Look, See

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A few things strike me about this small painting, Untitled (Four Ways). It looks simple and quickly painted. But it's more complex than it first appears.

Most painters will feel strongly ambivalent, even if that is an oxymoron, about the way I'm going to talk about this painting. In fact, I think most abstract painters would just plain hate it. They'd say I'm reading into the painting, or being too literal. What I propose here is not a finite way of looking at the painting. Instead, I see this as a way of entering the painting and making it open and possible to find other meanings echoing within and emanating from it.

At first the painting looks simply like a big painted "X" spanning a scumbled white surface. If you take the painting at face value as merely a flat surface and count the faint vertical line down the middle in the background you've actually got a six-legged shape, or you've got a rectangle divided in six somewhat pie-shaped sections.

But that vertical line is embedded in the softly-painted background; what it makes the canvas surface look like is something folded in the middle and flattened back out, like a creased piece of paper or cardboard. And since that vertical line is in shadow, more likely is that it looks like an open book. The more I look at it, the more the ground of the painting appears to me as an book opened to two blank pages. The horizontal strokes of cream, pink, and gray on either side of the soft vertical dividing line reinforce that reading.

So, if this is an open book, does the X across its surface cancel out whatever the book is about? Is this censorship? Absolutely not- I don't see it that way. I don't see the X as on the book, I see it as originating in and coming right out of the center of the book.

The subtitle, Four Ways, is a clue. Four lines come out and go four different directions- N,S,E,W, or up, down, left, and right. They are four different colors. And these are also four different kinds of lines, from top left clockwise: [1] a misty funnel of a line, like billowing smoke; [2] a smooth, sleek, pulled stroke; [3] a jagged, choked scrape; and [4] a line that has had most of its character wiped-out.

The painting shows a passage of time from left to right, the same direction as one reads. On the right side the two darker, more defined lines are strong and focused, in the present moving to the right, as words flow. On the left are two dissipating lines, fading off into the past on the left-hand page, the direction from which the eye moves away when reading. The X is like a figure leaving the past on the left and striding off onto the next page, if one could turn it.

What I describe is a mostly non-linear, visually narrative reading of this painting. That I describe this as a narrative fits conceptually with the idea that the ground reminds me of a book. Each leg of the X is its own kind of line, so much so that the X doesn't really exist. It's interesting to me how such an apparently simple painting can allude to language and story and literacy, summon reference to direction and multiple kinds of spaces, and allude to depicted time as well as engage the viewer in real time. In this deft little painting Tim covers a lot of territory.

Steven LaRose writes ( I had to read this a couple of times to fully get it):

Steven introduces [1] another kind of space (horizontal folding) and [2] another kind of time (sequenced animation).

[1] He suggests that an horizontal line is inferred by this: if the line in the top left quadrant (was, say, still wet and) was folded down onto the bottom left quadrant a faint impression of that yellow line is left behind, the blurry shape there now; and the if the line in the bottom right quadrant (was, say, still wet and) was folded up onto the top right quadrant an smoother impression of that thicker line is left.

[2] He also proposes that if we begin with the line in the lower right quadrant and follow it clockwise through the other three quadrants to the final one in the lower left it "progressively evaporates, like an animation. One can also follow that sequence from lower left clockwise to lower right.

His additional associations of clock or meter fit well with the idea of time and sequence.

Thanks, Steven.

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