The four artists of Purposeful Surfaces are all maritime painters, but their pictures do not feature the mainstays of earlier marine art, like breaking waves and ships at sea. What attracts these particular onlookers to the waterfront is not so much the nautical as the architectural: the dramatic contrasts, bold utilitarian structures, and superhuman scale of the industrial port, a world apart from the everyday realm of house, market, and office.
It’s a trade secret amongst artists that subject matter and narrative are merely the most obvious, rather than the most important components of a painting. The paintings in this show owe as much to the abstract artists of the mid-twentieth century as they do to the pioneering marine painters of England, Holland, and France. Those earlier artists would have never thought (as do our artists here) to dedicate an entire picture to the abstract patterns created by reflections of objects in moving water, or to paint ships, piers, and cargo so that they suggest a set of interlocking, colored rectangles. Nor would they have found themselves so intrigued by the blooms of rust or the streaks of weather stains on hulls and walls, features that would have looked right at home in a cutting-edge New York painting, circa 1965.
The artists in the current show also have many affinities to the American Precisionists, a group of early twentieth century artists who were amongst the first painters to focus on the industrial landscape at exactly the same time as abstract art was coming to the fore – not a coincidence. Artists like Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler found in subjects like factories and grain elevators the opportunity to create compositions as powerful as abstractions as they were as depictions of a particular place and time. These urban artists turned away from the unspoiled landscape that had been the dominant source of artistic imagery in the previous century.
Like the Precisionists, the artists of Purposeful Surfaces take on the industrial subject matter of the port primarily because of its striking visual qualities, not because of its more worldly aspects, like its historical or economic importance. But that is not to say they don’t love boats - clearly they do!
For Melinda Hannigan, the love affair has been lifelong. Her father was a specialist in marine law, and she studied marine engineering prior to taking up art; most strikingly, her husband is a Puget Sound pilot, and many of the titles of her paintings are names taken from his records of boats entering and leaving the port. Her works have obvious relations to both abstract painting and Precisionism, with her use of numbers, hatchmarks and letters reminiscent of the classic Demuth painting “I Saw The Figure 5 In Gold”. The other historical source of her work is the decidedly pre-modern tradition of trompe l’oeil, paintings which literally “fool the eye”. Her works both depict and almost seem to enact the process of weathering, denting, and staining that afflicts steel surfaces exposed to the marine environment. Her mastery of a wide range of painterly techniques creates a powerful tension between what we see, and what we only think we see.
Robin Siegl also features colorfully-distressed metal surfaces in her work, but her more distant viewpoint always includes the watery realm in which those floating structures reside. Her paintings have an almost elegiac tone, with the solid world of man-made structures seemingly engaged in a losing struggle with the forces of nature. Scouting subject matter from a wooden, oar-powered skiff, Siegl discovers otherwise unnoticed juxtapositions of the soft and the hard, the weighty and the weightless, the structural grid and the watery wiggle. The palette is decidedly minor in key, but each picture includes a warm grace note of intense color, all the brighter for its drab surroundings, and suggesting the possibility of rebirth and renewal.
Taking in a much more distant viewpoint, it is the imposing scale and electric glow of the industrial waterfront that energizes the work of watercolor painter Suze Woolf. She treats her gigantic subject matter with the sense of awe and discovery of an expedition artist encountering the Sphinx and the Pyramids. Her gantry cranes loom over us like gigantic insects or H.G. Well’s invading Martians, while the superstructure of a container ship corkscrews upwards against beautiful clouds like a stone minaret, the control bridge at the top ready for the afternoon call to prayer. Her nighttime scenes contrast heavy equipment with their molten, reflected light, while the bright windows of distant skyscrapers act as a stand-in for the stars.
It is objects and voids, line and mass, that engages Catherine Gill. Her boats, docks, wooded hills and warehouses are treated as equal elements in a highly-refined grid, allowed to go in and out of focus in the service of her overall pictorial design. Color unifies rather than separates, with each picture organized around a small number of strong tones. The light is always that of mid-day, and shadows are kept to a minimum. The white of the paper itself plays a strong role. A strong rhythm sets the structure for each picture; note the three adjacent ships on Lake Union stepping up from small to medium to large, or the dark L shape that anchors her view of the Duwamish.
In an urban landscape that is often chaotic, repetitive, garish, or banal, the working port offers the artist an environment with far more visual integrity. The movement of goods from land to sea has led to the development of a host of specialized structures and machinery whose straightforward lines and rugged materials delight the trained eye and reward the patient observer, as the present exhibition amply demonstrates.