Selected Essays & Reviews
Material, Immaterial: Waterston's Ghosts
- On Fujiyama
- Under the midsummer moon
- The snow melts, and falls
- Again the same night.
“Ghost” is the title of Darren Waterston’s latest group
of paintings. He hastens to explain that his ghosts have
less to do with spirits of departed humans than the nature
spirits of Japan that populate the hyakki yako, or Night
Parade of One Hundred Demons, represented in Japanese art
and literature for centuries. These creatures, which range
from the fearsome to the absurd, are expressions of Japan’s
animistic native religion, Shinto. The name Shinto comes
from a combination of two Chinese characters meaning “the
way of the spirits.”
Shinto involves the worship of kami,
or nature spirits. Some kami are local—the spirit or genius
of a particular place, for example—but others represent
natural objects and processes, like weather, wind, or water.
A waterfall, the moon, or an oddly shaped rock might be
regarded as a kami, but so might a charismatic person, or
abstract entities, like growth and fertility. Over time,
some kami took on anthropomorphic forms and mythological
roles. Although divine, kami, are not gods. Close to us,
they inhabit the same world we do.
In May 2002 Darren Waterston spent three weeks in Japan. His
work has always been populated with spirit-imbued forms,
both fabulous and natural, and it is easy to understand the
appeal that animistic aspects of Japanese culture held for
him. Yet, when I asked him whether “Ghost” represents a
shift in his work, he answered, unhesitatingly, “yes.” After
considering these paintings, it is not hard to see why. In
Waterston’s previous work, violence and grief are
omnipresent in a range of ways. References to moments from
the cycle of coition and generation, growth and death,
mingle there with luminous images of the body in pieces and
shadowy forms from the natural world and the world of
artifice. Despite their often brilliant color—vermillion,
yellow, blue, and green—sparked by carbon black, the mood of
the earlier paintings is predominantly elegiac.
Freedom emerges from shadows. Waterston set his intention
when he began working on the current paintings by limiting
himself to a “minimal palette.” Smoky whites, grays, and
blacks are only momentarily enlivened by small touches of
pink, turquoise, and red. Yet, the darkest mood of the
“Ghost” paintings is one of mystery, which brightens easily
into lyric exuberance, even humor. About the pair of
paintings, Fume No. 1 and Fume No. 2, Waterston says, “I
wanted a play of ghostliness that was icy and cool,” adding,
“during the hot summer months Japanese artists would conjure
up images of the spirit world to be hung in a home to
frighten and give a chill, to cool things off.”
Perhaps the most Japanese of these paintings is Chimera,
whose title refers to two whimsical, airy spirits that hover
across its middle. With its almost metallic warm beige
background and black ‘cloud’ hovering at the top, Chimera is
reminiscent of Japanese gold-background screens. Japanese in
feeling too are the little, white, apparently wind-blown
quadrangles that float upward through the picture. “They
started out very bat-like,” Waterston told me, “and they
ended up looking like Japanese wish papers at temples that
people write a prayer or wish on. They fold them up into
different shapes and tie them onto the exterior structure of
a Shinto shrine. Or sometimes they actually take them to the
wind and just let them blow.”
Waterston’s description of the white shapes starting out one
way and ending up another relates to his painting practice,
where, he finds, “the paintings reveal themselves more to me
than I do to them.” The process is very physical: “I
sometimes have a sensation, when I’m working, and think of
it from the particular point of view of my body—transmitting
through hand, through tool, onto surface—when all of a
sudden I realize, it’s really in reverse.” Waterston
describes this sensation as the painting “pulling” him
along. The recurring circular forms created with a single
brushstroke that appear in Chimera and other paintings in
this group exemplify Waterston’s yin-yang, “push-pull,”
relationship with the physicality of the painting process.
These are of two types: thinly painted enso-circles,
signifying infinity, and little nipple-like forms, “nublets,”
made with one stroke of a brush heavily loaded with
paint—sensuous form complementing the enso’s emptiness.
Even in his purely abstract paintings, Waterston is
attempting to evoke a pictorial space through which the
viewer can wander, visually and mentally. “That’s the tricky
part. I’m trying to play between flatness, depth, viscosity
of the material and the psychological viscosity of what’s
going on”:
You’re always reminded that this illusionary space is indeed just paint, and the paint is not the thing – it’s just the sign post pointing to the thing. This paint is the materia prima, the unformed, always ripe with possibility…I’ve always been interested in working with these very elemental substances of oil and stone, and the constant negotiation the artist has with these materials. There is a paradox in this love-hate of pushing and pulling, the dance that goes on with the materials.
Technical proficiency is a characteristic of Waterston’s
work. Impasto elements like the nublets are, for him, “marks
that are really about the paint—just little reminders, for
me.” But this “controlled gesture of repetition” is
complemented by his love for “playing with the material in a
way that I know the mark is not going to stay the way I made
it. I build something up, and then I savor watching, as it
changes.” This is an artist who enjoys negotiating the
razor’s edge between materiality and immateriality:
Just as I’m getting the image down, I feel it can almost slip away into something else instantly. If you turned your head, the painting might just keep evolving. They’re very volatile in that way…there’s only so much I can do, and then at a point I have to acquiesce. That’s the part of the studio practice that for me is always a powerful life lesson.
Waterston’s experiential engagement with his materials has
been affected by the work of the Czech painter and
printmaker Frantisek Kupka (1871-1957). The first artist to
exhibit abstract paintings in Paris in 1912, Kupka was also
both a practicing medium and interested in science. Such a
combination was not so rare around the turn of the twentieth
century as it is now, when anything having to do with
spirituality tends to be derisively dubbed “new
age”—meaning, hopelessly out of touch with reality. Kupka
ascribed to a view of reality that was relational rather
than rational. “The Cartesian theories about straightforward
investigation have been fortunately superseded by theories
about relationship,” he wrote. Kupka believed that our sense
impressions of the external world are but one element in our
organic experience of reality: “If an impression on the
retina is ascertained reality, then reaction and
assimilation are also reality.”
Although he has admired Kupka’s work over the years,
Waterston was dazzled by a Paris exhibition that he saw in
the Fall of 2002. “Kupka’s paint-handling was astonishing.
He would striate the paint, while really loading the brush,
so that each gesture would contain the full gradation.”
Kupka’s style ranged from representational—even
illustrational—to abstract. When I asked Waterston which
aspect of Kupka he liked best, he cited Kupka’s “spatial
reverberations that play between the physical and
metaphysical… he was able to capture an internal
movement—the way he would illustrate breath…or some internal
workings that are so much a mapping of the cosmos of one’s
own spiritual body and physical body.”
Waterston’s painting, Tower, is one in which the influence
of paintings by Kupka such as Hindu Motif, Red Gradations
(1919-20) at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, is pretty
clear. In contrast to the ecstatic red-blue reverberations
of Kupka, Tower’s palette is dark, and its luminosity seems
to emerge from the depths rather than from above. These
differences may say something about the difference between
the excitement of scientific discovery that attended the
birth of the twentieth century and the sobering evidence of
its limits that confront us now. What the two paintings
share, aside from superficialities of form, is their
expression of continuity between material and immaterial,
visible and invisible, physical and spiritual. It is an
expression informed by profound curiosity about the matrix
for all such doublets: the human body and the human mind.
What Waterston’s “Ghost” paintings have in common with his
earlier work is that they are about the cycle of life and
death. But the consciousness they express has inched up a
notch. What is death, if not a change of state? “Under the
midsummer moon,” writes the Japanese poet, “the snow melts
and falls again.”
The Author
Jacquelynn Baas
is Director Emeritus of the University of
California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and
Program Director of an arts consortium entitled “Awake: Art,
Buddhism, and the Dimensions of Consciousness.” Baas
received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of
Michigan; her academic specialties include the history of
prints, nineteenth-century French art, and twentieth-century
art and architecture. Baas has two books currently in
press: Smile of the Buddha: Influences in Western Art
from Monet to the Present; and Buddha Mind In
Contemporary Art, co-edited with Mary Jane Jacob.
Notes
Thanks to Mary E. Dohne and Rob Elder for their helpful
comments on this essay.
The poem by Akahito is from Kenneth Rexroth, One Hundred
Poems from the Japanese (New York: New Directions,
1964), page 6. Akahito lived in the eighth century.
All quotes by the artist are from an interview with
Jacquelynn Baas on August 18, 2003.
The Kupka quotes are from his 1923 treatise, Creation in
the Plastic Arts (Prague: SVU Mánes; Paris: Cercle
d’art, 1989); translation from Darren Waterston’s copy of
Jaroslav Andel and Dorothy Kosinski, Painting the
Universe: Frantisek Kupka, Pioneer in Abstraction
(catalogue to the exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art et
al., 1997), page 89.