Afterimage: Recent paintings by Betsy Stirratt
The latest group of paintings from Betsy Stirratt strikes out in a bold new direction, although a direction she has adumbrated in many ways in earlier work. She has chosen to test the validity and limits of painterly abstraction against the current visual matrix of the 21st century, in particular, the challenge of computer graphics. While paring down her means, in any given work, to a few dozen bands of flat color, vertical or horizontal, she has avoided many traps of abstract painting. A few decades ago, Minimalist theories of painting imploded, tending to make paintings that were only about painting. Stirratt’s paintings begin and end with a rich, emotional experience of a much larger world.
The use of simple stripes continues an important aspect from previous work, and that is in an expansive definition of pictorial space, or more accurately, its implied extension. One easily imagines the stripes extending indefinitely, with the painted space a more or less arbitrary “capture” of a single segment. The repeating vertical artifacts in Stirratt’s previous work made a similar implication, with overtones of an impersonal or mechanical process. In the same way that Warhol’s silkscreen technique, with garish color and bad registration, mimicked the cheapest commercial reproductions, the regular vertical stains and blemishes, the repeating, overlapping circles of a painting like “Reservoir” suggest a continuous roll of paper printed with a dirty roller and a depleted ink cartridge. We register such associations, perhaps subliminally, because our visual environment is saturated with examples.
So likewise, confronted with the stripe paintings, it is impossible to resist the intuition that this visual arrangement is making coded reference to other information. In the computer age, an immediate association with the vertical stripes is to a bar code, but they also share features with a voiceprint, a sonogram, or even the perforated scroll of a player piano. The viewer can sense a rhythm in the thinner and thicker stripes, a pitch in the higher keyed colors, a damper in the browns and grays.
But in the regularity and repetition of hues, one finds a more significant clue. Perhaps because of a familiarity with computer graphics programs, I recognized immediately that the colors had been “sampled,” that the broader bands of color implied a greater quantity, and that the image represented a stringent distillation of a natural scene. This in fact is how Stirratt develops her paintings, by scanning objects with an emotional or temporal connection, and sampling their colors to develop a palette and a composition of lines, which is then taped and painted in thick acrylic on board.
As always, Stirratt has a knack for liberating associations with the use of universal titles, like “Skin,” “Camouflage” or “Beach.” The objects that give rise to the various paintings hardly matter, but we do have a crucial, immediate, and visceral response to the spring greens or the cool blues of “Beach.” The colors evoke a bout of synaesthesia, where we feel the white like ice cream, the powder blue like a cool breeze, the spring green like space, the dazzling red like the hood of a car, hot with sun.
There tend to be “keylines” in each work that play a foundational role in the composition, usually darker tones, like the ultramarine in this work. I find the color families orienting and conclusive like a short poem with a regular rhyme scheme, or the firm repetitions of a sestina. (Repeated words in a sestina like “Do not go gentle into that good night,” also undergo a journey of transformation as context changes and develops.) The immaculate care required in producing the stripes satisfies a need for precision, and the luscious texture of the paint provides satisfying evidence of a hand.
The original confrontation with a work can be jangling, with the optical vibrations of the stripes blocking any easy or obvious entry. Every portion that is considered always resonates with the whole, and the wonderful result of repeating colors occurs with the transformation of hues in company with the neighboring colors. The eye begins to assign an odd sense of relief at times, especially in the horizontal paintings, where darker hues act as shadows for lighter hues above that seem to project in space.
Stirratt has taken a bold step in eliminating her subject matter, and profoundly reducing her formal means while at the same time allowing for great variety and unleashing a broad spectrum of associations. The results are exciting, jumpy, energetic paintings that have none of the tentative moodiness of stained, poured or dripped paintings. The contest of broad against narrow, and the heightened color of “Explosion, 2009” is scintillating. The grays slide into the hot reds like the graphite rods that slow down fission in a nuclear reactor.
These paintings perform interesting, incremental visual experiments in the way the eye reads color and makes space, relief, and meaning out of otherwise very neutral components. Stirratt takes full account of a new visual environment, the ubiquity of computer manipulation and commercial, “screened” color (in all senses of the word). This work would not have had the same resonance or meaning if it appeared even twenty years ago. Today, it looks like Stirratt has opened up in her painting some heavy iron gates that were rusted shut decades ago, and she is looking out on a vast field of possibilities.
-Tom Rhea