{"id":5618,"date":"2024-10-07T16:51:26","date_gmt":"2024-10-07T20:51:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thelantern\/?p=5618"},"modified":"2024-10-08T09:46:20","modified_gmt":"2024-10-08T13:46:20","slug":"finding-time-for-martha-diamond","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thelantern\/2024\/10\/07\/finding-time-for-martha-diamond\/","title":{"rendered":"Finding Time for Martha Diamond"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maggie Libby takes a deep-dive into exhibition <\/span>Martha Diamond: Deep Time<\/span><\/i>, exploring<\/span> the act of viewing, personal resonances between their practices, and how we make time to stop and look.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Installation view of Martha Diamond: Deep Time<\/i>, Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine (July 12\u2013October 13, 2024). Photo: Luc Demers.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Finding Time for Martha Diamond<\/span><\/h3>\n

by Maggie Libby<\/p>\n


\nTaking a cool look at the <\/span>Martha Diamond: Deep Time <\/span><\/i>exhibition in the museum, finding some quiet time to stop the noise of technology and the workplace. The pressure to be endlessly productive in the office as well as its constant interruptions makes it hard for me to focus, stay aware, or do deep work. How do I find time and mental space to really look without expectation here in the museum, where I feel much more self-conscious? It is much easier in the studio to adjust expectations and fall in love with the limitless solutions: start something, change it, walk away, look, get up close, try something. On a good day there is a rhythm of work, color, and movement on a surface, a sense of soundless music. And the work talks back! <\/span><\/p>\n

My visual language of painting is all about physical expression, elements of scale, surface, materials, color, application or gesture, and social and cultural context. It is built from the erudite lectures of Colby Professor of Art Jim Carpenter, as he spoke on art history in Given Auditorium, especially on Romanticism, Impressionism, Post-Impression, Expressionism, Paul C\u00e9zanne, and twentieth-century Modernism. His lectures were always historically and culturally satisfying but made delicious by his fine analyses of light, color, and form. Colby studio faculty Gina Werfel and Hearne Pardee brought a New York sensibility to the painting classroom and gave me support and encouragement to continue a life as an artist. But something was missing.<\/span><\/p>\n

The voices of the New York Studio Schools\u2019 faculty in the early \u201980s, Abstract Expressionists like Nick Carone, Esteban Vicente, George McNeil, sculptors Bruce Gagnier, Sidney Geist, Peter Agostini, and the strong female voices of Mercedes Matter and Ruth Miller, remain with me. The Studio School was an atelier-based experience of daily studio practice\u2014four hours of drawing, four hours of painting from life. Classes, discussions, critiques, and lectures were centered on gesture, realizing individual perceptions, and search for placement and location in space, and the undeniable hero worship of C\u00e9zanne, Giacometti, and Guston. Something was missing.<\/span><\/p>\n

Other embedded phrases and mythologies are from studio critiques, a generalized \u201cavoid cliches,\u201d as well as voices of 1987 Skowhegan Resident Faculty. Charles Garabedian\u2019s work and admonition to \u201cbe wary of too much facility\u201d led me to experiment with a lack of control by drawing left-handed, now a part of my daily practice. And Martha Diamond apparently did that as well: \u201c<\/span>So as never to do anything rote, she painted with her nondominant left hand. And in her deep commitment to the particulars of her own milieu\u2014she often painted the view from her light-filled Bowery loft\u2014she was like Jane Freilicher and other New York School mentors and friends.\u201d\u00b9<\/span><\/p>\n

That summer at Skowhegan during studio critiques, Agnes Martin would murmur, \u201cLife is a mystery, painting is a mystery,\u201d and say the same thing to my studio neighbor. In 1990, Sam Gilliam, a visiting artist at the Vermont Studio School Summer session, gave me generous advice to \u201callow yourself to realize your deeply felt artistic impulses.\u201d But there was too much mythology about individual breakthroughs and individual artistic heroism. Something was missing.<\/span><\/p>\n

It comes to this: follow the money, who has and continues to get money, who is in power. Who gets included in the public dialogue of art and its canon? Where are the women\u2019s voices? Where are the Indigenous voices, the Black voices, the world voices? In 2021, I audited Visiting Assistant Professor of Art and American Studies Amber Hickey\u2019s <\/span>Contemporary Art<\/span><\/i> class, which covered global production and reception of art since 1980. Its focus on the relationships among contemporary art and politics, international networks, popular culture, social activism, and new media articulated the issues that were missing from discussions and classrooms in the late 1970s and early \u201980s.<\/span><\/p>\n

So here is a woman, finally, from that New York School, from the urban environment, taking on large scale, gestural painting. The paintings in the Lower Jett\u00e9 Gallery start to talk and move, the multiple large-scale vertical supports create a cityscape in the gallery, each work a variation of gestures, form, and color.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Installation view of Martha Diamond: Deep Time<\/i>, Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine (July 12\u2013October 13, 2024), including Cityscape with Blue Shadow<\/i> (1994), Cityscape No. 2<\/i> (2000), and New York Purple No. 3<\/i> (2000). Photo: Luc Demers.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

More acidic color, oh here are some limited palettes; my favorite ochres and gray blue, burnt siennas, blacks, a wonderfully mobile grisaille painting (<\/span>Cityscape No. 2<\/span><\/i>), lots of active and varied surfaces. In <\/span>Cityscape with Blue Shadow<\/span><\/i> (1994) the dry-brushed, red strokes build vertical and horizontal rhythms on a warm opaque surface. The blue and red shadows are slightly translucent and stained, and they fluctuate between functioning as receding shadows on buildings and being flat paint. These dual visual readings create a satisfying perceptual flip, a wonderful ambiguity! Small strokes of black define the tops of edifices. A flurry of longer blue-gray strokes surround the major masses, building an apocalyptic sky. There is underpainting visible in some areas, underneath the yellow form, tracing the archaeology of painting, time spent in the studio.<\/span><\/p>\n

In an interview with Ilka Scobie originally published as \u201cUrban Visionary\u201d in Arnet <\/em><\/span>Magazine<\/em>, June 2001, Diamond says, \u201c<\/span>I don\u2019t use lines a lot. When I put paint down, I hope it\u2019s going to have a certain light or weight or space, or to imply the same. The definition of the image comes out of the way the paint is handled. And the formal properties, the light, the space.<\/span>\u201d\u00b2<\/span><\/p>\n

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Martha Diamond, World Trade<\/i>, 1988. Oil on linen, 72 \u00d7 57 \u00bd in. (182.8 \u00d7 146 cm). Collection of the Martha Diamond Trust.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the painting <\/span>World Trade<\/span><\/i> (1988), a pair of wide, vertical strokes evoke the two towers but read clearly as paint; the pink sweeping strokes create a <\/span>cloud-weather sign more dense than the paint of the buildings, then dissolve back into being heavily laden paint. There is a decisive sense of brush handling, with paint deposits at the end or beginning of strokes, which undermines the expectations of form-building or definition of contours. The clumps of paint that adhere to bristles form the top edge of the right-hand tower, leaving the implied forms permeable, not stopped by separate strokes for contours of a lintel or roof. Dark blue horizontals at the bottom, blue green in the middle, and red-pink at the top suggest sky and light, time of day.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Installation view of Martha Diamond: Deep Time<\/i>, Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine (July 12\u2013October 13, 2024), including Center City (Detail)<\/i> (1982) (second from right). Photo: Luc Demers.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As you walk through the main gallery, you catch a glimpse of a group of dark paintings on the wall shared with the Landay Teaching Gallery, slightly shadowed in their space and hard to read. Walking toward the group creates an animated experience of walking in the dark. The paintings, which include <\/span>Center City (Detail)<\/span><\/i> (1982), have limited palettes of mostly blues and blacks. The lush blues change from ultramarine to purple, black, and brown. The deep darks move to adjacent tonalities, black and gray, blue and black. Less glossy areas shift perceptually to green brown-black, harder to see, suggesting the way we register changes in shadowy forms in darkness. Not the night sky against trees, but similar to the cavernous dark spaces of the barn as I put the chickens to bed.<\/span><\/p>\n

Part of the artist\u2019s statement as it appears both in exhibition\u2019s display case documentation and at the <\/span>Martha Diamond Foundation website<\/span>, is a poetic excerpt of an interview by Bill Berkson:<\/span><\/p>\n

I paint light as it is remembered and what the city looks like when you are walking through, not as examining it. I know the city has straight lines or edges but as I walk around the ending or beginning of substance becomes less absolute. At night, where buildings are higher than streetlights, often you can’t see the tops or edges above. Dark areas around lights appear blurred. Several buildings may be perceived as one large mass, at night you may see lit windows and not the fa\u00e7ade.\u00b3<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Installation view of Martha Diamond: Deep Time<\/i>, Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine (July 12\u2013October 13, 2024), picturing group of oil on board studies. Photo: Luc Demers.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The group of works on board is wonderfully informative, especially after the intimate glimpses of the artist\u2019s intentions and the architectural sourcebook in the display case. The works are fast little studies, impressions, ideas, of work done after a walk. Look at the way paint sits differently on a hard surface, which registers more minute touches, allowing a quick buildup of impastoed paint. Blobs of paint adhere easily. The crusty, built-up surface and warm red tones of Diamond\u2019s untitled painting from the late 1970s suggests a molten earthiness. The untitled work from circa 2009 has a visibly brushed pale lemon surface and a single chunky pyramidal form in black, gray white segments, reminding me of Guston\u2019s touch and palette. There is monumentality at an intimate scale, and juicy paint handling.<\/span><\/p>\n