ESSAYS > ESSAY: ANDREW L. SHEA
Painting Between the Poles
By Andrew L. Shea
In Catherine Kehoe’s After Tintoretto, an athletic goddess vaults into view over a seascape backdrop, twisting and extending her body to crown a seated, half-nude princess and to grasp her left hand. The rollicking composition is clearly a transcription of Tintoretto’s Bacchus, Venus, and Ariadne (1576–77, Palazzo Ducale), yet Kehoe makes a crucial change to her Venetian precedent.
Where, in Tintoretto’s telling, the figure of Bacchus emerges from below to offer Ariadne a ring of marriage, here we find only a long, raking shadow—then, in that shadow, spot the silhouette of a black poodle, who watches on as the miraculous scene unfolds. The painting is one of about two dozen in “Back and Forth,” Kehoe’s new body of work, whose title evokes a kind of poised oscillation, an exchange between two poles. In After Tintoretto, for instance, we find Kehoe swinging back and forth in time and space: back to sixteenth-century Venice; forth to her present-day, immediate surroundings (the poodle is, in fact, a portrait of her own pet dog).
Viewing these paintings, I’m reminded of Robert Frost’s complaint that writing free verse poetry is like playing tennis without a net. For Kehoe, that necessary “net,” the rule that makes the game worth playing, is a series of self-imposed physical parameters. The panels she paints on are small: none exceeds ten inches to a side, and most are closer to half a foot tall and wide. Kehoe works in oil, doesn’t play with mediums, and uses only a few simple tools: squared-off sable brushes, sharp-tipped pencils, a handful of straight edges. Working from observation, she makes still lifes, interiors, and self-portraits, as well as interpretations of old photos and, as we’ve seen, “old master” European paintings. Her paintings seem to show us the sturdy bones that lie beneath a complex and changeful visual experience, converting the infinitude before her eyes into discrete planes of flat, solid color. Yet with these limited means, Kehoe takes on big ideas. One “back and forth” dialectic I keep returning to is that of presence and absence. This is one of the great themes of art. As John Berger has noted, “every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.”
A superficial look might suggest that Kehoe is a painter who only absents. There are the painted-out faces in After Reynolds and other works; the dresses without bodies in Dior and Balenciaga; the spare geometries of Helen FHC, an old family photograph that the artist has simplified down into just two tones of subdued yellow. Yet Kehoe gives as she takes away: consider the elaboration of faceted forms in Profile with Window, a three-quarters view of the back of Kehoe’s head (seen via two strategically placed mirrors); the coloristic nuances found in her
painting of a single oak leaf; or the seductive sense of light and likeness given by After Rembrandt’s portrait of an old Dutch woman. Then there is the way that Kehoe “presents” and “absents” with depicted space. Reflect on the etymologies of those words. Presence: to be before; absence: to be away. Painting, in Kehoe’s hands, is an art of near and far. She finds poetry between those poles.
Witness Kore, an interior scene in which a bronze statue occupies the center of the picture, flanked by two sky-blue windows. As a form, it is solid and legible, exuding an elegant, contrapposto grace, yet it stands amidst an unsettled environment that resists the quick read. Jostling about the central bronze is a cubistic arrangement of close tones—chromatic grays, tarnished ochres, mocha browns — that advance and recede at will, confusing our sense of spatial order. For a moment, we feel content to revel in these clean-cut shapes as decorative accents of pure abstraction. But additional clues soon crop up, such as, to the left, the gray contour of what must be another statue, and to the right, the silhouette of a figure, clothed, who stands motionless in this slowly unfolding museum gallery. Even after noting these spatial markers, however, it was still several minutes of further looking before I began to infer the presence of what I now read as one or two glass display cabinets, invisible except for the way that they alternately admit, reflect, and refract light. Soon a greater kind of space, an enveloping space, begins to jump off of this diminutive panel.
Similar delightful confusions abound in “Back and Forth,” which is all the more surprising given Kehoe’s taut, clear-headed style. Her paintings are constructive and declarative — those confident passages of full-bodied color seeming to say, “this is true, and this is true, and this is true, etc.” — but they are neither smug nor static. They are wonderfully ambiguous, yet the tensions they hold don’t for a moment go slack.
Part of these paintings’ virtue is how they engage not only one’s sense of sight, but also that of touch.
In After School of Fontainebleau, an undeniably strange composition, two young women sit naked in a bathtub, facing outwards to meet our gaze. One of these women reaches out to pinch the nipple of the other, and the other seems to hold something small between the fingers of her outer hand. Yet Kehoe has left out that small object, and she has blocked out their faces. Thus, we are met not with a pair of identifiable personalities, but rather a tactile surface of paint. Looking closely, one finds the ridges and incisions of previous, underlying layers, bearing the history of Kehoe’s slow, unplanned search for the painting. Unable to read any easy narrative into the work, we are left only to follow a succession of enigmatic gestures and delicate touches. As we do so, we find that the painting remains stubbornly mute, but that its mysterious presence is nonetheless palpable.
Andrew L. Shea is a painter, critic, and teacher.
By Andrew L. Shea
In Catherine Kehoe’s After Tintoretto, an athletic goddess vaults into view over a seascape backdrop, twisting and extending her body to crown a seated, half-nude princess and to grasp her left hand. The rollicking composition is clearly a transcription of Tintoretto’s Bacchus, Venus, and Ariadne (1576–77, Palazzo Ducale), yet Kehoe makes a crucial change to her Venetian precedent.
Where, in Tintoretto’s telling, the figure of Bacchus emerges from below to offer Ariadne a ring of marriage, here we find only a long, raking shadow—then, in that shadow, spot the silhouette of a black poodle, who watches on as the miraculous scene unfolds. The painting is one of about two dozen in “Back and Forth,” Kehoe’s new body of work, whose title evokes a kind of poised oscillation, an exchange between two poles. In After Tintoretto, for instance, we find Kehoe swinging back and forth in time and space: back to sixteenth-century Venice; forth to her present-day, immediate surroundings (the poodle is, in fact, a portrait of her own pet dog).
Viewing these paintings, I’m reminded of Robert Frost’s complaint that writing free verse poetry is like playing tennis without a net. For Kehoe, that necessary “net,” the rule that makes the game worth playing, is a series of self-imposed physical parameters. The panels she paints on are small: none exceeds ten inches to a side, and most are closer to half a foot tall and wide. Kehoe works in oil, doesn’t play with mediums, and uses only a few simple tools: squared-off sable brushes, sharp-tipped pencils, a handful of straight edges. Working from observation, she makes still lifes, interiors, and self-portraits, as well as interpretations of old photos and, as we’ve seen, “old master” European paintings. Her paintings seem to show us the sturdy bones that lie beneath a complex and changeful visual experience, converting the infinitude before her eyes into discrete planes of flat, solid color. Yet with these limited means, Kehoe takes on big ideas. One “back and forth” dialectic I keep returning to is that of presence and absence. This is one of the great themes of art. As John Berger has noted, “every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.”
A superficial look might suggest that Kehoe is a painter who only absents. There are the painted-out faces in After Reynolds and other works; the dresses without bodies in Dior and Balenciaga; the spare geometries of Helen FHC, an old family photograph that the artist has simplified down into just two tones of subdued yellow. Yet Kehoe gives as she takes away: consider the elaboration of faceted forms in Profile with Window, a three-quarters view of the back of Kehoe’s head (seen via two strategically placed mirrors); the coloristic nuances found in her
painting of a single oak leaf; or the seductive sense of light and likeness given by After Rembrandt’s portrait of an old Dutch woman. Then there is the way that Kehoe “presents” and “absents” with depicted space. Reflect on the etymologies of those words. Presence: to be before; absence: to be away. Painting, in Kehoe’s hands, is an art of near and far. She finds poetry between those poles.
Witness Kore, an interior scene in which a bronze statue occupies the center of the picture, flanked by two sky-blue windows. As a form, it is solid and legible, exuding an elegant, contrapposto grace, yet it stands amidst an unsettled environment that resists the quick read. Jostling about the central bronze is a cubistic arrangement of close tones—chromatic grays, tarnished ochres, mocha browns — that advance and recede at will, confusing our sense of spatial order. For a moment, we feel content to revel in these clean-cut shapes as decorative accents of pure abstraction. But additional clues soon crop up, such as, to the left, the gray contour of what must be another statue, and to the right, the silhouette of a figure, clothed, who stands motionless in this slowly unfolding museum gallery. Even after noting these spatial markers, however, it was still several minutes of further looking before I began to infer the presence of what I now read as one or two glass display cabinets, invisible except for the way that they alternately admit, reflect, and refract light. Soon a greater kind of space, an enveloping space, begins to jump off of this diminutive panel.
Similar delightful confusions abound in “Back and Forth,” which is all the more surprising given Kehoe’s taut, clear-headed style. Her paintings are constructive and declarative — those confident passages of full-bodied color seeming to say, “this is true, and this is true, and this is true, etc.” — but they are neither smug nor static. They are wonderfully ambiguous, yet the tensions they hold don’t for a moment go slack.
Part of these paintings’ virtue is how they engage not only one’s sense of sight, but also that of touch.
In After School of Fontainebleau, an undeniably strange composition, two young women sit naked in a bathtub, facing outwards to meet our gaze. One of these women reaches out to pinch the nipple of the other, and the other seems to hold something small between the fingers of her outer hand. Yet Kehoe has left out that small object, and she has blocked out their faces. Thus, we are met not with a pair of identifiable personalities, but rather a tactile surface of paint. Looking closely, one finds the ridges and incisions of previous, underlying layers, bearing the history of Kehoe’s slow, unplanned search for the painting. Unable to read any easy narrative into the work, we are left only to follow a succession of enigmatic gestures and delicate touches. As we do so, we find that the painting remains stubbornly mute, but that its mysterious presence is nonetheless palpable.
Andrew L. Shea is a painter, critic, and teacher.
