art as visual conversation
radcliffe quarterly, march 1992
by judith seligson
I call my work contrapuntal painting. In music, counterpoint is the coexistence of two or more independent melodies or rhythms that simultaneously function as the harmonies to one another. Each shape in my paintings is like a note in a musical composition. I combine these note/shapes to make visual melodies. Because each shape has multiple properties, or scales, several different melodies are created simultaneously. The “chromatic” scales of each shape include hue, temperature, value and intensity, size, and contour. A visual melody is significant by virtue of the intervals between the note/shapes and the nature of its interaction with the other melodies.
These several visual melodies playing simultaneously are metaphors for human interaction within a marriage or a family, and between communities and nations. They are also metaphors for ways of thinking about oppositions. They are voices in a conversation. I am suggesting that thinking itself is an inner dialogue and that the quality of our thinking depends on the quality of that dialogue. If one thinks of each of the separate wills in the universe as a melody, life can be seen as a complexly ordered contrapuntal composition. The answer to the question of who composes it depends on one’s idea of the balance among a divine control, random fate, and human initiative. The interweaving of these three elements becomes itself a subject of counterpoint in my work.
These paintings are indebted to Johann Sebastian Bach, whose name is practically synonymous with counterpoint. Edward Rothstein has asserted that Bach also used counterpoint to represent a vision of human interaction: “His fugues construct musical orders in which each individual voice is playfully free — maintaining its identity but capable of the most fantastical diversions — while having its position verified and reinforced by other voices. The fugue establishes a community of like minds and distinct parts, very different from the polyphony of the Renaissance, where the focus is less on individual voices than on the overall texture.”1 I am painting a community of minds as I see them in the late 20th century with a unique potential for individuality and interdependence. Each shape in the painting has a certain size and contour, which corresponds to the duration of a note of music, and visual rhythms are generated by the ordering of these time intervals.
In painting, a fundamental creative tension exists between positive and negative space. In a painting of a vase and the space around the vase, the vase, the object, is “positive” and the space around it, the background, is “negative.” Even the words sound as if they are imposing a value judgement. Yet Matisse said that the art of painting begins when the painter sees the vase and the space around it simultaneously. That means that the negative space takes on a life of its own, a shape of its own, and that the painting does not exist until both the positive and negative shapes are in a creative tension. The oppositions are conversing in counterpoint.