Suzan Woodruff: Luminous Matters
Luminous Matters describes Woodruff’s work to be sure, but also asserts that the luminous matters, that light holds the key to greater illumination. Opens March 19 at William Turner Gallery.
Suzan Woodruff’s viscous vistas conduct the viewer through mesmeric realms where colors seem potentially sentient, diffusing, roiling, billowing, erupting their way across surfaces of cosmic commotion. The multihued tendrils and filaments that spread, striate and stratify before the eye bring to mind every manifestation of dynamic natural-world activity from the motions of tides and tempests to the configurations of solar flares and fractal patterns. (Think also of the swirling clouds spurring Mitchell Feigenbaum on to his epiphanies in chaos theory.) Some of these abstractions resemble satellite photographs of the Earth or distant nebulae or galaxies. Other paintings appear as if summoned from within the Earth’s churning molten core. Woodruff is a sensitive cartographer of deliquescent chromatic terrains, an acute surveyor of tumultuous ecosystems of radiance and perception.
For Woodruff, to paint is to embrace chaos. “It’s the one thing I can count on,” she says. To make a pact with chaos, she explains, means maintaining an intuitive balance between concentration and recognition of the forces of natural occurrence, understanding the rigor required in allowing for the unanticipated in her art. Woodruff finds inspiration in art which makes its own personal covenant with the void, which delves into enigmas of light and color: O’Keeffe’s bold topography, Rothko’s deep abysses, Turrell’s optic environments, and the unearthly portraiture of that technological Eye of Providence known as the Hubble Space Telescope.
Communication between elemental worlds lies at the heart of Woodruff’s “Psychopomp” series, a psychopomp being both a spiritual ambassador to the afterlife and a Jungian term for a mediator between the conscious and the unconscious. Nature is this artist’s perpetual touchstone. When bands of nacreous paint in a corner of “Psychopomp II” sparkle with the aventurescent shimmer I liken to the interior of a geode, Woodruff tells me about her grandfather, an Arizona prospector, and growing up around minerals and ores from his backyard mine in the desert.
Luminous Matters describes Woodruff’s work to be sure, but also asserts that the luminous matters, that light holds the key to greater illumination. Kabbalists spoke of prophecy as the act of looking into a “luminous mirror.” An alternative title or a subtitle to Luminous Matters could be Light and Color (Woodruff’s Theory), after J.M.W. Turner’s 1843 supernatural vortex “Light and Color (Goethe’s Theory),” his depiction of the morning light after the great deluge. “The sun is God,” proclaimed an expiring Turner, whose majestic nimbuses find a way to waft into Woodruff’s “Properties of Light” and “Luminiferous.” Luminosity is revelation, deliverance out of darkness. Woodruff’s images provoke the viewer to see with new eyes.
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