Dee Donaldson – Formation

I feel immensely privileged to have been part of this exhibition – to have engaged with 3 painters of this standard and integrity. The first word that comes to mind when reflecting on this show is: ‘honesty’. Honesty of intention, dedication to the process of art making and the striving to reflect or talk about a particular journey or experience. Revealing that to a public audience is, at the best of times, an often daunting and exposing experience. (I smile as I read Anet’s comment about the length of time it took me to unwrap my paintings for hanging)

last hour
oil on canvas
2008

Anet Norval’s work (speaking of unwrapping) is at first like the unpacking of memories and objects from a box kept since childhood. The kind that is kept and shared, seated cross-legged on a bedroom floor. On closer observation they are not random memories. They are indeed poetic, cohesive conversations. Highlighted memories and fragments of events framed or specifically noted. Comments on a childhood, a particular era with its prescribed norms laced together as a whole. Fairy princesses… wolves and cowboys. Unlike the other work on the show, Anet’s may take a little more time – those who have taken that time I know have come away as intrigued and rewarded as I was.

My first impression of Janet Solomon’s paintings was one of duality. I found myself utterly seduced as a painter yet strangely uncomfortable the longer I stood in front of the work. I believe both of these responses are merits of the work. Seduced by Janet’s skill, her understanding of light, the sheer exquisite feat of that forest… Then the discord: Figures centrally placed in beautiful, natural environments yet feeling they do not belong there. At once the realism of these spaces seems to transform into more of a psychological space in which the figures seem suspended or locked. Uncomfortable in their worlds. Naked, vulnerable.

rainlight
oil on canvas
2008

Grace Kotze’s attraction to light as an almost tangible element becomes more and more evident. Mark making and light fuse in many of the small works into a dream-like abstraction, hinting at the mundane through a visual veil. Roads travelled through the dark and through the rain... They reminded me of travelling at night as a child, lights forming shapes passing by through glass and half-sleep. Being removed consciously – being behind something, be that a camera or winds-screen. They are beautifully rendered split second moments of light and movement. The sense of noticing something extraordinary in very ordinary moments, just before it’s gone.

Dee Donaldson

anet norval - Formation

From the word go I felt like the baby, not only in age but also in experience and exposure. Here I arrived with a bag full of golden toys and photographs that looked messy and disorganised in comparison with the sleek layouts done by Janet Solomon, the honest discussions logged by Dee Donaldson and the very considered imagery of Grace Kotze. But by stepping back it was clear that each painter’s process was a true reflection of their work and themselves. Diverse as we are there is a constant theme that runs through all four bodies of work; growth, change, loss, longing, and an emotional realisation of the past and what has been.

anet norval
Installation view

The long awaited work from Dee Donaldson, took my breath away when she finally decided to reveal the meticulously wrapped packages that tickled the curiosity of everyone in the gallery. A precisely planned process which revealed her loss, but in the same breath her bravery to expose her inner and most private emotions experienced during the last couple of months. Dee’s work is hauntingly honest and describes feelings few of us want to acknowledge.

All of Janet Solomon’s works feels like a self-portrait, they encapsulates her extraordinary sense of detail and watching her hang her work with meticulous precision left me in awe. The main thing that draws me into Janet’s work, is that all of the smaller areas are treated with such consideration, and when combined end up in one very finished piece. If I can compare it to a Zen garden, raked over and over until not one line is out of sync, this also comes across as Janet’s therapy, continually working up a surface until it is perfect.

anet norval
Installation view

When looking at Grace Kotze’s work, I get the impression she loves her medium and understands how to manipulate it to do exactly what she wants it to. I have always been a fan of Grace’s work; she spends time looking and captures something we all relate to, not only light on specific subjects but also some sort of nostalgia or emotion that shakes things up deep inside. I feel some sort of loss/ longing when I look at her work and ponder how some of us notice our surroundings in a more poetic way.

Being part of Formation made me reflect on the complexities every painter goes through to create a final piece that they willingly share with an audience, who usually cannot tap into the emotion or frustration of the ambiguous thoughts that are imbedded in every mark. Painting is an emotional and draining practise, which leaves one empty after a body of work is completed.

anet norval

Janet Solomon - Formation

I went back to the show on Friday to have some quiet time with the pieces, as during installation one is not properly focused. I came away from the show as if from a great tragic performance: - gutted and melancholic, with a sense that I had partaken in very private experiences in the lives of others.

Janet Solomon
Star of the Sea
Oil on Canvas
2008

Dee Donaldson’s work is very clearly represents a state of loss. Although her 4 diptyches worked as a stacked set, I would have preferred to have seen them individually, should space have allowed. The resonances from each piece needed surrounding space for one to absorb the full weight of their meaning. Two pieces I found harrowing in their aloneness, their grieving, were Rainlight and Last hour. Rainlight’s diptych depict the sheets and the impression of a head left on the pillow of an abandoned bed married to the beautifully rendered view of sheer crimson curtains holding back garden shadows and reflected “rainlight” from the window. One’s response to this piece is sensory, as it is whenever one walks into another’s home. One can imagine the still retained warmth in the sheets and the cold behind those red curtains. It is a snapshot of a moment of acceptance of loss.

Last Hour too is a snapshot; bare winter twigs twinned with rainheavy cloud bleaching and greying grassland spanned by pylons. This diptych has none of the human warmth of Rainlight. Instead it is wracked with aloneness and an icy cold. It is stripped, with nothing left to give. Because the landscape is so familiar, seen countless times from a moving vehicle, it provides a sense of journey, of moving through, but also the aloneness of private thought, and a small respite that the journey will end.

Dee’s emailed discussion with a most sympathetic friend is informative of the content of her pieces and fleshes out the context of her works being a dedication to her recently lost father.

Janet Solomon
Susannah
Oil on Canvas
2008

I enjoyed reading Grace Kotze’s description of her process and loved seeing the juicy informative pictures such as the one showing her palette growing like a coral all over a tabletop.

In Grace’s work isolation is strong. In her explanation of her process and influences she says that she uses ‘the familiar as a direct link to the emotive sense of self’. My interpretation of her use of everyday urban images of moving vehicles in low lighting conditions, like subterranean parking lots, is one of withdrawn emotion, removal and isolation. The mixture of self-portraits in flared light with these images seen through windscreens further enhances the dislocation. These portraits could be sensual but I don’t find them so, instead they are flat, as if only an eye saw them and not the other senses. I marvel at her technique, its abandon in early stages and wish that she might allow some of this to breathe more.

Experiencing Anet Norval’s part of the Formation show was like reading good poetry for me. The way she describes a scene and then unravels one’s preconceptions with a few well-chosen words is remarkable. Her 70’s soft focus family photos are barbed with cynicism and sometimes a dark foreboding. I told her I thought she should create books, as her work needs to be read as a whole. Each image quietly building on the next, each list

liefde

herinneringe

hartseer

verstaan

geduld

further building a family portrait, and developing the character of her chief protagonist – Anet herself.


I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Grace for curating this show. Her professionalism and adaptability allowed for a strong show and I’m honoured and proud to be a part of it.

Janet Solomon

Formation

Formation: an exhibition of paintings and supporting material by

Dee Donaldson
Grace Kotze
Anet Norval
Janet Solomon

Opening Speech by Bronwen Vaughan-Evans

Painting has been accused of being dead, “a ‘tainted’ arena sullied by patriarchal practice”, outmoded and unable to render the complexities of contemporary experience (Mackenny 2006:4). But, in our attempts to be truly contemporary / conceptual, I feel that we might have forgotten to be human, to respond first with intuition. So large is the contemporary chip on our shoulder that we choose rather to read the title, the statement, the text before we know how to respond to what is in front of us. I am not sure if I speak only for myself here but when asked about my practice I find myself whispering the word painter, as if it were taboo. And I heave a sigh of relief when the Saatchis launch an exhibition entitled “The TRIUMPH of Painting”.

Past and current debates around the life and death of painting aside, for me, the undeniable fact remains that I am in love with painting. The tactile experience of it, the intimate struggles with self and surface and the silent exhalation when standing in front of a body of work like Dee Donaldson’s and knowing what she means. I feel, for a moment, a connection with another human being.

What is so lovely about this show is the intent to foreground the process of painting. This, after all, is what we love about painting - the pure and basic fact that the surface is the site of making. The surface records simultaneously the thinking and the doing. It becomes a record of time, it becomes a witness to the life of a person for the period of its making. Despite the image that remains, or the meaning conveyed, it is the process itself which is intoxicating. Many contemporary forms of practice choose to skip this step – the artist goes from concept to product, farming out the process to machinery / artisans who remain un-credited (I do acknowledge that often this is an integral part of the meaning of the work.)

But at the beginning of the twenty first century we find ourselves in thrall to the meta experience of art, the ever present stepping back and viewing from afar, and a show like this reminds us about the joys of stepping forward to experience the ‘minor’ / unmediated surface.

Yesterday afternoon when I came to view the work I had the rare pleasure of seeing even more of the process of painting than we usually see. I saw the back of one of Janet Solomon’s paintings. A beautifully constructed and robust stretcher, the weave of really good quality canvas, the neat staples holding it taut. You may think it dismissive talking about the back of Solomon’s work first, when the front surface is so beautiful, and masterfully realised. But I think it is indicative of her seriousness of purpose. Painting is not something Janet stumbled upon; painting is something Janet has actively chosen, grappled with, loves and hates simultaneously. You don’t have to read about Solomon’s fascination with the History of Painting to contextualise her work. The surface tells all. It is “pregnant” with the weight of this history, of memory. This sophisticated image maker should be applauded for both her technical skill and conceptual underpinnings.




Janet Solomon
Star of the Sea
Oil on Canvas
2008

For me, one of the defining threads that runs through this show is that of memory, whether it be the memory of the surface, of the history of painting, of a South African childhood, or a memorial to the life and death of a specific person.

Anet Norval looks at popular, constructed memories and juxtaposes these with intimate, personal memories. For me, somehow her work holds a South African collective unconscious. For example, the image of the small blue and white school book label, holds an enormous unspoken history of both personal and collective repression. Her use of garish paint and popular imagery draws us in while the brutality of her intimate histories repels us, or is it the other way around? Either way the works resonate with the weight of a past.




anet norval
Installation view
2008

Grace Kotze’s work hits us with a familiarity which has not quite yet become a memory but holds the foreboding of one. Her surfaces some how record the process of remembering, both blurred and in sharp focus simultaneously. Her works convey an intimate personal response to neutral public spaces. These pieces are juxtaposed with flash frames from highly private spaces, the resulting emotional response being one of uncomfortable exposed fragility.




Grace Kotze
2008

And now at the end of this opening ramble, the easiest thing to say about the work of Dee Donaldson is that it leaves me speechless. And it does and yet I want to tell you why I have nothing to say. I have nothing to say because the work says it all, it speaks on a universal level to us about loss and our desperate human attempts to archive love. It speaks to us about the punctuation point at which experience becomes solidified as memory. It uses all of the relatively limited tools we have as painters to communicate humanity.




Dee Donaldson
2008

Thank you to Grace Kotze for curating this show and to the artists for sharing these works with me / with us – I know that there are many other things you could be doing to earn a much more decent financial living than this and I encourage any of you here who are earning a decent living to buy one of these pieces, you won’t remember the money in two months time.


Bronwen Vaughan-Evans

Mackenny, Virginia (2006) Painting Ourselves Out of a Corner, New Painting (a group exhibition of recent South African art) Kwazulu Natal Society of Arts, Durban South Africa.