A NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE

Posted by Jack on June 29th, 2008 filed in About Ann

For the last couple of years Ann has been working at getting a more regional voice in her paintings and most of these efforts have succeeded very well indeed.  About the middle of May, after flipping through her multitude of sketch books, she settled on drawings she had done last summer, sketches of a lovely, quiet cove on the west side of San Juan Island, a shoreline scene with ragged fir trees, with boulders and cliffs left over from the last glaciation, looking out to Haro Strait and the near islands between Victoria and Sydney on the Canadian side of the water.  It spoke loudly of San Juan Islands.

She fitted to her big easel a canvas of fine linen stretched on a hardwood frame.  A good sized painting this was to be, call it forty by fifty inches.  It is always an intriguing and mysterious process watching the transformation of raw canvas and paint into a work of art.  First there is a rather straightforward step of rendering of the subject in charcoal on the canvas.  Next the magic begins when layers of color cover large areas of canvas, colors that seemingly have relevance to neither shape nor hue in the sketch.  The charcoal gets bathed away under these layers; new colors and shapes are added.  Eventually, the colors start blending into a representation of both tone and shape that interpret the subject, objects and features somehow appear where their charcoal images had been drawn.  

Ann worked on this painting through half of May and most of June.  Trees were added to the composition and brush and bracken were painted out.  Cliffs that had been gleaming in sunshine were shrouded in mist.  Trees were removed and brush and bracken were added.  The sky went from blue to yellow to gray to green.

A week ago she said, “It’s not going to work,” and, saturating a cloth with turpentine, she rubbed the image from the canvas, leaving nothing on the surface but brown-gray streaks.  This had been, arguably, not her finest work, but it was a good, workmanlike piece of art, fine representational stuff, certainly commercial: it would sell.  And it was redolently Northwestern.  To Ann it lacked the soul or the force or the message or something undefinable.  She talked about cutting the linen into four smaller pieces and stretching these for lesser paintings.   Call it euthanasia or late term abortion or what you will, she was done with it.

Then early this week the canvas was back up on the easel.  Charcoal lines defined a different arrangement of the elements.  When the paints were layered on, there was a different palette in play. The painting had been given a pardon, a reprieve or at least a stay of execution.  It might yet live to delight another day.  This seems not to be all that unusual.  Art historians, preservationists and forensic experts use all manner of diabolically clever technology to poke and peer under the top layers of paintings of the great masters.  These probings show that artists such as Rembrandt, Degas and Diebenkorn have painted out figures, architectural elements and structural members in paintings, overpainting them for the final masterwork rendering.  Who knows whether Ann’s landscape will live to join her portfolio?  Perhaps we will have more on the subject at a later date.