Jill Nathanson

Abstract

Jill Nathanson Jill Nathanson (bio) and Karen Wilkin (bio) From the very beginning of her life as an artist, when she was a recent graduate of Bennington College, Jill Nathanson’s paintings have been notable for their commitment to abstraction and, above all, for their highly individual, unpredictable sense of color. While she has explored diverse possibilities over the years, in a logical progression, from brushy all-over field paintings, to more disciplined geometric, grid-based compositions, to the lyrical, clearly defined structures of overlapping planes of recent years, her work has always depended on the multiple associations color triggers in us. Nathanson orchestrates complex relationships of unnamable hues like a composer writing for nontraditional combinations of instruments, searching for new harmonies and new moods. Through color, she plays wordlessly on our emotions, experience, and intellect, allowing us to revel in the meeting of gorgeous hues, some of which we feel we are encountering for the first time, triggering thoughts about what these colors might allude to in our own recollections, and then, just when we are focused on these associations, forcing us to concentrate on the evidence of the history of the paintings’ making. Nathanson has spoken of what she calls “color desire,” which, for her, is a kind of shorthand for the way a hue set down in one part of the painting demands the presence of another hue elsewhere and will probably influence what happens in between. In her recent work, these relationships are made more complex by her wish for the color in her works to be what she describes as “light-like—active, transmitting, and quicksilver” and by her interest in the ranges of color generated by differences in translucency. “I think often,” she says, “that there is material color—paint—and color as light, and that each color painter revels in that dualism in his or her own way.” Until very recently, there was little visible evidence of Nathanson’s hand in her paintings, which she builds with thin, translucent, carefully controlled pours of specially formulated acrylic paint. The edges of the planes of color have generally been made to carry the burden of drawing, so much so that her works can seem to have come into being almost magically, without physical effort. Yet we are also very aware of Nathanson’s will and agency [End Page 73] in constructing them. Generous planes of unexpected hues are arrayed and overlapped in sensuous, rhythmic expanses, unfolding sequentially like a classical frieze, sometimes solemn, sometimes flirtatious and playful. We are led across the painting by a rhythmic chain of events. Suave curves confront blunt angles; intervals expand and contract. The overlaps become mysterious zones that now seem to belong to one adjacent color, now to another, while equally mysterious shapes with similarly ambiguous connections to the dominant shapes are created in the same way. Some of the energy of Nathanson’s recent works derives from these subtexts. The instability of the overlaps, combined with the advancing and receding properties of warm and cool hues, the nuanced edges of the poured planes, and the diverse associations that colors provoke in each of us, animates and enlivens the progression of planes. In some very recent work, fluid brushstrokes and imposed line add yet another note. I use the word “note” deliberately. Confronted by Nathanson’s recent works, it is impossible not to think about musical analogies. The slow progressions of colored planes in horizontal paintings suggest complex chords, even orchestral crescendos, while the coiling, upward thrusts of the occasional vertical picture trigger thoughts of chamber music or virtuoso solo riffs. Or not. Each of our responses will be different. Yet it seems impossible, as well, not to consider Nathanson’s expansive, harmonious, and (that much maligned word) beautiful recent paintings, many made in 2020, as challenges to our constricted lives or as paradigms of calm and order, antidotes to the stresses of the pandemic. But whatever associations they elicit from us, Nathanson’s paintings, like all art worth taking seriously, stimulate our imagination and enlarge our experience. [End Page 74] Click for larger view View full resolution Sway Chorus (2020) by Jill Nathanson, acrylic and polymers on...