Commenting on Heather Wilcoxon’s Seattle Studio Show December 2019

http://www.heatherwilcoxon.com/paintings-2014/

Blood red of the water surrounds the sailors, who have never sailed nor know how to swim.

Paint is like water running over a boat, which seems to be shipwrecked. The people have capsized. The boat, a living thing rendered by human hands, is a still life. Cobbled together for a painting to create the best composition. It becomes the thing we look at to garner catharsis in a museum, where the privileged shuffle, immune to the disaster that is coming. You are supposed to see yourself in art. Even this Titanic is only a work of beauty to those who have never sailed and never left the dead-end job. Capitalism, or man’s inhumanity to man, is sucking the air. Everything is only two-dimensional, a photograph, a memory, not what life should be. It is stark raving mad, a dog that has overeaten and can barely go outside.

Cityscape with empty migrant vessels. New World Order. The crossing for those who would not accept them will remind one of a cemetery. The sky, like in the Industrial Age, is sedimentary. Each landscape is a Whistler rendering.

The Ark is under construction, except that the world hasn’t been cleansed. It is a hollow vessel in the planning stages. The shadows of its ribs show no hostages.

Envisioning the journey of the immigrant. The empathic water looking up at the edge of a boat full of migrants and not knowing anyone in particular, but like a shark getting a sense of appetizers. The sardine can spill over and reveal the sardines. No one belongs in open water.

This luscious swell, out of focus, heaving, hiding, consuming, indifferent but still ominous, is like the vision of an immigrant who has lost his glasses in the escape from horror only to be met with frightening uncertainty, stuck counting waves that seek to steal him like a coyote sheepishly.

This floats like an empty holocaust that is the White House, dried to the bone, hollow, and during a storm.

The simplicity is haunting. It goes to the very essence of things, our childhood conception of reality, a kind of scientific short-handedness, the stroke of a child, which we have never left as the first grace of our being. The stool, too, is reminiscent of kindergarten. You no doubt take advantage of the light in this otherwise darkened room. Oh, what a great plan. What an excellent rendering of the ocean, the mountain, or the vista, which is always the landscape of the human psyche. We seldom really study the background. Isn’t it almost always out of focus or scurrilously considered? And yet, to be aware of it might wake us to our self-centered views. It could be anywhere. We could be anywhere, and our genotype is the same. I want to hold you like the dolls in the attic and get back to that first dream. Everything is put away. Who we are is in storage. I am brought back to the table and chairs we danced around as children learning to treat each other like human beings.