About face

Rachael Eastman at the Hay

by Chris Thompson

"AVA,":oil on panel, shows Eastman's polished strokes.

The painter Robert Motherwell once said that the musings of critics are to artists what those of ornithologists are to birds. Every other month or so someone peddles the opinion that painting is dead, and then like clockwork another someone announces its reincarnation in the work of some new talent. Rachael Eastman's work now showing at the Hay Gallery suggests that she lives in the world Motherwell alludes to, one in which art's seasonal fashions have little bearing on the daily practice of painting.

But the boys' club conjured by the names of such high-Modernists as Motherwell, splashing and thrashing their pigments around on canvases larger than life, is far from the meditative and intimate scenes Eastman explores in her show "Face, Facade and Portal." While her work engages with "the tradition" -- she names Giotto, Leonardo, Turner, Rothko, and Whistler as some of her loves, and she handles paint with an elegance that shows her debt to them -- she integrates it with her experiences and sentiments to personalize and appropriate this history. For example, her series of small paintings entitled "Little Sleeper" is suffused with a divine light straight out of Renaissance painting, and creates in its play of layers over a luminous underpainting a mood as palpable as the one in which Whistler's mother sits. The glow that she manages to find at the heart of every image communicates a deep affection for the subject of the portraits -- who are often fusions of friends, family, and ancestors, real and invented.

The popular mythology of painting, in which Monet and Picasso forever behold and conquer their gardens and their mistresses, often presents the painter mercilessly studying the visible world with an almost clinical gaze, stripping away everything but the essence of an experience of reality, translating it into the painted mark that might capture a fleeting moment. This act of possessing through seeing is precisely what Eastman's work is not about; in fact it is the caressing quality that her images achieve which sets her work apart from the familiar picture of painting as an effort to capture something from the painter's objects of desire. Her painting "Golden Door, Surrey," made from a series of observations, sketches, and photographs, but also from imagination and memory, weaves together swathes of warm color anchored by an autumn yellow. She allows the textures of her memories to add to the richness of the present as she lives it and extends it through her brush, rather than attempt to pin down a dissolving present. Her works inhabit the present by lovingly letting the past unfold into it.

The paintings in the show consist of portraits and images of doorways. Though these images would seem unrelated, the opposite is true. "I have spent the better part of the last decade working from the surface of the human face," she writes, "and this show marks my first significant move outside of that." These symbols of the threshold between interior and exterior, the "face" and the "portal," are closely linked enough for her that the move from one to the other reads as a logical step in Eastman's development. But the formal relationship between the two figures is also uneasy enough to produce tensions in paintings where "face" and "portal" appear together, tensions not found in works where one or the other is the sole subject matter. In this respect the single-subject works are more polished and technically sound. Indeed some are masterful -- like "Lavender Arch," a gemlike, ethereal little painting of a church door, with a strikingly simple palette of soft but intense purples; and "Ava," a Pontormo-esque portrait of a woman whose face basks in the most otherworldly light, thinly painted in ambers that almost make the image breathe on its own.

The paintings that combine the "face" and the "portal" are less secure, but are engaging none the less. Here Eastman tries to reconcile these two things, for which she has developed and mastered separate gestural and formal languages. She approaches paintings of the "face" and the "portal" in certain specific ways, in each instance with distinctive vocabularies of colored strokes that have become comfortable for her. However, when placed together within the bounds of a single canvas, the ways of handling the "face" and of handling the "portal" are at odds. They disrupt and interrupt one another, and this disorder, this raw quality, actually makes these paintings compelling. In these newer paintings Eastman only rarely lets her images remain rough and shaky, often falling back on tried and true ways of pushing paint around. But there are also instances where she gives her new experiment the space to develop its own logic, welcoming disturbing new rhythms and ignoring the call of the mild.

Chris Thompson can be reached at xxtopher@hotmail.com.