Reading Beneath, Behind, and Between

 

Reading Beneath, Behind, and Between

Ursa Minor, Facing North / Jack McWhorter

Lunch with Picasso / Patricia Zinsmeister Parker

Partially Buried 3 / Earl Iselin

By Tom Wachunas

 

   EXHIBIT: JACK MCWHORTER: VISIBLE UNIVERSE / PATRICIA ZINSMEISTER PARKER: LUNCH WITH PICASSO / EARL ISELIN: STACKED

 November 4 – 27, 2021 / The Painting Center, 547 West 27th Street, Suite 500, New York, NY 10001, (212) 343-1060

https://www.thepaintingcenter.org/

    I was especially honored to write the catalogue essay for this exhibit.

Here’s a link for seeing artists bios and their exhibited works:

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58e51549cd0f681f932c3e9c/t/617cad918fac1d3a0d07cf2b/1635560852805/McWhorter_Parker_Iselin_Catalogue+2021.pdf

“If good art illustrates anything at all, it’s likely to be a story you didn’t even know needed telling.”  - David Salle

    In the introduction to his 2016 book, How to See, painter and critic David Salle wrote, “Art is more than a sum of cultural signs: It is a language both direct and associative, and has a grammar and syntax like any other human communication.”

   This analogy, while complex and expandable, is useful in “reading” contemporary painting. Think, then, of the three painters in this exhibit – Jack McWhorter, Patricia Zinsmeister Parker, and Earl Iselin - as writing in dialects. Each of their respective dialects is in its way a discreet synchronicity, or a dialogue, transpiring in unique terrains wherein the painter straddles the fluctuating boundaries between representation and abstraction.

   In the past, Jack McWcWhorter has characterized his process and product as “personal archaeology.” For this group of recent paintings on paper, that description remains potently apropos. Equally potent is the wide arc of his subject matter, born from his question, “How can one give form to one’s connection with the cosmos whether it be lost or hidden?” He adds this consideration: “Contemporary cosmology challenges us to look at nature in new ways and to see the inorganic world from broad areas; art, astronomy, chemistry, earth sciences and physics.”

   At the core of his aesthetic is a persistent navigation of tensions and harmonies within symbiotic dualities. His compositions, which he calls “live surfaces,” are clusters or matrixes of lines, shapes, and patterns that juxtapose accumulations and singularities, gatherings and dispersals. Like an explorer’s field notes on remembered sights and sites, places and spaces, his pictures often entwine a then with a now, as if remembering their own beginnings even as they are transformed by his imagination into new visual moments.

    Live surfaces to be sure, they’re drawn with a vigorous, gestural immediacy, combining marks made in broad and loose ways with more concentrated movements of the hand that we might associate with calligraphy.

   Additionally, McWhorter’s exuberant palette imbues his imagery with a numinous energy, bringing to their spatial dimensionality a sensation of rhythmic pulsing. Rising from evanesced fields of personal history and the memories held there, his transfixing configurations have a heartbeat.

   Similarly, visceral gesture, remarkable chromatic dynamics, and personal history are prominent in Patricia Zinsmeister Parker’s works. Recently she wrote “I have always believed that abstract art and representational art are one and the same. It’s just a matter of scale and particularity.” Her pictures are invigorating records of spontaneous actions – an immersion in the primacy of painterly impulse and intuition.

   In a spirit of equanimity, Parker presents her canvases here in pairs, suggesting a continuum, or conversation, between a non-objective work and one of a relatively more representational nature. For example, Girl in White Tutu sits beside My Leaky Fawcet, while Wallflower attends Lunch With Picasso. Two pictures reading as a single entity, these pairings are unified by one or more formal commonalities, such as a recurring color, shape, or pattern motif.

    There was a period in Parker’s career when she deliberately painted with her “untrained” left hand. Consequently, the representational elements in her works regularly possessed a distinctive awkwardness. She has recently commented that her leftist approach, if you will, is a thing of the past. Her current paintings signal a re-emergence of her trained right hand - what she calls her “… return to figurative work and draughtsmanship skills - those skills being undermined and buried for decades by the use of my left hand.”

   Parker’s drawing acuity is especially evident in her renderings of female forms. They seem to emerge from under surrounding scruffy veils or rough layers of paint in a fluid, even graceful manner, deftly capturing the subtlest of bodily attitudes.

      Insightful and inciteful, Parker makes art that wags a sassy finger in your face and rattles your sense of “finished” aesthetic decorum. As the sardonic titles of her paintings suggest, such as Caught in the Act of Painting, she’s a painter seriously engaged in mindful play, and generous enough to provide us refreshing cause to chuckle.

   Meanwhile, for Earl Iselin, the act of painting is in many ways an ongoing inquiry into the very motives and meanings of creativity. Metaphor is certainly an active force in his iconography. “In five of the paintings I have offered,” he writes, “I’ve used isometric perspective, which has the penchant to lift, in essence to ‘sky’ the painting, as if to give flight to imagination.”

   Those five paintings share a title, Partially Buried, named after Robert Smithson’s 1970 land art installation, Partially Buried Woodshed. Made on the grounds of Ohio’s Kent State University when Iselin was living there, it was a site he visited, occasionally sitting inside, and which he remembers as greatly obscuring his view of the blue sky, itself a symbol of pure, limitless possibility.

   That sensation has prompted some intriguing philosophizing about history and existence itself. What he calls ‘skying the painting’ is his way “…of defying the past and escaping its definition.” Thus his paintings present the shed not as something dead, collapsed by gravity and entropy, but as a bright-colored geometric structure, maybe a house, free-floating in an open field dotted with suggestions of dirt piles or bodies of water.

   Meanwhile, his series of paintings under the collective title of Stack, is a further probing of history. These smaller individual pieces, some executed in lavishly-hued impasto, are attached to each other to make large modular grids, evoking a variety of modernist painting genres such as Color Field, Minimalism, Expressionism. The Stacks are intended by Iselin to symbolize and encourage imagination – his, and ours – and to create an energy for really seeing our present.

   And again, Iselin’s words describe that energy best: “It is…a creative force… to move me beyond the limitations of my own gravity, beyond myself, that gives purpose to the painting, a purpose that has everything to do with you. Your sky is as blue as mine.”

   Jack McWhorter. Patricia Zinsmeister Parker. Earl Iselin. To you, the viewer…enjoy the flight.