Carolyn Marks Blackwood: Water Water Everywhere
©Carolyn Marks Blackwood. Wave Length II, 40x50 inches
Images by Carolyn Marks Blackwood
Text by Carter Ratcliff
Carolyn Marks Blackwood’s subject is water: flowing, frozen, and ascending in the vaporous accumulations we know as clouds. Her images of water imply the other elements----- earth, air, and fire--- but this is not immediately obvious. On first encounter, we are struck by the beauty of her work. Wave Length II, is a play of gorgeous color. Undulating in horizontal bands, black, reddish oranges, and blues verge on coalescing into a regular pattern. Because they never do it is tempting to imagine that these forms have a pattern in mind but are persuaded by their fluidity to try other possibilities. These feel boundless and of course boundlessness is a quality of water. Objects have fixed shapes, but the shape of water is inexhaustibly mutable. An image of ripples on the surface of the Hudson River, Wave Length II celebrates this mutability.
©Carolyn Marks Blackwood. Bering Sea I, 35x50 inches
Blackwood photographs the Hudson from a bluff on the river’s east side. Each time of day generates its own palette. Wave Length II is filled with the splendors of sunset, as are several of the Glint pieces. The Bering Sea I, softens the glare of midday into lush, scintillating ribbons of bright blue and silvery gray. With Glint I, the artist gives us an image of darkness pierced by streaks of reflected moonlight.
©Carolyn Marks Blackwood. Glint I, 40x50 inches
©Carolyn Marks Blackwood. Ice Cubism I, 18x17 inches.
When seasons change, ripples turn to shards; colors shift to icy whites and grays and blues. It is winter and water has become solid, at least on the surface of the river. Yet the fragments in Blackwood’s photographs of ice do not quite count as objects. In their profusion, they are more like the glittering stuff of currents that refuse to stop flowing despite the frigid weather. Eddies of energy surge through all these images, sometimes turning back on themselves and sometimes reaching from edge to edge. With its towering, billowing cloud, Long Term Forecast I, takes us into the sky above the river---- and beyond the cycle of seasons. In this image it could be any time of the year.
©Carolyn Marks Blackwood. Long Term Forecast I, 30x40 inches
Many of the winter photographs are entitled Ice Cubism, fittingly so, for their shards resemble the fractured planes of the Cubism invented by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in the early years of the 20th century. In their paintings from that time, form can be seen as abstract or obliquely representational. Blackwood’s photographs of ice are of course minutely accurate and yet, like the water images, they invite us to see them as abstractions: display of pure form. These forms are endlessly engaging on their own complex terms, apart from subject matter, yet precise renderings have their own allure. The preternaturally sharp focus of the artist’s lens helps us focus on details of ice and water that we ordinarily miss.
Yet nothing, no matter how precisely rendered, simply is what it is. The colors in Blackwood’s pictures of ripples imply the sun--- that is to say, fire. And these images also imply earth, for liquid water takes its transient shapes from the land through which it flows and, at the scale of the oceans, surrounds. Her cloud, majestic and seemingly solid is of course a mixture of air and vaporized water. Air, earth, fire and water……. Fully seen, Blackwood’s art encompasses the natural world. In a word, the cosmos.
The exhibition Water Water Everywhere opens Friday, December 2 at the Von Lintel Gallery in Los Angeles.
©Carolyn Marks Blackwood. Ice Cubism III, 25x30 inches
