The brilliance of reflected sunlight, pools of luminous shadow - and throughout, a poignant awareness of passing time. Wendy Artin has always been a painter of light. Now she is engaging the richness of time as well.

An artist’s choice of motif is always revealing. Columns have been present in many of Artin’s studies of the Roman landscape, but with these new paintings – in particular those of solo columns, they have come into their own. Where they had been in conversation with other shapes, textures and historical fragments, these columns stand alone – proud and individual – as though Artin has been circling a subject that now demands her full attention. Rome’s ancient columns become her focus. As she herself notes, “This body of work emerged as a result of paintings on and about Hadrian. I discovered that what I was most interested in was the opus reticulatum and [the] columns, broken by the wear and tear of centuries. It is [their] massiveness and delicacy that I tried to capture… the effect of these strong yet fragile giants.” And perhaps this very contradiction is intriguing because it mirrors the dual paradox of the paintings themselves: they depict the columns’ solidity by using the most fragile of mediums and record the columns’ endurance with brush strokes that last no more than a moment.

Time has been implicit all along. In her paintings of nudes – especially those rapid watercolors that capture a fleeting posture – Artin’s technique matches the subject’s spontaneity. Both are caught up in the moment. The pose and the act of painting move together in synchronized rhythm. The dancer holds still – the brush acts quickly; the brush pauses – the dancer stretches and repositions. Looking at these paintings one is watching time unfold. The landscapes are also of the moment. Her use of monochrome emphasizes that the real subject of these paintings is light – patterns of sun and shadow. But one is always aware that the sun will move – or go under a cloud – and the patterns will change. The intense presence of that sunlit moment will be over.

Where the nudes and the landscapes capture a moment, these columns mine a richer vein. They speak of time, but time as a continuum that stretches from the carving of the marble up to the present moment. And what stories they have to tell – years of hectic activity followed by centuries of neglect, looting, rediscovery, archeological dispute, tourist snapshots – always weather. They speak as well of the act of building, of quarrying the ancient stone, of erecting the shafts and carefully positioning the entablatures, of carving capitals of such delicacy that enormous weight will appear to be borne by a basket of leaves. One senses their role in the original structure because the artist does not show us the column capital in decapitated isolation, but where it belongs – up in the air on top of its shaft, celebrating the tricky architectural transfer of a very heavy load from a horizontal beam to a vertical column.

Although her technique can have the momentum of calligraphy, each of these images is the product of countless patient hours of intense observation. It would be simply impossible to execute a watercolor of this complexity, size and detail in the field. However Artin always begins by making on site studies – in watercolor – in which she records values and overall composition, and surely captures her initial excitement. Because she has absorbed the experience so fully, Artin is able to carry this excitement into the
final, very large and scrupulously detailed watercolors.

The artist honors her subject with absolute fidelity. This means truth to the spirit of the subject as well as to its particulars. Although she has shown again and again that she is unexcelled when it comes to fluid but precise brushwork, she does not take this marble carving as an occasion for a bravura riff – as Tiepolo might have done. Their extraordinary beauty has drawn her to these columns, but she also feels deeply that they have lives of their own that must be respected and that ultimately the columns themselves remain more significant than their depiction.

History’s time is alive in these images, but immediate time is here as well – the moments of the artist’s experience of the place and of her crafting of the image. With her we feel the heat of the sun – the luminosity of Rome. The artist describes it best: “Hot stones, sounds of crickets, great stillness, sun revealing forms with shadows like puddles of clear watercolor. A gentle wind brings wafts of sun-baked plants, the same wind that for centuries has gradually worn away and rounded off the architectural shapes that seem eternal, in their great immobility”. That she can convey this atmosphere is a tribute to her sensitivity and to her skill. Wherever possible she lays down a single wash, so the light reflected off the paper is not lost and her careful marks appear spontaneous. Her control is such that she can coax the water and pigment into the most refined gradation of values. We can look into the shadows and discover forms defined by light reflected from below. Watercolor is unique in its capacity to record the act of painting, and as our eyes register the spots the brush has missed or where the water has made a puddle, we are watching the image come into being. Because Artin thinks in terms of values – of light and shade on surface – rather than in terms of line, her eye sees, and her hand can recreate, these crucial subtleties. Just compare these columns with those delineated by Ruskin.

And these columns also live in the moment when we look at the paintings. We participate in the making of the image – we complete it in our minds. Artin’s precision is perfectly calibrated. She knows when to pursue a detail and when to back off. Sometimes the edge of a form is distinct, sometimes it is blurred, sometimes – as when the brilliance of the sun dissolves the edge into the white of the paper – it isn’t there at all.

This inert marble is so filled with light, with life, with memory, that we are made to forget that, in the end, these are just stains on a piece of paper made by the strokes of a brush. We are stunned by the beauty of the image.

Alexander Purves
September 2009