A thread I was not aware of when I set off to view a number of exhibits during my recent trip south of my normal place began to emerge as I viewed artworks, had conversations and time alone to think as I traveled up and down I-95.
The idea of ‘place’ as defining not only the identity of the artist but also impacting the work he or she creates.
For Sara Berman it was a closet at 2 Horatio Street in Greenwich Village.
For Marsden Hartley it was the coast, the mountains, the trees of Maine.
For Mimmo Rotella it was the streets of Rome with their torn posters.
For Brian Rutenberg it is the swampy coast of South Carolina.
For Mark Roth it is a place altered by the of clash of cultures migrating and mixing across it.
For Claire Barratt it is a nomadic place enabling quick changes and adaptability.
For Michael Williams it is place moving between yesterday and today, or maybe now and now.
For Betty Tompkins it is place of human desire.
For Al Taylor it is the place where forms, colors, layers of paint meet and (sometimes) overlap.
For Alice Neel it is Uptown.
For Sue Williams it is a sensual, sensuous, sexual, scary?, Seussian place.
For Henry Taylor it is the place where the compositions of painting since Post-Impressionism meet the realities of the subjects of Post-factual America.
For Jo Baer it is the place granted the subject and its reality in the painterly illusion.
For Celeste Dupuy-Spencer it is a place embedded with contradictions for which to report on.
For Shara Hughes place is a trippy, imaginary landscape traversed with a painter’s eye.
For Carrie Moyer place is a playful juxtaposition of fluidity and flatness.
For Albert Oehlen place is a hysterical contradiction.
For Emily Dickinson place was beyond the rose covered wallpaper surrounding her as she wrote.
Daughter and grandson question if the bleached, starched, pressed and folded stacks and hangers of white in Sara Berman’s closet where tied to her memory of a childhood in a small village next to a muddy river in Belarus or the bright, sunny Mediterranean light of her youth and young adulthood in Tel Aviv, both places where women, mothers constantly cleaned, ironed and starched.
Marsden Hartley painting the Alps in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 1933-34 was also painting his memory of a place, Mount Katahdin in Maine. Later, back in Maine, the memory of the view of the Alps from Garmisch-Partenkirchen finding its way into the paintings of Mount Katahdin.
The residue of the paper torn from its place on a billboard in a street in Rome preserved as a memory on a canvas.
The lingering smell of the oil paint thickly applied to the canvas analogous to the swampy smells of a coast.
The memory of the plant seeding itself across a land bridge between two continents, or of pages from a magazine, or paintings from painters long canonized.
Searching for memories of places long forgotten or never seen before.
Remembering yesterday through the technology of today.
A memory of the colors radiating from beneath the layers to a surface making it anything but neutral.
A memory of then still fresh now.
Remembering a diversity disappearing.
A memory of a pause found in empty space on the canvas.
A memory of the stories paintings can share.
Remembering the place can change and still remain the same.
Remembering there are many in the same place as you.
A memory of a place can be more vivid than the place itself.
Remembering the studio is a playful place.
Remembering the innate freedom of the creative act.
The memory of a person, her words are forever tied to the place they were written as much as to the place from which they came.
Through our presence the place we are at contains the memory of all the places we have been.