Miss Bogdan is a powerful painter: he walks to the studio, opens the big iron gate, climbs up the stairs and enters the space.
Valerie Bogdan: Attaining the Sublime
Bridget Parris
Miss Bogdan is a powerful painter: he walks to the studio, opens the big iron gate, climbs up the stairs and enters the space. The largest painting stands before you leaning against the main wall. She can wield heavy objects, but this 8’ x 10’ work is too massive to lift alone. The painting is covered with paint, paint that is thick and coagulated like an old palette. It looks like the floor, she explains, and I look down. The floor under the stretcher has a build-up of thick, thick paint that has accumulated and dried in much the same fashion. The painting is somehow a part of the room. Like a living picture of the studio itself.
It has been a month or two, I say, since I was here last and these drawings aren’t drawings anymore, they are paintings now. This grouping of 19" x25" paintings on paper are lovely. She wouldn’t want me to call them that, but they are. She tells me that the imagery is bird-like. That the brushstrokes are like birds flying. Looking at the paintings as they are grouped together, it is not so much an overriding reference to bird flight that I see, but rather thunderstorms, I say, clouds forming, storms preparing themselves to unleash. Each one in a different stage. It is impressive to see them all together. To see how beautiful they look now, and to think about all of that power they are forming within.
Miss Bogdan is slight, and soft spoken. Her body language alternates between bashful and brightly engaged. The voice of her paintings in contrast, is big and forceful. Large canvases with commanding brushstrokes; layer upon layer of color and texture. The paintings speak for themselves. At first, when asked to discuss her work, she has a hard time putting her finger on the right words. The words come later, much later to the painter. Now, it is in the paint–all of the energy, the emotion–everything the artist has to say is in the work. To experience the painting requires observation, not discussion.
Yet the words do come. They come later to the artist, and when they do, they are inspired. I say thunderstorms and she says a "coagulated mass" an entanglement, everything, everything, too much. So much there is no more space, no space to breathe–every corner, every patch of open air is filled with paint.
She thinks all day. The next day she tells me: "You are right, what I had been referring to as a coagulated mass could accurately be compared to a thunderstorm, a coming together of clouds…a gathering…to form something massive with power, force and strength but without a solid physical body…just a gathering of forces. Swirling clouds, latent energy…potential energy…dormant energy–-a gathering of potential energy."
We look at the canvas paintings. One after another she takes them out of the painting rack that dwarfs my size by four or more feet in height. They are articulate and commanding. They speak many words all on their own. They tell you about the trees in the forest where she goes hiking. Where she stands in a clearing and breathes in the snow filled air–and hears not a sound but that same breath. Where she thinks about how awe-inspiring the beauty of nature is and then recognizes its power as a tinge of fear escalates the level of beauty, with the added realization that she is miles away from civilization in the snow and that this could potentially be dangerous. Beauty and the sublime. This description of how she felt in the snow-filled forest, is a great example of the sublime as it differentiates itself from beauty according to the philosophers Bogdan has studied–Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke. This added element of fear, or danger, elevates the sublime above the level of the merely beautiful. For Burke, beauty is finite, whereas the sublime is infinite. Consider the thrilling expansiveness in the majestic landscape paintings of Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Cole or J.M.W. Turner. Huge mountain peaks and giant clouds, dotted with tiny figures walking along the mountain passes, or tossed among the waves of a rolling sea–the miniature human form in comparison to the immensity of nature and its beauty. It is this idea of the sublime that Bogdan is after in her work, and she has captured it.
She will tell you that although abstract, her work is highly influenced by observation. Walking through clouds. She tells me the story about one of her hiking trips where she found herself walking through clouds. Her own experience as awe-inspiring as those depicted in Early American 19th Century painting. She is working on this painting now, in her studio. This is her second white painting in this recent body of work. The first is entitled: i can no longer tell the birds from the airplanes nor the airplanes from the stars and i have mistaken the reflection of a streetlight for the moon (78" x 96"). I love this painting. So does everyone else who has seen it lately. It was painted to give one the feeling of looking up at the clouds, an experience that makes one feel very small, and disoriented by scale. It has an optic effect, for when I look at this painting I see the opposite: I feel as though I am flying up in the air looking down. The white texture that reads as cloud obscures my vision of the ground beneath me–it is this that gives the sense of space and grand scale. The layers of paint and the range of value in the many greys and hints of soft yellows gives the feeling that one has risen above a very great expanse.
They are beautiful paintings I tell her, you should be proud of this body of work. She has made great progress from her last collection, which was quite accomplished in its own right. In these recent paintings, she has reached a new level–there is a depth and an air to them that the others weren’t seeking. The grid she once painted over and over again has opened up to show us the space that stretches out beyond it–has thrashed and bent into a line work that is itself as energetic as one could ask for. In the piece entitled: i saw myself reflected as a horizontal blur on the side of a passing subway car (60" x 78") you can feel her brush moving across the canvas, around down and then out–as you follow the path of that line with your eyes. The once regular half-inch flat has been joined by quarter-inch flats and rounds, one-inch brushes, and the handle end. Her new work has a freshness and energy of movement that is unexpected–yet somehow a natural evolution. She has grown in her handling of paint as she has grown in her relationship to the force that moves her to create. Her narratives are guided by the long descriptive titles she chooses, and come alive with the oil and the brush.
We talk about painters who have inspired her. Painters who have pioneered the abstract and the expressive: Philip Guston, Mark Rothko and Milton Resnick. It is Guston she loves the most–it is evident in her work. A man who is to be admired not only for his groundbreaking abstract work, but also for his courage to break away from this style for which he had gained acclaim, and in his late work, create something completely new. To make paintings that the art world might reject, that the art world DID reject, for this Guston is the ideal of strength and courage to which Bogdan aspires. She has taken a leap of faith with her own recent body of work–to let go of known territory, and explore new roads. To present something new. It has taken equal amounts of courage and strength, which has paid off.
Bogdan’s work is abstract for many of the same reasons that her predecessors chose to work in this fashion. The work is abstract because she wants it to be about emotion: Pure, raw emotion. Emotion that cannot be tied to any one narrative or life event. Emotion that is all encompassing, that fills up the canvas with layer upon layer of paint, that has been scraped down and built up again. Freedom. The ultimate freedom for the artist is to paint what comes freely from another source–"That is the only possession an artist has: to do whatever he/she can imagine." Freedom to not judge, to not be judged, that is admirable painting.
Because of her work, Bogdan lives in New York City, although she is not naturally suited to the environment. She gets claustrophobic in great big crowds, with all of the noise and the traffic. Yet she adapts. For herself, she has learned how to quiet the noise by painting about it. The line work in her paintings, encompasses all of the tumbling swirling energy of the city and strives to tame its many voices to silence. She begins by reveling in the sounds. By filling the canvas with so much noise, so many lines and colors, so many layers and textures that eventually reach a crescendo and fall to silence. The hope that all of those layers of paint could somehow cancel one another out–until this very loud screaming painting has been quieted. This is her goal.
In Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, there is a great description of a river who’s sound is made from the combination of many different voices "that are interwoven and interlocked, entwined in a thousand ways, until they become one." It is this ideal that Bogdan strives for in the act of painting–to stream all of the noise around her into one quieted voice. In the best of her work she achieves this peace. A peacefulness that is quiet–quiet, yet moving. Lines that run and pulse, energy that pulsates out of the painting, but that has a hushed tone to its movement. Movement with no sound. She makes reference to a specific piece of music to illustrate her point: Koyaanisqatsi by Philip Glass. She describes it as a cacophony of sounds that grates on the nerves. Repeats and rejoins until the listener finally loses his/her place. Until the sounds begin to merge together and become meditative. Bogdan likens her goal in painting to this score and its ability to achieve a silence out of the madness.
Bogdan is a young, accomplished painter who does not work in a fashionable style or media. Rather, she is a painter who works in a style that allows her to convey and attend to what interests her: energy, emotion, freedom, in layers of varying texture, color and fluid line. It is important to her to make work that is authentic, work that resonates.
