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November 29, 2006
Jackie
Tileston is a visual omnivore with a large appetite and a
craving for color. She has traveled broadly, and along the way has looked
hard at the natural and the man-made, the consciously-aesthetic as well
as the vernacular and the accidental. She takes photographs as notes;
a recent, five-week trip to India yielded 1,200 images, some of which
hang on her studio walls. Her artistic development has been a process
of seeing how much of this imagery she can work into her paintings, which
still retain roots in abstraction.
She has always worked in a single format for paintings, and one or two
sizes for the drawings. For the early, abstract paintings, Tileston chose
canvases only slightly off square, to avoid a rectangular canvas' choice
of either an implied horizon or a reference to erect human posture. As
the paintings became ever more landscape-like she moved to her current
size of 60"x72."
Ten years ago Tileston became interested in fractals; she was fascinated
that mathematical algorithms could generate forms so close to natural
ones. This correspondence suggested an underlying ordering to the world
which appealed to her syncretic spiritual inclinations She used a computer
to generate the fractals which she worked into the paintings as precisely-painted,
polychrome rippling figures against more thinly and sketchily-painted
backgrounds, although the paintings avoided any perspectival sense of
space. Her palette was high-key and saturated. Slightly later the fractals
resembled polychrome models of chain molecules.
This sense of figures within an indefinite but atmospheric space increased
as her forms and sources became more diverse. Some of these new citations
were small areas of geometric patterns that might derive from textiles,
tiling, or lattice-work. Other forms resembled mountains as depicted in
Chinese ink-paintings, as well as the Chinese convention for representing
clouds, used both in textiles and ceramics. If you looked closely, you
might even recognize the forms of a deity from Indian painting or sculpture.
She used silhouettes of some figures; others she processed via Photoshop
to the point of un-recognizability. She likened her use of found forms
to collage, and the analogy freed her to incorporate identifiable imagery
within paintings whose formal concerns were still abstract. She also said
it allowed her to create a "composite universe," drawn from
multiple sources and traditions.
The collage aesthetic is also reflected in her paint handling, which she
varies from figure to ground and among the figurative elements in each
painting. The grounds are usually done with thinned oil paint, which she
occasionally allows to form fluid drips that appear to bleed into the
canvas. Some paintings contain figurative elements painted with thick,
opaque paint, some with considerable impasto, and most have some figures
painted in enamels. She regularly uses enamels for striped, bulbous, irregular
forms that might be plucked from abstract animated cartoons. The shiny
paints create an even stronger contrast with the thinned oils. She occasionally
works on a horizontal canvas so that the enamels can pool and swirl, like
fair-ground paintings (an effect Pollock employed ). When I suggested
that she used these accidental paint effects the way Chinese scholars
used natural forms they found in rocks, she was comfortable with the comparison.
Tileston also uses unbound pigments, which she rubs into the paintings.
These produce luscious surfaces and bursts of intense, glowing color,
an effect which the sculptor Anish Kapoor employs.
Like Kapoor, Tileston has lived both in India and the West; she grew up
on several continents, so her global imagery is more than cultural tourism.
She was born in the Phillipines in a home filled with paintings from China,
where her mother and grandmother were raised. She spent time in India,
London, and Paris and, despite her U. S. passport, did not live here until
she came to college. Her paintings synthesize this peripatetic childhood
and her later reading and observation. The breadth of her sources shows
up in her idiosyncratic titles, which she began to use as a way to make
things easier for her dealer (the works were previously untitled). She
did not want the titles to lead to false interpretations, so they are
sometimes nonsensical (Monkey Brain Chatter, Emptiness, and Everything
Good, 2002) and often humorous (Aphrodesia's Gazpacho, 1999;
Damascene Diva, 1998).
Drawings are her way of trying out ideas, although they are not studies
for specific paintings; she considers them finished works. Her current
drawings fall in two distinct bodies. There are a playful group of small
(6"x6") images, some done on handmade Nepalese paper, others
on print-making paper. Most of them contain collage elements such as torn
pieces of paper printed in Hindi, or Japanese popular decals of the sort
made for children. The second group of drawings are on large (30"x42")
black paper, with intensely-colored figures painted in gouache and occasional
use of unbound pigment. The outlines and silhouettes taken from other
art read more clearly than in the paintings, where they sit within the
atmospheric haze of their painted grounds.
The current paintings in her studio are on dark, unbleached linen, sized
but without priming, and she has allowed the color of the unpainted fabric
to play a significant role. The rabbit-glue sizing causes the surfaces
to sparkle when seen in even a slightly-raking light. She has begun to
incorporate photographic images in the paintings, taken from nature and
other art, which she transfers with laser-tran film (she described it
as similar to children's fake tattoos). Some of these images are recognizable
landscapes. In Himalaya she has combined two photographs from
her recent travels, one of sunrise over the eponymous mountains, the other
of the source of the Ganges, with a Thomas Cole painting, to create an
imaginary distant landscape in the mist. Two brightly-painted abstracted
cloud-forms hover in the middle ground at left, and at right an abstract
form composed of stacked stripes sits upon what might be a dark storm-cloud.
It has already begun to rain and bursts of blue illuminate the darkness.
I am reading Tileston's juxtaposition of the specific with the allusive
images as more coherent than it is. The subject matter hovers between
landscape and pure painting.
Not only has she incorporated clearly-readable imagery for the first time,
but it is imagery of a compositely-imagined, sublime landscape. Awe. This
is where Tileston began, but with abstraction; awe at the colors and the
patterns generated by algorithm, nature, and brush. The idea of the sublime
was a recovery of the spiritual by the culture of the Enlightenment. Tileston
has mined the spiritual in many traditions and her beginnings as a painter
place her within a tradition of abstract painting as spiritual quest that
goes from Kandinsky to Rothko. But Tileston's attempt to create a world
within a painting, composed of the grandeur of nature as well as the stuff
of the everyday and global artistic patrimony is a very contemporary one.
It incorporates the humorous as well as the grand, high art and pop culture,
the provisional as well as the certain, and it celebrates the eternal
wonder of color and light.
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© 2006 Andrea Kirsh and InLiquid.com;
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