1+1=3: The Summerfield sums of the one and the many
In loving memory of Julie Wyn Summerfield (October 1, 1954 - May 7, 2024)
There are bands wound around one another, one of which is made of the rare element and another of the dense, and between these, others are to be found, composed of light and darkness mingled. — Parmenides, On Nature
LOADING THE BRUSH. There seems to be something going on in the surfaces and depths of a Summerfield painting that overturns 2,500 years of Western thought. Really? Well, no, and yet, there is a disruptive power at work in her sensuous facture—stroke, hue, line—that shifts and unsettles the perceived order of things, altering the well-worn break between the sensory and the logical.
What, exactly, this might be, and what might cause it to happen—accident, technique, laws of physics, a trick of the light—remains unclear, and this is what makes gazing upon one so sublimely satisfying.
Since Parmenides, we have torn knowledge into two incommensurable parts: one gained through the senses, therefore never to be trusted; the other gained through reason, thus smacking of the divine, or failing that, the truth.
Summerfield detours around this divide by closing her eyes to it. Nothing is posed. There are no props or models, no bowls of apples or landscapes. There is no background, no space, no location. Everything contained within each is entirely from within her, from her memory, from thoughts processing a few inches from the canvas.
A Summerfield represents, if anything, a boundary in spacetime where being and thought are one and where the two-dimensional reality of painting’s full, great, glorious arc is fully traversed, from the sacred immediacy of the cave wall to the rounded grandeur of Giotto to the requisite “flatness” of abstraction. It is a window and a looking glass through which we look anew at the way we look at the world – both the real world and the world of appearances. Nature, in all its compendia of guises, from the closest things at hand – flesh, lips, eyes, rock, a piece of luscious red fruit, a field of wheat, a forest-trimmed lake at nightfall.
What is seen, really? One thing slips its identity and becomes another. The pomegranate is a man’s back, the stone a cell and a planet, and the meaning and implications of each echo and reflect endlessly.
LIKE MIRRORS FACING EACH OTHER. A Summerfield takes the things found in these competing arenas—the real world and the world of appearance—and makes them its own by confounding their properties and predicates. The process takes time—an unplanned gestation after a long deliberation. The immediately visible forms hide and then reveal other forms. The palette says one thing—monotones, for example—but sparks visions of chromatic lushness, realigning the rods and cones of the particulars into a new form of universal that is formed, literally, in the brush and the gaze—pigment seized by the light and pulled into consciousness through the retinal outcroppings of our brain. This is its alchemy. There are no cheap ideas or painterly tricks. The longer you look at the work, the better it shows itself, the more it disengages from the busy, eye-candy world and slows down, and slows us down, and makes us look, and feel, and be seduced by the visible—this flesh, these lips, just these lips, just this back, just this life in its smallest details, read between the lines, between one and one and three, a special space in life that perhaps has no logic, that is intimate and secret, that makes you think you know where you are going until you arrive, somewhere else, someone else, blessedly alone, alive.
I wrote the text above for an artist catalogue (1+1=3: Julie Wyn Summerfield) in 2014. They are the only words I can find right now, except for these that her husband wrote in 2019:
A man on a train sits alone with his thoughts. And as the train crosses a switch, its interior lights dim for just an instant. In that instant, without reason or warning, he knows that his life has gone all wrong. He does not yet see why or how to make it right again. He has, in a sense, shed an old skin and is about to emerge transformed. It has happened to each of us, for good or ill, this unannounced and irreversible moment when we first laid our eyes on our one true love or when the bank said no more or when a feared illness was given a name. It leaves its print like blood on the brow of every human face, and it looms behind the man right now a dark and rampant form, a rearing angel with wings outspread and jaws wide in anticipation of the imminent feast. It is raining in his eyes but dust is in the voice he hears imploring, "Don't hurt the angel. She is sad today." - John Carnegie, "Graceless", Amsterdam, 2019
Help with Julie’s final journey to Greece by clicking here.
Thank you, Chris, with all my heart.
I'm so sorry for this sad announcement. Thank you for the lovely words about Julie's work for for John's poem, too. Haunting imagery indeed.