One Hand Clapping: The Recent Art of Patricia Zinsmeister Parker
By Tom Wachunas
Exhibition: “Painting In The Dark” at Kent State University
Downtown Art Gallery, 141 East Main St., Kent, Ohio / June 20 – July 14, 2012 /
Opening Reception Thursday, June 21, 5 – 7 pm
Just when you
think you might have a firm handle on Patricia Zinsmeister Parker’s aesthetic,
it slips from your grasp and evades easy categorization with almost maddening
regularity. While she once described her painting approach as “bipolar,” I
never regarded the reference as the trembling confession of a soul tormented by
anything pathological. Call it an admission by an artist ever trusting of her Muse
– a Muse not confined by a single idea or style for very long.
This would no
doubt be the same faithful Muse who, many years ago, convinced Parker to
distrust working with her favored, traditionally trained right hand and choose
to traverse more volatile, unpredictable pictorial territory. This leftist
decision, as it were, was a watershed moment, and one in harmony with Parker’s
solidarity with the 1970s arrival of what became known in art world circles as
the ‘New York School of Bad Painting’. The irony was intentional and the
reasoning behind it, according to its early adherents, went something like
this: Really ‘good’ painting eschewed conventionally accurate figuration while
indulging in highly expressive, often lurid color, visceral paint application,
and subject matter that could be alternately funny, mysterious and fantastical,
irreverent, or disturbing. And all of it was driven by the painters’ gleeful surrender
to pure intuition.
Sound familiar? In
retrospect, this was not a wholly new movement at all, but rather a reshuffling
of ideas originally put forth by, among others, European Surrealists and
Expressionists from the 1920s-30s, and the pioneering American Abstract
Expressionists of the 1950s. But enough with the thumbnail history lesson.
Suffice to say that is in this heady context
of Modernist painterly flux that Parker’s work developed. But it is a context
that should not be viewed as a cleanly delineated niche she occupies so much as
it is an entire ideological milieu which she continues to explore with
singularly earnest muscularity. Think of it as the difference between being
comfortably anchored on a picturesque lake and shooting the rapids of a wildly
winding river.
So what are we to make of Parker’s
challenging new expedition into “Painting in the Dark”? In many ways this new
suite is very much in keeping with the esoteric nature of her entire ouvre. She
has always been an adventurer, with her canvases being an often startling
travelogue of where the river has taken her. Here is arresting evidence of a journey
that began by embracing a decidedly more dreary palette than she had employed
in many of her past travels into unabashedly bold color and frenetic
configurations.
In citing a
motivation, or initial influence in generating these paintings, Parker
acknowledges the impact of Ad Reinhardt’s highly reductivist, severely dark
paintings and prints executed late in his life. Her images, however, are not so
utterly unforgiving in their blackness. On the other hand, this is not to say that
their deftly painted surfaces, awash in brooding hues and eerily floating
forms, give up their secrets easily.
Her canvases are
comprised of simple grid-like structures, or stripes, or amorphous elongations
that seem at once predetermined and spontaneous, often exuding a spirit of
primordial mystery. Her forms have subtle auras that appear to simultaneously
float atop, and emerge from within, fields of dark colors. But this darkness is
neither lifeless nor without promise. Parker’s colors undulate with delightfully
subtle variations in value, saturation, and intensity. And there’s often a tangible,
ghostly magic in her restrained integration of finely powdered glitter with the
pigments.
So now back to
Parker’s Muse for a moment. In this group of paintings, I envision her at first
donning the guise of one of her dark-souled sisters - the Sirens - luring Parker into murky waters. But this
wily and whimsical Muse was always, after all, bright of heart, and late in the
journey began singing a different, louder song, beckoning Parker back to more
vibrant topographies. Hence, the inclusion of several works here with color so
irresistibly electric that they seem to be exploding from the inside. Such
chromatic drama is clearly the result of an evolution of sorts - a process of fully releasing the colors that
were subtly lurking underneath even the darkest paintings all along. It is an
evolution that brings an intriguing sense of closure to the suite.
To the extent that
the excited hues and simple structure in these later paintings reverberate,
alternately and to varying degrees, with the echoes of Josef Albers, Piet
Mondrian, Hans Hoffman, or Mark
Rothko, one could make a reasonable case for viewing this body of work as the
artist’s personalized recapitulation of historic Modernist “pure painting”
concerns, and the search for the unadulterated “art experience.” Call it the
pursuit of essences.
As such, Parker’s
new works bring to mind how Zen masters challenged or boggled their followers
with koans – those apparently paradoxical statements or questions intended to
aid in acquiring enlightenment. Applying one classic koan to this discourse,
then, what is the sound of one hand
clapping? In Parker’s case, that’s an easy one. It’s the sound of her other
hand intrepidly paddling ‘round the next bend in the river.
Photos: (Top) “Dot
Com” mixed media 36”x36” / “Stealing Thunder” mixed media 42”x42”
