Vision becomes Gaze (Regard), in the etymological sense of the term, to guard, to place in safekeeping: "Regarder [to look at, to gaze upon] is a movement that aims to recapture, reprendre sous garde [to place in safekeeping once again]. The gaze does not exhaust itself immediately. It involves perseverance, doggedness, as if animated by the hope of adding to its discovery.1
2020.
The year an extremely contagious and deadly pandemic swept through the world. International borders were shut down and society was quarantined for its survival. Akin to a form of wartime, Covid-19 has an unknown end date. Daily life unfolds in slow motion while people undergo curfews and severe restrictions. Families and friends are separated, there is a staggering human loss. This past year’s collective experience feels like the ‘Lost and Found’ in an airport or train station — a floating space in the public sphere outside of chronological time. One reports that something has been lost, and hopes it will be found.
Dawn.
I began Dawn studio in the early morning hours of 2020, when the pigmented night sky slowly shifts in color and chromatic intensity as the day begins. Dawn is scientifically categorized as astronomical, nautical and civil —graphically represented in shades of blue on a gradient scale before the sun appears over the horizon. Each morning, I wake up before 6:00 a.m. and place my inks, watercolors, paper, brushes and jars of water onto the dining room table. A candle is lit. The city is quiet, the room is compact and faces west over the Hudson River.
Through the window, one sees the sky meeting earth meeting water — three horizontal planes that move to separate rhythms or become blurry depending on the weather. Like punctuation marks in language, natural phenomena possess agency, express emotion. The ocular shape of my eye mimics the circular shape of the earth, and like an aperture in a camera, opens and closes depending on the amount of light outside. I begin to paint in curvilinear motion, layer upon layer of transparent ink, watercolor or gouache, until a lacuna appears, or rather, arrives.
Several sheets of 9 x 12 inch watercolor paper are in process at once, like unique multiples. In painting, I chase after a particular suspension of lightness and density, in color and form. Vision is an aggregation of real time and memory. The gaze possesses a spatial dimension of gravity, movement, an interior and exterior. During the time of Dawn studio, I pause to photograph my environment. There is the mise-en-scène of the table, a lamp, candlelight, the hue of dawn as seen through the window and the works in progress. Under the play of light and shadow, the paintings’ details morph into shapes or fragments of color. Anamorphosis can occur. Afterwards, I find names for the works such as: “Envelop(e) dawn”, “Fanning dawn”, “Dawn plumes” or “Tongues of dawn”. Here, I become aware of my gaze.
Lacuna.
A lacuna is generally defined as a gap or hole in a manuscript. This notion of space frames the Dawn studio paintings, connecting the time of the lockdown to three years earlier in Italy. It was early June, when I journeyed to Rome with a small group of friends from Belgium. We gathered there for a festive 80th birthday celebration, and our host planned a daily itinerary of his favorite churches and architectural sites to visit. One afternoon, while standing in Borromini’s baroque masterpiece, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, my gaze turned upward at the ceiling and met the oculus. At that moment, the space of the lacuna entered through my eyes, and once I returned to New York, it became incorporated into my work. Like a bookmark that you revisit after reading a text, your travels, impressions of site, and color palettes make their way into the studio most naturally and in sync with process.
Eye(s).
There is a “devouring vision” beyond the visual, such as the interior, pictorial eye that gives “the imaginary texture of the real” and effects the passage from the visible toward the invisible, according to Klee, as Merleau-Ponty states (Eye and Mind, 165). In this respect, Visioning—by which things absent become present to us—defines simultaneously the place of art and the access to Being, the simultaneous appearance of an aesthetic and an “ontology,” whether it be negative, fractured, or exploded. “Vision is not a certain mode of thought or presence to self; it is the means given me to be absent to myself, to participate in the fission of my Being.” (Eye and Mind, 186)2
Vision occurs once you are ‘absent to yourself,’ as Merleau-Ponty writes in Eye and Mind. The space of the pandemic and lockdown opened the door to such absence. The horizon line across the river yielded to curvature after prolonged gazing in the same direction. Amid the eerie sound of sirens racing up and down the West Side Highway, the eyes found comfort in the sunrise, the ebb and flow of the Hudson, the subtle changes in color, blinking lights in the distance. The micro and macro fold into a (w)hole, details are magnified, solidified. The sedimentary layers of ink and watercolor flow in continuous motion. Painting becomes peripheral vision, space expands as if encountered through sequential mirrors.
When the eyes meet the lacuna, they simultaneously swirl inside and skate on the surface. There is a sensation of being on the edge of a cliff, painting on a precipice.
Vision becomes an inventory of multiples, repetition of ordered profusion, metaphor of a representable universe.3
IMAGE LIST
- Blink, on this lithe brown feather, Metallic ink on Windsor & Newton cotton watercolor paper, 9 x 12 inches, 2020, Private collection
- Blink, le jardin suspendu de la rue de Bosnie, Metallic ink and watercolor on Windsor & Newton cotton watercolor paper, 9 x 12 inches, 2021
- Blink, down in the reeds by the river, Metallic ink and watercolor on Windsor & Newton cotton watercolor paper, 9 x 12 inches, 2020
- Blink, a rose is a rose is a rose, Metallic ink on Windsor & Newton cotton watercolor paper, 9 x 12 inches, 2020
- Blink, bed of eyes and leaky pens, Metallic ink and watercolor on Windsor & Newton cotton watercolor paper, 9 x 12 inches, 2021
- Blink, liquid gold is the air, Metallic ink and watercolor on Windsor & Newton cotton watercolor paper, 9 x 12 inches, 2020
- Blink, a little language of my cat, Metallic ink on Windsor & Newton cotton watercolor paper, 9 x 12 inches, 2020
- Blink, like the loosening grip of each star, Metallic ink, watercolor and gouache on Windsor & Newton cotton watercolor paper, 9 x 12 inches, 2020
***
This work is part of Doubled and Divided, a micro-issue on space and the built environment, edited by Lakshmi Luthra and Florence Uniacke.