Standing in front of Julianna’s animal drawings, you know you are not in The Peaceable Kingdom (Edward Hicks, 1780-1849). The child-like subject matter obscures the profundity that the surface and the construction of the drawings convey. Two paintings in particular – Red Dog (2009) and Dog & Berries (2009)– depict the intense emotional components of art making.In Red Dog, white paint ovals, encasing beautifully painted stripes, no two the same, surround a loopy dog who, snapping his jaws, has somehow managed to catch one in his mouth. The circle of white paint around the stripes places these fireflies on the surface of the paper. The subtlest variation in the use of the material – a set of stripes surrounded by the white of the paper itself – locates one firefly inside the dog’s stomach.
During her gallery talk, Julianna mentioned loving color so much she wanted to eat it. This dog has successfully ingested the embodiment of color itself. Shown red against a black background, he is, to be sure, a devilish looking character; but, more to the point, having ingested light, he glows from within with his passion for color. Unlike a William Wegman Weimaraner, this dog is not anthropomorphized: he catches the firefly with his mouth, not his paws. He demonstrates the wild, animal nature of an artist’s passion for color.
Whereas Red Dog is light-hearted, Dog & Berries is an Aesop’s fable for horror fans. A dog wolfishly devours berries, clusters of which hang tantalizingly around the picture field. Look closely, and you will see that the air is splattered with delicately painted dots so red they look like fresh blood. These are more than berries; and, this is the satiety of more than physical hunger. This is the fulfillment of a powerful desire. Humor and fierce voracity hold each other in balance.
Dog & Berries is divided into a dark and a light section. Conventionally, a horizontal line across divides earth from sky. As with the work of Barnett Newman, Brice Marden, and Terry Winters, among others, the division signifies a relationship which is abstract. While this drawing is ostensibly representational, the use of the division suggests a relationship between its parts that is both opposite – black versus white – and complementary – the larger light area rests upon the dark area. Julianna’s adeptly adopted format both relates and distinguishes the state of wanting and waiting from that of getting.
Volcano on Rabbit (2010), also in the show, has a strong bearing on how Julianna has constructed meaning in Dog & Berries. In this drawing of a pink rabbit with geyser ears, the background is more solid than the rabbit and seems to hold the rabbit in place. In Dog & Berries, Julianna paints a black field around the negative shapes of two dogs surrounded by dark, shadowy clusters of fruit. While the rabbit looks to be trapped in its space, multiple renderings of a dog’s shape in lighter colors within those negative spaces create the image of a creature that is wriggling.
Volcano Rabbit also came up during Julianna’s artist talk. Once she had this idea of the ears, she thought of them the whole night and could not wait to put them on paper. Just so, the dark segment of Dog & Berries implies the dog’s obsession with the elusive fruit. The light space shows those grapes in all their ripe reality; within that space Julianna has painted a slightly darker rectangular ground where the dog stands firmly and wolfs down his prize. Whether the dark area is literally the night or just that untamed place where ideas form, waiting is hard. The realization of an idea is serious business, the equivalent of fulfilling a powerful hunger. As one can see from Julianna’s surfaces, she chews her ideas fiercely and uses her materials passionately.
As a mentor, Julianna not only taught her students to paint but also how to have an idea and to use materials to convey it. When she says that she does not know how these drawings came about, this must be modesty. Her shrewd use of bare paper which serves to not only situate the firefly but to also create the dog’s negative shapes means that the ideas were embedded in these drawings from their beginnings. Perhaps even at this stage in her career, she is awed by the gift that makes these drawings seem so completely spontaneous. As a maker, she practices what she preaches; and she is the mistress of her own technique.
- Illa Loeb
http://www.rochestercontemporary.org/photogallery_williams.asp
Makers & Mentors
February 5 - March 21, 2010
Rochester Contemporary Art Center
New Sculpture, Painting and Drawing by influential artists/ educators Judd Lawrence Williams and Julianna Furlong Williams and their former students, Elaine Defibaugh and Illa Loeb. Co-Curated by Nancy Kelly and Bleu Cease.
