JILL NATHANSON CHORD FIELD
Jill Nathanson. Photo: Jorge Marquez Gaspar
JILL NATHANSON CHORD FIELD
JUNE 27 - AUGUST 16, 2024
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Jill Nathanson: Light Music
Always an artist involved with abstraction in painting, Jill Nathanson quickly oriented herself during a period of extraordinary difficulty for those choosing to pursue this direction. During the 1970s and 1980s, artists in New York experimented with formal and material ways to continue painting after it was declared “dead.” Among the artists seeking to continue with painting, several have been of particular importance to Nathanson: Thomas Nozkowski, Harriet Korman, and Louise Fishman, all of whom pursued individual paths. Of these artists, Korman still remains a colleague and a friend. Interestingly, Nathanson can be seen as an artist that continued with some aspects of Color Field painting whilst assertively developing her own way of making art. Today she pours paint to find forms—we can think of both Morris Louis and Lynda Benglis—and uses a collaged element in her preparation, that was previously her finished painting, recalling Al Loving’s collaged/assembled work. Yet, a crucial factor in appreciating Nathanson’s achievement is not only to consider the way Nathanson’s paintings are made technically, but in the way her process does not leave pictoriality behind and does not dismiss the relationality of part to whole, and because of this, the direct line through the history of painting is maintained.
Color Field painting, a category that, incidentally, includes painters that are much more diverse than the title might suggest, was no longer center stage as Nathanson started her career, and painting itself was, in fact, as I have said, challenged by most of mainstream art discourse as no longer credible. Irrespective of these difficulties, for Nathanson what was at issue was articulated so: “When I started out as a painter I found Color Field painting exhilarating, mysterious, and experimental. But it lacked the emotional range I needed from my art.” An undergraduate at Bennington College where Clement Greenberg, the champion of Color Field painting, had lectured and Sidney Tillim was still lecturing, Nathanson soon eschewed the technical methods of Helen Frankenthaler whilst deriving a lot of encouragement from artists she was encountering. Among these artists were Larry Poons, a visiting artist who made important studio visits with Nathanson, Kenneth Noland, who lived nearby and visited the college studios informally, and Sophia Healy, who was on the faculty. All of these painters were engaged in an exploration of color that went well beyond the boundaries of purely formal concerns to embrace the psychological, spiritual, physical, and optical. Frankenthaler was the reason Nathanson had chosen to enroll at Bennington—Frankenthaler had been a student there—and she would remain an important inspiration. This moment represented an exciting confluence of interests for Nathanson. Nathanson later said: “I want the painting to transmit affective realties of seeing, lived through a thinking, intensely feeling body. It’s the idiosyncratic, illogical color unity of each painting that I’m after.”
The color, form, and structure of Nathanson’s paintings were arrived at over many years, and it will no doubt continue to evolve despite the particularity of working and focus of interest already so evident. Brushed, all-over gestural painting and loosely geometric assemblages of colored acrylic polymer sheets contributed to the artistic trajectory that eventually led Nathanson to her recent paintings. The appearance of these paintings is of spontaneous improvisation, of chance and discovery—and these qualities are indeed part of her process—however, there are several steps involved that move toward the finished painting eventually seen by the viewer; I think of some of the works of Hans Hartung that are taken at face value to be spontaneous, gestural, and expressive and yet are carefully scaled up works from preparatory drawings that are themselves spontaneous. Nathanson now begins
Figure 1. Jill Nathanson, Called the Light: Day, 2007-2010, mixed paper, plastics, acrylic paint, 23 x 36 inches.
with files printed onto transparent sheets where previously she used polycarbonate colored “gels” used in theatrical lighting. An early work, Called the Light: Day (2007-2010, Figure 1) comprises the use of plastic, lighting gels, and rice paper. It is irregular in overall shape and assembled from disparate materials that range from dark to light and from black and opaque from transparent to colored—it is a progenitor of the recent paintings. The cut transparent material on a small scale is assembled to approximate the design or composition of the full-size painting. An intermediary size work on panel is carried out first. The cutting and layering of the colored transparent sheets facilitate changes that would be unavailable in the making of the panel painting itself.
In 2007, Nathanson realized that the plastic sheets that she used to make an installation based on the beginning of Genesis 1 offered transparency but lacked what paint could offer in its organic, tactile versatility. The contradiction or paradox that this paint, a pigmented, thick, fluid acrylic medium, embodied was the optical ethereal together with haptic materiality. And, it is important to note that the Book of Genesis is a narrative of light ordering chaos, something that is both tangential with and apposite to Nathanson’s paintings. The coexistence of complex thought or emotion is central to paintings that are clearly not invested with the desire for pure pleasure alone, despite their obvious sensuality, but rather they acknowledge the constant push and pull, here visual visceral, of human feelings that frequently oscillate between attraction and repulsion: like the color and surface of the paintings. They do not comprise simply one quality or the other but more usually aggregate conflicted or ambiguous feeling. It is the nature of these paintings to illicit emotional curiosity and response through a visual and material narrative.
Painting is recoined for each historical moment, and much is carried over in different forms for different ages. Painting has proved that adaptable. Titian’s The Death of Actaeon (1559-1575, Figure 2) is an important painting for Nathanson. It was never shown during Titian’s lifetime as he considered it unresolved, perhaps this quality he found unacceptable, a discord, is now part of the painting experience. The color relationships in this painting do communicate discord and unease, unsurprisingly given the subject matter. As Nathanson says, “It’s the form but also the content: the action at a distance by Diana, causing the metamorphosis of man into a stag that results in Actaeon’s horrible
destruction. And the coloristic action at a distance—the cold pink of Diana’s garment on the left activating the green brown of the woods that make up the right of the painting. This has been and continues to be totally gripping.” This correspondence with Nathanson’s own ambitions in the use of color is stated with humility and accuracy. Although Nathanson’s paintings are abstract, her awareness of painting’s history is by no means limited to only this particular modality.
Part Song (2024, Plate 10), like the other recent paintings, both continues and contrasts Color Field painting, to which there are both obvious affinities and difference in image, composition, and structure: this is not canvas and pigment soaked, sprayed, or brushed into a soft and absorbent substrate. Instead, pigment is mixed into a custom
Figure 2. Titian, The Death of Actaeon, c. 1559-1575, oil on canvas, 70⅜ x 77⅞ inches. Collection of The National Gallery, London.
manufactured polymer medium and poured across a wooden panel. First it is positioned horizontally to be manipulated by hand in conjunction with gravity: lifted to allow the poured medium to flow and to find its shape, its edges expand until limited by tape. The shapes created correspond to a preparatory work, first in cut, colored transparent sheet and then, a paint study on a smaller scale panel—where a shape can have the appearance of a single gestural mark—with the pigmented medium. Once fluid, mobile liquid settles and dries, and another layer is added—it takes a day to dry—until multiple pours cover the gesso primed panel one careful and precise step at a time. In this way, the foundational means of painting are considered: light, color, space, surface, and drawing. The color choices and color transitions depend on each other in a sequence of reactions and connections between separate colors across the paintings’ surface in a flux of hues and fluctuation of light. The exchange involves tonal shifts as they layer in laminations of overlapping, illuminated, and numinous phrases. In the case of Part Song, the violet shape has a muted brightness compared with the bright pale yellow to its right. This yellow combines with an orange that darkens as the two colors overlap forming a third shape. As is typical with Nathanson’s range of shifting chromatic relationships, individual colors are hard to definitively identify. They are constantly modified as the layering thins or thickens and the striations within each layer of pigmented medium add nuance, not always predictable, and so introduce surprise as well as new possibilities.
The thickness of the surface of these paintings introduces a material quality that not only adds tactility but also a place for light itself to register. This adds a glow that further nuances the color radiance and surface presence. Light falls onto the painting and penetrates the opaque thickness of the polymer medium and thinner glaze like areas. In Psalm Harp (2024, Plate 6) this can be seen clearly, as in the other paintings, and along the right vertical edge oil paint is used, brushed on at finger width adding range to the sense of touch already present. The oil paint adjusts the edges of shape and modifies the impact of line and color by its difference in weight and inflection. A grey-blue, distinctive shape merges partially as hue with a moss green and a soft yellow with more curved energy as its edge arabesque with an orange-ochre. Often color descriptions demand invention as the colors are so unlike straight from the tube color or simple segments in their proper place
on the spectrum. Color becomes gradually cooler again toward the far side of the painting as shapes overlap and reach out and across to each other in an animated entwining of line (edge) and hue. This adjacency of color zones is a result of a kind of co-authoring in that the color itself suggests where and which color is added: rationality is deferred here as the artist is far from imposing her own desire on color. All through the painting tonal values flicker and shift as analogues of natural light. Nathanson orients her paintings distinctly: narrow horizontal or narrow vertical. Lateral or vertical is consistently elongated, an extended topography. This emphasizes passage: the unfolding of transition, a visual equivalent as far as this is possible to the temporality of music. Nathanson’s musical background I have referred to earlier, her titles confirm this ongoing passion, to give some examples: Light Phrase, Light Octave, Harp, Chordzephyr, Woodwind, Brass instrument, Sway Chorus, Timbre, Time Signature, ReHarmonic. The rhythms contained in the passage of shape and color are what Nathanson has associated with the somatic effects of painting and its connection to human pulse, something that is just as apposite to music. The titling of paintings puts me in mind of Paul Celan’s poems, and as it turns out this use of combined words—a friend of Nathanson’s named a painting Spark/Lift, in helping her refer to ideas in Kabbalah in a poetic, rather than obvious manner. Green Shift (2024, Plate 1) is a vertical painting in which Nathanson places green in the lower left quadrant as a contrast to areas of red which pass over and under. The segments of color appear to expand with a pulse of centrifugal energy and project a turning of forms clockwise across the painting. Each color is both a veil, a shadow, and a radiance. Nathanson comes from a musical family—her mother was an accomplished pianist, and her brother is a distinguished jazz musician. Nathanson graduated from La Guardia High School of Music and Art before enrolling in Bennington’s Fine Art Program. Music has been significant for her throughout her career and the current and continuing evolution of her paintings. A connection between music and painting has had a substantial role, particularly in the last century and a half, for both mediums: and this is particularly relevant in considering Nathanson’s paintings which perhaps lie at the cross roads of these two mediums as what could be described as: light music.
—David
Rhodes, New York, May 2024
PLATE 1. GREEN SHIFT, 2024
ACRYLIC AND POLYMERS WITH OIL ON PANEL 60 X 33 ½ IN.
PLATE 2. FLUID BRIDGE 2021 ACRYLIC AND POLYMERS WITH OIL ON PANEL 43 X 78 IN.
PLATE 3. NEAR DISTANCE 2022 ACRYLIC AND POLYMERS WITH OIL ON PANEL 43 X 78 IN.
PLATE 4. STRETCH RADIANT 2023-2024 ACRYLIC AND POLYMERS WITH OIL ON PANEL 43 X 79 IN.
PLATE 5. FURL 2023 ACRYLIC AND POLYMERS WITH OIL ON PANEL 44 X 90 IN.
2024 ACRYLIC AND POLYMERS WITH OIL ON PANEL
PLATE 6.
PSALM HARP
43¾ X 111¼ IN.
PLATE 7. EVENING’S GARMENT 2022 ACRYLIC AND POLYMERS WITH OIL ON PANEL
½ X 78 IN.
PLATE 8. LEARNING CURVE 2021 ACRYLIC AND POLYMERS WITH OIL ON PANEL
PLATE 9. TALK TANGO 2023 ACRYLIC AND POLYMERS ON PANEL 33 ½ X 60 IN.
PLATE 10. PART SONG 2024 ACRYLIC AND POLYMERS WITH OIL ON PANEL 42 ½ X 79 IN.
