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An
Introduction to Leise Wilson
By
Viv
Levy B.A., M.A., R.C.A.
“……..when I try to imagine a faultless love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone
landscape.”
(In praise of Limestone, W.H.Auden)
Substitute chalk for limestone and see how Auden’s lines
apply to the essence that informs Leise Wilson’s paintings, how the
landscape of the Kent coast has educated her hand. It is fitting that she
should work in a studio situated in the shadow of the Turner Gallery in
Margate; Turner who worked from this same landscape.
We are all affected by landscape while writers conjure it
with words; visual artists show it on paper, canvas or in space. The most
successful evocations of landscape do not imitate nature , are not mirrors of
the external world , they are infused with the same beauty
that is found in nature , they imitate the way that nature works not the way
she looks. Mere descriptions of landscape are boring, you may as well take a
snap or read a tour operators brochure, and expressive colours are not
necessarily descriptive.
I came face to face with Leise’s work shortly after my
introduction to the sea and shore at Ramsgate. Far from being confronted with
copies of the world outside, I was looking at a parallel world described
through the intervention of emotion, filtered through memory. Matisse said
that” exactitude is not the truth. There is an inherent truth which must be
disengaged from outward appearance of the object to be represented. This is
the only truth that matters. “This is a truth Leise strives for. She
translates the visual experience of standing before a landscape into an
equivalent sensation in the work, it is collaboration with Nature, employing
Her methods as well as staking inspiration from Her looks. Water, salt, and
stain are used to render sea and sand, while bleach echoes the sun’s work on
the white cliffs and volatile skies; colour is cajoled and implored as she
strikes out with whatever comes to hand: scissors inks, layers of plain or pre
painted tissue paper. Through constant experimentation she breaks new ground,
and I’m sure, manages to surprise herself. These are not complacent works.
“If you obliterate something it will always be there”,
a Hemingway principle. Through the layer upon on layer of rubbing out and
returning there is another parallel with nature, here is erosion and regrowth,
the seasons passing, life beating beneath the surface of these translucent
paintings. Encroaching on the fragility of some of these pieces come the
robust and shocking coastal plants of summer, wounded red, and slightly vulgar
puce surprise the eye.
There is no literary intervention in these paintings; the
marks on paper are the sole agents in the relationship between the landscape
and its interpretation. Neither are these bucket and spade pictures, humans
are absent , no one walks these cliffs and beaches , the shore is deserted,
there is a strange feeling of loss ,but also of relief for there are no
human traces, no abandoned picnics, no tossed bottles , or
beer cans, no pollution. We are only spectators on this side of the picture.
I noticed a kayak propped up against the studio wall. I
assume that drawing and paddling cannot be engaged in simultaneously, these
vistas of sky and horizon are imprinted directly onto the retina, like
conceptual sketchbooks, to be carried back to the studio and woven into the
work. Nothing is planned out, these paintings are intuitive, unconsciously
researched, and they change on the page like the English weather.
From October through the winter Leise is exiled from her
end of the pier studio, as the hostile seas and weather make the building too
cold, too wet, and too dangerous to inhabit. She returns to London where the
work shrinks to fit the available workspace in a North London flat. The
content, however, does not shrink; it becomes more intense, resolves itself
into small acrylic memories. These are not views from a London window, the
mind retains the Kent landscape as a whole but the edges merge with the make
believe. These are small explosive memories of summer, tricks of shadow, and
flashes from the corner of the eye, differentiation of texture like snatches
of song heard through a mist, conjuring whole tranches of atmosphere, exciting
visual energy through colour, line and form. These are more abstract and
dreamlike than their summer counterparts and push against their small scale.
Size is of little importance, everything in these small works is amplified by
imagination.
There are always problems when work has to be “hung”.
Reflections on glass, inappropriate frames and crowding. Galleries and
collectors are loath to handle or value anything unframed or unglazed unless
it is a work on canvas. Paintings once free to breathe on the studio wall are
now shackled by a frame making them precious and insular. When the four sides
of a picture are part of a larger vista one should be able to place it on the
wall without a frame. Howard Hodgkin gets around the problem by incorporating
the frame into the picture, muralists paint right up to the edges; sculptors
are constrained by available space, the scale of their work radically altered
by placement. I know that Leise is unhappy about the effect of frames on her
work, they seem to want to elbow their way out, I would be happy to live with
one in a state of dress or undress!
Fine artists should undertake to transform the ordinary
into the extraordinary. There are times when the sorcery goes wrong. You can
tell when someone struggles through the fallow times to regain the magic and
comes up again with a fresh body of work, it takes courage and perseverance, I
believe that Leise Wilson has these in spades and I look forward to seeing her
future work.
Viv Levy B.A., M.A., R.C.A
June 2011
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