it at the same time.
— Mary Hambleton
After the reception at Ken and Mary's, I drove north in the snow until I got scared with all the cars sliding off, and so I pulled into a motel. The room, perfectly anonymous, reminded me, somehow, of comfort-the comfort we all look for after death: and all I could think of, staring at the TV screen, not really staring at it but through it to the blankness I was feeling, feeling from the snow piling high out the window, covering the cars, feeling from snowclouds covering the stars that were anyway too far and too cold and too surrounded by anti-matter to know what any human being was feeling, all I could think of was how strange it was that Mary should be here inside my head and yet she was dead, this I knew the same as I knew she was living in her paintings of the dodo, extinct bird, awkward bird, unlovely in its flightless, ungainly squatness that Mary must have loved because it looked somehow intelligent of all that was going to happen to it as if it had a kind of second sight: and knew before it knew that it would be the last of its kind. And then there was Mary swimming in the pool, looking up surprised to see me there and me looking down at the reticulating water talking to Mary while she talked to me about her surgery and turned it all into a joke about going extinct, saying if she had to go the way of the dodo she could at least paint them and bring them back- then saying how she loved Teniel's drawing of the dodo in Alice in Wonderland who proposes a race run on a course of each of our making and so nobody could lose, and nobody could win- and then I saw her as a scan, her skeleton floating on the screen, and the snow was still falling, falling all night long, and what was black in the darkness was turning white just the same as if Mary painted it in stripes, painted it over with what she called my PET, her Positron Emission Tomograph of her own body that ran away out into the snow and rolled in the cold in wonder at the whited-out parking lots and highways and hills and snowclouds burying the earth so that when she called it back home, it stood there, her PET, and watched her, hidden from her, and refused to come.
P-00407
2007
Archival digital print with gouache
3 x 4¼ inches
Her art is similar; it has always been about the wonder of life and its many contradictions. She embraced nature, rendering forms that could be either microscopic views of the smallest things or macroscopic vistas into the heavens. Reflecting her experience as a gardener who lived primarily in an urban environment, she combined organic looking forms and earth colors with the regularity of geometric stripes and bold, primary color. And as an observer of everything around her, she allowed her personal experiences to seep into her art in ways that could relate to a larger audience. As such, it is not surprising that when she was diagnosed with cancer in 2002, her encounter with the disease made its way into her art. But living with cancer did not become the central focus of her work; it was an experience layered onto the many others she addressed.
Hambleton’s art gained recognition in the mid-1980s when her work was included in a number of group shows nationally and internationally. And from 1988 to 1995, she had seven solo exhibitions at the Pamela Auchincloss Gallery in New York. She was friendly at a time with a number of abstract painters in New York for whom the inventions of the Abstract Expressionists still carried resonance. The work of painters such as Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman and Brice Marden, more clearly associated with Minimalism, were also admired. But younger painters were seeking to update the language of abstraction and expand the range of its content. They wanted to dislodge the notion of essence often attributed to abstract paintings without abandoning the immediacy of confronting a non-representational, frontal object full of meaning.
Even as this discourse found a smaller audience with emergence of Neo-Expressionism and media based art in the 1980s, Hambleton maintained a serious and firm adherence to abstraction. Her work at the time was compared to artists such as David Reed, Sean Scully, and Bill Jensen. In a painting such as Misericordia (1990), for example, the thick impasto surface, bold blue stripe at the bottom shared aspects of Scully’s painting; the division of the canvases into parts that don’t quite merge was related to the David Reed’s paintings; and the reference to organic forms, beautiful and threatening as the same time, was compared to Bill Jensen’s paintings.(1)
These formal aspects are important but as the title, Misericordia, suggests, Hambleton also wanted to endow her work with spiritual or mystical content. The title alludes to an exceptionally magnificent altarpiece by the Italian Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca called Madonna della Misericordia. Depicted on an arched, gold background, Piero’s Madonna is a large, central figure opening her mantle with outstretched arms to offer protection to followers kneeling at her feet. Hambleton’s form and its gold color, radiating light, are vaguely similar suggesting her ambition to evoke a comparable transcendence. But Hambleton’s form could also be many other things: a nautilus shell, splitting cellular matter, a galaxy or a fan. And the ambiguity in shape corresponds to the space it occupies which is depicted as both close and far. This density or layering of content conveyed by a complexity of space and form as well as the ambition to address the most profound content remained characteristics of Hambleton’s art always.
By the late 1990s, however, Hambleton’s work had lightened up both in color, texture, and content. This change reflects the influence of another discourse gaining influence in the arts at this time: feminism. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s a number of woman painters had been making paintings that while not stridently feminist were responding to the heavy-handed machismo associated with Abstract Expressionism and the rigid constraints of Minimalism. Painters such as Mary Heilmann, Elizabeth Murray and Joan Synder, a close friend of Hambleton’s, opened the door to bright colors, domesticity, humor, storytelling, a certain irreverence, and the layering of content through collage and the introduction of images to otherwise abstract compositions. They found inspiration is their personal experiences and environments. Not surprisingly, a feminine perspective resonated with Hambleton after the birth of her son Jacob in 1993. The joy of that experience -- especially coming after several difficult late term miscarriages -- and the change in her environment that comes with the presence of a baby, is palpable in her work.
An important series of paintings from this time called Elements of a Periodic Table (1996-99) shows the new directions she was developing. The work is composed of small, square canvases aligned, but not touching, in a grid on the wall; there are forty-five elements in all but the number installed depends on the available wall space. Each square, or element, is a small painting unto itself (some, even smaller versions of other paintings) and shows the many motifs of stripes, dots, checkerboard patterns, washes of color that Hambleton was now using. Though the rich earth tones and black and white of earlier work is present, there are squares of bright yellow, orange, light green and blue as well. Besides the added color, there is playfulness to certain motifs like the dots and checkerboards and the way in which the elements can be arranged or re-arranged. This quality is emphasized by the humor of the slightly ironic title that equates the chemical elements of all matter to the foundations of Hambleton’s art. There is also a narrative aspect to the work; not only was it made over time, it recounts the story, like a scrapbook, of Hambleton’s art.
In much of her painting to this point, Hambleton had used compositions that joined distinct areas or panels together as parts of a larger whole. Though she never totally abandoned that strategy, by the late 1990s and early 2000s, she had found a way to merge the parts together. In Dot Calm (1999), for example, horizontal stripes form an underlying structure and rhythm of texture over which a large white and black circular shape, transparent and gaseous, is painted. Many colorful dots punctuate the surface leading the eye in and out, over and around. All her elements are layered onto a single panel suggesting complexity that is carefully balanced. The ironic reference to the financial dot-com bubble of 1999 in her title implies the tension between an inherent chaos suggested by the many dots and the swirling glazes of paint depicting the bubble-like shape held in check by the underlying structure and square confines of the canvas.
For Hambleton, the bubble burst in June 2002 when she was diagnosed with melanoma. As she describes, the moment she was made aware of the cancer, she was presented with a new reality.(2) The news made life more complicated and simple at the same time, filling her days with endless doctors’ appointments, operations, hospital stays, medical treatments, and the discomfort of it all but forcing her to concentrate on the present and what was important to her. She never gave up on life or art. In the period from 2002 to 2008, she had six solo exhibitions, she traveled to Ireland and France on teaching fellowships, and she won several grants and fellowships that allowed her an especially productive time in the studio.
Drawing was a regular activity for Hambleton. She said, “I find that drawing often calms me, balances me.” While working on paper, usually with water-based media, she would often let nature surround her and let the process take over. As a result, the drawings are more spontaneous than her paintings and clearly distinct though they certainly influenced the latter. And for the most part, her drawings did not change noticeably as a result of her health; they remained abstract mediations on mark making and the substance of space and form.
Around 2003, however, a major change started to take shape in Hambleton’s work.(3) She began to work with images scanned from books, postcards, maps, and photographs that she would modify using a computer. Predominantly black and white, the images would be sized smaller or larger, made into both negative image and positive images, sometimes reversed or flipped, and tiled into a grid. And though they reflected long-standing interests in science and nature, one prevalent theme among images was death or extinction. She used pictures of the ivory-billed woodpecker, the dodo bird, and the passenger pigeon as well as one of an extinct elephant and a photograph of a Sleeping Buddha that iconographically represents the figure at his death, attaining Nirvana. And then, adding further poignancy to the choice of these images, she added her own PET (Positron Emission tomography) scans, taken to monitor the course of the cancer in her own body to her selection. It became clear that Hambleton was considering her own death in relation to the passing of species over time.
Though Hambleton always liked the intimacy of small scale, the size of her scanned images was partially dictated by the potential of her computer printer. She started by making small prints that she would then paint introducing the images as another layer within her abstract fields of dots, grids, stripes and color washes. Interestingly, she sometimes scanned the painted-over prints again, saving a favored work, but also using it as the underlying image for another piece. She then started collaging the images to her paintings and eventually found ways to make the images larger so they could more or less generate the form as in Nine Dodos (2008).
Surprisingly, the use of these images in her work went hand in hand with the further development of a kind of play that had emerged earlier. She began to more obviously reference games and toys. She increased the depth of the sides of her paintings and painted the sides, often bright colors that reflected onto the wall. And along the top, as though on a shelf, she placed small, painted cubes - some with her chosen reproductions collaged on them -- like children’s blocks, in rows or seemingly random heaps. She also made slightly larger cubes, usually 5 x 5 x 5 inches, painted on all visible sides and stacked them in a vertical row on the wall or placed them as sculptural objects or towers on a table. Though Hambleton was clearly making reference to a kind of objectness that made her work present in real space, a quality fundamental to Minimal art – the boxes of Donald Judd, for example -- the small scale, color, and arrangements introduce a lively and cheerful feature not associated with Minimalism. She gave a hint of her thinking in the title, Game Plan (2005), given to a largely abstract painting that has a checkerboard pattern border around dots and circles floating in a nebulous space – a little like planets and moons seen through a telescope.
The merging of the tragic implications of death and extinction with the lightheartedness associated with play gives Hambleton’s late work particular resonance. But she also maintained a tension between painterly techniques associated with abstraction and her representational imagery. Her paintings are available on many levels; as beautiful well-structured objects that contrast color and texture, gesture and geometry, deep meditative space and flat, physically present space and as paintings suggestive of thoughtful and personal narrative content. As she said, her work “…which aims to reach mind, body, and soul, is first of all a retinal experience, a visual feast and must be entered through the eyes.” These formal and narrative aspects fuse in more or less intensity in the later works.
Topsy Turvey (2006) and Target (2007), for examples, are both small, square (a format Hambleton favored), mostly black and white, with small blocks sitting on their top edges. Both include repeated images of Hambleton’s PET scan presented in a grid pattern that recalls Andy Warhol’s compositions. The intensity of the images is somewhat neutralized by repetition (as in Warhol’s Disaster paintings) and abstracted by actual lines of superimposed tape in Topsey Turvey, and with black and white dots and round painted circles in Target that recalls the well-known Target paintings by Jasper Johns. The abstract elements engage with the images absorbing them into the overall patterning of the painting. While the blocks on top introduce a playfulness and visually activate the larger, painted surface in Target, they also obscure the harsh content implied by a target superimposed on the silhouette of the artist’s body.
Hard Rain (2006), with a title that references the well-known Bob Dylan song called A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, is less subtle. Like Dylan’s song, interpreted to be about injustice, suffering, pollution, and warfare, Hambleton’s painting is melancholy. It incorporates some of her familiar motifs, the PET scans, black on white dots, and a large semi-circular form. There is a starkness to this painting, conveyed in the contrast of black to white and a sadness suggested by dripping paint that could be abstract marks referencing material and process but also recalling dripping raindrops and tears.
In the painting, Enough (2007), the title could be addressing her own situation or perhaps a certain difficulty she had with this painting. It has decorative stripes and white dots on a pink background on the left edge and bottom but the right side is full of thick globs of paint with nails embedded in them. With the heavy build up of paint, it looks like it might have taken some time to make. But it also has an aggressive edge that contrasts with lighter, decorative aspects.
Her Dodos, an image Hambleton seemed to particularly identify with, are more playful. Two paintings of 2008, both Untitled, started from the same format of an image of a Dodo bird surrounded by repeated images of her PET scan. These images become ghosts beneath the surface as the structure is overlaid with dots and color.
Towards the end of her career, Hambleton was increasing the size of her paintings. Waiting for a Miracle (2008) is one of the last works she finished. Primarily shades of white and grey, it is a long, horizontal rectangle with a checkerboard border, recalling the format of Game Plan. Like the planet-like shapes in the earlier painting, this one has circular forms, faintly painted white and repeated within the central section. That space, and movement across it, is delineated by long, thin, horizontal stripes. Single and stacked blocks, some simply painted one color and others with images of the extinct birds and PET scans, line the top of painting. As a token of hope, there is also an image of the palm of an outreached hand, holding an egg. A ball, made from recycled tape, and a glob of paint are also in the line.
Is it to read too much into this painting to suggest that Hambleton is proposing that life is a game? Probably so, the work presents itself as a painting first, beautifully painted, elegant and abstract. But within the context of Hambleton’s work as a whole, it resonates with meaning. All the elements of her later works are here: the gesture, the geometry, the process, images of birth and death, the toys, and the recycled wades of discarded material. It is all merged into a kind of narrative or continuum through time overlaid on a game board. The balls and blocks are there -- parts of the game -- tempting the viewer to join in.
1. See William Zimmer, “ The World Has an Edge: Mary Hambleton’s New Paintings,” in Mary Hambleton, exh. cat. (New York: Pamela Auchincloss Gallery, 1991); Barbara Zabel, “New Abstract Painting,” in Small Work: New Abstract Painting, exh. cat. (Easton and Allentown, Pa: Williams Center for the Arts, Lafayette College and Mulhlenberg College, 1984); David Carrier, “Abstract Working Spaces,” review, Art International (Spring 1990), p. 70.
2. All quotations from Mary Hambleton are taken from “in conversation: Mary Hambleton with Ron Janowich,” The Brooklyn Rail, March 2004. See also, www.maryhambleton.com for a reprint of the interview.
3. Jessica Hankey, who worked as Hambleton’s studio assistant from 2003-2007, describes scanning images that meant something to Hambleton. She was also helpful in relating the process Hambleton used to manipulate the images with a computer.