SEIZING THE LIGHT : THE PAINTINGS OF GIANNE HARPER

"Reflection does not withdraw from the world towards the unity of consciousness as the world's basis; it steps back to watch the forms of transcendence fly up like sparks from a fire; it slackens intentional threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to our notice." Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenology of Perception)

Gianne Harper doesn't just paint light, she seizes light and with it the powerfully evocative color that is the light. In Atmosphere II, for example, bright, hot yellow bleeds into warm, cool, mauves as pale hints of pink can be gleaned floating above a deep, blue-green, ocean; And, in Deluge, dark purple-blues wrestle with earthy browns and in-between those seemingly solid spaces there are swells of opaque mist and white-ocean foam. When experiencing the paintings of Gianne Harper, as these paintings evidence, one seems to see, hear, feel, and, even, breathe the landscapes of a once glimpsed place. The paintings are not recollections of sites so much as they are sights transformed by the artist into expressive, painterly gestures, fueled by memory and imagination. In this way, Harper recasts the experience of the lived body into an imaginary Nature suspended in time on the surface of canvas, panel, or paper.

Harper knows light because she grew up in Southern California, which like the French and Italian Rivieras, is a fusion of solid and mist, of earth and sea. She understands light and color because she knows the paintings of J.M.W. Turner. Her works, like his, speak a spiritual poetry and evolve deep from within the soma. They are expressions of sites seen and experienced through a body, which is conscious and unconscious, mind and matter and everything between and beyond. She feels through her knowledge of art history to produce works that may or may not reveal her love of Turner, Friedrich, or Nolde. Sometimes the reference can be perceived, other times it is felt. Atmosphere II speaks to me of the spiritual and mysterious spaces of Friedrich , while Deluge is clearly derived through Nolde's expressionism by way of an unconscious synchronicity.

Gianne Harper is an articulate artist. She speaks about her work with a verbal acuity often absent in the artist. She knows the history of her discipline end because she took her B.F.A. at the University of California, Irvine, she understands its complex discourses. As well, because she trained at Irvine during the height of conceptualism, she didn't learn to paint there. From John Paul Jones, however, she learned how to see a composition and Tony Delap taught her how color could become the composition. In fact, she really learned to paint well after her graduate training. This she will tell you without apology. She learned to paint by painting. Paradoxically, her painting technique is classically based;. She combines 17th and 18th Century Dutch glazing techniques with the painterly impasto of the 19th Century Romantics and later the Expressionists. Such a manner of thinking about painting doesn't seem extraordinary or odd for someone who spent a year in Rome at the American Academy working through her notions about the practice of painting. It is, however, interestingly odd, for someone coming from the theoretical playing fields of conceptualism. The strange dichotomy of her formal and practical training makes her work really interesting. Considered within the terrains of postmodernism, Harper's work is truly hybrid. Although, because it lacks irony, it is more modern than postmodern, more object than concept, more feeling than self-conscious idea.

I don't with to elide the fact that Harper has been painting since she was a young child. I saw a remarkably prescient pastel sketch she made in grade two that seems a veritable small-scale forecast of what was to come. Deja vu or fate, her desire to become a painter was not born of chance. At first, she wanted to perform, to become a musician. She still loves music and the melodic abstraction that is its essential form may serve as an aesthetic parallel to her own painterly inventions. Nevertheless, she was clearly a rebellious adolescent, whose overwhelming desire to express herself needed to be channeled into one of the many artistic pursuits she felt compelled to experience. Painting soon became that focus. Painting suits her nature and her practice may best be characterized as a studied and disciplined performance; She is a passionate artist.

It is no surprise that opera and poetry inform her work as much as the reminiscence of nature. Home is a brooding drama of blues, reds and evanescent white. I feel the coldness of a dark wet void when I stand before it. I can smell and hear the sea, but at the same time, I am not certain that I am in such a landscape. The painting allows me to move away from it in order to see it as a material object that has been worked meticulously by the artist; Just as I experience its objectiveness I move into its imagined space, once again, and feel the cold salty spray so I am no longer separated from it, but pulled into the interstices of its fictive landscape. It is opera because it is melos – the emotive abstraction of music and it is drama – the over-determined site/sight of artful recollection and history. And finally it is poetry in its subtle suggestion of a magical and mysterious unknown.

I am moved, also, by Out My Window, a painting that literally presents movement as timeless space. Its clear cobalt blue funnel outlined by a lighter, equally rich, medium blue, gives visual definition to space and time as both outside and inside: a non-place of myriad imaginings detailed by floating colors, transparent and solid, of form and formlessness. I enter the floating world of color and fly past and through, but never out of time. I am caught in time and I free-fall in an unbounded universe by way of Harper's rendering.

Finally, in these works Gianne Harper has created distilled compositions of a world breathed-in and recreated in an abstract imaginary. Her painterly gestures are gifts to her viewers. We begin in a place she defines and we move on to other places unimagined by Harper, places where we live inside ourselves and beyond. In the afterglow of such sensation surely the possibility of rapture is confirmed as we, too, seize the light.

Patricia L. Levin, Ph.D.
Independent Curator
Professor of Art History
Saddleback College, California