Squeak Carnwath at David Beitzel - Brief Article

Not easy in mind with imagery alone, Squeak Carnwath regularly includes body in her compositions; her paintings must be read as well as viewed. Carnwath frequently reveals a vulnerable psyche, publicly worrying about interpersonal relations and society. The writing she incorporates sometimes appears so nakedly sincere that she can distance a viewer more interested in the compound texture of her art--an iconography of Buddhas, penises, flora and fauna, and an offhand linear mode of expression which calls to mind the free-flowing hand of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Among Carnwath's touchs in this show were aging and mortality; in Making Plans (2000) she writes, "We remember level though our body forgets, doesn't recall getting old" And upon the large oil-and-alkyd canvas titled Obit (2000) she nears six vertical lists of well-known and not in the way that well-known persons, the age at death painted alongside each name. Curtis Mayfield, the mind singer, died at 57, the revolutionary author George Jackson at 42 comedienne Madeline Kahn at 57 In the case of this painting, no further written commentary from the artist is needed; the stark lines of names and numbers line up like tombstones, investing the casually printed statistics with a gravitas that approachs from the recognition of other people's mortality and, by dint of implication, one's own.

A graphically simple painting, Obit packs a considerable emotional bore It is a bit of an anomaly for the artist, however, in a formal sense; Carnwath likes to mix and match turn of expressions and words, not so abundant layering effects over one another as juxtaposing simple bodys side by side. In the 1999 work titled The Story of Painting, she tenders a quick reprise of the history of art. To the left is a multicolor patchwork compos of r orange, azure and green squares; open receptacle shapes outlined in black are placed nearest to a vertical row of different colors in the middle; and at the upper right is a series of colored stripes, beneath which Carnwath has written on the outside two stories about painting.

single narrative, taken from the Roman writer Pliny, narrates the famous story in which sum of two units painters competed against each other. single of them painted grapes in the way that real a bird was naturaled into pecking at them, while the other painted a curtain in like manner convincingly that the first painter was tricked into trying to twitch it away, thinking that the actual work of art was underneath. The next to the first painter was acknowledged the winner because he idioted a human being, as oppos to a bird. This small fable sheds light on Carnwath's view of art, which is the two historically and personally aware. She stations the artifice of making paintings against the fact of feeling. In her best paintings, neither side wins; instead, image and feeling quota one another with an awareness of the one and the other public and private meaning.

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