CRITICAL REFLECTIONS
Joan Watts: poems and more “From yet another vantage the search for abstraction, the means to communicate that which is otherwise impossible to project, has come full circle: the inchoate abstraction of the Symbolist generation now reappears in the paintings of contemporary artists, who have so thoroughly absorbed lessons drawn from the history of nonrepresentation as to make the issue of abstraction less poignant.” —Maurice Tuchman, “Hidden Meanings in Abstract Art,” from The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985
I often go back
to the book The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985, and not always for the same reason. This is a profoundly important piece of scholarship about the development of abstract art. Supported by its wealth of images, it delves into the nature of our evolving consciousness and, by inference, the nature of our longing to circumvent our ties to the material world and yet make visible and comprehensible
Joan Watts, Untitled 22, oil on canvas, 36” x 36”, 2011
what is essentially an intangible aspect of our being. Or, if not to circumvent matter, then at least to open it up so that form yields its endless digressions about the power and the gravitas of formlessness. The Spiritual in Art is like a passport to realms of speculation about what lies inside the visible—what we have for thousands of years projected on the interior, porous membranes of our freely associating minds. You could think of this book as an atlas of relationships concerning our experiences of the world juiced by our imaginative interpretations of what lies in the realms of the unknown. In trying to find my particular relationship to Joan Watts’ new body of work, poems and more, I needed to lay some groundwork to understand these extraordinary paintings whose eloquence is both complete and self-assured in each image, and yet each work is dependent on the whole; I would almost say severely dependent. Theoretically speaking, could you pull one painting out of this exhibition
Charlotte JaCkson Fine art 554 south Guadalupe street, santa Fe without some kind of conceptual collapse? Yes and no. Let me put it this way: This work is analogous to the act of breathing— an involuntary process where each breath, whether shallow or deep, is inextricably linked to an ongoing vitality. You can’t say “I won’t breathe for ten minutes and then will begin to breathe again as if nothing has happened.” Short of a miraculous intervention, you are not going to be able to pick up where you left off. Breathing must go on regardless of what tricks our mind thinks it can play on itself. So it is as if each of Watts’ paintings inhales and exhales in a continuum that both radiates an intense and meaningful beauty and is utterly indifferent to our individual concerns for beauty or even our own truths about the nature of reality. How then does one locate oneself in this work? As abstract paintings, Watts’ images are immensely satisfying in the understated rigor of their making—in the way they follow a certain order in their
conceptual underpinnings—as if we are witness to the vibratory nature of thought itself. If one looks closely at each painting, the brushstrokes assume the appearance of waveforms, and these waveforms suggest that matter is always in motion, just like our minds. But just when you think you begin to understand the artist’s wavelengths, you are back where you started—at the bottom of a well looking up at the light. Actually, the experience of being at the bottom of a well was my second reaction to poems and more; my first response was that I was looking at representations of a lunar surface or that of some other celestial orb. Watts’ extremely subtle color modulations create a sense of dimensionality, as if she had carefully studied photographs of the moon, but it’s an embodiment that quickly transitions into a dematerialization—matter seems to disintegrate into a series of visualizations of altered states. These paintings are not images of runaway psychedelic explosions, however, but the kind of psychic retrieval that comes from years of practicing meditation, of looking inward by way of the art of selflessness with all its oscillations between being and nothingness. Yet, there is another level operating in this work: that of producing abstract art for its own sake and discovering what new revelations abstraction can give us regardless of our interest in Watts’ private spiritual path. What makes these paintings especially poignant for me is that they provide one more sampling of incarnation. Because that is what abstraction is all about— making incarnate some idea, some association of one thing to another. This obviously could mean an infinite number of explorations—into color, for example, or the distillation of emotional states into some kind of visual space. And that is why contemporary artists have uncovered more, not less, poignancy in their honest search for equivalents to what it means to be alive in this particular web of time and space—more fraught than ever with complexity and the possibility of emergent orders of behavior drifting up from the bottom of every well of consciousness. Trying to reach the light, you realize that making art is, as Robert Frost wrote, “a momentary stay against confusion…. A backward motion toward the source….”, a source we can only hint at with our abstractions, make vague references to, or suggest by our oblique stabs in the dark.
—DianE armiTagE
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