Painting and Nature
by Antonello Tolve
In all of Sue Arrowsmith’s work, nature and painting share a relationship of subtle mutual influence, a (radiant) secret agreement that turns the fragment into a precious wholeness, underlying the idea of blurring the line between canvas and space to give rise to precise (expansive) soothing actions towards the surrounding environment.
Making use of the weaving, the warping, the language palette offered by the model of nature, the artist proposes a different relationship with reality, an access to the endless richness of things through the creation of a place where the arrangement of matter echoes a fragment of a trembling landscape which, in its vivid and naked existence, remains suspended (leaving us wondering), swinging between a before and an after. Each work by Arrowsmith is in fact to be understood as an iridescent habitat resulting from the selective sampling carried out on a series of elements from the Umgebund (the environment of man, his flowery garden): but these elements, almost the bearers of multiple meanings, are never isolated or closed in themselves, but rather arranged on the canvas according to a strict functional unit, a detailed fluctuation between κρόνος (krónos, stable time) and καιρός (kairos, the favourable moment).
After the various Untitled (1994-1996), Draper, Forge and even Great neck (1997), in which the surface is treated as a work (a research) setting with horizontal and vertical patterns that recall weather streaks (almost light, hazy, creamy mists), Arrowsmith shifts the rerum novarum attention to nature perceived as fabula picta, an environment in which (and on which) to verify the possibility of culturally adhering to an all-encompassing vision of the cosmos, where the values of emptiness and surrounds become a utopian garden, a time-space tangle, a geotropic analysis (i.e. one addressing the influence of the force of gravity on the orientation of leaves and roots), an undulating force, material liquefaction, a close link between botanical shapes – flowers, branches, foliage – and clear colour pigments, enriched with gold or silver according to personal chemical and alchemical recipes.
The air is soft as silk (2020), Dance through the darkness (2021), You’ll never know how many dreams I dreamed about you (2021), Search beyond the clouds (2022), Only love can live in my dream (2022), Keep me warm in your love (2022), Maybe you can make my dreams come true (2022) Bathed in the firelight (2022) are, together with a series of more recent works – namely the mesmerizing Sea Glow ( 2023) and Magic Never Fails (2023), the warm Must I Dream (2023), the windy Winter’s Day (2023), the silvery Blue Horses (2023), the soulful Did I Ever Tell You How Much I Love You(2023 ) and the joyful The Sky is Full of Stars (2023) –, critical paintings that slip beyond reality, calling for enigmatic and magmatic visual observation as essential for the painting and aimed at mending a pact with the arabesque (Baudelaire, the most acute mind of the nineteenth century, said that “the arabesque drawing is the most spiritual of drawings,” “it is the most ideal of all”) [1] and with the ornament, which in Umberto Boccioni’s art vision is the only capable of making a work great.
In enclosing her own recent experiences, Sue Arrowsmith seems to conceive a chilled romanticism[2] that never ceases to throb notwithstanding its crossing the notes of the heart with those of the mind (the cruel exercise of analytical lucidity), refined in defining, outlining, recalling surreal and at times paradisiacal notations of nature – let us not forget that the Greek term paradeios, transcribed into Latin with paradisus, is, according to lexicon, an impression of the Avestan pairidaeza (from pairi and daeza, around and wall, respectively) which designates a large enclosed garden[3] – elegantly tamed by the mental breath of painting.
Projected onto the canvas like the shadows of an ethereal and milky landscape which becomes a grammatical gateway according to the rules of pictorial language, Sue Arrowsmith’s nature works also recover an archaeological substratum of technology – the projection, the poetic game of lucis et umbrae brings to mind the magic lantern and early cinematography – which they rearrange according to the pondered choice of a sample, a splinter, an excerpt, a part worth the whole, as if to recall the fragment-form theorized by Schlegel, by Novalis, and then by Poe and Baudelaire in the Fusées and Mon coeur mis à nu. In other words, the artist throws the image of nature on a wall and then starts a melee with the canvas dipped in the glowing outline to crystallize it, absorb it (auroral writing, I would say), record it, as if to indicate an anacoluthic space for the conservation of caducity.
In the broad account offered by Sue Arrowsmith with these works from the last three years (2020-2023), we find today a confirmation of her clear desire to go behind the landscape (to enter it emotionally), as well as her wish to touch the silence of things with her hand, and her longing to focus on a narrative that does not succumb to representation or mímēsis, but which thanks to its filamentous sinuosity or its quickly-changing colours, visibly opens up to the essence of light, to an abstract (corpuscular) value, to a reassuring tension towards the eternal and the infinite.
[1] Ch. Baudelaire, Journaux intimes. Fusées, Mon coeur mis a nu, préf. par Ad. Van Bever, Les éditions G. Crés, 1920, p. 37.
[2] Cf. at least F. Rella, L’estetica del Romanticismo, Donzelli, Rome 1997.
[3] Cf. G. Agamben, Il Regno e il Giardino, Neri Pozza Editore, Vicenza 2019, chapter I, Il giardino delle delizie, pp. 9-19.