November 4-December 11, 2004

Introduction

Emerging in the early 1980s, painter Squeak Carnwath, a Professor in Residence at the University of California at Berkeley, has evolved a number of vocabularies with which she explores the dilemmas of the self in relation to a larger world. Carnwath combines luminous color with handwritten notations, hieroglyphic symbols and the delineation of everyday objects. Meaning is not read literally or narratively from her canvases, but is instead elliptical and open-ended.

Carnwath is a consummate painter. Toward her notable achievement of chromatic nuance and subtlety, she employs a complex process incorporating numerous layers of under-painting in combination with alkyd, a substance that aids in the buildup of glazes. With self-deprecating humor, the artist terms her labor-intensive method, "Carnwath Science." For the artist, the practice of painting and the accretion of color are a means to be human. In a corollary sense, the act of painting is understood by Carnwath as akin to healing. Her radiant, warm use of color is intended as analogous to skin, and more broadly, to all of the senses. Skin, of course, reveals its dimpled, mottled imperfections and vulnerability. Similarly, Carnwath's membranes of layered paint are regularly interrupted by shifts in hue and by irregularities. Light is an essential alchemical agent for Carnwath; in her manner of working, it resides within and emanates from paint as a medium. Early in her career, Carnwath traveled abroad to see the works of European masters such as Rembrandt, in part, to confirm for herself the capacity of paint to embody light. If light - a primary symbol of the spiritual throughout the history of art - resides in these canvases, so also do clues to our spiritual dilemmas and possibilities.

Distributed across her modulated surfaces of color, Carnwath in spontaneous yet deliberate fashion, imparts an enigmatic combination of words, pictographs and symbols, in a way that is suggestive of an exploded rebus. Inspired by the routine and everyday, the artist evinces poems, numerals, lists and observations in her own naïve cursive, offering her canvas as a personal writing pad or diary writ large. Her richly textured paint surface is scratched and incised, indicating an active reworking of the hand. Carnwath imbues tension in objects by rendering them both solidly and tentatively, selectively softening edges. Writing and other mark-making on these canvases often has the nervous look of graffiti - furtively and passionately applied. Objects and symbols are repeated and segmented by classification, as if to satisfy some understood scientific schema.

Carnwath feels an obligation to rescue the mundane - "boring things" as she puts it - in order to get back to fundamental notions of the spiritual, of childhood, of the instinctual. Recalling the way that ordinary things are pictured in grade school vocabulary textbooks, elemental objects such as a bird, a beehive, a glass, a telephone, a flower, a hand print, typically appear - almost hauntingly - in Carnwath's compositions. The artist's symbolism has always evolved from a personal place, and from the magic of childhood. For Carnwath, toys (actually those of her dogs) can be perverse, mysterious, even erotic. A cartoonish outline of a rabbit - a recurring talismanic motif in the artist's current work - functions in various ways: autobiographically as a humorous exorcism of a recalled childhood trauma; as a kind of blank witness to events of a personal and societal nature; as a trickster figure; and as a symbol of fecundity. Carnwath typically exploits the repetition of words and objects within compositions and between different works. Such duplication affords an inherent structure and connectivity in her work. The reassuring comfort of this strategy serves as an antidote to apprehensions - both personal and societal.

Carnwath's canvases and prints evoke the loss, doubt and humility that are rooted in life's experience. Her compositions register, often whimsically but also viscerally, emotional pain, the questioning of truth, and the recovery of difficult family memory through therapy. The artist is committed to revealing something of herself in her work. Carnwath humorously tempers her expression of free-floating anxiety through the use of occasional tongue-in-cheek references to Freud, and the establishment of dotted, outlined areas, so-called safe spaces that she terms "Guilt Free Zones" (a reference to the residual guilt of her Catholic upbringing). The artist manages to effectively turn personal disquietude toward a larger expression of concern for what she calls the crisis of contemporary existence. Over the past few decades, Carnwath has attempted to conduct an extended conversation in her work about (pre-September 11th) social ills such as the environment, violence, crime, AIDS, and urban despair, as well as those that can be less easily identified. Indeed, this artist - a kind of poet-scribe putting down on her canvases the questioning inner conversations that we all experience - has become a voice for our day-to-day imaginings and conscience. Graphically, sensually, Carnwath weaves together a dizzying register of the daily minutiae that fill our heads, with subtle references to the larger social, political and economic issues that we confront.

Squeak Carnwath makes repeated references to systems of observation, mapping and diagramming as ways to grasp and understand the world. Her illustration of such long outmoded pseudo-sciences as palm reading and phrenology may suggest that with the present-day suspicion of intuition and superstition, we have lost something of our humanity. Against a backdrop of the artist's palm prints and a palm diagram (denoting head, heart, health, love, life, fate) Carnwath writes in her painting Luck (2001), "There's a place for luck in science," a reflection possibly on issues of aging, health and longevity. The artist writes more subliminally elsewhere in this work, "the painting takes care," a reminder of her conviction that art and painting contribute to well-being. In Be Happy (2002), Carnwath superimposes a phrenological map of the head and a palm diagram over the outline of an artist pallette, apparently linking the sensing, intuiting, chance aspects of character and fortune reading with the subjective readings and connections made by artists. If our greeting card, pop culture bromides can be faulted for their lack of depth, Carnwath satirizes the commodification of happiness starting with the title of this piece. Moreover, she humorously sprinkles cheerful color dots throughout the composition and offers the following prescription that borders on sarcasm, "If you want to be happy, don't read sad stories." In a similar light, the artist clings without apology here to a deceptively simple solution: the aforementioned clear demarcation of a "Guilt Free Zone," a personal safety net.

Carnwath's paintings work to resuscitate and reinvigorate a familiar visual and verbal vocabulary, often recalling childhood. A number of her canvases, void of imagery, are densely filled with words, phrases or sentences. In Please (2000), the short sentence "I am sorry," and slight variations of it, are repeated numerously and minutely, such that the handwritten letters almost vibrate and together seem to take the organic form of a kind of profound ur-text. Putting us in mind of the tedium of the elementary school punishment that called for hand writing an apology as many as a hundred times or more, this work seems to signal regret for certain life choices that we make as adults, and an inability to escape the larger consequences. The pleading, insistent repetition of Please implies, ultimately, the futility of the endeavor. Within the space of an ominous, floating black ink blot - a disconcerting interruption of the repeating text - Carnwath writes in reversed-out lettering: "We make a fiction to understand feelings and emotions . . . It seems that life chooses our imaginings." Here the artist posits an inevitability to our life path, and that we tend to be less than straightforward with ourselves. In Nursery Wall (1998), Carnwath treats the inescapable memory and patterns of her childhood years. On faded, retro wall paper, we find a graffiti outline of a penis with appended text ("intelligence of a 3 year old"), a childish drawing of a young boy and girl standing together, each with scrawls, and nearby, a generic game board with corresponding win/loss cross-outs. For Carnwath, the tangible color, texture and even smell of her wallpapered childhood bedroom, palpably bring forth subconscious memories of her earlier self. In Nursery Wall, she has imagined and graphically imprinted a darker side of these formative recollections.

Squeak Carnwath inculcates qualities of the eternal and psychic in prosaic objects, moving back and forth between dualities such as reason and emotion, the sensual and the cerebral and the ordinary and the exotic. Her sense of microcosmic structure, balance and rhythm, parallel that of the macrocosmic - the earth and the cosmological sphere. She moves incisively between interior disclosure and a larger philosophical, ethical universe. Perhaps most of all, Carnwath brings sensuous attention to the matter of things.

Dan Younger
Director

This essay is based, in part, upon an interview with Squeak Carnwath conducted in October 2004.

This exhibition and the accompanying public program and printed materials are sponsored by the Olin Art Gallery and the Art and Art History Department at Kenyon College. We thank the artist, Squeak Carnwath, Gary Knecht, and studio assistant Tracy Boshé, for their assistance in organizing this exhibition. At Kenyon College, thanks are extended to gallery assistant Ruth Woehr; administrative assistant Beth Staats; Olin Art Gallery work study students; and designer Nan Black.

Squeak Carnwath, Be Happy (ed. 30),
color sugarlift aquatint and hardground etching
with chine colle, scrape and burnish, drypoint,
30" x 29", 2002

Squeak Carnwath, Please,
oil and alkyd on canvas, 80" x 80", 2000

Squeak Carnwath, Winter/Spring (ed. 40),
color sugarlift aquatint and hardground etching on paper, 19" x 18", 2002

Squeak Carnwath, Grass,
oil and alkyd on canvas, 11" x 9", 2000