Selina Trieff a WISE MENAGERIE
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A R T I S T S Selina Trieff A WISE MENAGERIE BY CHRISTOPHER BUSA The Painting of Performers OLD IS VERY SOFT. A substance so rare and beautiful must be beneficial to one’s health, people have long assumed, and sometimes gold flakes are used as a food decoration; a little bit of gold in your body is supposed to give your skin an inner glow. Gold possess- es a dull gleam that polishes to mirror brightness. When alloyed with other metals, it exhibits complex color variations. Iron turns it blue. Copper reddens it, and platinum makes it whiter. Gold is the most malleable metal known to man. A troy ounce—based on a twelve-ounce pound—can be hammered with wooden mallets to make it thin enough to cover three hundred square feet. We associate gold with medals given for great deeds, the gilded domes of Gstate houses, and jewelry deposited in bank vaults. Beyond being a store of value, gold is used to fill hollow teeth and glaze the visors of astronauts’ helmets to protect them from the searing glare of the sun when they are in outer space. The gold leaf that Selina Trieff uses in place of paint in her paint- ings costs about $800 for a box of twenty books of leaves, but, as she told me, “You get a lot of gold.” 46 PROVINCETOWN ARTS 2007 She was in Wellfleet last March in order to attend to the selection and pho- small differences are significant in the way the figure fits into the compo- tographing of about forty paintings that would be in a large survey this sition. She applies the makeup of a woman’s social face, using it to com- summer at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Having known pose the masks her figures wear when they appear on the canvas that is Trieff and her husband, Robert Henry, for many years, and admired their the artist’s stage. work, I was curious to know how they functioned as an artist couple able Trieff’s figures look more like women than men, but they reference a to do strikingly individual work under the same roof. They are featured in variety of costumed personages—court jesters with an undertone of cyni- a documentary film, Their Life in Art (Vineyard Productions, 2006), which cism, shrine seekers with personal agendas, widows wearing a cloth so provides glimpses and conversations with each in their various studios, dur- black they seem protected from their grief. Their tight-fitting costumes, ing the span of years when they raised two daughters, between New York, revealing slender, athletic bodies, suggest performers at ease, however pre- Martha’s Vineyard, and the Lower Cape. pared to tumble and leap. Slim at the waist, her figures remind us that boys Trieff began using gold leaf when she started painting portraits of her played women in medieval and Renaissance plays. daughters, Sarah and Jane, posing the children in black velvet dresses. Even though he is aware that many people have remarked about the Thinking of the way Velázquez inflected the necklaces in his portraits, Tri- apparent androgyny of Trieff’s figures, Bob Henry said he sees only por- eff began to thumb gold leaf onto necklaces worn by her daughters. She traits of women. For my part, I see an intrapsychic dialogue between two was mindful that Velázquez could paint a color that looked like gold, but, sister-images of Trieff’s ideal self. The androgyny means the two do not in her paradoxical modesty, Trieff chose to use the real McCoy. While con- have to be sisters. They could be acrobats about to do somersaults. As we ceding the talent of the Spanish artist who inspired her, Trieff discovered discussed this question, Trieff asked me, “Could they simply be people?” that the natural medium for her expression was not confined to pigment. Once, visiting Japan, the two attended a Noh play in Kyoto. Noh plays Since then, the use of gold has become something of her signature. She can last for eight hours, and Selina and Bob, being baffled tourists, sat for applies the gold leaf directly onto paint when it is tacky. Often she paints only the two-hour introduction. During that extended period, Bob over some of the leaf. Her integration of these divergent mediums creates became aware that two Japanese ladies, seated next to him, were having a shimmering equivalence that is similar to the relation of a solid subject trouble finding their place in the script. Instinctively, he remembered his to its ephemeral shadow. synagogue education in which he and his classmates fumbled the pages Just as the traveling performers in the commedia dell’arte of the six- of the book in their hand; quickly he pointed, somehow by sound, to page teenth century chose to present themselves as stock characters, improvis- 47. Without knowing how to speak Japanese, he helped the native speak- ing new scenarios by enacting an aspect never developed in the existing ers pick up the sequence. script, so Trieff reprises her cast of troubadours and their menagerie of There is an otherworldly elegance in Trieff’s isolated figures. They domestic and farmyard animals. Her people share strong kinship in their stand before us with dignified ceremony. I immediately see Manet’s crisp faces, but their bodies are mostly clothed. They huddle together, conspir- reorientation of a flute player on a red ground, but I know this is a fool- atorially whispering. They look out, not at an individual viewer, but at a ish association with Trieff’s grounds in gold leaf. Something altogether sea of faces in an anonymous audience. Her figures, both human and ani- different is going on, not about the isolation of the figure, but about the mal, wear porcelain expressions—unmoving, serenely poised, calmly pur- integration of the person into the company of surrounding color. If I men- poseful, with zones of otherworldly energy registering in their eyes. Eye- tion Alex Katz, who, along with Trieff, exhibited in Provincetown in the brows are rendered thin or thick, pale or blackly emphatic, and these midfifties at the Sun Gallery, the comparison reveals Trieff’s divergence ABOVE: PASTORALE (DIPTYCH), 1990, OIL ON CANVAS, 72 BY 60 INCHES EACH, 72 BY 120 INCHES TOGETHER FACING PAGE: THE WISE GOAT, 1982, OIL AND GOLD LEAF ON CANVAS, 60 BY 60 INCHES COURTESY BERTA WALKER GALLERY PROVINCETOWN ARTS 2007 47 Provincetown.” However, they found nothing they could afford in Provincetown. Once again, a decade after they left Provincetown because it was cheaper to buy prop- erty in Martha’s Vineyard, the price of real estate had become too princely for their present means. When Bob discovered a house on Commercial Street in Wellfleet, across from the inner harbor and possessing two storefront windows where each artist could hang a sin- gle work to share with passersby, Selina said, “Wellfleet is close enough.” Back in the Vineyard, her daughter Sarah was babysitting Louie, their mostly white, mixed- breed dog with yellow ears, whom Selina had painted many times, never once using the opportunity to gold leaf his ears. Selina told Sarah that they were going to sell the Vineyard house and buy a house in Wellfleet. Sarah started crying. She had grown up summering on the Vineyard. Selina and Bob liked the Vineyard. “How can you not like the Vineyard?” Selina asked me. The parents relented, choosing to keep the Vineyard property and take out a mortgage for the Well- fleet house. Over the years since their re-arrival, both have had annual exhibitions at the Berta Walker Gallery. Henry was presi- dent of the Provincetown Art Asso- ciation and Museum during its remarkable expansion and remod- eling, completed last year. In the Vineyard they had a circle TWO FIGURES, 1997, OIL AND GOLD LEAF ON CANVAS, 72 BY 60 INCHES, COURTESY BERTA WALKER GALLERY of friends who were artists, but they gravitated back to Provincetown, where they could more naturally play leadership roles in the com- from Katz’s depiction of expressionless and blank age, devoid of any expression except in the eyes, munity; here they were understood by their peers eyes. What is it about the eyes of living creatures stares back at us, out at us, as if we are invisible. for their longtime involvement with the crucial that fascinates Trieff, and makes all their emotion She does not consider her pictures to be a type issues that, like geological pressures, form each concentrated in the eyes, which glow like coals in of self-portraiture. Much of their meaning artist into her or his individual shape. the sockets of the white masks they wear? depends more on the gesture of the body than What is a successful career? Bob is clear that it She emphasizes the oval of a face by outlining the tilt of the head. “Body gesture,” she told me, is one in which the artist, aging, continues to do its shape and the key features—fleshy nose, lips “is more of a portrait than the mask of the face.” her or his work. He, personally, is not interested zipped shut, and intensely, poignantly expressive in “big money,” he said, reminding me of the title eyes. She hints that her people have ears tucked Wellfleet of the novel by John Dos Passos, The Big Money. under their caps. I am always curious if visual WHILE HER FAMILY was spending summers on The suspicion seems to be that the reward of artists consider the eyes more important than the Martha’s Vineyard, over several decades, Trieff money is excessive, unnecessary to the profound other organs of reception we humans share.