Darren Waterston
IN THE REEDS AND RUSHES: MUCH MAGIC AFOOT
Fresno Art Museum
1999

All that is visible must grow beyond itself and extend into the realm of the invisible. Thereby it receives its true consecration and clarity and takes firm root in the cosmic order.

I Ching

Each one of Darren Waterston's paintings invites us on a journey. Seductively, they open up their dizzying spaciousness without the reassurance of a horizon line, nor even the orientation that might be offered by defined spatial relationships between the objects that mysteriously inhabit them. Forms and images seem to be given a necessary place, but neither their relative scale nor their metaphorical association permits us to tell ourselves a story that would fully explain their presence here. These are unexplored territories, whose indigenous life forms are at once as foreign and familiar as the images in a dream. To experience them we have to take a lot on faith: we must take the risk of adventuring without map or compass.

We may start with what is visible. From Waterston's earlier work we know to expect the virtual landscape, in which we are unsure where finite and infinite meet: the line between water, or earth, and sky is blurred, and with it the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious mind. These paintings make their appeal to both at the same time. From his more recent work we have come to expect the juxtaposition of microcosm and macrocosm, the immaculate, microscopic rendering of flora-spore or frond, moss or root system-set against the vast distances of unknowable cosmic space; or fauna, the hummingbird caught in the nanosecond arrest of its whirring flight, the flitting, fork-tailed swift, the delicate moth, or butterfly, or dragonfly; or still more elemental, unidentified organic forms, coiling tubes that call to mind internal organs, or subterranean or submarine life forms caught in the ageless evolutionary progress of time.

Now the visible in Waterston's latest paintings has expanded to include, for the first time, specifically figural-though not necessarily human-references. Some, as in Moisture Seekers, take the form of fairy-like creatures, sometimes winged, whose antics are at once whimsically humorous and disturbingly erotic. Others suggest an angelic presence, reminiscent of the angel who haunts Rilke's Elegies, the intermediary between physical and metaphysical, the human and the divine. Others still are reduced to body parts, sometimes grotesque: our eyes settle on the silhouettes of heads severed from their bodies and strung like lanterns on a line, as in Mandalyan Fairy Tale, or quasi-human forms emerging from cocoon-like excrescencies or clumps of sodden land in the apparent process of giving birth to themselves (Chrysanthemum.) The human body, Waterston recalls for us, is made of "the same material as a clod of earth."

Also newly visible are the taut or looping threads that Waterston uses to make connections between separate, sometimes distant images. We find them strung across the painting in a way that brings the images startlingly to the surface, festooned with delicate, twining tendrils and hung with dewdrops or berries, lanterns or balloons. Connections are made, too, in other, sometimes painful, sometimes scatological ways: a bird defecates in a delicate arc into a waiting cup, bound around with thread; other birds bond, or battle, with threads that connect their beaks in cruel constraint or hang them, seemingly, by the neck; a pair of silhouetted lovers' heads is brought together topsy-turvy in a disturbing exchange of body fluids, flowing mouth to mouth. Everywhere there are ties that make connection, ties that bind, a complex of relations that suggests both positive and negative association, the interconnectedness of the universe, and the perverse, often mutually painful codependency of its creatures, loving and fighting, attracting and repelling.

The threads are both helpful and confounding, seeming to offer to help us chart a course but leading us eventually nowhere. They are false friends, teasing us with their decorative detours, exposing the sleight of hand of formal artistry. They reflect the "chinoiserie" which continues to fascinate Waterston, and which he incorporates in these paintings with frequent visual references and citations, reminding us of that Western infatuation with Asian art (he calls it "patronizing") that mistook form for content and exotic images for literal meanings and cultural truths. While he himself indulges in the risk of flirting with the immediately appealing surface and the seductive image-in a word, with the "beauty" much disparaged by twentieth century art-he is careful to maintain an awareness of their shadow side.

In his gardens of earthly delights, the exquisite is always shadowed by a hint of the grotesque, perfection countered by the subtle presence of the wound, a metaphor for the fatal imperfection of all physical beings in their inevitable separation from the divine, the original sin. Here and there we come across slyly introduced genitalia, yoni and phallus, symbols at once of separation and union, the physical organs of human reproduction and sexual ecstasy. And as in the moralized dreamscapes of Hieronymous Bosch, we find Waterston's creatures engaged in the most unseemly but most elemental of behaviors, defecating and urinating, copulating and vomiting, offering us the spectacle of our deeply flawed physical existence and the extremes of our expressive acts.

It is through the interstices of these paradoxes that Waterston offers us entry into the world of the invisible, for it is only in the profane we have the opportunity to find the sacred. And Waterston's purpose is unmistakably transmutational, transcendent. Like the alchemists of an earlier era, he uses the raw material of the physical realm only as a medium that can be converted into metaphysical gold. His mentor, he says, was Beatrice Wood, the late ceramic artist, a veritable life-force in herself, an irrepressible eccentric, and an unabashed advocate of the spiritual in art. In her work, she turned the loam of the earth into enchanted vessels, chalices-ritual objects whose sacred purpose is manifest in their gleaming, opalescent presence. For Waterston she opened the door not only to the early twentieth century theosophists whose philosophy embraces art and spirit, mysticism and mind-power, but also to Far Eastern thought and religious practice, and the alternate realities attainable through meditation.

In this, Waterston borrows more deeply on the Romantic heritage than his sense of the continuity between man and nature. His world view belongs in the tradition of such cosmic visionaries as Jakob Boehme and William Blake, who intuited the ecstatic possibility of the unity of all things, and aspired to its achievement. And his own pursuit of these values has brought him to the threshold where he now stands, and from whose perspective he paints, with a view into the reality of both worlds, the visible and the invisible, and their mysterious correspondence in nature and the mind of man. After the heady, agnostic irony of so much of twentieth century art, his work offers a refreshing entry into a new aesthetic for the future, unlimited by form or intellect, and open to the vast, unexplored expanses yet available to the human mind.