THE SPELL
EMerald Rose Whipple:
THE SPELL
Schedule a private viewing of the artwork at the artist's studio using the form below.
Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences. . .
[T]hat great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere [is] that Unity, that Over-Soul, within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other. . . . We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul. . . .
All goes to show that the soul in man is . . . the background of our being, in which they lie, — an immensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed. From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all. A man is the facade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide. . . . When it breathes through his intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love. . . .
Of this pure nature every man is at some time sensible. Language cannot paint it with his colors. It is too subtle. It is undefinable, unmeasurable, but we know that it pervades and contains us. We know that all spiritual being is in man. . . . We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature, to the attributes of God.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Over-Soul
Emerald Rose Whipple's most recent collection of paintings offer an intensely personal meditation on how images and feelings combine and connect in brief moments that often exceed our capacity to capture or describe them. It would be cliche to call such moments "fleeting," at least on their own. What the paintings of The Spell show is how the fleeting and the enduring are inextricably paired.
On the level of content, what The Spell shows its viewers are moments from the artist's life – outings with friends, visits to clubs and galleries, car rides and smoke breaks. Though a dialog with digital-image-making is explicit, none of the pictures could be described as "decisive," as containing within themselves a kind of coherence all their own. If anything, the images are more "indecisive," ambiguous as to their compositional integrity, but meaningful all the same – just one or two frames down the row of images on the contact sheet. Selected, but not chosen. Or rather, images that chose the artist, because of who was in them, or when and where they were taken, oblique references that a viewer will "get" even if they can't know the details, the circumstances.
On the level of form, Whipple’s one-time signature pointillism is here pushed and pressed. A departure from recent collections where the brushwork was fast and loose, with The Spell, the compositions are blurred and bled at points, patterns are over- and underexposed, color levels are dialed up and down, but never to extremes, just to the point of altering the image state, giving it an altered consciousness, reality and memory in a different key.
There is a story in and between these episodes – hence the pairings, the trios. That story is one of loss and grief, but also one of family and friendship – again the twin poles of fleeting and enduring: loss happens fast, friendships, good ones, endure, even where and when families can't or don't. Grief comes in waves: it crests and breaks quickly, but it also rolls and rolls and rolls.
The Spell might be personal to Whipple, but its episodes are accessible, familiar even. There is an entire language of art direction and film direction in them, a history of the photographic image, of painting coming to terms with itself. Like an artist coming to terms with herself, taking a step back and seeing things differently: prelude to a spell being broken.
Jonathan T. D. Neil