Ann E. Coulter
Pastel Drawings
closer
Ann Coulter's large-scale works on paper propel the viewer into vivid and exalted realms of claustrophobic thickets, dewy fronds, coiling peduncles, and spiny pods. The effect can be intensely meditative and at times fantastical. Shrinking the viewer's scale to nearly microscopic, she manipulates their perspective, and as a result she draws them closer. Closer to the subject at hand, closer to the landscape, closer to the regenerating cycles of life and death, closer to some kind of truth. The humble array of weedy wildflowers, thistles and stalks modestly counter the oft-celebrated and decisively snobby breeds such as the rose, orchid, and carnation. Coulter's drawings, which dispense with the refined frills of vivid blooms and groomed stems entice through the unlikely attention to their stark appearance. Her drawings bring the viewer down to the soil, to the roots and the stems and in this way they deliver downright humanist revelations. It is in this extreme nearness and enveloped seclusion that the viewer discovers solitude?of which Thoreau once said he "never found a companion that was so companionable."
Rendered captivatingly in an in-and-out of focus photorealist style, these drawings, particularly the large-scale ones, threaten to snatch us up into the recumbent picture plane like greedy limbs of an enchanted forest. Coulter's ability to depict the camera's deficiency of total focus is tied to her chosen medium, the pastel. With no pencils or brushes, her process is a braille-like reckoning with the drawing surface, yielding delicately blended layers of color-saturated dust, and allowing her subjects to appear both photographic and painterly. Her use of the photographic reference rather than rendering en plein air reminds us of the universal desire to capture our botanical surroundings through photography. And further, it underscores the ubiquity of nature as subject matter, creating a non-human testament to the wonderment of creation, which has been endlessly reformulated into a litany of still-lives, clip-art, and photo-album diaspora.
In the case of Gerhard Richter's beautiful photo-realistic paintings, Richter uses the blurring of the image as a mechanism of distance, both spatially and temporally. His paintings employ the unfocused photographic moment not only as the language of antiquated photographic methods, but also as a way to detach the familiarity, the humanness of the subject. In this sense, Richter seems to have a fascination with distance. In contrast, Coulter's murky and often blurred spaces, which lie beyond the foreground, amplify the viewer's nearness to her subject and often at times reverberate with figural connotations. To my eye, coiling tendrils daintily grasp stalks and stems like babies' hands, patches of intertwined thistle tussle and churn in ways that at times seem violent and at others erotic, and an apparition of Correggio's strangely leaf-like depiction of the broken Christ in his Deposition (1525) emerges from the reddened underbrush of Coulter's Air Like Honey.
Ultimately, Coulter's work extends the language of the vernacular landscape as she forsakes the vast, low-lying valleys of the panoramic format for the myopic effect of the camera lens. This move inward like the microscope to the specimen or a scalpel to the body strives for the revelation of divinity through a closer inspection. It peers into the timeless moments and ever-moving cycles of nature and grasps for the rooted bits of truth. Beyond all, her drawings are just beautiful to see. And with the beauty, a reward as if we have been given the privilege of falling headlong into the unrelenting secrets contained within the quiet lives of the kingdom; emergent from dirt, writhing in clusters and launching to the heavens.
Bill Conger