Doors close, 'Windows' opens

By Bonnie Wells
Staff Writer

Published on August 29, 2008

In 60 years of making and showing his art, no exhibition has meant more to George Wardlaw than the one opening next week at Hampshire College.

The former longtime chair of the art department at the University of Massachusetts has shown his work in countless solo and group exhibitions at galleries and museums up and down the East Coast and west to Chicago. A major retrospective exhibition in 1988 at the Memphis Museum of Art traced the development of his work from the early abstract expressionist paintings and silversmithing that earned him international recognition, through a series of vibrant geometrical compositions that presaged the rise of Pop Art, and on to sculpture expressing the essence of portals and doors. Since then he has spent eight years on a series of sculptures exploring facets of his adopted religion, Judaism, among other projects.

But "Windows II," opening Sept. 1 at Hampshire's Main Gallery, is different. It's not just that he believes that the work may be his strongest to date, or that the series was inspired by the Maine coast, which has great spiritual and personal meaning for him. For Wardlaw, the show is especially meaningful because it is dedicated to the memory of his wife, colleague and best pal, Judy, who lost a battle with multiple myeloma in May, at the same -able editor for any and all writing I did. She was a great coach ... This show is very much a dedication to Judy."

"Windows II," a sequel to "Windows I," which was exhibited in Hampden Gallery at UMass in March, will be celebrated at a reception Sept. 4, from 4 to 6 p.m. in the gallery in Hampshire's Johnson Library building. In the series, each of 13 acrylic-on-canvas paintings leads a viewer through a stylized window to a scene of the artist's invention.

Aggressive aspects

Wardlaw, 81, has always worked in series. And whether he worked in two or three dimensions, the stuff of his life has found its way into his imagery. In an artist's statement he wrote, "My windows are your windows to my vision and experience."

His career-long fascination with apples and apple forms comes from the orchards that surrounded the couple's first home in New Paltz, New York. The "Windows" series inspiration, the Maine coast, was where they spent nearly every summer of their lives together. And while "Windows I" was a much calmer, quieter show, Wardlaw says "Windows II" owes much of its mood and energy to the sadness and anger he felt during the last difficult year.

"Some of [the pieces in Windows II[']] have aggressive aspects in them and a certain amount of hostility, because I was reacting to Judy's illness," he said.

For example, in "Unidentified Object" a three-sided black window leads to a view of stylized sea and sky, dominated by a large, dark and craggy, meteor-like form in the sky.

In addition to the imagery, he said the process of working the surface with tools like a carpenter's rasp, and the resulting underlying chaotic markings, adds to the aggressiveness of the piece. In the sea, an elongated, organic, white form suggests a range of images - reflected light perhaps, an archipelago or maybe a sea monster.

"My work is rather mysterious, ambiguous in some ways," Wardlaw said. "They have multiple readings. But they are not Rorschach tests. They're more like poetry, which can have many interpretations." And he's happy to leave that to the viewer. "I like people to look at it and find their own identity in the work," he said.

While coastal scenes form the bones of each window view, the specific imagery is drawn from a range of Wardlaw's experience and interests. One dramatic and beautiful piece, "Big Bend," done in a limited palette of deep navy, black and white - suggestive of a silhouette and ripe for a figure-ground reversal during a long gaze - was inspired by a child's drawing of the weather in the Daily Hampshire Gazette. Wardlaw loves the regular newspaper feature and says he has clipped hundreds of them.

"Some of them are incredibly strong," he said. "I think children are the most inventive of all. They're uninhibited."

In another work, "Goddess Sea Sentry," the dominant ambiguous figure was modeled after the headless statuary known as "Three Goddesses" from the east pediment of the Parthenon, c. 438-432, now housed in the British Museum in London. Yet another composition is a tribute to the Old Man of the Mountain, the natural granite face that protruded from Profile Mountain in New Hampshire until May, 2003, when it collapsed overnight.

A conversation

Each painting began with a drawing. When Wardlaw moved to the canvas, he started with the windows.

"I had two ideas that were working simultaneously," he said. "I wanted to do windows, where you looked out at the ocean or at my inventions. And I had another idea - a kind of formalist idea - I wanted there to be a question as to whether it was a painting on a black wall, or is it a window?"

The paint for the windows was applied with a trowel, from top to bottom in one stroke - 10 or 12 coats of it, rendering it opaque from a distance, with depths visible in a closer view. The window views were created through a process of building up and scraping down paint many times over, creating surfaces alive with energy and subtle markings.

"Each painting kind of dictates what I need to do," Wardlaw said. "I talk to the painting and it talks to me. We have a conversation. Sometimes we have a battle or a fight."

He takes a beat and laughs. "And sometimes the painting wins!"

These paintings all asked for a limited palette. "Basically I removed a wide range of color from this work, because I didn't want it to be decorative. I wanted them to be more about big form, big shape, big presence," he said. "To me they're about hope, about optimism in the strength of their visual imagery."

Wardlaw had three more paintings in the series in progress when he stopped painting to care for Judy last spring.

"I don't know if I'll get back to them," he said. "I'm not the same person I was. I was a duo. I have to find myself again, as a painter and as a person."

"George Wardlaw: Recent Paintings: Windows II" will be on view through Sept. 28 in Main Gallery at the Johnson Library Center at Hampshire College in Amherst. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 10:30 to 4:30 p.m.; Sunday, 2 to 5 p.m. For more information about the artist and a gallery of his works visit the Web site www.georgewardlaw.com.