Leaf 14
Transfiguring Painting
[Agnes Pelton, ”Orbits;” Rebecca Salsbury Strand James, “Earth and Water,” Florence Miller Pierce, “Into the Light.”]
“Colour is the soul of nature and of the entire cosmos.”
In 1919, art and literary patron Mabel Dodge Luhan enticed Agnes Pelton to visit the writing colony she was nurturing on 12 acres in Northern New Mexico. Pelton was a California adherent of the original Taos Transcendental Group [active in the 1930s]. Not until 1931, however, did she permanently leave the East Coast to live in the luminous freedom and tranquility of the desert near Palm Springs. Drawn to its sublime expanse and streaming sunlight, her esoteric landscapes crystallized Austrian anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner’s [1861-1925] theory that our graphic mental imagery connects to ethereal and astral forces that channel a spiritual world. And the younger Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung similarly characterized vivid dream imagery as symbolic and inexhaustive products of our subconscious. These revealing and pure epiphanies configure the truth about ourselves as do those universal archetypes prefigured in myths, religions, visions.
Steiner argued that the phantasmatic pictures in our mind --deriving from our senses and imagination --can open out onto supersensible dimensions. It is this intimate, yet limitless, realm, feeding the root of existence that, with its shining lucidity, Pelton’s paintings seek to capture. Her glittering chromatic Orbits—spiralling against night’s coming darkness—are revealingly borne aloft into higher worlds. Transfigurational paintings, such as Messengers or Trumpet Awakening, paradoxically startle our attention by their delicate calmness and stillness. In this they resemble deeply-felt nature painting going back to the clarity of the almost-transparent fog , moon, and mountain scenes by the German Romantic, Caspar David Friedich, where the ego is vanquished in wordless contemplation. Pelton’s pictures also temperamentally align with early twentieth-century artists. Recall how Franz Marc and the Blue Rider Group valued animal intuition and anti-materialism, and that Wassily Kandinsky’s synaesthetic abstractions were attuned to the color of one’s inner life, thus bypassing language to connote the spiritual directly.
This unsparing moral economy of respectful depiction and “honest” separateness of objects has a folk art quality to it, that is, a deep sense of what is authentic or genuine representation. Self-taught American painter, Rebecca Salsbury James, was a member of Alfred Stiegliitz’s Circle in New York and, significantly, married for a time to photographer Paul Strand. Think of his radically geometric and diagonally-shot photos of soaring Wall Street skyscraper windows, balconies transformed into their chiaroscuro rails, slim bridge girders, or the ascetic shoreline of the Outer Hebrides. This absolutist aesthetics of isolating the singular is also found in Salsbury’s small flower bouquets where each fresh petal—observed lovingly with eyes wide open—achieves a hallucinatory emotional strength.
Florence Miller Pierce’s monochromatic abstract reliefs on plexiglass can seem, on the contrary, to fade into the wall. Her drooping, triangular, [possibly] fir tree almost vanishes into uniformly gray weather. Other geometries—whether richly colored squares--or, like Friedrich’s skeletal composition shining through the translucent oil paint, use resin to float over and soften verticals, rectangles, and stripes. As in her eternity-evoking First Form, an opalescent glow emanates from within, not outside, the conch shell -- visibly conjoining the object with an allusive ambient, the phenomenon with the noumenon.
The archetype works in mysterious ways. Embodied not only in heightened objects, we find it operating also in grand gestures: in amorphous upheaved earth, tempestuous autumnal atmospherics, thick rain like “a cloak of death,” and shattered light in Dominique Knowles vast ochre, carmen, and sage oil painting dominating Site’s Main Building Lobby. Here inner and outer space exploration takes the form of cloudy sfumato, phantom figures, wind-whipped colors, cracked objects that behavioristically coalesce personal psychology with demented cosmic forces. We are given big movements in an expanding universe tossed here and there.
Of all the painters at Site Santa Fe, the thrilling and mournful Knowles, and the magical Bosnian artist, Maya Ruznik [appropriately featured one more time in this Gallery in addition to her installation at the Saint Francis Auditorium] manage, with thinned pigments and elemental hues, to find an objective correlative between the visualization of a dissonant nature and the dim, or just-out-of-reach, imagery ringing in the discordant galaxies of the brain. In today’s sea of multi-and mixed-media, film, video, animation, collage, montage, varieties of photography, it is wonderful to see painting make such a dramatic appearance against today’s heavy digital competition. Interestingly, it seems its special ability to conjure mystical, mythical phantasmagoria, voluntary and involuntary memories, episodic moments from the past and present with emotional conviction has given it renewed power within our VR and AI continuum.
