Unwilling Suspension of Belief
Hemda Rosenbaum
“In any case, I always thought that if the Spirit of God moved
upon the face of the water, the water was bound to reflect it..”
– Joseph Brodsky, Watermark 1
Clusters of clouds, with barely a trace of human activity, fill Maya Gold’s canvases in one of her recent series, Maritime(2008). In some of the paintings there appears the vertical line of a ship’s mast, slightly inclined, like a momentary indication of time and place, of civilization. The realistic painterly language—in the stormy background as in the ends of the masts, painted in great detail in the foreground—could compel one to believe. The sky, devoid as it is of any tangible foothold, was a popular theme among 19th century modern landscape painters, such as Turner and Constable, in whose canvases the sky often pushes the horizon outside the composition. Atmosphere, to a greater extent than water even, is a field of painterly expression that seems unbound to the detailed representation required by the singular brushstroke. Precisely because of this, however—and in modern landscape painting in particular—it serves as a pact of trust between the viewer and the artist, or better still—between the painter and the landscape he beholds. For if fidelity to the slightest nuances of nature is the ultimate feat of a landscape painter, then when a fleeting atmospheric phenomenon is concerned, the burden of fidelity is sevenfold grander.
Realism, however, has two facets, and Gold’s landscape paintings, which belong to the western tradition of landscape painting only in appearance, are well aware of this duality. In one of the works in Maritime(all of them Untitled,2008), somber cloudiness serves as backdrop for a mast towering diagonally in the foreground, while the head of a spherical streetlight appears in the lower right, standing vertically; in another painting in the series, which seems to freeze a very particular cloud formation, a thread can be perceived, resting on a lush volume of two cloud clusters, solidifying, as it were, the condensed water vapor into tangible matter. The language of painting, these works tell us, is so developed that it is easier for the eye to believe in a professed, explicit lie. Perhaps the suspicion should have arisen precisely by the painting most congruent with the series’ title, Maritimep, which alludes to a sub-genre of landscape painting: Here there is already a grouping of masts, with ropes stretched from them and little red flags fluttering in the wind, but the body of the ships can only be imagined; the framing of the picture and the perspective angle, tilted slightly upward, push them out (and we may wonder whether the masts are not too close together for these ships to have any real body).
The framing of the picture and the perspective angle are decisive parameters in Gold’s painting. A retrospective survey of her oeuvre reveals that once in a while there is a purposeful shift of that angle, following which the field of visibility changes as well. While most of the series until Maritime, and in some instances thereafter too, were dominated by a bird’s-eye view, in Maritime, as we have seen, the gaze is turned forward and inclined slightly upwards—enough to “miss” the horizon and show only sky.4 Only in Echo, her current series, created after nearly a decade of work in painting, Gold finally agrees to adopt the “standard” frontal gaze of landscape painting. Gold’s painting, with its three major modulations thus far, would seem to be subordinated to the rule of linear perspective. It is perspective, we think, that determines the subject matter and scope of her paintings. But that perspectival grid which is cast on Gold’s paintings—the more it tightens its hold, the more holes open in it.
Gold’s early paintings (2003-2004), where the gaze hovers high above a land populated by tiny human figures, enjoyed a scattered, nearly decorative freedom.
The foreshortening of the upper angle is not yet absolute as it will be in later paintings, and the population of tiny figures, whose bodies are summed up in a minimal set of brushstrokes, are, in fact, seen from a diagonal angle—which grants a nearly frontal view of them. In her paintings from those years, Gold adopted from perspective the vision play which it allows, but not its binding strictness. Moza’ei Ha’hag(‘End of the Holiday’, 2004)p. 7, for example, features a scattering of translucent white circles in varying dimensions, with white threads hanging from them. On the one hand, these are helium balloons, in whose meditative climb upwards (and toward the viewer) they hover above the community of humans on a holiday eve—children and adults whose clothes form colorful dots on the deep blue background of the picture; but on the other hand, the circles create a geometric array intended to produce a two-dimensional rhythm, further enhanced by the colorfulness of the clothing and the linear shadows extending from the figures—dark hatchings turning in different directions.
The schematic figurative depiction, the emphasis on rhythm, the multiplicity of tiny figures, and the themes of the paintings, which are usually drawn from leisure activities or various types of communal gatherings, have all been replaced in Gold’s subsequent paintings with a gloomier atmosphere. The more she refined her painting technique and representational skills, the fewer the figures became, the more the hues darkened and the more the color gamut became restricted. Gradually, clouds appear between the ground and the viewer located above, only to be replaced soon after by the shadows of clouds, cast on the ground in flat, gray color stains. Whereas previously the beach emerged as a spacious sunny site leisurely accommodating its multiple visitors (Untitled, 2003), now it is occupied by a single, melancholic figure, a last bather who remained on the beach on a wintry day (Send, 2005). The point of view, which previously hovered above and opened to a broader field of vision, has now fixed itself in a threatening zenith, like a hidden eye dominating the view below. This new attribute of the vantage point corresponds with the tightening of the perspectival grid and the grim, indrawn atmosphere in the paintings. Despite moments of magic still persisting here and there, or a flickering of light—as in the pair of paintings Make a Wish(2006)p. 7 where a girl juggles with oranges—on the whole, the paintings imprison their protagonists in a Sisyphean space devoid of a temporal dimension, in which they are doomed to repeat the same action over and over again; as in the paintings of the series While(2005), for example, each of which portrays a figure sweeping ever-growing piles of autumn leaves.
Once the upper perspective stabilizes and tightens its hold, however, the first cracks, or better yet—escape hatches, open in it: shadows of trees, electric poles and wires stretch in opposite, wholly unlikely directions, on the asphalt at twilight (the series Urban Eve, 2006)p. 7; moreover, it suddenly seems as though the figures and the occurrences below are aware of the eye observing them from above, and deploy themselves accordingly. In the series of paintings Restreet(2006)p. 7, for example, the figures carry large paper arrows on their backs and over their heads, much bigger than their own bodies, which are nevertheless consistent with the eye of an “omniscient observer” viewing the painting; due to their size, however, the arrows collapse under the paper’s weight; their pointed heads droop, and they fail to indicate any direction whatsoever.
The paper arrows were among the first signs of a new register gradually added to the paintings, a choreography of signs which took shape before the upper eye, acquiring its full meaning therefrom. This process culminated in the suggestive restraint of Sunrise(2009)p. 15, where the shadow of two treetops is cast on a dense grid of flagstones; the circle of a manhole cover outlined on the grid may thus resemble a sun rising amid the treetops. A similar idea is manifested in another painting from the same period, To Sea You (2009)p. 24, where two women row surfboats pitted one against the other. Depending on the viewer’s distance from the painting, the surfboats may resemble a pair of eyes; but their schematic delineation, inscribed by the meticulous symmetrical outline of the boats, as much as it revives a gaze sent from the painting back to the viewer, it
