Art Papers Volume 10 Number 6 Nov/Dec 1988
Victoria Webb: Nepenthe
Callanwolde Fine Arts Center, Atlanta, GA September16-October
14 1988
Presenting 11 large unframed oils painted this year, Victoria
Webb called her show ‘Nepenthe’. It’s
a mythic allusion. In Book Four of the Odyssey, Homer cites
an Egyptian elixir supposed by the Greeks to coax forgetfulness
of sorrow. And Milton refers to the drug in Comus. Yet the
power and modernity of Webb’s art derives exactly
from an ultimate, perhaps unconscious, refusal of amnesiac
bliss. The work realizes the anxious longings that fuel
the urge for the narcotic of release.
The considerable vitality here - of color, primarily, but
also of line - is one of an uneasy rising toward loveliness,
of disturbance masked tantalizingly by veils of green, orange,
red, purple. And it’s to the degree that the tumult
is allowed to show through the shimmer that each painting
achieves the stronger note of force and personality.
Given this dynamics of stress, it seems no accident that
the paintings, oftentimes celebrations of a spiritualized
Nature, are highly Romantic. Not only do such titles as
Rachmaninoff’s Torch, Africa and Road to Nepenthe
echo a poetics of heroism recalling everyone from Delacroix
to Rilke to nearly any aesthetician of the dream-in-action,
but the reliance, in even the figurative canvases, on ‘private’
inspiration places the work on the side of Santayana’s
art of ‘expression’ as against ‘communication’.
Too, by turns commemorating the jagged undulations of The
Blue Rider, the hurt dazzle of German Expressionism (Webb’s
colors are softer than Ensor’s, sharper than Munch’s),
and, in one instance, the dramatic drapery of Titian, Webb
sets up a relationship to history that, however oedipally,
consents nonetheless to the existence of a ‘tradition’.
As the works edge further from the literal, the allusions
are more modern. The crisscross brushstrokes of Sound of
Rain, Feel of Water seem a kind of sprung Vorticism. Rachmanioff’s
Torch hints at Motherwell, Kline, Hans Hofmann: a stern
black glyph resounds from a subdued jazz of blue, purple,
yellow. The complex blue fluidity of Shallow End reflects
Monet’s water lilies but also, at least thematically,
Hockney’s swimming pools. And the askew nimbus in
Moscow might suggest Gottlieb.
The movement from representation to abstraction is best
read in the loose series, Nepenthe, Bridge at Nepenthe,
Road to Nepenthe, wherein mountainous forms evolve, beoming
more stylized, ampler, bolder. In the last, the signal shape
is something simply organic (hills? knuckles? brains?),
and the inkling of narrative, present in many of Webb’s
paintings, turns from prose to poetry.
The work becomes music as content and technique find a flourish
in a freer touch. While divergent in mood, the meditative,
wandering grid of Shallow End and the pop, yellow wham of
Moscow yet meet in a sensibility of dream, striving, irresolution.
Especially in the four pieces having to do with water, a
favorite Webb motif, the viewer is given a sense of immersion;
line and boundary seem to evaporate, making way for a suffusion
of color. Paintings almost of color for color’s sake,
they underscore the painter’s chief talent, an idiosyncratic
chromaticism (a kind of mysticism of color), while their
primal, open-ended symbolism encourages a reaction in the
viewer of intimacy and communion.
Moscow makes another, more ambitious, kind of connection.
Not only does its title conjure up an actuality rich equally
in myth and politics, but its central emblem, no matter
how abstracted, is an LP disc, technological conveyance
of the most intuitive of the arts. And if its field of overwhelming
yellow makes this the most sensually immediate of the paintings,
its metaphorical compression (disc as dark "sun",
clash/fusion of nature and culture) makes it the most intellectually
provocative.
Finally, Webb’s exhibit displays an impressive, creative
impatience. The variety and generosity of styles and approaches
reveals a painter in process of serious discovery, hand
and eye moving, with an apparent sense of velocity, surety,
and inevitability, toward a tighter tension of expansiveness
and depth.
-Paul Evans
Paul Evans taught English and Art History at St. Anne’s-Belfield,
the oldest preparatory school in Virginia. He was editor
of the now-defunct Southline, an Atlanta journal of politics
and the arts. His book reviews have been published in The
Atlanta Journal-Constitution, his music criticism in Record
and Muzik magazines. He was editor of Rolling Stone Magazine’s
Encyclopedia of Rock ‘n Roll. His fiction appears
in Puerto Del Sol, a journal of the State University of
New Mexico. He has been writer-in-residence for the Georgia
Council for the Arts and was a member of the Atlanta Poetry
Collective. He has given readings and lectures at the High
Museum of Art, Seven Stages Theatre, Emory University, Georgia
Institute of Technology and for WETV and WRFG. He currently lives in Tucson, Arizona.