Mulligan’s Travels
By Tom Wachunas
“There's the story, then there's the real
story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's
what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.”
― Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam
“Everything you can imagine is real.” –
Pablo Picasso
EXHIBIT: Symphony of Life: The Art of Erin Mulligan, at
the Canton Museum of Art, THROUGH JULY 20; 1001 Market Avenue North, Canton;
330.453.7666 www.cantonart.org
For the last eight
years or so, I’ve watched Erin Mulligan continually secure her place as one of
this region’s most compelling and, no doubt, popular painters. In all that
time, this exhibit at the Canton Museum of Art (CMA) is the largest gathering
of her work I’ve seen in one place. It allows some of my past observations
about individual works, scattered through many group shows, to finally coalesce
into a more unified appreciation of her oeuvre.
In some ways
Mulligan’s work recalls the symbolic sprawl of Hieronymous Bosch paintings, the
stark scenarios of Salvador Dali, and the elaborate allegorical journeys and
characters described by J.R.R. Tolkein. After viewing this show three times,
however, I find other hackneyed generalizations such as ‘surreal’ and
‘fantastical’ (which I’ve previously employed in discussing Mulligan’s work) to
be ultimately unsatisfying descriptors of both her content and style.
Those terms don’t
go far enough in separating her iconography from many other painters who render
all manner of alien landscapes, goulish monsters and slap-dash sci-fi
silliness. Not that there’s anything wholly vapid about that level of
sensationalist pictorial entertainment, but I think Mulligan offers something
more conceptually engaging if not enigmatic.
If only in their
virtuosic technique, with their astonishingly fine, crisp detail, her musings
are of a distinctly elevated character. She doesn’t just put oil paint on the
surface of her clay board panels so much as embed it. In the laudable tradition
of the finest Flemish masters, she builds up her paintings in successive layers
of pigmented glazes that give a remarkable chromatic depth to her images.
Some of the paintings
are reminiscent of the tenebrism employed by post-Renaissance masters whose
figures appeared to be sharply illuminated in contrast to darker, relatively featureless
backgrounds. Mulligan’s murky, vaguely defined backgrounds in pieces such as The Consequence of Being Human, The Poetry
of Deception or Cicadas After
Rembrandt evoke real drama. The
sheer theatrical intensity of these painted stories is, ironically enough, all
the more augmented by their very small scale.
At times their
theatricality is simply eerie. At others, it’s utterly nightmarish. Saturn after Goya is a direct
appropriation of Francisco Goya’s horrific Saturn
Devouring His Son – one of his “Black Paintings” from late in his life. Mulligan’s version, every bit as ferocious
and bleak, might be a fable about lost or destroyed youth, as her Saturn
ingests a child dressed in bunny pajamas.
In the paintings with the most brightly
illuminated passages, as in Cosmos
Umbilicus among others, the light, for all its otherworldly
lustre, seems less than joyous. It’s a tentative light, more like twilight than
dawn, and one that seems to impart a patina of pessimism. It never fully overcomes
the pervasive sense of tainted innocence, conflicted emotions and frail
mortality threaded through many of the works here.
Rabbits breathe
fire or morph into frogs, cats grow wings, fish parachute into fiery battles,
humans grow spider legs or birth alien parasites… Even the air in Mulligan’s
strange narratives is equal parts sparkling fairy dust and ash. Yet the
chimerical whimsicality of her images belies their very robust and urgent
embrace of vexing dualities in this world.
We’re told in the
recent issue of the CMA magazine that Mulligan compares her paintings to
orchestrated music – symphonies – to be perceived and unraveled by the viewer.
An interesting metaphor, to be sure. Her spectacular paintings remind me that
soaring, melodious lyricism is never so sweet as when it is placed against
haunting dissonance.
And that, as Mulligan suggests in her statement
for the show, is the stuff of life.
PHOTOS (from top):
Cosmos Umbilicus; The Consequence of
Being Human; Nadine’s Curtains; Katywhite (A Treaty with the Slugbots) and
Katywhite Embryonic Stage
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