Swayne paints with poetic words, colors

The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Thu, 10/11/2007 10:55 AM  |  Life

I Wayan Juniartha, The Jakarta Post, Ubud

It is a rare thing to find a painter who give their work beautiful titles. After all, a painter is supposed to be a visual artist, an expert in creating images and manipulating colors, and not a poet, the alchemist of words and sounds.

Therefore, encountering a powerful painting with a lame, even inappropriate, title has became an integral part, an ever-recurring rite of passage, some might say, of becoming a painting connoisseur.

Fortunately that rite of passage is absent from Yellow But Not the Sun, a painting exhibition that opened recently at Gaya Art Space, a gallery known for its continuous support of contemporary, avant-garde works.

The exhibit features 13 paintings and three installation works by Tennessee-born artist Michele Swayne.

""In short, it is an exhibition in which the esthetic quality of the titles is equal to that of the works. For once, I enjoy the titles as much as the works,"" art lover Kadek Purnami said.

Intriguing titles like You Remind Me of the Mushrooms in Hell, Where One Thing Stands for Two Other Things, Great Adventure Portrait and Goodbye and I Feel An Affair Coming On, have surely succeeded in captivating the many visitors to the exhibit.

These titles clearly reflect Swayne's love of literary works, poetry in particular. This love had not only manifested itself in the titles of her works, but also in the catalog of the exhibition.

The four-page catalog includes only two pictures of Swayne's works. The rest is filled with at least 11 poems, including the works of Paul Celan and Anne Carson. The latter is Swayne's favorite poet.

Despite her fondness of poetry, Swayne conceded there was no direct relation between the poems, including the ones she picked as the titles of her works, and her creative process.

""I am not a conceptual artist, in the sense that I have to have a concept first, deliberate thoroughly upon that concept and then materialize it on the canvas. The poetry evokes a sense of beauty inside me, so does every other object and thing in this world,"" she said.

She once wrote that there are two kinds of artists: those who are filled up and pour out and those who gather and re-negotiate; those who blindly go to discover and those who specify what is found.

""Swayne herself works in a ""pulling"" mode, rather than a ""poising"" analytical mode,"" the exhibit's curator, Alexander Boldizar, said.

He pointed out that Swayne's artaltogether conceptual; her objects and her ideas are too interwoven"".

Her art has been a process of creating a personal mythology that, like every good mythology, makes contact with something universal: a sense of the personal in an epic human narrative.

Sound like poetry? Well, Boldizar captured the esthetic essence of Swayne's works, painting and poems, when he said that they ""maintain a dream sensibility, an imagined real narrative that's not exactly fictional"".

It is no wonder then that her paintings have always possessed that haunting, fleeting and emotional haziness that we often associate with great poems.

Yellow But Not The Sun
Oct.6-Nov.6
Gaya Art Space
Jl. Raya Sayan, Ubud
Phone: 0361-975895
www.gayafusion.com

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