Notes On A Writing Life / 34
February 14 2022
Dear All,
This month, I had the honor to be asked to write an essay on the paintings of two friends who were showing them in an exhibit here in Key West. Judith Murray and Robert Yasuda are, quite simply, extraordinary artists. Writing about painting is a challenge - like moving into another language. Here is my short essay:
Murray/Yasuda paintings. Painting/Place
Robert Yasuda - Life Line
2013, Acrylic, fabric on wood, 84 x 72 inches
The painter climbs ladders, reaches out, moves like a spider spinning across a vast expanse. You don’t often get to see this usually private activity. The first touch of brush to canvas – that ‘stick of wood with hairs on it’ as Robert Yasuda called it – that activity that first took place in the deep caves of pre-history, when our first artist ancestors touched color to the forms of rock. It’s like watching someone dream – that reach into the unconscious, that initiation of conversation with the painting-to-be. I watched both these artists at work, on video on their web sites, and thought of the Yeats poem, ‘Long-legged Fly.
‘There on that scaffolding reclines
Michael Angelo.
With no more sound than the mice make,
his hand moves to and fro.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence…’
The artist’s first tentative and then surer brush strokes seem to interrogate the painting, to suggest that the whole of it is to be uncovered, released into view. What does the painting know? These paintings know color, they know suggestion, they know the inchoate imagination; they also know that the eye of the beholder will see them change and shift, the longer the gaze, the steadier the contemplation. In the age of the quick glance, the rapid hunger for information, these paintings say – slow down, take the time it takes. I stood in front of Yasuda’s ‘Origins’ hung on a gray wall, and saw it change color, as if it blushed. It was green and then it was pink – it shifted and changed as a sunset does. These paintings are organic, built up in layers, releasing their essence slowly, altered by the light, and by the eye and movement of the beholder.
Judith Murray - Currents, 2017, Oil on linen, 50 x 54 inches
With Judith Murray’s sparks and showers of gold, a different energy is released – that of the universe of shooting stars, sun-spots, volcanic eruptions. Her palette is that of the cave-painters, yet she brings the viewer into the airy eruptions of meteor and star-dust. Again, what do these paintings know? I watched her in her video begin on a bare canvas, the first marks like hand- or foot-prints, the outlines of a cosmic movement just beginning. The sculptural use of paint, its expression on a flat surface, its thick curls and sharp edges – all this was to follow. Her work is full of a dashing energy, passionate and exact. My eye created fish-shoals, water reflections, rain showers - but that was my own literary side attempting translation. Paint is paint.
A writer longs often for the plastic simplicity of paint. Words are approximations, always, language a scrim for what lies behind it. Here, in the paintings of both these artists, I found the essence of paint as language in itself, its purity, its simple ‘I am.’ It escapes any notion of art as commodity, comes from a time when no artist expected to sell a work – its integrity is decades-old. You don’t get to create paintings like these in less than a lifetime of dedicated attention. And paintings have a home, too, they have a native place, a home port, no matter where they are carried in the world. Key West light informs these paintings, I think, the way the light of the South of France informed those of Cézanne and Van Gogh. It’s not about the literal place, so much as its ambience, the particular light in which landscape and skies appear, and the way that plays in the mind of the artists, as well as that of the observer. The fact that Murray and Yasuda have chosen to show their work together for the first time in Key West – their home port – is a compliment to our island and its inhabitants. It is also timely, born of a world whose fragility we feel. Our obligation to it is to look – really look – to pay attention, and let these paintings speak.
“A writer longs often for the plastic simplicity of paint. Words are approximations, always, language a scrim for what lies behind it. Here, in the paintings of both these artists, I found the essence of paint as language in itself, its purity, its simple ‘I am.’ ”
"Into Egypt" - it's available from Mike Walmer, Sandness Press, North House, Melby, Sandness, Shetland ZE2 9PL
https://www.michaelwalmer.com/titles
I also received copies this week of my own third published novel “Into Egypt” from the publisher Mike Walmer. This came out originally in 1973 with Macmillan in the UK. I based it largely on a trip I made to Israel at the ripe age of 19. Now, in these days of anxiety about political correctness, cultural appropriation and other bugbears of authors, I re-read it with a slight sense of dread. How did I dare to plunge into the politics of another country after just one visit? How did I dare to preface it with a quote from T.S. Eliot? Chutzpah, if not utter rashness.
But when you are a young writer, you have to dare everything. It’s up to the publisher if they choose to publish it – and at the time, I had few qualms. Now, as a much older writer, I still want to say: we must write as we want to, on the subjects that we need to write about, and simply do the best we can.
Happy Valentine’s Day –
Affectionately, Ros