forming, then a splotch of ink -- more like a glob or a pool of ink.  I like the onomatopoeic words that the painting is suggesting to me: splotch, glob, drip, swish. I feel the movement of the brush on the surface and I follow the contours. Not so different from writing. Underneath an eye forms. Something that resists the pull of geometry, that tries to resist. What do we see when we look at an abstract painting? Shapes. What do we hear? The movement of the brush. I keep reading. Cubes and rectangles begin to appear. Now we have some shape, some order, but is there any sense? After the curfew ends, we prepare for its return. It's a human compulsion, to be contained, to contain. 

I am looking at a shiny photograph of a very tactile painting, actually. Tactile in the sense that it asks to be touched: its textured surface calls me to feel it with my hands, not only with my imagination. The brush work is rough. Irregular strokes. After the curfew I don't care about what this is going to look like; I am only glad I can step outside again. Planks of wood of the kind you find in a construction site. Rock surface. Does it want to be absorbed through my senses, instead of my imagination? Is my attempt to read the painting an attempt to tame its energy, to control it by giving it some meaning? 

Abstract painting can sometimes maintain a very tenuous relation to the real world. As my eyes move around the surfaces that keep emerging, I want this painting to have some relation to the real world. I want to see an industrial landscape, but I only see a disintegrating landscape. A disintegrating landscape of the imagination.

What does it say to me? "I'm trying to dissolve shape into colour and texture. Against the compulsion of form."

"The imagination builds 'walls' of impalpable shadows, comforts itself with the illusion of protection -- or, just the contrary, tremble behind thick walls." Bachelard, The Poetics of Space. 

Samuel Beckett in his corner, silent, unlike his characters, who cannot stop the flow of words. On the left, his room in the house in Roussillon. I find this photo of Beckett quite calming and reassuring, although I know from his writing that he "trembled" behind the "thick walls" of the language he created to comfort himself with the "illusion of protection." 
It is interesting to see how the photo montage seems to push him further into his corner. In practical terms, this is the only way to fit both images within the constraints of the frame—if Beckett's picture was placed over the image of the room, it would conceal an important part of the scene under a section of white wall. This way, the empty space is filled by images. How curious, that Beckett's writing keeps trying to fill those spaces, those empty gaps, so that he doesn't have to look into the abyss, when everything he does is look into that abyss and "tremble." How curious that the empty room is boxing him into his corner, but there he is, as always, contemplating the human condition with equanimity, even if a little fed up with it (at least in this photo). You box me in and I fill you with words. The space of the blank page, that is. 
"Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that's what I've had to make the best of." The Unnamable.


This is how Spanish writer Javier Marias interprets Beckett's photograph in Vidas Escritas (Written Lives):
“[the shoes] are the main object in the photo of Beckett too, except that their owner, seated almost on the floor and in a corner, seems slightly terrified of them. He is another hounded man, but at least he is not surprised by the hounding: he’s ready for it; he is holding a cigarette in his right and his left hand seems to be adorned, incongruously for someone so sober, with a bracelet rather than a wristwatch. His clothes are nothing out of the ordinary, although his cufflinks look like handcuffs. If it weren’t for those large shoes, the only thing that would matter, as in any portrait of Beckett, would be his head and those eagle eyes, which stare straight out with a truly animal expression, as if they did not understand the need for this moment of eternity, or why anyone should want to photograph it…..”

Photo credit: Fung-Lin Hall. Vitro Nasu Blog.
Quotation taken from Vitro Nasu Blog.

Two weeks ago I saw Nicola Wheston's exhibition at Duthie Gallery in Salt Spring. The title, "Stuff," hints at our obsession with the accumulation of material possessions and our unhealthy attachment to things. "With the paintings in “Stuff”," Wheston explains, "I wish to reveal some of this pathology, including the sadness, the need to fill the empty places within ourselves," something that she does successfully. Her domestic scenes, all of which feature women surrounded by piles of household objects and cleaning implements in bright reds, yellows, greens and blues, perfectly capture the messiness and clutter in our modern homes. 

It was a powerful experience. The brightly-coloured life-sized canvases were curiously seductive and overwhelming in equal measures.  Their seductiveness for me lay in the Pop-Art -inspired bold colour scheme and use of everyday objects, but, mostly, in the illusion of depth induced by Wheston's skilful use of perspective. At  times, it felt as if the paintings were beckoning me to step into their spaces. But, as I got closer, I had an eerie sense that the objects were suspended on a flat plane, ready to spill out and fall on top of me. This curious visual effect shifted my attention away from the overt theme of the exhibition and made me focus instead on the role of space in the paintings. Yes, I was looking at a series of carefully-organized and crafted tableaux in the style of old historical paintings and portraits. In these traditional works, the aim is to represent reality while at the same time shaping it and containing it within the boundaries of a frame. I realized that Wheston's paintings also articulated this theme of containment: how our living spaces, like the space of the canvas, act as containers, vessels or repositories for our lives ; how our rooms -- the real ones and the ones we imagine in art -- can harbour and at the same time give expression to our deepest thoughts and desires, projected onto walls and surfaces, hidden in corners or contained in the objects that we choose to fill their spaces with. As Gaston Bachelard reminds us in The Poetics of Space,  our living spaces, and those represented in art and literature, have their own "poetics," their own "imaginative way of being."  They are more than representations of our internal worlds. They constitute a topography, a map of "our intimate being," where complex and contradictory desires co-exist, like the desire to accumulate to excess, and the need to contain and control. Our living spaces are always sites of tension and ambivalence, of the ebb and flow of desire.  

So, how has Wheston imagined this map of desire in her paintings? What kind of space has she created to articulate its complexities?  A contained and organized space that, on closer inspection, yields something more. The painting at the top of this page, "Roast Beef," is the one that best expresses this dynamic, for me. It presents a kitchen where objects abound but don't crowd each other, where everything has a place and nothing overflows. Even the garbage has its proper place: in the can, on the floor.  The woman standing at the front, holding a plate of roast dinner, is strangely immobile, lifeless, yet  has a commanding presence. She is the point around which all the other objects accumulate.   Hoarding is the external and exaggerated expression of human desire, which, psychoanalysis tells us, is fundamentally impossible to satisfy. Wheston imagines a space where the desire to accumulate objects can somewhat be tamed within the space of the canvas and the boundaries created by the frame, captured in one single static shot. Only that there is something compelling and strangely alluring about the objects displayed, their colours, the soft yet firm brush-work that creates the feeling of volume and space that calls the viewer to look closer, to reach inside and touch. Suddenly, the woman was no longer flat and lifeless but full and rounded, exuding eroticism in her skimpy nightdress. The more I looked at her, the more I realized that her body was uncomfortably contained by the lines that form her shape on the canvas. Shadows began to emerge, colours appeared to dissolve a little ; the water bottle began to look strangely misshapen. The illusion of  containment and organization was beginning to soften, allowing the exuberance of the painting to shine through : the textures and colours, the softness of touch, the loving care employed to paint each and every object -- the artistry at work. That's when I felt the compulsion to walk "through the looking glass," only to be confronted by the reality of a flat surface. I was back in the realm of structure and form, of straight lines and composition. But now the woman was looking straight at me with a soft yet slightly ironic expression, as if saying, "See? You also live in a place like this, full of stuff. You also feel the pull to let go, and the pull to keep everything in place. And you can't let go. Or you won't let go. But sometimes you just have to. See? This is your imaginative space, too."