Mary Mountcastle Eubank: "The Deep Heart's Core"

.... I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey

I hear it in the deep heart's core.

                       ---From W.B. Yeats's "The Lake Isle of Innisfree"

Mary Mountcastle Eubank is presenting a show called "Edges and Flows" at Gallery Route One in Point Reyes Station, where I am an artist member. Eubank is a founding member of the gallery, now in its thirtieth year. Here are two installation views of her show:

"Out of Nothing," a small (18" x 24") painting near the entrance, feels to me the way the pistil and stamens of a flower might look to a visiting honeybee.    The ceramic shards come cleanly out of the blurred surface of the canvas, but we feel so close, as if zoomed into that surface, and it's as if some small, silent explosion has just happened, and we have landed in its center:

Eubank wrote in her artist's statement that "I want to imagine a replica of a landscape that is not an imitation, but a reflection of my inner response to landscape and place." Pure imitation would be photographic; a reflection of a response is a purely intangible thing, something to take a lifetime reaching. Like Yeats, Eubank seems to be able to reach across pavements and time back into this reserve of blue water and red sands that she so ably portrays in this show. Eubank has written that hers is "a sensuous relationship to the natural world." To be truly sensuous, I think! one must hold nothing back, and that is just what we see here. Wide-open art.

Here is a piece without title or price, representing, perhaps, some of the ingredients in the work on display:

Reminds me of something... My husband, our two children and I lived for a year and a half on the island of Malta, located in the Mediterranean between Tunisia and Sicily. In winter, the mistral blew the red sands up from Northern Africa, and the particles fell on cars, roads, tree limbs... And it was just this color; desert sand could blow right by us, so the world was very small, wasn't it?

Eubank would seem to agree. Yes, the natural world is vast, but each piece of it, each fragment that makes up our world, is part of us, can be small enough to be seen and understood, if only a little, by each of us. The artist has explained that her works "develop with alternating layers of thin washes and heavy impasto, often laced with organic materials, such as sand, decomposed granite and wood ash."  It is an unusual set of tools for painting, but one that echoes the colors of earth and water in Eubank's home, West Marin.

"Passage," a monumental mixed-media painting  (49" x 72"), could be a landscape. I could say it looks like a cold morning pathway seen from The deck of a ship, with icebergs threatening on either side:

But, for this artist, the painting is far more likely to refer to an interior journey. Possibilities are there, rich in color and warmth and light, if you can just steer clear of those icebergs. Those two brown built-up paper objects -- or obstacles -- are deeply etched. We know these rocks and shoals. We have been on them ourselves, marooned for a time until that bit of light at the bottom breaks through and sets us free.

There is another Irish poet whose work has been running through my mind these last few days. Seamus Heaney wrote a poem called "Postscript," published in his book "The Spirit Level." He talks about driving in a car past the kinds of landscape we see in Northern California (or, in his case, the West of Ireland):

....So that the ocean on one side is wild

With foam and glitter, and inland among stones

The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit

By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans....

Useless to think you'll park and capture or

More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,

A hurry through which known and strange things pass

As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways

And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

We viewers are "A hurry through which known and strange things pass." If we are lucky, we stop in front of one of Eubank's paintings of the landscapes of the "deep heart's core," and we feel our hearts blown open.

Unfinished paintings, perhaps: "No vanity's displayed..."

W.B. Yeats wrote, in what must be his best book of poems, The Winding Stair, a poem called "Before The World Was Made," and here is its first stanza:

If I make the lashes dark
And the eyes more bright
And the lips more scarlet,
Or ask if all be right
From mirror after mirror,
No vanity's displayed:
I'm looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.

So I was rooting around in my folders filled with images from magazines and from my xeroxed drawings, and I found this wonderful picture, from a French magazine article on Ingres (from six? years ago?):

The "vide intérieur" of this portrait, (the "empty interior"), the caption on the lower left reads, echoes a passage from Flaubert's Sentimental Education.  But I wasn't clever enough to save the name of this work. It is exhibited in Le Musée Ingres in Montauban, France. One of Ingres's assistants painted in the background, and Ingres started in on the outline and figure.  The closest Ingres woman to this sketch, in pose and manner, is his "Madame Moitessier," from 1856:

 

Ingres was not interested, initially, in painting a portrait, but here we are.  I like the idea of the "vide intérieur"  passing through to this finished version; Madame's face is perfect, but rather out-matched by her dress.  If we look closely at the mirror image of her face, however, the less "finished" portrait, there is a kind of mystery (a mystery that Picasso's large faces would pick up on, years later).  I love the mirror image here, and that's what made me think of the Yeats poem, of the woman looking in "mirror after mirror" for the face she had "before the world was made."  I like the fact that the "world" of Ingres's portrait was not quite finished in that mirrored face ... not-quite-finished works appeal, because you can almost see the artist thinking. Take a look at this sketch, an Ingres work called "Woman with Three Arms," from 1859, three years after the portrait of Madame:

Wow.  Here, there are no draperies, no distractions. The face here is more "finished" than Madame's, I would argue; you can see the model clearly, here. The third arm here will help Ingres make a decision about where to place the arms on the woman on the far right border of his 1862 "Turkish Bath":

 

We can see that he made his decision ... her head is framed by her arms. Ingres was 82 when he painted this scene.  But the face of the (formerly three-armed) woman on the right is less complex and compelling than the "sketch" above...

I went to Picasso, next, who knew Ingres's work well; here is his "The Artist and His Model," from 1914:

 

This is a work emerging from Cubism ... Picasso had completed his best works in that mode by this point ... and we can almost feel the uncertainty here.  "What now?"the artist, and the painting, seem to be asking.  The unfinished work is playing figure against ground, the lines of an Ingres portrait against a less well-defined landscape ... because it is so open, so much a question, I find it fascinating.

One more, this from De Kooning, his "Seated Woman" of 1940, a "portrait" of Elaine, who would marry him three years later.  De Kooning's "Women" have divided critics.  I think they all descend from this sketch ... it feels, to me, just a bit unfinished ... and the beauty here appears and disappears, like the Ingres face in the mirror so many years before:

Matisse-ian, no? The fore-grounding of the figure here is clear, and yet... the powerful blues and oranges tend to overwhelm the body. De Kooning seems to be looking for Elaine's face, still.  On November 5, I had written that if we can see that the artist is still looking, the work feels unfinished ... here, I think, that is true. "I'm looking for the face ... [she] had/  Before the world was made."

Repetition is Redemptive... in praise of a series, because we must TRY

 I was reading about Gertrude Stein ... the article was "Desperate Seriousness and Avant-Garde (Mis)Recognition in Some of Stein's Sentences," published originally in Modern Philology, Vol. 97, No. 2, Nov. 1999, pp. 220-233.  As you might conclude from his title, the author, David Kaufmann, concludes that "the public that Stein invites to dance is by definition limited. Stein courts obscurity and derision precisely because her authority as an artist rests on both philistine rejection and delectation of the cognoscenti" (231).  Don't you just love those last pairings... "philistine rejection" and "delectation of the cognoscenti."

Wow! One is tempted by this well-articulated coolness and sophistication. But one would do well to re-think.

The article quotes an argument from a book by Hal Foster, The Return of the Real. Kaufmann says that Foster claims that repetitions, a favorite technique in avant-garde work (see, for example, virtually any Stein work, except the Autobiography), are redemptive. But not for the reasons we or the authors might have thought. Foster writes that "the future the avant-garde looks to is not the one it has saved, but the one that saves it by putting it on the course it charted but could not see" (p. 29 in Foster, quoted in Kaufmann).  This is a very interesting use of time; but it is the sort of imaginative turn one must take to read any really "new" work. I really like this Foster, but Kaufmann moves on...

Kaufmann says that there is a pressure, in the university, to "legitimate difficult practices of writing and reading" (233) and he's not a fan.  Yet when I taught Stein in both basic composition and interdisciplinary classes, the students, at first reluctant, warmed to her prose. This happened when she was read ... aloud.  Thinking about the sounds and import of what we read --as we read it -- is not really a "difficult" practice. The students had fun with her, wanted to see what it would be like to write like her, but they liked Hemingway and Emily Dickinson, too.  They were travelling a middle road, the one Kaufmann claims is not there.

Aren't we all on "a course" we "charted, but could not see"?  W.B. Yeats said that "all life ... seems to me a preparation for something that never happens" ("Reveries Over Childhood and Youth," the Autobiography); his may not be the most optimistic view, but ... aren't we always in process? Isn't that what Stein teaches us? That we are thinking and looking and writing and listening, all at once?

Of course we have to screen out some stimuli and concentrate in order to create anything. Stein's way of concentrating was to write after everyone else had gone to bed. She tried to finish, she once said, before the birds began singing, because if she didn't, she would never get to sleep. Stein comes at us in waves, but I believe that her work is in ordered waves ... it is an attempt to get past that idea of "preparation for something that never happens."

A series of waves. A series of paintings. A kind of order (as Wallace Stevens said, in "The Idea of Order at Key West": "Then we,/ as we beheld her striding there alone,/ Knew there never was a world for her/ Except the one she sang, and singing, made") that we need. I have been thinking about my series of nudes in just this way. Here is a painting, completed in the last two weeks, part of my "Odalisque" series: