Look, See

“There's nobody living who couldn't stand all afternoon in front of a waterfall. It's a simple experience, you become lighter and lighter in weight, you wouldn't want anything else. Anyone who can sit on a stone in a field awhile can see my painting.”

Agnes Martin

Place
An artist typically can’t help but absorb and reflect her environment in some way. Where she spends her times seeps in and affects the art, often in very direct ways, such as in terms of light or color or space, and also in seemingly less direct ways, such as an artist’s subject, intention, or spirit.

The pace of life in the artist’s environment, or the local political climate, may also somehow be in the art. Geography and weather of course help shape outlook and sense of place, and also whether one is near water, among hills and trees, in or near the city, or beneath one kind of sky or another. If making art is part of how one lives, then where one lives and works is also part of the art.

Sandi Miot made her way to Northern California after living many years in Florida. She says that on arrival she felt immediately at home and knew she’d found the place where she would live and make her art. Her studio is in a large 1930’s building on a former US Air Force base north of San Francisco, where she is a powerful force in the local art scene. The restored buildings there are solid and spacious, California-style Mediterranean constructions well suited to the landscape, built of sturdy wood and thick stucco, fitted with large windows, and topped with roofs of red Spanish tiles.

Nestled amid rolling hills on the west and the San Francisco Bay on the east, this location is wonderful in every way: open, quiet, light-filled, airy, and inviting. There is life here: deer are often seen grazing under the oak trees on the hill, one sees and hears birds, and there is the invigorating presence of numerous other artists whose studios are also located in this complex. Here, Miot works on a daily basis in a large white room with a high ceiling. There are several work tables, a desk and comfortable chairs, many books within easy reach, and of course her art— paintings finished and in progress hang on the walls, and works on paper lay about in various states of completion. This room is a place in which to work, to sit and look, and to contemplate.

Encaustic
It is important to know that Sandi Miot’s primary medium is encaustic, a way of painting with pigment in heated wax that goes back at least as far as the Fayum mummy portraits from Egypt around 100-300 CE. Entering the studio the senses are immediately filled with the smell of wax and the sight of the paintings bearing thick, lustrous color.

The next thing you might notice is the hot plates and the blocks of colored wax lined up in trays. Unlike painting in oil or acrylic, where you can basically squeeze paint from a tube and begin applying it immediately, encaustic requires tools, time, and preparation— the hot plates need to be turned on, the wax needs to melt, and each color needs it’s own pan and brushes. There is labor involved here, and you can easily see it in the paintings. Paint is built up in layers and often melted back down with torches, resulting in a surface that is thick and textured yet soft and smooth, in places almost liquid, puddled, earthy, and organic, such as in Miot’s Sapphire Silk, Garnet Ambience, and Citrine Veneration, (all 2001). In others, flame-carved crevices cut through a painting's topography to reveal layers of color, like sediment, a kind of geological history, as seen in Beginning and Sanskrit (2007). (Left: Beginning, 2007, Encaustic on Wood, 12" x 12" x 2")

Wax seals and insulates— the painted image is both on and in the surface. Encaustic's translucent quality results in a colored light that glows through layers, luminous like a burning candle, stained glass, or amber. Since wax cools quickly, it drips or runs very little, indicating a sense of brief or frozen time, which furthers the sense of a captured moment that Miot uses to good effect in paintings like Awakening and Prophecy (2000).

Encaustic requires a sturdy support. All of Miot’s paintings are on wood panels, which have a very particular presence— thick, heavy, strong, and crafted. Some of the work walks a fine line between painting and sculpture, often venturing towards relief, some projecting several inches off of the wall. Many works consist of multiple panels, each a smaller unit of a larger whole. A wood panel covered in wax presents several dualities: hard and soft, solid and liquid, opaque and transparent.

Connections
In Miot’s work the paint, the supports, and the imagery have an iconic, object-like quality. They have a historical connection in several ways to, say, Sienese panel painting: the wood panel feels like a shape, not simply a canvas; the painted image is luminous; details are carved into the surface; and they feel built to last.

I am reminded of Duccio di Buoninsegna’s panel painting Madonna and Child (ca. 1300) at New York’s Metropolitan Museum. The gold ground is flat and inscribed with the Madonna's halo, and the space of the painting is shallow. There is an association I make, coincidental but fortuitous, between this painting and Miot's use of wax and heat— at the lower edge of the gilded frame on Duccio's painting two rounded notches have been burned into place by candles set beneath the painting. Not only is devotion depicted in the painting, there is also evidence of devotion, the result of burning candles. A painting like Miot's Sanskrit (2007) comes to mind, which has a centered, brilliantly colored image and a carved, relief-like surface made with a torch. While Duccio’s image is painted in small, repeated strokes, Miot creates her image with a finely controlled flame.

Paintings such Dance I and Dance II, (both 2007), each square and in low relief, make me think of Lorenzo Ghiberti’s twenty-eight gilded bronze reliefs (1404-24) on the north door of the Baptistery next to the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence. And Miot’s use of multiple panels shares the narrative quality Ghiberti’s reliefs. These poignant, almost incidental visual rhymes made across seven hundred years, from Duccio and Ghiberti to Miot, are a reminder of art's history and its continuing value.

Images
Miot's art images are the result of constantly managed chaos and order. Paint applied gesturally suggests improvisation and intuition, while panels that are arranged in grids create order. Strokes applied deliberately contrast with less easily-managed areas where paint is carved with a torch. Geometric shapes hover over fields of scattered color. This contrast of chaos and order is an emotional push-pull for the viewer, who falls in and out of balance, moving from one state of consciousness to another.

Color is of course an important component of Miot's painting, as well as her use of multiple panels to make a single work. She often uses a saturated palette of pure and unmixed color, as in the vibrant, celebratory Night Music (2007). Recent paintings that consist of multiple panels hung in a grid or or rows are painted in an ordered spectrum of color that gradually shifts from one panel to the next, a gradation that suggests movement or a transition from one state to another.

Sunrise (2007) is a good example— the five deep vertical panels transition from a bright orange on the left, through red and purple, to a deep blue on the right. The color across the forty two panels of Lifelines I (2006), six columns and seven rows, transition both vertically (light to dark) and horizontally (blue to orange). Additionally, the panels in Lifelines I reduce in size as they descend in each column, so that it contains two kinds of transitions: color (pictorial) and size (physical).

Miot's art is both consistent and diverse, an interesting balance to maintain. Part of the consistency comes from her use of encaustic and certain formats. But it also comes from a concern for making images and creating meaning using a limited vocabulary of shapes and marks: squares, strokes, drips and thrown paint, layers, lumps, and crevices. And although diversity might best be illustrated by describing a few paintings, it isn't easy describing paintings that have so much built up color, so many different kinds of textures, and so many ways of treating paint.

Awakening (2002) contains a horizon line, with black above and orange below. In the black field three molten hot orange squares are each rotated in a different position, appearing to have burst spinning upward and falling back downward, like cubes of lava. It's possible that these three squares are actually the same square depicted three times in a kind of animation. This image evokes Kasimir Malevich's Suprematist paintings in which stacked squares, rectangles, and lines appear to move apart and evoke space and flight, a moment in time. (Right: Awakening, 2002, 48" x 48" x 2" Encaustic & oil on panel)

Dreams (2007), Eye Candy (2006), and Night Music (2006) are all diptychs, the images of which are made with drips and lines applied without a brush touching the surface. Dreams consists of two fields of deep turquoise blue carved into delicate vertical channels across which Pollock-like skeins of more turquoise are dripped and drizzled. The two red panels of Eye Candy have scattered magenta drops and a few quick lines of thrown yellow that span the two panels' dividing line. The color of Night Music is hard to name— both panels have a blue-gray ground across which a dense field of blue, lavender, yellow, and gray drops and lines are built up from the bottom edge, scattering out further as they ascend the painting. While these descriptions sound similar-- two panels side by side, a colored ground, dripped and flung paint— they really are very different images resulting in very different effects and moods.

Whirligig (2007) is a new direction for Miot's work. The twenty two panels are so deep that they are actually cubes. The smallest cube is at the center on the wall, and the successive cubes form a spiral several feet in diameter that eventually leaves the wall and trails off onto the floor. Every visible surface of each cube is painted, and the color shifts from one cube to the next in an expanded spectrum; the smallest cube is green, and the color of each cube moves through yellow, orange, red, purple, blue and full circle back to green on the largest cube. Each cube has drips of complementary colors, so that a reverse spectrum runs back through the spiral. Like Frank Stella, Miot brings the painting out into the viewer's territory, creating more than in any other work a shift from pictorial two-dimensional space into architectural space.

Understanding
I could simply write that Sandi Miot's paintings are beautiful, a word I haven’t even used yet, and although they are, that wouldn’t be very helpful in understanding her art. That her work is beautiful is so obvious that it almost goes without saying, but in fact she deserves credit for her mastery of materials and color. To further understand her paintings it is important to point out that her images teeter between representation and non-representation, and to recognize how she takes work from the expected flatness of painting to the realm of relief and three dimensions. Miot’s paintings provide us with the opportunity to experience and reflect on emotion and thought. The dichotomy of chaos and order is both something we feel and know as an idea. As Agnes Martin suggests, time spent in front of these paintings results in things to see and feel that might not be apparent at first glance. Miot’s paintings are models for ways of being and thinking. This is ambitious and inspiring, and a tremendous gift from the artist.

Chris Ashley
Oakland, CA
May 2007