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SOCIETY, WHERE
NONE INTRUDE; RECENT WORKS BY JILL TISHMAN
“
I always perceive human qualities in nature,” Jill Tishman
has said. On
first encounter with her arresting, large-scaled landscapes, this
is exactly
what many observers might intuit. And both Tishman and the truly
emphatic
viewer of her works are, in turn, reverberating to the intuitions
and sensations
of countless artists in the long history of Romanticism,
from the early nineteenth
century, right down to the present.
Tishman’s ethereal drawings strive, over and over, to dematerialize
the face
of nature so as to reveal not just its actual appearance but, much
more
powerfully, to reveal the artist’s own spiritual accord with
her subject. To
give tangible shape to what the artist sees within has been a cardinal
component of the evolution of modern art, both abstract and representational.
That landscape painting has survived at all, in our post-, post-modern
world,
is testimony to our imperishable need to commune with the spiritual.
The
history of abstraction in modern art can actually be seen as an
unbroken tie
with many artists’ attempts to escape from the material world
into the
mysterious gulf between “being and nothingness”---and
return with an image
of what they saw there.
Jill Tishman’s haunting, black and white “fragments
of nature, as seen
through a temperament” (one well-known description of classic
Impressionism)
are authoritative, modern efforts to make a “religious” experience
tangible
in completely contemporary terms. Tishman’s long, lonely
vistas create a
symbolic contrast between the immediate foreground---upon which
we and the
painter stand, in solitude....and a receding, immaterial realm,
somewhere
“ beyond.”
It is remarkable that Tishman’s mesmerizing landscapes, though
never
containing people, nevertheless reverberate with humanity. Effectively,
the
artist seems to take the viewer by the hand, and we view the snowy
garden or
misty lane or the foggy forest as though standing in silence at
her side.
While the overwhelming mood of Tishman’s work is a profound
melancholy, it is
never disturbing. In fact, a melancholic strain in art stretches
from
Germany’s Caspar David Friedrich to England’s Joseph
M.W. Turner, right down
through Rothko and Pollock, to the mystical allees and solitary
pathways
depicted by Tishman.
Tishman can and does work in color very well, yet it is in her
black and
white, that is, “chiaroscuro” work, that she seems
most able to push her
vision beyond the literal towards the lyric. Of course, it is very
clear
that drawing has always been the medium which most powerfully captures
the
instant of artistic inspiration; this is undoubtedly why Jill Tishman
feels
constantly drawn back to that most basic of mediums.
In Tishman’s images, line, the oldest element in the whole
history of art,
completely determines her form; moreover, continual drawing invites
her to
serial compositions, cycles of similar images which continually
ring subtle,
tantalizing changes on her motif. What the artist strives to capture
are not
“
landscapes”, per se, but “inscapes”---a fanciful
term coined by Rainer
Maria Rilke which, in truth, might describe much of modern art.
What is particularly attractive in her dreamy landscapes is that,
in the end,
they are not accurate images of a specific place and time but rather
a
distillation of pure atmosphere. Tishman’s drawing so isolates
her subject
matter that fantasy itself creates her pictorial space.
At times, the tall, narrow vistas Tishman favors---inviting, like
open
portals---verge on the Surreal. And we might then recall that the
Surrealists, themselves, were vastly taken with the possibilities
of
photography, the ultimate black-and-white medium, to capture the
vibrations
of melancholy in the everyday environment.
Both the Surrealists and Tishman, in turn, owe something to the
unforgettable
photos of Eugene Atget, whose images of empty, turn of the century
Parisian
byways and hazy, lonely allees suggest, but never depict, humankind.
Like Atget’s work, too, Jill Tishman’s images always
seem to be captured by
dawn’s earliest, meditative light. Like Atget, Tishman seems
to take very
long, breathless “exposures.” (Atget once said that
he could never work
with a handheld camera because they were “too fast”---”Trop
vite, enfin!”
In the end, there is paradoxical comfort in Tishman’s realms
of solitude, for
she knows, as Byron said, that there can still be “society,
where none intrude.”
– Jan Ernst Adlmann
Author of the 1996 publication, Contemporary Art in New Mexico,
Jan Adlmann
has been director of art museums in California, Kansas, Florida
and at Vassar
College, as well as Assistant Director of New York’s Solomon
R. Guggenheim
Museum. He has taught at the University of Colorado, Vassar, the
College of
Santa Fe and at Hamilton College.
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