Commenting on Heather Wilcoxon’s Seattle Studio Show December 2019 Blood red of the water…
By: Mario Savioni
Tags: Commentary, Water, Heather Wilcoxon, Migrants, Art Show

Commenting on Heather Wilcoxon’s Seattle Studio Show December 2019

http://www.heatherwilcoxon.com/paintings-2014/

Blood red of the water surrounding the sailors, who have never sailed nor know how to swim.

Paint is like water running over a boat, which seems to be shipwrecked. The people have capsized. The boat, a living thing, rendered by human hands, is a still life. Cobbled together for a painting, to create the best composition. It becomes the thing we look at to garner catharsis in a museum, where the privileged shuffle, immune to the disaster that is coming. You are supposed to see yourself in art. Even this Titanic is only a work of beauty to those, who have never sailed, who have never left the dead-end job. Capitalism or man’s inhumanity to man is sucking the air. Everything is only two-dimensional, a photograph, a memory, not what life should be. It is stark raving mad, a dog that has eaten too much and can barely go outside.

Cityscape with empty migrant vessels. New World Order. The crossing for those who would not accept them will remind one of a cemetery. The sky, like the Industrial Age, is sedimentary. Each landscape is as a Whistler rendering.

The Ark under construction, except that the world hasn’t been cleansed. It is a hollow vessel in the planning stages. The shadows of its ribs show no hostages.

Envisioning the journey of the immigrant. The empathic water looking up at the edge of a boat full of migrants and not knowing any one in particular, but like a shark getting a sense of appetizers. The sardine can soon to spill over and reveal the sardines. No one belongs in open water.

This luscious swell, out of focus, heaving, hiding, consuming, indifferent but still ominous, is like the vision of an immigrant, who has lost his glasses in the escape from horror only to be met with frightening uncertainty, stuck counting waves that seek to sheepishly steal him like a coyote.

This floats like an empty holocaust that is the White House, dried to the bone, hollow, and in the midst of a storm.

The simplicity is haunting. It goes to the very essence of things, our childhood conception of reality, a kind of scientific short-handedness, the stroke of a child, which we have never left as the first grace of our being. The stool too is reminiscent of kindergarten. The light, which you no doubt take advantage of in this otherwise darkened room. Oh, what a great plan. What a great rendering of the ocean or the mountain or the vista, which is always the landscape of the human psyche. We seldom really study the background. Isn’t it almost always out of focus or scurrilously considered? And yet, to be aware of it might wake us to our own self-centered views? It could be anywhere. We could be anywhere and our genotype is the same. I want to hold you like the dolls in the attic and get back to that very first dream. Everything is put away. Who we are is in storage. I am brought back to the table and chairs that we danced around as children learning to treat each other like human beings.