Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars – Horace Brockington

Mary O’Neal, Running with Black Panthers and White Doves, 1980/1990. Mixed Medium on Canvas.

As museum and historian take a revisionist approach to the modernist canon, one area that has provided an interesting point of reinvestigation lies in the area of American Abstract Expressionism and abstract painting in general. Ann Gibson writing in her groundbreaking work Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics observes that many of the problems that have limited the definition of American abstraction are based on issues of gender, race and sexuality. Over the last two decades both feminist historians and art historians have begun to question the heroics of Abstract Expressionism especially as it defines both the art and culture around strictly white, hetero male markers.

As Gibson notes: contradictory aspects of Abstract Expressionism strictly denied inclusion. Coupled with its conflicted politics of race and gender, Abstract Expressionism becomes a highly negotiated and contested terrain. It is therefore not surprising that many women and minority artists moved through Abstract Expressionism but were less converted by its strong tenets. Often they found the need to redefine its theme and critique for far more personalized interests and platforms. While the myth of the Abstract Expressionism remains intact, scholars are slowly coming to terms with the fact that while they offer radically new approaches to abstraction in the process they nearly invalidate all those who were not amongst America most powerful; male, white and heterosexual.

Abstract Expressionism claimed for itself the mantle of marginalization, mustering social strategies and aesthetic preoccupations that might otherwise have been used against blacks, women and other disenfranchised groups. The success of these strategies and themes was affirming values that supported an aesthetic elite and the potential of those same strategies and themes to empower work that offered others a relationships with power. This is perhaps ironic because the very nature of abstraction at the beginning of the 20^th century promised inclusiveness, a style that would be universal; immediately capable of assimilating conventions from other cultures which would give birth to both European and American modernism.

Gibson continues, Abstract Expressionist style, whose definition was ultimately related to the identity of the artist’s personal identity and linked mainly to power, can also be measured to the standards established by certain interests particular to those present in New York in the 40s. Abstract Expressionism delicately negotiated a position of simultaneous opposition and affirmation. The mythology of the New was formed from the belief that significant art was by definition apolitical, unappealing to the general public and separate from politics.

In the late 40s in a cultural atmosphere informed by anti-Communist hysteria that made many artists’ former socialist associations suspect. It was safer to believe that the proper function of art was this invention of code to transport the universal then local meaning into visual forms. Abstract Expressionism undertook a path that made political practices useful for Cold War propaganda.

The artists themselves and their supporters such as Seitz, Alloway, Sandler and Rosenberg amplified the early definition of Abstract Expressionism as abstract presena.

The problem becomes how to define the movement in general and its strong assumption of universality, especially as it is an art that most thoroughly excluded blacks and women. As Lowery Stokes Sims has suggested, it is a movement that while claiming to embrace non-western tenets in their art and practices denied the marginalized the possibilities to represent the primitive and be the primitive.

Recently, more inclusive interpretations of Abstract Expressionism have allowed us to consider the works of such women artists as Mary Abbott, Sonia Gechtoff, Grace Hartigan, Louise Nevelson, Louise Bourgeois, Joan Mitchell and Alma Thomas as important contributors to the idioms than the male-centric view proposed by historians and critics over the decades.

Women working in the abstract idiom have faced an uphill battle for inclusion and recognition. These boundaries are even greater for women of color, especially for Afro-American women and even enlighten critics and historians failed to acknowledged the contribution that many of these women working in isolation have provided as artists, teachers and mentors to the recent generation of artists. While Afro American women artists such as Howardena Pindell and Alma Thomas has gained considerable recognition for their work, until very recently they still failed to be included amongst the core group of female artist s since the l960s that have pushed the abstract idiom in independent new ways.

Pindell, must be seen in connection with a generation of artists that include Vivian Browne, Emma Ammos, Barbara Chase-Riboud and Suzanne Jackson who have since the 70s offer an alternate an important direction in approaching abstraction. Thus as the canon makers create their list of important artist, not to discount the contributions of great painters such as Joan Snyder, Janis Provisor, Pat Steir, Louise Fishman and Joan Mitchell, these Black Women artists are important contributors as well. They provide the direction for a younger generation of painters such as Cicely Brown, Sue Williams, Laurie Owens and Julie Mehrtu to explore the limitless possibilities of abstraction female abstractionist.

Regrettably others have dropped off the galleries and of museums radar have worked extensively and competently in the abstract idiom creating important contributions are worthy of re-consideration especially in light of a re-emerged interest in abstraction.

Similar to her contemporaries, Snyder, Steir and Fishman, Mary Lovelace O’Neal painting described as monumental gestural abstraction whose large scale is accentuate by a sophisticate system of mark making. She is also united to this group of female painter in their unparalleled individualism. Each has reinvented and expanded the concept of abstract painting against the marked terrain as exclusively male. Each of these artists forced a rethinking of many of he assumptions of the history of Abstract Expressionism and progress of the abstract idiom. Not limited by the apolitical positioning of their white male counterpart, each embrace experiences in order to create art that responded to political and cultural events.

For Mary O’Neal, Abstract Expressionism was not a terminus, but rather an opening up of new territory. Pollack never intrigued her because she knew intuitively that Pollack had never completely close the field of painting. As such, she wanted her work to operate with much of the vocabulary of modernism, but they equally want of transcend it.

O’Neal’s paintings are a mixture of fast and slow, thick and thin, virtuosity of handling and a deliberate clumsiness, building up surfaces such that the final results operates between recognition and pure gesture. But despite their apparent gestural improvisation O’Neal’s canvases are never a place for unmediated expression. They are consciously constructed. Although she relies to a large degree on a certain intuitive responses to what happen on the surfaces, O’Neal understand her process well enough to convey to the viewer the way certain combinations of the painterly, gestural, line or partial imagery can suggest specific conventions.

Based in California Mary Lovelace O’Neal is perhaps has been singularly overlooked by both East Coast galleries and museum system, despite the fact she has over the last four decades established quite a reputation amongst her peers and have exhibited extensively on the West coast and internationally. She must be seen as part of a vast group of artists working in California before the l980s who received little attention in national and international art circles. She is currently Chair of the Department of Art Practices at University of California, Berkley. Kellie Jones, Yale professor and the curator of the recent exhibition, "Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists, 1964-1980" at the Studio Museum, in currently researching a book on Mary Lovelace O’Neal to be soon published.

Mary "O"Neal’s paintings reveal an intense involvement with the physicality of process, with imagery and memories. Her work has been described as flash floods of colors, which merge and remerge across her rather dense saturated canvases. Her surfaces are large accumulations of material —creamy paints, glitter, pastels, velvety lampblack.

But O’Neal is also a consummate storyteller, as she notes: "A story get me to the canvas and allows me not to be afraid of it blank expanse .The story may be intangible as a smell remembered, a series of dreamed color changes, the geometry of a bridge or the patterns formed by leaves on a tree. I try to extract the drama from the story or memory and the dram from the paint and put it there."

O’Neal’s paintings are distinguished by the virtuosity of her brushwork, her brilliant use of color across vast canvases that convey a sense of movement or action. This energetic brushwork, physical process and gestural painting have easily aligned her to the New York School of painting of the l940s and 1950s. Her earlier sources included the Abstractionist Barnett Newman, Rothko, Motherwell and Franz Kline. One of her earliest work is a small post card size watercolor entitled: In Search of Franz Kline". In Kline’s art O’Neal understood the connection Kline made with an interest in an Asian aesthetic .The connection between his painting and calligraphy are readily apparent. However, it perhaps Kline’s build up of surfaces, slowly, deliberately overlapped layers of paint that intrigued O’Neal. The white background in Kline’s paintings acts as a positive presence, not as the space in which the black character existed. In Kline’s painting the tension between the mark as mark and mark as reference to something else dominates his work. It is precisely this type of narrative that O’Neal commands in her work while pushing it towards a conceptual edge. Similar to Kline, O’Neal’s paintings need to be seen and read in order to de-tangle the intricate relationship operating between the reference and the referent.

One can also cite the work of Sam Gilliam whom O’Neal would have been familiar with as student at Howard University in Washington. Her more mature work is closer to Julian Schnabel, circa l980 paintings or the paintings of Anselm Kiefer. In terms of her own black contemporaries her work is closest in application and approach to the painter Stanley Whitney, another black abstractionist of considerable importance.

Born in l942 in Mississippi, her father Airel M "Pops" Lovelace chaired the Music Department at historical Tougaloo College, Mississippi and the campus the Mary grew up on. From an early age, O’Neal was mentored in art by German born Tougaloo artist and German teacher Ronald Schnell, whose own color palette reference more precisely the German Expressionist painters particularly those who belong to Die Bruck. Her family position in the community often insulated O’Neal from the harsh realities of segregation experienced by most African American children living in the south at the time. O’Neal has stated that as a child European Modernism but equally the work of African American artists such as Jacob Lawrence and Augusta Savage fascinated her. For O’Neal Lawrence’s art was magical and mystical. But O’Neal notes that while she was aware of the abstract paintings of Norman Lewis and Sam Gilliam she was not exactly moved by them.

Attending college O’Neal spent a year at Tougaloo, but then enrolled at Howard University where she would earn a degree in Fine Arts in l964. But as early as l963, O’Neal was exploring a new language of Expressionism. At Howard she studied with noted artists as Lois Mailou Jones and David Driskell. Driskell opened O’Neal eyes to the work of the Washington color school colorists including Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, Sam Gilliam and the Abstract Expressionist, Pollack, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and more importantly for O’Neal, Franz Kline. O’Neal also attended Skowhegan in l963, which expand her awareness to artists from around the world.

It was not the idea of abstraction that challenged her, but rather Kline’s approach to black and white, the power and the monumentality of his paintings which she has described as "mysterious and impressive–Pollack didn’t affect me at all."

Her early works reveal a clear affinity for Kline’s broad energetic strokes of paint laid across his canvas in bold non-objective compositions.

Social circumstances have always integrated with her art. O’Neal was at Howard during the crucial years of the Civil Rights Movement. Howard University was a center of student activism, groups such as SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) established in l960 offered students such as O’Neal a sense of community within the broader Civil Rights struggle.

After Howard, O’Neal moved on to New York, an entered graduate school at Columbia University where she soon discovers she was the only African American in her class. She studied under the abstract painter Stephen Green. Again O’Neal found herself in the midst of the storm, for this period mark the turbulent time of Harlem riots and the Black Power/ Arts Movement.

Stephen Green pushed O’Neal to devote her attention to painters such as Kenneth Noland, Barnett Newman and Joseph Stella. O’Neal, however, find her own world in the Black Arts Movement with poet/playwright Amiri Baraka and painter Joe Overstreet, who often attacked O’Neal’s painting as "not Black enough". In the period’s call for a "Black aesthetic" the group called for a visual equivalent of the literary and theatrical activities that would speak to political, cultural and spiritual needs of the black community.

At Columbia, O’Neal created large raw, un-structured canvases rubbed and brushed with broad areas of lampblack resulting in velvety background powered pigment interrupted by thin "zips" or line of color, initially suggests the influence of minimalist abstraction. However the tactile physicality of the artist’s hand and gesture of her entire body is evident in the application of materials to canvas is more akin to the energetic, gestural process of Abstract Expressionism. Both in material means and attitude about art, O’Neal was in many respects responding to her peers: "Isn’t this black enough…How much blacker can it get than this!" But it was also O’Neal’s way of responding to intensely machismo driven context of the Black Power Movement.

During the period O’Neal weaves together biographical elements and narratives images from her travels, themes from the civil rights movement and memories of her childhood in Mississippi. O’Neal training at Columbia opened her up to absorb the lessons of modernist. This combined experience of Howard and Columbia made O’Neal unique amongst her peers and provides few points of convergence with her a number of her contemporaries.

After Columbia, She returned to color as if the earlier "Black Paintings" had been "unzipped to reveal the color underneath. These paintings, the dusty black of the canvases is thick that the canvas cannot hold all of the unfixed black powered pigment. O’Neal has noted that those works were her personal way the works became her abstraction of the struggle as an African American woman.

O’Neal traveled to California and a short stay in Mexico. Upon her return to the United States, the atmosphere and the intense surveillance and repression of the Movement activities by the U.S. Justice Department and FBI’s informants for COINTELPRO operated and caused division amongst Black Nationalist factions creating an atmosphere of suspicion. As a result O’Neal distance herself taking a teaching job at San Francisco Art Institute and setting up a studio in Oakland.

In l979 O’Neal is hired as an assistant professor at Berkley and became a full professor in l992, where she is now Chair of the Art Department.

In the early l970s O’Neal created a large body of works, muddy paintings in which surfaces composed of solid paint made bold statements. The paint is densely applied yet appears liquid in appearance. After this point a intensely painted surface would become a identifiable feature of O’Neal’s art in which distributed blocks of paint would fill the entire surface of a canvas revealing occasional lines of well planted flickers of paint; vibrant reds, yellows or whites.

These devices visually draw the viewer closer to what has been described as " a loaded with texture or variant design". Moving in this direction it would become the means O’Neal would pull away from Kline.

Throughout he 70s O’Neal continued to work with unfixed lampblack and powered charcoal, producing velvety rich black surfaces through which the texture of the raw canvas remains evident. By this period O’Neal is using black soot like surface. The surfaces in this painting are unorthodox.

Thin lines of masking tapes add to the materiality of the surface of these large canvases revealing undulating line of raw canvas visual linear rhythm is established by brilliant strips of color in pastel or acrylic or glitter add yet another yet another layer in the play between surface effects and depth. They always reveal more black underneath. The abstraction of this work and the materiality of the varied and accumulated substance rubbed into and applied onto the canvases and improvisational nature of this process, are based on a carefully organized architectural structure.

As a curator who has showed these paintings in the early 80’s I can attest that when exhibited some of the pigment still floats or fall off the canvas to the floor or saturated the exhibition space walls.

The l970s’ Plenum Series set the stage for a more decisive and deliberate form of representation in her paintings in which the artist turned to whales as subject in a socially inclined environment. She represented whales, abstract in nature, copulating socially often perceived within an observed human environment although they mostly remained in the vast blackness of the sea. The Plenum Series uses paper as the support. O"Neal spread her trademark combination of lampblack and charcoal over the surfaces, leaving the dense, velvety pigment unfixed. The imagery is pared down, traverse by a "zip" or two or having a shape that echoes Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko O’Neal is at this stage responding tot he aesthetic of minimalism and post minimalism.

The Whale Series has been considered by critics as being of O’Neal most significant body of work. Although begun in the 1980, to series continued into the mid-l980s. The Series consisted of a number of large canvases in which a luminous black background serves as the basis from which the artist projected movement through expressionistic brush stroke and active painterly surfaces with vibrant colors. Images of these large size animals engaged in scenes surrounded by vigorous color are both enchanting and disturbing. They are lusciously rendered compositions. They speak directly to the ambiguous fairytale worlds that O’Neal often creates. As the animals explode onto the canvas, they are rendered in viscous layers of paint applied in a frenzy of thick color. These animals dominate the picture plane in brushwork in which figures melted into ground in explosions of fluid pigment.

The Whale Series evoke the grandeur and massive power of whales suggested by sensuous forms that appear to move and join within and occasionally breaching the surface if the expanse of boundless black. Viewing whales often the California coastline inspired the series. Whales continued to appear in the work throughout the l980, they are lushly painted with sensuous saturated colors.

On the subject of whales O’Neal has stated: " Whales are associated with freedom and a tremendous intelligence we don’t understand"

The works are partially inspired by DH Lawrence ‘s Whales Weep Not! , its rhythms and sonorous images correspond to O’Neal’s churning, colorful brushstrokes. O’Neal’s whales are often outlined, in some instances more clearly portrayed than others. In one related paintings, the whale’s contours are overwhelmed by an red which in turn vies with black, as the paint whipped like waves in the ocean and bloodied, splatters the tumultuous surface that is soothed by an occasional glimmer of green and the midst of sparing sprays of white. O’Neal has in this work left behind the reticence of her previous paintings behind her.

"And over the bridge of the whale’s strong phallus, linking the wonder of whales the burning archangels under the sea keep passing, back and forth,keep passing, archangels of bliss from him to her, from her to him, great Cherubim that wait on whales in mid-ocean, suspended in the waves of the sea great heaven of whales in the water, old hierarchies.

From DH Lawrence — Whales Weep Not!