Elaine Marinoff: An Inner Journey
By Tova Beck-Friedman
Elaine Marinoff draws upon the sensual language of the body to express all that is emotionally, psychologically and physically human. A figurative artist through and through, even in Marinoff paintings of nature, human forms emerge.
The nude has been a ubiquitous subject in art for centuries. Kenneth Clark, in his study, "The Nude: A Study In Ideal Art" (1956) observed, "The Greeks perfected the nude in order that man might feel like a god." Portraying dancers unbound by gravity and couples in erotic embrace, Marinoff’s "Synergistic Series" and "Erotic Series" celebrate the divine within human form.
Marinoff painted this body of work, in 80s Southern California–an era infused with energy of the women’s movement. The Womanhouse, a cooperative project at CalArts, and Judy Chicago’s publication of "Through the Flowers" reverberated throughout the artistic community. Though not directly involved with this projects, Marinoff absorbed their vigor. As Marinoff remarks: "These luscious, passionate works reflect a period in my life when I felt I was soaring to my greatest heights."
Marinoff is not only a painter of figures; she is also a painter of light. Layers upon layers of oil paint and varnish create luminous effects; light radiates from the figures as the bodies emerge from dark backgrounds.
Marinoff painted reclining women, erotically intertwined couples, and dancers leaping with freedom and exuberance. She strips her figures of individuality by zooming in on the body or obscuring the facial details; these are archetypal forms of mythological grace and power. They do not represent specific women but rather of the primal act in which figures are engaged.
With her move to New York, Marinoff was no longer surrounded by strong light and shimmering ocean waves; this transplantation shaped a major change in Marinoff’s perception of the world. Paradoxically, this move away from nature brought about an environmental awareness. The 1990 Prince William Sound Spill was pivotal in inspiring her ecological consciousness, prompting her to depict the environmental on her canvas. A series of dark toned-down paintings produce a somber mood; every now and then, light makes a brief appearance beneath or behind a dark brown earth–sometimes as a lit edge, a glimpse of horizon or a river that cuts across the canvas. As with her Synergistic and Erotic series, Marinoff’s working method remains the same, she builds layer upon layer. In her earlier works, Marinoff’s layers of oil paint and varnish produced luminous results; in the environmental series Marinoff builds up the layers with a palette knife and impasto earth colored paint, rendering the image dark and opaque.
Seeking respite from the somber and laborious paintings, Marinoff developed a series of drawings of oil pastels on paper in which she used rock face as a metaphor for fragility. These drawings do not narrate a theme; they hover between the premeditated and the subconscious. Robert C. Morgan remarks in a catalogue essay: "Marinoff reveals the transformational substance that pulls her perceptions of nature into the interior: her inner nature." Though the drawings began as nonobjective compositions, figures emerge and reemerge —in single forms and in groups; some represent humans and others, animal figures
As artists we are "working with the eye, we search in the mysterious center of thought," observed Gauguin. Marinoff searched in the center of thought by abstracting from nature and refracting it through her personal experience. Following a trip to Egypt, Marinoff, embarked on a series of paintings in an attempt to mirror the inner soul of the pyramids. On a series of small canvases, she constructs triangular compositions with a single or few pyramids at the center of each. Each structure seems inaccessible; the viewer’s eyes are pulled to its summit, to the culminating point of ascent.
This most recent body of work has the formal elements of minimalism as well as abstract expressionism. They evoke meditative powers, not unlike Mark Rothko’s dark paintings. Unlike Rothko’s, however, Marinoff’s surfaces emit light. Again, her layering technique is evident. Encrusted pigment, gel and marble dust create a light colored, opaque surface accompanied by beautifully sensitive edges, where yellow-orange light peers from behind.
While this group of paintings started as a response to a personal trauma via a distant allegory, it took on an added dimension after the events of 9/11. As the series progressed, faint shadows started to appear at the bottom of the canvas, looking like abstracted figures, harking back, once again, to human representation.
