The Painters Contract on Presence and Provocation in the Work of Mary Waters

The painters contract On presence and provocation in the work of Mary Waters For an artist capable of transforming light into atmosphere it must have been a glorious subject: a portrait of a girl, swathed in sumptuous clothes and sporting a red hat, sitting by a window. The somewhat androgynous features of the elongated face contrast with the moist lips of the sensual slightly open mouth. The pearls in her ears glisten in the sunlight which floods in abundantly. The Girl with a Red Hat, 1665, by Johannes Vermeer sparkles and shines. As a basis for Mouth, 1993, a tiny painting measuring just 25 x 20 cm and painted early in her career as an artist, Mary Waters took a detail – the seductive, vivid-red mouth from Vermeer’s painting – enlarged this detail and subsequently added a wide black painted border to the image. While the light in the painting by the old master appears to radiate across the canvas from an external source, the blow-up by Waters resembles a photographic slide, only surrendering its image when a bright light is shone through its transparent surface. The curvaceous, full-bodied lips and the dramatic use of red and black in Mouth would not look out of place in one of the highly staged-managed commercials for a fashion label such as Chanel. Another example: in 1996, Waters painted her Girl with turban, again after a work by Vermeer, namely the Girl with a Pearl Earring, painted in 1665 and a favourite of the public at the Mauritshuis. This time, Waters took a detail from the old painting, which she not only stretched to a truly large format (125 x 90 cm) – nearly three times the size of Vermeer’s work – but which she furthermore painted entirely in shades of grey, whereby she used the grisaille technique in order to make the tonality more extreme as it were. This work does not produce the association with a colour slide, but with a black-and-white photograph that, thanks to the use of a single basic colour, has the depth of a duo-tone print. Top fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld once stated that people who are far ahead of their time are just as tedious as those who are behind the times. According to Lagerfeld, the art is to be of the present. In this light, the paintings by Waters mentioned above can be regarded as a statement, after all Waters’ paintings position her in a field in which the relationship between painting and newer media such as photography and film is made into an issue, a highly topical subject, which breathes new life into the modernist question regarding the essence of painting. Despite the question concerning the specific meaning of photography for the painting that is connected to it, Mary Waters’ oeuvre attracts the criticism of being ‘old-fa- shioned’ and actually not of the present. The literal allusion to the works of old masters is responsible for this opinion. Moreover, the traditional aesthetic quality of her work (such as the attention paid to the expression of the material, the refined style of painting) brings with it the risk of attracting applause from the wrong side. Why then does Mary Waters, nonetheless, indulge herself in the old masters? Is she a painting kindred spirit of Peter Greenaway, the world renowned film director who, with boyish bravura, annexes images by artists from the Golden Age in order to reanimate them in the baroque, theatrical dé- cors of films such as The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, from 1989. Greenaway is opposed to the supremacy of text over image in contemporary cinema. Recent projects involving Rembrandt’s Night Watch or The Last Supper by Da Vinci aim to allow the au- dience to once again observe the images, to become submerged in them. Greenaway, who began his career as a painter, gained recognition for his medium-surpassing experiments and the lack of formal narrative structures in his films, in favour of the intensity of the images themselves and of shifting meanings. Mary Waters is also averse to the narrative, and is fascinated by formal elements such as abstraction, image intensity, symmetry, ornamentation, series’ and parallels. To find a possible answer regarding the motivation for the apparently literal use of sources from art history, it is, however, important to ask the question of how one can paint realistically in these times, and do so on the basis of paintings by famous predecessors, without becoming narrative. On the strength of the two previously mentioned works by Waters, one might contend that the illusionism of the world of classical images in her work corresponds precisely with the postmodern media reality, in all its glossiness. When seen as such, her (double) portraits and still lifes would be props, typical postmodern baroque, subject to the eclectic manipulations of the artist. And yet, this assessment falls short. The use of cinematic and photographic techniques such as the close-up, the detail, the mon- tage, and repetition are indeed consistent with postmodernist practice, but specifically the effect, and the way in which Waters appropriates her images, are equally reminiscent of the introspective aspects of postmodernist thinking, and of pop art in particular. In his book on painting, Della Pittura: De schilderkunst en andere media (Della Pit- tura: Painting and other media), Frank Reijnders describes how in the nineteen seventies painting was definitively ‘pronounced dead’, as an intrinsically played out, commercially exploited art form that had lost all contact with the real world. According to Reijnders we need to seriously consider whether the ‘unhurried, opaque fabric’ of the painting may indeed still have something to say about reality, which in recent decades has increasingly become a reality that is experienced through the media. Painting will never be able to match the possibilities that digital media offers for the manipulation of reality, but even in a time in which every painter knows that the art of painting ‘no longer depicts an image or a me- aningful composition, nor that it represents itself’, Reijnders believes that there is still a ray of light in the darkness. Now that contemporary painting is no longer self-referential it exists primarily in relation to other art forms, which it defies to generate meaning of their own, according to Reijnders. (Frank Reijnders, Della Pittura, de schilderkunst en andere media, p.114) The illusory capacity of painting to make appear that which does not exist may well be its salvation and from that perspective the work of Mary Waters can be described as a ‘neo-modernist’ attempt to scrutinize the medium of painting as such, but by utilizing the achievements and techniques of the 21st century and, therefore, without throwing realism overboard. Mary Waters finds her inspiration in art books. For her, the photograph of the painting, the reproduction, not the original, is her point of departure to create an image. This appropriation is nothing new. In the nineteen seventies and eighties, young American artists such as Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince shared a keen interest in the pop art of the sixties and its use of images from the world of mass communication, advertising and the consumer society. Andy Warhol’s work in particular served as an example. The Appropriation artists were not a group, but they did all use the strategy of appropriating and reproducing images. In contrast to these artists, for whom social criticism and a highly conceptual way of thinking was predominant, the work of Mary Waters revolves far more around abstract notions – such as image intensity, symmetry, ornamentation, series’ and parallels – and capacity of painting to suggest a presence and to provoke. Those abstract notions can be explained in part through the idea of identity in general, and Mary Waters’ Irish identity in particular. Mary Waters was born in London, but raised in Ireland, in a small town 140 mi- les west of Dublin. She graduated from the Galway College of Art in 1981, after which she chose to take up a teaching position. She worked as an Art and Design teacher at a secon- dary school until 1990. Waters: “My first encounter with art history came in the form of reproductions in books, sometimes in colour, but usually in black-and-white. There was a museum in Dublin, it’s true, but that was so far away that I never actually visited. When I was teaching, I based my lessons on photographic slides without ever having seen the actual paintings themselves.” Though she struggled to rouse the interest of her adolescent pupils in art, the projected works of art caused her to fall ever deeper under the spell of the old Italian and Dutch masters herself. Waters:“I was never really interested in the idea of Art. I was a bad student and went on to study Art at third level because I had a natural facility to paint and draw, so study- ing both seemed a logical and easy option, I remained a bad student in College and found Art largely irrelevant to my life. However as I looked at the projected images of European paintings on the wall while teaching Art history lessons, it increasingly began to dawn on me the depth and integrity of these images. They had a powerful effect on me, it was an abstract visual experience, I wasn’t just looking at the images I was encountering them, being drawn into them in an almost physical way. These images were a vehicle, a way in, to where I didn’t and still do not know.” In 1990 Waters decided to fulfil the growing desire she felt to paint herself.

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