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Sunday, May 16, 2004
Where color meets color
Copyright © 2004 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc. | ||||||
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Also on this page: MARK WETHLI, 'NEW PAINTINGS' | |||||
One of the best compliments Mark Wethli heard about his recent series of small paintings came from a friend who remarked that Wethli's colors were hard to name. What appears at first glance to be red might actually take on an orange hue, or perhaps violet, the friend said. Likewise, a color that seems bright and clear one moment reveals itself as darker or duller the next. Gotcha, Wethli thought. "One of the reasons I keep the designs so elemental is to allow the color to interact more freely and unencumbered in this way," says Wethli, 54, a Bowdoin College art professor whose color experiments have formed the bulk of his sabbatical in New York City this year. "I'm also interested in color's associative and symbolic qualities, which the paintings stumble into from time to time - from school colors, national flags or color chords that evoke various periods in popular culture or fashion, to colors that might remind somebody of a place or a moment from their own personal history, good or bad." And then there's the purely physiological aspect of how color grabs and moves the eye, he adds. "I do my best as I'm painting to keep the colors from ganging up or creating patterns that stand apart or detract from the whole, so that visual experience of a given painting is as unified, fluid and unbroken as possible." An exhibit of Wethli's new work remains on display through May at Icon Contemporary Art in Brunswick. The sabbatical has been everything Wethli hoped it would be. It has given him a chance to focus exclusively on art. He's visited dozens of New York galleries and museums to stay current with new work, to research favorite artists or movements. He's been to many openings, and acquainted and reacquainted himself with friends new and old. A steady stream of Maine artists have shown in New York in recent months, and he's been to most of their exhibitions, including Sean Foley, Tanja Alexia Hollander and his Bowdoin chum John Bisbee, among others. But mostly, he's painted. "It's been a chance for me to get up every morning and do nothing but paint," Wethli said during a recent return visit to Maine. "It's been wonderful." Those who have followed Wethli's career will recognize his style, even if the scale and detail in his current work are dramatically different from those in the work of his recent past. These small works on paper are geometric abstract expressions of color and form. In that broad sense, they are similar to the large and very public mural-like installations that he has completed in recent years at Portland Museum of Art and Midcoast Hospital in Brunswick. Those installations are massive, covering walls with huge swatches of color within a highly engineered series of mapped-out grids. These smaller works, which he has completed in a cramped New York studio, are looser, freer and more painterly. They are, for lack of a better word, warmer. It almost goes without saying that the smaller works are more intimate, but there's an inherent truth in that statement that requires amplification: Wethli executes his large installed pieces over a long period of time, atop scaffolding and often with a cup of coffee close at hand and a choice of CDs at the ready. Using Photoshop technology to fit the grids in the space and to choose precisely the right colors, he knows what those installed pieces will look like before he puts his brush to the wall. Not so with the small pieces. The small works on paper are highly improvised and spontaneous. "I literally make them up as I go along," Wethli says. In these new paintings, there are only general boundaries between colors. Some of his thick blocks end with certainty, others simply fade. The edges are soft and loosely defined. The recent studio experience that spawned these small works has been more existential, he says. He's had to wrestle with the question of where a particular painting is headed or whether a piece actually is done. He's also had to learn to work with different materials. He is using gouache instead of his more familiar acrylic. The gouache provides a more densely colored paint surface, absorbing light and energy and deeply embedding the color into the paper. Those factors result in creative pressures, unlike the sort of pressure he deals with atop the scaffolding while completing a large installation. "When I get to the site, I'm 95 percent certain the piece will work. All that remains is not getting any paint where it doesn't belong and not falling off the scaffolding," he says, with only a hint of humor. Susan Danly, a curator at the Portland Museum of Art, said Wethli's large wall painting, title "Transom," has transformed the Great Hall lobby of the museum in ways the staff never imagined possible. The painting is the first thing visitors see when they enter the museum. In a year's time, it has become a landmark. Docents plan their attire to coordinate with the painting, and the museum staff uses Wethli's colors as a foil for the graphics it chooses to frame rotating exhibitions. Other art in the Great Hall, most notably the current contemporary quilt exhibition, takes on different meaning in context with Wethli's piece. "It defined a space we didn't even know was there. We never really thought about that space before, but in an interesting way Mark's piece has really defined the architectural perimeter of the Great Hall," Danly said. Wethli installed the painting as part of the museum's 2003 biennial. It was intended to be a short-term installation, to be painted over soon after the biennial exhibition closed. But it's still up, and there are no plans for it to come down any time soon, Danly said. Wethli recently gave the painting as a gift to the museum, along with a preliminary drawing. "That way, if the wall has to be repainted for some reason, we have the capacity of recreating it," Danly said. People who have seen "Transom" and who view the small paintings currently on display at Icon in Brunswick will notice the similarities. But the differences - aside from the obvious differences of size, scope and medium - are equally dramatic. In the end, though, it all comes down to color. Color is what drives the work and what keeps people interested. Color is why docents at the PMA think about what they are going to wear before coming in to volunteer for the day. "No matter how many colors are in a given piece, the question of color boils down to how any two of them come together," Wethli says, summarizing his efforts. "Although it might sound odd, in choosing colors I try to be as 'dumb,' or inattentive, as possible - or at least inattentive to my own immediate desires - and try to let the colors speak for themselves. "This is an elusive goal, of course, and represents a kind of ideal. But the twin hurdles I have to get over every time I put a color down are my own preferences and my experiences as a painter. While some might assume that these are the very factors that I should depend on, or that would qualify me to make the work in the first place, the only way to carve out new territories of color and color experience is to leave those instincts behind." Staff Writer Bob Keyes can be contacted at 791-6457 or at:
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