Half a Life on Canvas
Expressions of Time
Palette Knife Paintings
Developing from the movement paintings of the late 1980s and early
1990s is a new genre, the kinesthetic. This dimension—the
actual or imagined feel of the surface against our fingertips—has
become increasingly important in Gail’s art during the current
decade. Even when movement is not the subject, the dense and energetic
application of paint with brush or palette knife makes these works
literally a felt experience. Gail is trying to break us of the habit
of thinking that paintings come to us only through the eyes. As
in her movement paintings, the image in these works sometimes fills
up the entire plane of space and seems to extend beyond the edges
of the canvas, and sometimes it exists in a more conventional background/foreground
arrangement. Even though the paint is applied with palette knife,
her technique shows a remarkable variety. The short, clumpy strokes
of Sea of Dreams are very different from the dense web of
colors in Shimmering Twilight. Likewise, the more uniform
fabric of Rainbow Bridge is like neither the short, muscular
strokes of Emerging with the Dawn nor the energetic and elongated
pulls of Seen and Unseen.
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| In all cases, however, the complexity
of the colors built up stroke upon stroke gives these paintings
the extraordinary condition of having their history present
and visible in the instant. Once again, time enters as an
implicit subject of Gail’s painting, but with this difference:
time is not felt as movement across the present, but rather,
as the past reaching into the present. More than any other
group of Gail’s work, these palette knife paintings
are a process of discovery for her—and they take the
longest to make. If there is a suggested image (the architecture
of City Nights, for instance, or the water ripples
in Dappled Sunlight), it takes a long time to present
itself to her. And all these paintings keep calling her back
to put a dab of white here, to kill the yellow there. The
most difficult question every artist faces—how do you
know when the painting is done?— becomes unanswerable
with these works. There could always be another stroke added.
Consequently, any ending is inherently arbitrary. So just
as the painting’s past is present to the eye and to
the touch in the build-up of pigment, so, too, all of its
futures are implied by the stopping of its development. Instead
of seeming to spill off the spatial edges of the canvas, these
paintings seem to spill out of the present into the infinite
past and infinite future.
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