Ann Saint John Hawley: A Collection of Works

HAWLEY A COLLECTION OF WORKS

Ann Saint John Hawley A Collection of Works

Ann St. John Hawley spent her life studying dance and the arts. She pursued her undergraduate training at

Northwestern University where she received a Bachelor of Science degree in Theater Arts and received her Master of Arts degree in Painting at the University of Denver. Her works include paintings, watercolors, pen and ink drawings, woodcarvings, woodcuts, ceramics, serigraphs, monoprints, etchings and sculpture. Throughout her life she also continued to study many forms of dance including Ballet, American Modern Dance and Japanese Butoh.

She was not only a dedicated and successful artist herself but supported and encouraged others in their artistic careers.

Some of my earliest memories of my Mother are of her encouraging me to draw or to dance. She did not try to make me conform to any expectation, but simply rewarded any of my early attempts at creative expression with copious praise.

As I remember, this encouragement to create and unconditional acceptance of the product of my creation motivated me to explore new and different ways to express myself and to impress my Mother seeking her praise. Eventually this early experimentation with creative expression evolved into a more mature channeling of self-expression through creative outlets. I will always be grateful to my Mother for this gift.

But my Mother’s appreciation for the artistic products of the naive and untrained artist goes beyond her desire to encourage and motivate the young exploring mind. She had an intuitive and inherent appreciation for the beauty found in art that was unconstrained by self-conscious adherence to society’s rules for conformity to a conventional aesthetic.

As an interpretive artist, I observed my Mother exhibit a rebellious and critical attitude toward art that aspires to exactly mimic its subject, but highly values that which captures the illusive beauty in the immediate, the vulnerable, the imperfect and sometimes grotesque. My mother was happiest when she was engaged in her artistic process. On occasion I heard her state that she was, “on fire with a passion to make art”.

Although she had a Masters degree in art and many years of training, I have come to appreciate that my Mother inten-

tionally allowed the unpretentiousness of her hand, the unexpected or accidental slip, the fortuitous event to impact her artistic process. She sought the imperfect, felicitous nature of the Divine channeled through her disciplined hand to inform the beauty in her art.

Tina Hahn

Taos New Mexico

Ann Saint John Hawley, 1920-2011 Essay Since early childhood, Ann Saint John Hawley’s in-

terest and commitment in the arts have been reflected in a body of work that alludes to the artist’s immediate and innovative approach to life. Working within a unique idiom, Hawley nevertheless, was inherently available to trends and influences that included modernism, minimalism, surrealism and expressionism.

While the label of ‘ism’ does not apply to the artist’s oeuvre, the spontaneous mark composed of organic shapes and gestural strokes frequented by fields of sfumato create an evocative visual environment.

From early childhood dance and theater provided the impetus for Hawley in her creative life and became the source of experimentation in her art. Figurative subject matter dominated Hawley’s idiosyncratic aesthetic throughout a long and active career, tempered by her love of beauty, culture, spiritual matters, and the natural world. Thematically, “…integration and disintegration, exploring how things die and disintegrate before they are reborn” is evident in all of Hawley’s compositions, whether they are works on paper, canvas, or three-dimensional representations.

It is in late life, that Ann Saint John Hawley achieved a technical and aesthetic virtuosity through unending exploration. There is a clarity and immediacy to the works, accomplished with an economy of mark, with elements of humor and horror, or loving simplicity, grace, and understatement. In any event, the viewer is invited to stand closer to appreciate the nuances of the image, the hard lines and translucent surfaces, the colors and forms, suspended perspectives and illusionary distortions; most importantly, the moment of “integration and disintegration,� the single moment of completeness.

As a child, Hawley’s family lived and traveled worldwide. After earning a degree in dance and the-

ater from Northwestern University, Hawley married Robert Hawley, and together they raised a family of six children. Never losing touch with her passion, Hawley earned a master’s degree in painting from the University of Denver. Eventually Robert Hawley and Ann Saint John Hawley moved to Taos in the early 80’s. At first, the artist stated that she was “befuddled” by the beauty of the landscape.

“I had this feeling of ‘Why make art when there it is just outside my window?’” It was at this time that she

fell in love with butoh—she felt she had come home. “Butoh is daring.” It’s about the underbelly. I’m fed by the gut instinct that comes out of me when I look at… Taos Mountain. It’s very daring; it’s very sexy. It’s the human condition.

Butoh, a theme present throughout much of the figurative pieces, is primarily female, and presented in

bold black and white. Forms are folded and bent, reaching, exaggerated, and raw. In many, fluid gradations of black consume the form, dissolving the figure. In later work, the figure, reminiscent of the earlier pieces, floats on the surface, recalling the body’s perfect and imperfect shape, now in colors, melting form within the form. The tone of these paintings becomes freer, lighter in spirit, with an economy of brush mark.

Over the ensuing decades, the artist easily segues from subject to subject, remaining true to the “underbelly,” always direct, yet with a sense of the inexplicable and mysterious. In a radio interview with Jean Neyens in 1965, Magritte, the Surrealist, commented on his painting The Son of Man. “…Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.”

Filled with similar subtleties, the works of Ann Saint John Hawley capture one’s interest, urging the viewer to explore and appreciate her work.

The figure, styled by the artist, is presented in infinite variety over several decades, becoming more refined, but always with the artist’s signature mark. The female dominates the figurative works, although some of Hawley’s strongest and most expressive works feature the male figure, as seen in these untitled works.

Printmaking became an extension of this intuitive process, providing manifold opportunities to present

a theme or subject in its simplest or most complex form, anchored in the natural world and evolving into the creative abstract. The crisp line of etching and the supple qualities of monotype on paper lent themselves to Hawley’s intended design.

Employing added color and form to the original plate or printed image, a figure, landscape, or simple object is transformed, becoming the essence of the original inspiration. Similarly, objectifying the image became less important, yet never lost sight of the natural world. Memory de Tatoo, a variable edition of etchings demonstrates this trend. So innate was Hawley’s connection to the creation of inception to conclusion, that the process of making art in any media became a natural exercise.

Hawley worked in various mediums, triggered by curiosity and experimentation. The swift application

of paint on paper or canvas was second nature, as one image unfolds into another, often so closely related that they become a narrative. A series of landscapes are executed as small color fields of fluid pastel shades, unmarked by lineation, that become tonal studies on a white surface.

Ann Saint John Hawley, was, succinctly, the sum of her parts—child, mother, dancer, artist, humanist, spiritualist; available to both the dark and the light, willing to struggle and enjoy the struggle; droll and serious in the same moment; a lover of the beautiful and grotesque; open to the world, yet non-derivative in her approach. For this reason, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between early and later work, although at closer look, the work becomes spare with an economy of mark in later years.

Clearly, Hawley made art because she loved making art. The handiness of paper, paint, a found object,

the figure in motion, all that was near in the physical world and in her heart were her tools. Drawing in paint, charcoal, pencil, wash, or printmaking was not about technique, but a way of visually expressing her thoughts, a moment, a glancing light, or objects, today, yesterday or another season.

Drawn to a physical environment at once harsh and beautiful, Hawley saw and felt its energy,

patterns and rhythms. It was these experiences that Hawley celebrated and leaves for us to enjoy.

CREDITS Ann Saint John Hawley Selected works from the following collections

Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, New Mexico

Ann Saint John Hawley Family

Lynne White & Associates Ann St. John Hawley

Dance of Darkness The Santa Fe New Mexican, Pasatiempo, September 15-21, 2000

The Dance of Art The Taos News, February 22, 2001 Essay by Julia McTague

Graphic layout and design by Renny Russell