by John Chilver
Written in 2016. Unpublished.
Swift arrows fly true. The swifter the truer, Mary Heilmann seems to find. She has been said to make her paintings in a day. Meaning all of the painting kneaded out of the layers of one single day. This can’t be entirely accurate because some are dated over several years. But it’s undeniable that one never sees labour time in her work. The paint we’re shown is always applied very fast. Other fast workers in the one-day’s-work club are Katz, Tuymans, Morandi, Kawara and often, though not always, Picasso. The unevenness of the list traces a divide. The one-day limit could mean routinization, as risked in On Kawara’s date paintings. Morandi executed each painting in one session only, but rehearsed and wiped successive stabs till one came good. The small differences between his compositions were carefully calibrated in a continuous tactical war against stultifying repetition. Then there is the other pole that tries hard to forget repetition as routine. If every day brings a fresh dawn then the one-day rule can equally license carefree wanderings: however errant or ill-met the results of today, they can always be forgotten – and forgiven – by the mercy of a tomorrow that yesterday never forbade. As Françoise Gilot tells it, Picasso frequently completed two paintings in a day, often repetitiously, sometimes adventurously, other times recklessly. Heilmann has her bag of spills and thrills and maybe pills. She has her own honed and finite vocabulary yet has rarely been predictable. Swift arrows served her best in the period between roughly 1970 and 1990. By forcing the pace, Heilmann attuned the pitch of her art. She could harness the condensed power of Mondrian’s style without ever worshipping alongside him at the altar of transcendent equilibrium. Swift arrows bore other gifts. They meant no time to edit. First thought best thought. No time to brush out the brushmarks. No tidying. Even when the conception brought to mind early Al Held (as in the superb ‘Orbit’ of 1978) or 60s Ellsworth Kelly (‘French Screen’ also 1978), Heilmann accomplished something unlike either, by making us look at the friction between imperious conception and raw, brushy execution. If the formal play and sometimes hieratic design leapt across eras and histories, the paint instead spoke of the glare, shove and shank of a New York weekday. The constant beat of the paintings invokes the noonday nowness of a working life that is also a lived life, a life around and beyond and bestride the work. In Heilmann this rhythm is quite unlike the brushmarked anxiety of 50s New York painting, where the conception of a painting often emerged – as with Guston or de Kooning or Mitchell – out of improvised marks, slowly and retroactively. Heilmann’s painting holds to a very New York sense of the mark as livedness and personal style. But it throws out the 50s baggage of struggle, sufferance and palimpsest. The 1960s of course had already reacted against the styles of its precursors. Much abstraction of the 60s had removed the brushmark, as if leaving a visible stroke or drip in a field of pure red would render its conception un-immaculate. Heilmann retained the feel of colour-speed and acuity that came from 60s abstraction while remaining untroubled by paint bleeds, drips and runs. Her marks carry a gleeful charge of pragmatic livedness without the burden of expressivity. Heilmann reminds us that things in art can move on without advancing, without progress. And without logic. And small differences can become big differences. Small moves can end up big moves. Wednesdays as sharp as Fridays.
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