Mark Strickland
THE AUTHENTICITY OF TOUCH
(Unpublished)

That Mark Strickland's work as a painter is about the human body is self-evident. What's more important is to notice that in the same breath it's about the human mind, and more broadly about the human condition. At its deepest level, it's about the suffering that we humans bring into our individual lives, and into the world we share with others.

Let's start with the body, though. It has been the subject for artists since long before the memory of our own civilization. But it is more than that. It is what we walk around in, what we are recognized by, and what we in turn recognize others by. Through its gift of sense perception, it provides us with us most of the information we will ever receive about the world around us. It is the fulcrum of the most acute and personal of our feelings, ranging all the way from the highest ecstasy to the deepest shame. We spend our lives nurturing, clothing and protecting it, and we ignore its messages at our cost. We mistake it all too often-and all too irresistibly-for who we really are.

Naked, the body reduces us to our most human and most vulnerable. To gaze upon the naked body with a compassionate but unwavering eye is to explore what all have in common, and Strickland invites us constantly to return to that ground zero of the human experience: a woman raises the last remnant of her clothing, a white blouse, over her head, so that it covers her eyes and leaves her momentarily blinded, while the length of her sensual torso remains unprotected from the viewer's voyeuristic gaze. A man turns away, his body pinched and torqued, his genitals exposed, his face buried deeply in the crook of his arm-in shame? In sorrow? In images like these, Strickland offers us the image of our most intimate and vulnerable selves, allowing us space to project our own body-consciousness-with all its accompanying joys and fears-into the figures that he draws and paints. He asks us to consider how it feels to be inside this human body, or that one, how it feels to be vulnerable to the world out-there, how it feels to be examined by the eyes of fellow beings.

This is the starting point. But the body, in his work, becomes also a means to sensitize us, to offer us a gateway into everything that transcends body. The mind coordinates the information delivered by the senses. It sifts and sorts, prioritizes, and puts out instructions as to how the body should react. It rationalizes, thinks things out for us, draws conclusions, makes decisions. Some part of it, we know-thanks to the great pioneers of 20th century psychology-is conscious, aware of what it's doing as it's doing it; whilst a far greater part is unconscious, a great ocean of knowing, feeling, understanding, craving and avoidance, spiritual longing. Artists worth their salt are those who mine this mother lode, seeking all the while to expand the reach of consciousness and, with it, our understanding of ourselves and our compassion for each other.

Throughout his career as an artist, Strickland has employed a number of different strategies to bring about that goal: paradoxically, perhaps, he has cultivated spontaneity of line and gesture by assiduously honing his "chops"-a musical term for technical fluency to which he often returns in speaking of his process; he explores the alternative world of dream, and cultivates this special gift of the unconscious mind through "lucid dreaming"-of which, more later; and he works. That is, he leaves the physical work of painting evident in his surfaces, inviting us consciously to follow the path of his intuitive discoveries. He also, importantly, "works" on himself and others, in the sense that each painting takes him deeper into the psychological and emotional depths of both the artist and his subjects. And, most recently, the kind of work I'm speaking of has taken on the physical aspect of performance, especially of dance.

The first of these strategies, the cultivation of spontaneity, is most clearly evident in his sketches. The Chinese art of calligraphy, long an inspiration for him, presupposes years of careful training and discipline before the mark is made, and Strickland's earlier years of dedicated exercise in draftsmanship have their pay-off in many of the nude studies which he practices to this day, both in the teaching studio and his own. Though he describes himself as largely self-taught, he apprenticed himself in this task to masters, living and dead-Rembrandt, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, and most recently the late Joyce Treiman-to learn the discipline of craft without which spontaneity would be mere artlessness. His sketches are strong, yet at the same time tentative encounters with their models, quick insights which transcend formal concerns and probe straight to the life-force that activates the soul.

This eloquent fluidity of line and penetration finds expression in one of the two very different-though of course related-modes of painting that Strickland has evolved over the past twenty years. He comes back to the words "thin" and "thick" to describe that difference, and they do well enough to make the distinction between those paintings whose surfaces are characterized by fast, light, energetic brushwork, and those which are dense, layered, collaged, often heavily impasto'ed, and whose energy seems more inherent in the accumulation of mass than in movement.

The former-the "thin" paintings-share the spontaneous quality of his sketches, but allow the activity within the medium to take them deeper in their emotional exploration. Consider, for example, the studies of "Jean-Pierre" and "Sophie", completed in the course of a cold, bleak sabbatical on the remote Ile de Ré off the Bordeaux coast. By Strickland's own account deeply connected with a period of emotional depression, he found the mirror image of that suffering in the faces of these two reclusive persons. In the case of Jean-Pierre, the tonality of deep mauves and purples itself evokes the inner pain and sadness of the man, and the almost hypnotic rhythm of the brush strokes works to engage us, through the artist's process, in a melancholy with which most of us are all too familiar. The space for compassion, though, arises somewhere between the viewer and the artwork, in the interstices between reality and art. Strickland allows us to feel his subject's pain, while maintaining distance enough for us not to take it on ourselves.

The term "thin", then, is certainly not intended to exclude emotional and psychological depth. Complex relationships are investigated, for example, in both the "thin" and the "thick" explorations of a highly traditional theme: that of the artist and his model. In the former, the female model stands highlit in the foreground, on the right side of a vertically divided canvas. Her belly revealed, she is caught in the most intimate moment of unzipping her jeans, looking back over her shoulder with an expression of doubt and hesitation to where the artist, on the left side, is seen in shadow, turning away from the erotic potential her presence seems to offer, lost in his own dream or fantasy, and dominated by the reverse of a pre-stretched canvas. What is stressed here is the drama of a single captured moment: with the speed of the rapid brushwork that limns the model's blouse, it will be gone.

Compare this, then, to the "thick" version, where the separation between the two halves is fully achieved by the two panels that now form a diptych, with the artist's arm bridging the gap between the two. The heavy texturing of collaged gauze and paint, along with the working of the medium that is evident even at the surface, suggests a less ephemeral intent, a worked-for understanding as opposed to a sudden, intuitive insight, a desire to solidify, as it were, through paint, the perceived relationship. The quick erotic impulse is replaced by an intellectual and emotional curiosity about the relationship between the living model and her painted representation, between the model and the artist as the executor of the painting and therefore the intermediary between art and life. Not surprisingly, the painted figure in the left panel is not the identical twin of the model who shares the left hand panel with the artist: as Wallace Stevens wrote, "Things as they are/Are changed upon the blue guitar." Art changes life, transforms it, and Strickland is at pains to reveal that act of transformation. The artist's symbolic act of possession moves from the playful erotic impulse to physical and aesthetic actualization.

Nor, let me add immediately, is the distinction quite so simple as the above suggests. Even the "thin" paintings have their thickness. Strickland has noted that during his stay on the Ile de Ré he became fascinated with the surfaces of walls and the visible layers of time that constituted their antiquity. Seeking to introduce some aspect of this temporal depth into his drawings, he began to treat the paper surfaces prior to painting on them, stressing them in a variety of ways to approximate that antiquity as a preparatory act. The results are visible in the nude studies referred to earlier, where the figures emerge from a background of horizontal and diagonal smears and splashes, making them almost ghostly, ephemeral presences in the deep texture of time.

This concern with the depth, or textured quality of both experience and the painted surface might be seen as a physical manifestation of Strickland's sense of the depth, or layering, of human consciousness. Typically, he shows his models in a pensive, reflective posture, eyes lowered, so that we have the impression that they are lost in thought or dream. "Lucid dream"-a technique that he both practices as a personal resource and introduces in his studio classes-involves a training of the mind not simply to remember dreams, but to take an active part in them, to become aware that it is dreaming, and to watch and in some cases guide the process. While the viewer may not be privy to it-unless possibly through a title-a number of his paintings recreate elements of dreams that have been particularly influential in shaping his own consciousness: for example, recalls a dream in which the artist found a garment that he took to be his grandmother's apron, bringing back a flood of sadness at the loss of this key person in his life: it was his earliest attempts to sketch this loving spiritual nurturer and role model, he recalls, that first fostered his desire to be a painter.

In his most recent paintings, Strickland has discovered a new and-for a painter, perhaps-surprising direction, borrowing elements of the performing arts and incorporating them not only into his thematic material, but also into his process. Collaborating with Domenique DeFazio, the director of a method acting studio in Rome, he was thrilled to find common ground in some of its principles of spontaneity and role identification. His first impulse seemed to be to explore performance as potential subject matter, coming up with a series of paintings in which a parade of figures dance individually across a tactile surface against the horizon of an empty landscape or a simple backdrop, each seeming to enact in their implicit movement the essence of their being. In the painting, "Dancing Figures With Shadows", the figures are seen, significantly, dancing with their shadows, those Jungian dopplegangers who accompany each one of us through our lives.

The shadow dancer also figures prominently in several other new paintings, including "Sarajevo", where the possibilities of performance are explored in a different way. In this painting, dramatic action is involved at every stage: the stressed sepia-toned background is marked with a texture of casually threatening boot marks, as though a squad of arrogant storm troopers had idled over it; the shadow dancers themselves, black silhouettes from some dreamlike danse macabre, strut their stuff at a secondary level; and, in the foreground, the oversized portrait of the dreamer, the image of suffering humanity, is represented in huge, gestural brush strokes-strokes whose self-assured spontaneity Strickland could only achieve through a rhythmic dance that he himself performed in the final stages of the painting.

As its title implies, this painting is inspired by Strickland's personal outrage for the people of the Balkans, trapped in their own history of ethnic hatred and despair. Another, related painting in the same recent series uses the device of scrawled lettering, a quotation from an article in Paris-Match, to place the Kosovo conflict in the context of Nazi barbarity, though half a century later. Human beings, the picture reminds us, seem to have learned nothing in this time. The epic quality of these paintings forms a logical progression from those earliest attempts to find a way to give expression to his compassion for suffering at the most intimate and personal level. Their large-scale drama simply expands this vision, and roots it in the continuing tragedy of the history of our species and its propensity for destruction.

And yet the deep paradox of this work is that a sense of hope pervades-a hope that springs from the miracle of creativity itself. As we work to expand our consciousness, it seems to suggest, compassion will surely follow. The more we can know of ourselves, the more we shall be able to share our authentic selves with others. After all, as Mark Strickland himself has written with exquisite precision, each drawing is "a witness to the authenticity of our touch."