READING NATURE: THE PAINTINGS OF PEGGY BATES

Abstraction, in continuity since its origins, has been a method by which we can experience the world anew, and have our expectations of a specific esthetic experience transformed from the intellect down to the senses. The new paintings of Peggy Bates present  a singular example of this experience; she translates the essential qualities of nature into a visceral interval with specific tonal impositions of color, gesturally arranged within the limits of the canvas. They are equal parts ephemeral and elegant, drawing us into an original view of the world.

Each of Bates’ new paintings each utilize a single color mixed to perfection in advance, so that it will run consistently depending upon the material weight of the sample. Her pours are gestural, tightly wound, incisive. They create a swirl of form that is hypnotic and suggestively introspective. Depending upon the color of choice and how heavily it has been utilized, we may find ourselves gazing deeply into a painting as if it were a mirror with readymade reflections. Form has that power—and the artist informed by progressive painterly ideas as well as by the forms eternally evoked in nature—to achieve a strength of presence that despite being expressive and singular, is forever unknowable in any other terms, either of explanation or comparison. The image in a painting such as this is unlike anything in nature, although its power can be found nowhere else. These marks upon the canvas are like ancient etchings on the walls of some ruin.

The complexity of Bates’ métier connects specifically to her choices of color in relationship to the gestural imagery highlighted by it. Such subtleties are the essence of a certain kind of mastery which we must take in all at once. Looking at two very similar constructions, one in dark gray and the other in lime green, the first comes off as somber, and the other as playful. Each painting presents as a tightly wound cluster of broad gesture, which in using a single color for each painting, creates an allover effect on a reasonably small surface. Color operates as both method and structure in her paintings, leading us toward as yet unknown territories of meaning. They are not generally metaphorical but are chromatically pure. Bates avoids the use of titles, to not distract from the intimacy of the color itself in each piece. Take for instance “Untitled (light blue)”: In this area no larger than a poster we have a universe of color; her work is neither a view nor a mark, but is the overwhelming sensation one receives when either hit by a traveling wind or a passing wave while bathing in the ocean. One can look at this painting and imagine currents of elemental motion, like seeing forms in continuously morphing clouds. Her work is not about settling an image, but about feeling the presence of the natural all around us.

Bates understands that color dictates the nature of our relationship with form. If one has looked deeply into any painted area dominated by a single color, either suffused with it, interrupting and subverting other colors, or universally applied in a basis with no counterpoint, only the swirls and swoops of gesture to enumerate the possible range of expressions in each unique canvas. Bates desires the viewer to be immersed in an experience unique to her process. It’s impossible not to be impressed by the facility with which she has brought this new series to life. She has used the tools at her disposal to create something new in manipulated experience. Her achievement is the advancement of the actual. Her canvases are vessels containing an essence that never diminishes.

Essay by David Gibson