Solid Air, Liquid Earth
By Tom Wachunas
“To a nonpainter, oil paint is uninteresting
and faintly unpleasant. To a painter, it is the life's blood: a substance so
utterly entrancing, infuriating, and ravishingly beautiful that it makes it
worthwhile to go back into the studio every morning, year after year, for an
entire lifetime.” – James Elkins
“The secrets of alchemy exist to transform mortals from a state of
suffering and ignorance to a state of enlightenment and bliss.”
― Deepak Chopra
EXHIBIT: in the whisper of silence / paintings by
Mona Brody, on view THROUGH OCTOBER 27, 2017, at Main Hall Art Gallery, Kent
State University at Stark, 6000 Frank Avenue NW, North Canton, Ohio / viewing
hours Monday-Friday, Noon-5 P.M.
Early in her gallery
talk at Main Hall Art Gallery on October 6, visiting painter Mona Brody -
currently Professor of Art at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York - described
her methodology. Several times she used the term alchemy in an overarching way. It’s a wonderfully loaded term in
this context, useful as both a practical and philosophical descriptor. Without
traveling too far into painting arcana, suffice it to say that Brody is an alchemist
extraordinaire.
Start with
regarding alchemy in the sense of transmuting common, ordinary materials into
uncommon ones, or a process of changing one thing into another. Here I’m not
talking about using paint to make merely prosaic illusions of plastic realities.
Yes, there are certainly indications of terrestrial or celestial metaphors to
be seen in Brody’s paintings, such as animal forms and aerial views of
landscapes, or volatile skies. But in her process of altering pigments and oil
to transport us beyond their innate materiality, Brody constructs altogether
discrete sensory experiences, independent of recognizable nature, and stunning
on their own terms.
In considering
alchemy as it might be applied to making abstract imagery, think of it as the practice
of reconciling dualities or opposites: temporality and timelessness; permanence
and ephemerality; the apparent and the implied; the literal and the
metaphorical. Brody’s paintings are on one level really about the paint and,
paradoxically enough, the paint transcending its paint-ness in the same way
poetry employs words.
The linear elements in such works as the
magnificent diptych, “Keep Out,” might be seen as bleeding, or crying, or
simply an overflowing, like rivulets of
emotive energy. They’re a drawing out, which is to say an identification,
memory, or preservation of pathways - an intuitive sort of cartography to
navigate through all those surrounding organic forms. Some of those forms are in turn indeterminate, cloudy and
vaporous, while others are relatively more substantive and defined.
As in many of the
other paintings here (15 in all), these amorphous structures bloom toward us
and also fade away simultaneously, all the while hovering or perhaps
incubating, as if waiting in our present moment. The intimate scrutiny that
they invite reveals a subtly mesmerizing depth of entities both veiled and
exposed – a layered history of gestures and responses, of diaphanous things
emerging and changing, or hiding in plain sight.
Throughout
her paintings, Brody has incorporated a product called “interference paint.” This
remarkable product’s name seems somewhat antithetical to its purpose of causing
certain colors to change right before your eyes - with varying degrees of
opalescence, iridescence, or otherwise translucent shimmering - depending on
your proximity and viewing angle to the work. Maybe it should be called
something more relevant to its effect, such as ‘augmentation paint’ or
‘enhancement paint.’ In any case,
there’s often the delightfully uncanny sense that parts of the canvas surfaces
are being illuminated from the inside. Brody uses the effect judiciously. It’s most apparent in those hints of warmer
and more verdant colors, or little flashes of metallic accents, that seem to
lurk underneath a palette dominated by off-whites, muted greys, browns, and
intermediate earth tones.
So as the title of
this exhibit tells us, Brody is not shouting. The sensations evoked here are
not exclaimed via hyperbolic hues or heavy impasto, but uttered, even sung,
quietly. Gazing at all the paintings, especially “Keep Out,” I went in. And
what I heard when I got there was the exquisite sound of my looking. That’s alchemy.
PHOTOS, from top: 1. Keep
Out 2. Indistinguishable 3. Leaning
Into the Wind 4. In There 5. Layered Soil and Bone 6. Artist
talking, photo by Jack McWhorter
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