Notes on... Karin
Davie, by Deven Golden
Karin Davie Pushed,
Pulled, Depleted & Duplicated #2 2002
oil/canvas, 78 x 90 inches; September 18 cover shows Pushed, Pulled,
Depleted & Duplicated #8, 90 x 78 inches; all images courtesy
Mary Boone Gallery, New York
"A painter's painter"
is a phrase that turns up somewhere every dozen reviews or so but no
polls are ever taken among painters asking them who qualifies?"
When it comes right down to it, critics and not painters are the ones
most likely to use so loose, yet oddly particular, a turn of phrase.
And this makes sense, for while painters are well versed and comfortable
discussing another artist's work in terms of pure process, writers tend
to blanch a wee bit when placed in the position of making a linguistic
assessment of an intangible, i.e.; the meaning of a brush stroke.
Which brings me to the paintings
of Karin Davie. An impressive new series of her works were recently
on show at Site Santa Fe, New Mexico. Large, colorful, raucous and sensuous,
Davie's paintings rely on a tightly blended quartet of formal qualities
to convey their meaning; composition, translucency, color, and brushwork.
As with any minimalist recipe, none of the elements can be removed or
even watered down, but that does not mean that they have equal weight,
either.
Compositionally, Davie works
the edges. Her swooping lines careen from side to side, mostly staying
inside the picture plane but frequently veering off the canvas - only
to reappear a few inches later. Because the technique plays so strongly
on the ambiguity between willfulness and loss of control, the effect
on the viewer can be unsettling; feelings of intransigence and anxiety
are apt to be aroused in equal measure. Indeed, the closest visual equivalent
might be found in the experience of staring at tire skid marks on a
highway as they crisscross the yellow lines a number of times before
leaving the road altogether, becoming the unmistakable dark black parallel
lines that culminate with a car fatally merged with a tree. You can't
help but wonder staring at a Davie painting - was she hitting the brakes,or
speeding up?
Pushed, Pulled,
Depleted & Duplicated #7 2002
oil/canvas, 84 x 108 inches
Her color offers little by
way of hint. Somewhat reminiscent of the palette of Judith Linhares,
an early mentor, Davies fields a mixed palette of predominantly bright,
sunny colors, a full spectrum of blues, reds, and oranges, deep greens
and yellows. Woven in, occasionally, one also finds a range of low notes
comprised of midnight blues, ivory blacks, and burnt umbers. It could
be that these darker colors serve to intensify the brightness of the
lighter ones, and in part they do. But they also create an undeniable
undertow, pulling us into far murkier waters with little warning. Extended
viewing reveals that even the brightest colors have an oddly turned,
spoiled quality, akin to a bouquet of flowers that have been in their
vase a day longer than they had ought. The net effect is to create,
ever so slightly, a seeping melancholia.
Despite these elements, one
would be hard pressed to describe Davie's work as depressing - her brush
strokes will not allow it. Exuberant and graceful, the artist's brush
work is the kind possible only when an artist paints with her entire
body engaged. It is hard to think of antecedents for this kind of brush
handling other than perhaps the late de Kooning's, which calls for a
brief digression.
At the time of the brilliant
show of those late de Kooning's curated by Robert Storr at the MOMA
in 1997, many in the art world questioned aloud whether de Kooning had
painted the works on display and, if he had, whether or not his advanced
Alzheimer's condition made them "not" de Kooning's. Gallerist
Charles Cowles was among that latter group. Standing with me at the
opening in front of one of the works in the very last room, a giant
white painting with long, powerful red strokes winding diagonally across
the surface, I asked Charlie, "Do you think that he actually painted
these?" "Yes," he replied. "Well," I asked,
"regardless of de Kooning's condition, can you think of any better
paintings painted in the last ten years?" He paused and said, "No."
The point being that certain things cannot be faked, any more than their
meaning can be ignored. Simply put, the late de Kooning paintings are
just too good technically and emotionally for anyone other than a master
to have painted them and, medical evidence not with standing, the paintings
themselves prove beyond a doubt that while de Kooning the everyday person
may have ceased to exist, de Kooning the painter had not.
This is not to claim that
Davie is on par with the late de Kooning. What I am asserting is that
certain aspects of technique may simultaneously reveal many truths while
at the same time sailing clear over the heads of many less technically
savvy viewers. Davie's brush strokes are a prime example. Gracefully
to the point of appearing effortless, they pile up in shimmering bands
of color that traverse monumental lengths with unflagging intensity.
Just how ambitious these brush strokes are, however, might best be illuminated
by some basic measurements - in an 84" x 108" painting like
"Pushed, Pulled, Depleted & Duplicated #7", 2002-3, a
deep blue-black line makes its way from top to bottom six times as it
completes its journey from left to right across the canvas. To be clear,
as with all of Davie's lines this stripe was not physically created
with a single loaded brush, but it was painted in such a way as to appear
that was, and it is over 40 feet long. This is typical for Davie, and
she has painted much longer ones. For instance, the deepest red stripe
in "Pushed, Pulled, Depleted & Duplicated #2", 2002, is
close to 75 feet long. As with the others, though this stripe was not
created with a single stroke, the impression of continuity has a tactile
verisimilitude;despite its considerable elegance, it is hard won.
What information can be found
in marks like these? Certainly, the abstract content can only be gleaned
by each individual viewer - that is part of the excitement of abstract
art. However, the physical content is a different matter: insights can
be deduced from process. Some painters paint with their wrist, others
paint using their whole arm, or their arm and their upper body; Davie's
paintings require the use of her entire body. They could not be painted
while sitting, or even while standing still; Davie's paintings require
her to move back and forth, up and down, to and fro. In working wet
as she does, she must scoop up massive dollops of viscous paint on her
brush and apply it in a series of rapid gestures over exceedingly large
areas. While she may depend on improvisation, she has little space for
indecision; fluidity of this magnitude is only possible through intense
concentration. In short, each Davie painting is a glistening, high fidelity
record of the dance she choreographed in order to make it.
Karin Davie recently exhibited six paintings in a solo exhibition this
summer at Sites Santa Fe, NM, curated by Robert Storr. She is represented
by Mary Boone, NY.
Deven Golden
is a writer living in Brooklyn, NY
also by Deven Golden: The
Raw and the Cooked, Roland Flexner and Shirley Kaneda
