Nancy Eiseman in her 16 spare drawings at
InsideArt seems a world apart from individuated emotions and urban angst.
She renders the simplest of subjects--fruits, vegetables, nutshells,
sea-shells--in pencil on white backgrounds. Though these works are
representational, I thought immediately of the spiritual tradition in
abstract art--of Mondrian and Malevich, of Barnett Newman and Agnes Martin.
Eiseman, 36, a Chicagoan who grew up in New Jersey, was inspired to become
an artist in college after seeing the work of Georgia O'Keeffe; she mentions
Giorgio Morandi, Louise Nevelson, and Edward Weston as other artists she
likes.
But Eiseman's Two Peppers is very different from Weston's famous
photographs. While Weston's peppers have an almost infinite variety of
shades and textures musically modulated, Eiseman's two peppers are nearly
white at their centers, with delicate light grays around the edges and
darker grays in the small shadows beneath. What she shares with Weston, and
O'Keeffe, is the removal of objects from any human context. Her work aspires
to a pure and elegant silence.
Yet these drawings have their own quiet dynamism. In Nutshell, Stone, &
Fossil everything but the named objects and their shadows is white, but the
shadow under the nutshell is rendered in grays with varying degrees of
sharpness. Delicately shaded, it feels oddly alive: the darker areas,
growing gradually out of the surrounding light gray, almost seem to be
actively gathering darkness. In Two Nutshells Eiseman juxtaposes the inside
of a large shell, made up of intricate chambers, with a smaller, rounder
whole one whose surface is smooth and almost evenly gray. But as I looked
longer, the subtly shaded surface began to seem as complex as the larger
form. Juxtaposing them, the artist seems to be saying that even the simplest
of things is alive with spirit.
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Eiseman is forthcoming about her sources:
"It's important for me to communicate my spiritual perception of the world,
what lies beneath or beyond the surface. I converted to Catholicism in about
'87, and that's been a major thing in my life. I also meditate and hang out
with Buddhists--I see pretty much the same truth in all religions, but I
worship as a Catholic." The white in her drawings is like a spiritual
ground. Within the objects she depicts the white areas are in many ways
indistinguishable from the surface of the paper, and if she gave us only the
decontextualized objects we might see the white paper as a mere backdrop.
But by including shadows Eiseman makes her objects three-dimensional,
encouraging the viewer to read the white surroundings less as paper than as
light: the light that shadows can block out, the light out of which objects
can emerge.
This is clearest perhaps in Big Shell. An area of shadow at the center,
where the shell spirals inward, has a very different feel from the shadow
underneath, whose sharpness and intensity subtly shift as this curved form
rises and falls from the invisible surface on which it rests. Many areas of
this gently curving form nearly bleed off into the paper's whiteness, but
the shadow below, cast on a surface no more visible than the background,
suggests that the whiteness stands for neither empty space nor the paper but
a world consumed by brightness.
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