Dona Nelson, El Toreador, 2023, acrylic paint and acrylic mediums on canvas, 106 x 88 inches.
By EDWARD WAISNIS May 21, 2024
Dona Nelson has come a long way. I do not mean to, by using this pedestrian implication of advancement, reduce by way of triteness, but rather to acknowledge the painter’s temporal commitment to her practice. After filing through a number of movement styles, and finally losing faith in painting to the point of stopping entirely, Nelson has emerged as amongst the strongest of contemporary practitioners currently predominant with female proponents including Pat Steir, Mary Heilmann and perhaps most pertinent Joan Snyder.
Dona Nelson, First Painting, 2021, acrylic paint and acrylic mediums on canvas, 106 x 88 inches.
Nelson’s surfaces are covered with an approach to paint application that can be summed up as a cross between the hands of Pollock and Frankenthaler. Elaborating on the pour and stain work by Olitski, Barnard and Poons, but adding swank. Foundationally, or maybe it is more appropriate to say historically, Nelson emerges from the work of Joan Mitchell and Grace Hartigan. But, unlike their approaches, Nelson allows her medium to ebb and flow, often relying on the use of a garden hose to propel her sluices. Strange to say, but the results somehow connect with Max Ernst’s frottage technique, with a passing nod to the symbolist bricolage of Gustav Moureau.
By using acrylic gels and other mediums, including a bitumen-based substance, and the application of cheese cloth in skeins, Nelson achieves evocations of sea as well as forest. There are also alchemical biomorphic manifestations produced in in the vein of the syrupy miasma of a lava lamp. And, if that is not already enough, their are strong evocation of the ether of the cosmos as well as the inner sanctum hermeticism of stained-glass windows. Ranging from autumnal rusts to marine sapphires and astral viridescence, the streams of color over which Nelson builds her imagery, for lack of a better term, recalls everything from the internal workings of the human body, to earthbound flora and fauna, to galactic cosmologies, with that measure of the jewel-like luminosity found in the aforementioned stained-glass windows.
Dona Nelson, Fisherwoman, 2022, acrylic paint, acrylic mediums, cheesecloth and muslin on canvas, 80 x 80 inches.
The two-sided paintings, she has produced since 2003 and which make up the bulk of the exhibition, while in the mode of dividing screens and suggesting sculptural space, in fact rely on the reflective states of interior and exterior (Nelson has commented on the inability of viewing both sides simultaneously) rather than front and back, something the artist strongly eschews. Each of the four large works on display here offer a different experience.
Dona Nelson, Day and Night, 2023, acrylic paint and acrylic mediums on canvas with steel stand, 106 x 88 inches.
Perhaps the most pertinent precursor are the works that Sigmar Polke made in the 90s. However, despite the similarities of format, Nelson’s works have nothing of, nor nothing to do with Polke’s weirdly nostalgic antiquity. From the stained glass-like experience to be found in El Toreador, 2023 (It’s installation, close to the wall, adds to this effect) one can get lost in the verisimilitude of the amoebic pools of color. The strident Day and Night, 2023, fulfills the flora and fauna themes in a brazen flash of action painting. Rounding out the quartet are Fisherwoman, 2022 depicting the eponymous woman, in a cheesecloth rendering, that recalls Segal’s plaster impregnated gauze figures, sitting, her back to us, gazing at the landscape beyond. While, on the other side, there is the quietude one associates with a lonely field delineated by striated bands, in blues and ochres with yellow flourishes, appearing to represent the sky and earth our woman is gazing at. And the Sun Came Up, 2019, revels in it’s solid scrawl of automatism.
Dona Nelson, Founders Day, 2019, acrylic paint, acrylic mediums and painted string on canvas, 80 x 45 inches.
Scale is Nelson’s forte. Monumentality is assailed with a confidence that informs a deep-seated need for space into which to dive; Nelson fords the depths of a large canvas brilliantly. For me, it is one of only two wall-bound canvases here that I would consider the piece de résistance, First Painting, 2021. From across the room it reads as almost an aerial view of land below–recalling early paintings by Terry Winters–but, on closer inspection, it is a revelation, encompassing all of Nelson’s process and learning. The title alone forebodes a sort of emergence from primordial ooze. The idiosyncrasy found in her topography can be attributed to her early study with Malcolm Morley. It is truly a thing of beauty.
The exhibition is filled-out by four smaller-scaled two-sided works. Aquetong, Founders Day, Shortie Four and Shortie Six, all 2019 work in splendid harmony across the gallery augmented by the curatorial decisions that make the show sing. Their role as a sort of punctuation does not diminish their strength, reinforced by Nelson’s addition of painted string into her litany of materials.
Nelson’s sources extend to the absorption of impressions from meaningful objects and sites. From ancient Asian artifacts that were repurposed to festoon a fountain in Philadelphia, to the monumental architectural marvel of the Mercer Museum in Doylestown (an engineering and visual marvel, built on levels using concrete this masterpiece informs Nelson’s architectural skeins). These influences mark both the process and the pictorial imaginings, reflective in the cheesecloth ‘veins’ in particular, of these persuasive works. Luckily, for the state of painting itself, Nelson has, besides bestowing a large body of work on the world, contributed immensely to the health and well-being of the craft by way of her legacy as an important professor.
The exhibition was on view April 5 through May 17, 2024. WM
