|
Foreword
In 1985 a community of artists formed Washington Printmakers Gallery (WPG) to share ideas, printmaking techniques and resources. WPG is a confluence of personalities and talents who engage in a myriad of conversations about how artists can effectively make art that communicates what they want to say in their own visual vocabulary and style. The discussions are both explicit and implicit. Sometimes discourse occurs verbally, but, more often, new ideas germinate from the work exhibited by colleagues at the cooperative. One such ongoing conversation at WPG is the question of what makes a person or a thing beautiful.
The present exhibition is in many ways Margaret Adams Parker’s exploration of some ideas developed in the work of her colleagues at WPG in the context of her own personal journey as an artist. Parker and some of the other artists in the cooperative have held workshops to share some of their techniques. Two relief-printmakers whose work, like Parker’s, is content-driven are Trudi Y. Ludwig and Max-Karl Winkler. Winkler’s last two solo shows, She Alone (2000) and States of Grace (2002), and Ludwig’s Beneath the Old Masters Series (ongoing since 2001), have been concerned with the nature of beauty, and the Greco-Roman ideal of the dance of the Three Graces figures prominently into Ludwig’s and Winkler’s perception of beauty.
Unlike those of her colleagues Parker’s beauties are more architectonic. They are pillars, having greater kinship with caryatids in a state of stasis, than with her colleagues’ choreographed commentaries on the quintessence of beauty.
About the Exhibition
Women of pure, unadorned beauty may or may not be pretty or elegant. The pleasing power of their presence shines from within. Margaret Adams Parker’s new exhibition of woodcuts and sculpture, entitled simply WOMEN, could be fittingly subtitled, Beauty, Truth, and the Human Condition. Parker’s way of creating figurative art in two-dimensions is akin to the method actor’s way of creating a protagonist or the sculptor’s method of building a figure: First, the armature of content or motivation is constructed, then the outer structure of presence is modeled around the armature in a series of steps.
Like many great dramatists and artists, Parker looks to three principal sources to gain insight into the human experience: classical art and literature, the Bible, and her own interaction with the people around her. Her figurative subjects are people coping with realities and consequences that are part of their life journey, archetypal experiences integral to the human condition.
Some of the woodcuts in the exhibition may seem to be exceptions to this beauty in the life-journey concept, but, looking at the exhibition as a whole, an epiphany occurs, and the viewer gains better insight into the content of the work.
Sunday Morning shows an older African-American woman adjusting her hat in an effort to add panache. Whether she is getting ready to go to church or sprucing up in a mirror there, the cultural implications of the work relate to the custom of preparing for the weekly ritual of a formal meeting with God and God’s people.
The sculpture entitled The Earring shows a young woman engaged in the ritual of affixing an earring to her ear. Parker has caught the characteristic introspective look as she finds the hole and fastens the backing. The moment Parker has chosen implies a future: the act is part of getting ready to do something else.
Parker’s representations of two girls at similar times of life speak eloquently of the ritual of gaining a sense of one’s own beauty as an element of self worth. Nine Years Old in the Mirror revisits the question posed in Max-Karl Winkler’s Who Am I, Who Will I Be. While Winkler observes his young woman as an other, Parker shows a girl assessing her own potential in the context of an old-fashioned dressing table. The intensity of the girl’s gaze, the strong horizontal stripes of her tee-shirt and the closed position of the her arms contrast dramatically with the strong verticals of the wainscoting and the casual, almost disheveled appearance of the dressing table. The window behind the child reveals the light of an undefined world beyond the traditional accoutrements of beauty-making. The nine-year-old’s beauty lies in the wordless question she is asking, the dynamic of her presence, rather than the pleasing line of her form.
I am beautiful! is a young girl’s recognition that she is as beautiful as the flowers of the field, and much more important. With her dreadlocks and a flower in her hair her facial expression subtly acknowledges that she has something to offer the world, whether the world wants it or not. This discovery is not an entirely carefree realization, as it carries with it a responsibility to show the world what she has to offer.
Parker’s depictions of the two girls epitomizes a statement expressed by Charles Baudelaire more than a century ago:
All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory—of the absolute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions: and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.
Charles Baudelaire, Curiosités Esthétiques,"Salon of 1846," sect. 18 (1868; reprinted in The Mirror of Art, ed. by Jonathan Mayne, 1955).
Nativity in Black, Nativity in White, and the sculpture New Mother express the pride and tenderness of early motherhood. Both mothers in Nativity in Black and Nativity in White hold their sleeping infants to their breasts securely and with commitment. Each is dressed in a basic shift, a timeless dress that is a staple in Parker’s representations of women. Both stand in poses that are stable but imply flexibility of motion: an ancient mode of representing the figure in stasis.
The sculpture New Mother, in contrast, shows a spectrum of emotions characteristic of early motherhood. From one angle the seated figure’s expression nears ecstasy, and Parker has achieved the expression very subtly through an upturned corner of the mouth and loving facial expression, coupled with the rocking rhythm in the relationships between the angle of her neck, the position of her hands and arms clutching the child, the position of her legs, and the way the hem of the sleeves and dress interrupt the rocking rhythm. From another angle the mother appears determined, protective, holding something precious; yet another angle shows the mother as fragile.
Memory and The Yellow Afghan were modeled after the artist’s memory of her grandmothers. Both images depict women in customary roles of elderly women. The Yellow Afghan shows a woman in a housedress busying herself by making a coverlet to keep the chill away. The tired, questioning look on the face of the woman in Memory reinterprets the question asked in the context of Nine Years Old Looking in the Mirror: Who Are You, What Will I Become? The tension of the woman’s grasp around her own wrist betrays a feeling of apprehension. She is not at ease with her present life or the future.
Joy, Grief and Strength — Our Sisters shows women whose bodies are well-toned and ready for action. Two of the standing figures in the triad stand in an operatic stance: feet planted with expressive content blossoming from the roots. Strength looks directly and calmly at the viewer, one hand on her hip and confident of her power; the skirt of her dress falls in folds that reinforce  the dramatic content of the work. They are static and vertical like flutes of a column. The facial expression and gesture of Joy are more dynamic; her drapery folds acknowledge the carved positive and negative spaces of the woodcut medium. The figure Grief turns in on herself. The position of her feet and direction of the lines in her face betray the agony that consumes her.
In contrast, the sculpture Lament resembles Mother Theresa more than a classically inspired form. The figure’s paunch supports the arm that supports the elbow that supports a huge hand, covering the face in a sorrowful gesture. In Lament Parker exploits the expressive potential of generalization, a lesson learned, perhaps, from the fact that Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pietà is both less elegant and more profound than his earlier, Vatican Pietà. But while Michelangelo’s generalizations have the effect of making his message transcendentally spiritual, Parker’s use of blocky passages in Lament bind her protagonist firmly to the travails of an earthbound life.
Except when she is making a point that concerns itself with costume as a manifestation of culture, the women in Parker’s work generally wear timeless dresses that link them to their classical predecessors. This universalized garb, lacking the triviality of prettiness, is completely functional in the context of pictorial content, and this practice allows her to give great attention the subtle gestures that reveal her protagonists’ inner states.
Parker’s public sculpture commissions often focus on Biblical characters as archetypes of human behavior, and her small-scale sculpture reveals human beings eking out a meaningful life in the present. Her approach to the image of women presented in the present exhibition echoes the comments of philosopher Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition:
The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the "easy life of the gods" would be a lifeless life.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition,
chapter 16, "Labor" (1958)
Parker’s depiction of other women is informed by her view of herself. Her Self-Portrait at Work shows the artist carving the woodblock of her Self-Portrait at Work. Parker was trained as a painter, etcher and sculptor, but she is a self-taught relief printmaker. She taught herself to make woodcuts from pictures of Antonio Frasconi at work. She, like Frasconi, uses two hands on the knife for strength and safety. Keeping both hands behind the blade and putting the block on a table keeps the artist from cutting herself.
In contrast to her portrait of Käthe Köllwitz in her studio, Parker’s Self-Portrait captures the artist’s likeness but plays down her face as a mirror of her character. Instead, her determined visage emphasizes her strength, determination and her high regard for the act of making woodcuts. The brushes in the foreground, the closed octagonal vessel of water and the palette are tools she uses to paint the block before she begins to carve. She paints the block in black, white and gray to indicate the extent of light and dark to be achieved in the carving. The knives beside her left elbow are her tools for making gouges of various sizes and shapes.
Having depicted Köllwitz straight on, as an icon among her own iconic images, Parker shows herself as an active artist. The diagonals of the composition bring the eye to the work of art, presenting the artist as a vessel for image making.
As a woman of faith as well as a classicist, who was a Greek and Latin major as an undergraduate, Margaret Adams Parker brings to her art a wealth of knowledge about archetypes. She has always been drawn to great art that plumbs the depths of the human spirit, the work of Rembrandt and Giotto in particular. She knows that she and her colleagues wear the mantle of the great printmakers before her, and she does not take on that mantle lightly.
In her solo show, WOMEN, and in her recently published Ruth Portfolio, she reminds the gallery-goer of the beauty of spirit that is the kernel at the center of each human being. While this vision of beauty need not be confined to women, the present exhibition explores one part of the story.
|