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| Dale vN Marshall, 'Beauty Is Always With You No. 2', Mixed Media On Canvas, 2013 |
2014’s frenetic
round of exhibition and gallery going continues apace. I can’t remember a period in recent years
when quite so much of interest came along at the same time and, to be honest,
I’m struggling to assimilate it all, (not to mention responding on here). It’s not such a bad problem to have really,
and might give me some clues about how I want my own work to progress in the
near future. I just need to ensure I
don’t get deflected each time I see something new. The key, as always, is to enjoy the immediate
thrill of encountering something I hadn’t thought of myself, but to digest it
all properly over time; and to retain faith in my own creative concerns rather
than constantly questioning them in the light each new thing I see.
It all comes out in the wash eventually, and it's all about evolution, -
not a series of half-cocked revolutions.
Also, one shouldn’t overlook the aspect of simple pleasure in viewing
artworks.
Anyway, working
on the principle that you only regret the things you didn’t do, (or see), I
zipped over to Coventry’s Herbert Art Gallery & Museum the other day, to
view ‘Walls With Wounds’, an
exhibition of paintings by Dale vN Marshall. A former graffiti artist, (as ‘Vermin’), Marshall is now making a name for himself as a studio-based painter, having graduated from Coventry University. In the event, the show was a bit of an eye-opener,
in more ways than one.
Marshall’s
biography to date takes in a period of ‘at risk’ existence as a graffiti writer
and hard drug user in the Bristol & Bath area, and a history of serious
mental illness, culminating in a period spent as an in-patient in Cornwall’s StLawrence’s Hospital, Bodmin. The
paintings on show were mostly produced during 2013, (representing a fairly
impressive turnover), and amount to a somewhat harrowing attempt by Marshall to
externalise, and hopefully, to move beyond these traumatic episodes in his
life.
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| Dale vN Marshall, 'Fire Burn Bright', Mixed Media On Canvas, 2013 |
Amidst all the strategies and theoretical underpinnings of contemporary painting, it’s easy to overlook the medium’s ability to simply express feeling, and Marshall’s pieces are certainly some of the most deeply felt and cathartic I’ve seen in a while. If his take on Abstract Expressionism sometimes feels slightly naive, it’s also a perfect antidote for the cynicism or distancing that pervades so much contemporary art. For all that, this far more than simple Art Therapy, (not necessarily ‘simple’ at all, I realise), and it’s sufficiently ‘thought through’ to indicate that Marshall is already a ‘serious’ painter above all else. It feels like the processes of rebuilding his once-shattered identity, and of artistic ‘becoming’, are very much two sides of the same coin for him.
Whilst fitting
into a primarily Expressionist tradition, Marshall makes reference to a variety
of external sources, in addition to the obvious internal ones. As often happens with this branch of
painting, he might actually be said to be, at heart, a painter of landscapes or
other inhabitable environments. If one wishes
to find formal antecedents, it’s easy enough to draw comparisons with the work
of Mark Tobey, Pollock, Twombly or, even, Rothko. At times, I also thought of the automatic
mark making experiments of Henri Michaux.
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| Dale vN Marshall, 'Drown', Mixed Media On Canvas, 2013 |
In one particular
mode, Marshall employs fields of, dashes, scribbles, drips, threads and text
fragments to build fields and networks of varying degrees of intensity and
abandon, that, despite Marshall’s allusions to walls, often appear to recede
into ambiguous space. Generally, these peices
walk a tightrope between order and chaos.
Often, a relatively stable grid emerges within the apparently random
mark marks. In nearly every case, these
also coalesce into horizontal bands of contrasting density, somewhere around the
central region of the canvas, which, inevitably, can be read as a notional
landscape, or the surface of water.
Reading them less literally however, there can be a sense of violence or
turmoil viewed at a remove, or a sense of physical or psychic fracture, (but potentially,
of juncture also).
This motif
becomes psychologically powerful, and even disturbing, through repetition but
it’s not easy to decide if all this activity represents a search for order out
of chaos or the opposite process of psychic unraveling, (potentially both, I’m
guessing). In this context, I couldn’t
help reading his use of threads, sometimes taught, - at others loose and
meandering. In fact, Marshall’s
employment of mixed media, including anti-bacterial varnish, wood ash, and
foil) throughout the work lends it a visceral quality and is one of the
exciting things about the show.
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| Dale vN Marshall, 'We Need To Transfer You Home', Mixed Media On Canvas, 2013 |
Much of that
particular group of paintings exhibits a vivid palette that, by turns, might
evoke fiery intensity or a variety of pastoral exuberance. The latter might seem at odds with the
harrowing events to which they specifically relate, (detailed in accompanying
captions), until one considers the sense of euphoria which can accompany
serious psychotic episodes. This is
directly alluded to in ‘Beauty Is Always
With You No.2’, - perhaps my favourite piece in the show, where caligraphic
elements play an important role in evoking both Marshall’s graffiti writing
past, and archaic fragments of writing by children he claims to have found on
the walls of his current studio. The
sense of a surface plane seems stronger in this piece than in much of the other
work.
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| Dale vN Marshall, 'Stitched Wound No.1', Mixed Media On Paper, 2012' |
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| Dale vN Marshall, 'Stitched Wound, No.2', Mixed Media On Paper, 2012 |
Another category
of Marshall’s painting is one I can’t help thinking of as ‘medical
paintings’. They address his experiences
within the mental health system and, in their predominantly white colouration
and incorporation of bandage or gauze-like materials, obviously evoke the
sensory aspects of a hospital or associated medical environment. Most dramatic here, is the way the horizontal
divisions transform them selves into livid wounds, and the threads into fragile
surgical stitches. Should the inclusion of this overt element of gore prove too
melodramatic, In the smaller paper based, ‘Stitched
Wounds 1 & 2’, Marshall incorporates his wounds into a geometrical
armature relating to the street plans around St Lawrence Hospital and of
Falmouth, where he experienced a severe psychotic crisis, prior to
hospitalisation.
Perhaps this
impressive ability to let the paintings operate on several levels, and indeed,
Marshall’s powerful evocation of a ‘landscape of the mind’, is most affectingly
seen in ‘Tell Me Nurse Am I Dead?’. Heavily textured, but terrifying in its white,
monochrome nullity, this cardboard-based piece suggests an abstracted aerial
view of the Cornish landscape through which his ambulance carried him. Convinced he was dead, he imagined the
ambulance ascending into the sky. Having
recently returned from a Cornish jaunt myself, I couldn’t help reflecting on
the contrast between Marshall’s relationship with that landscape, and my own, less
traumatic one.
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| Dale vN Marshall, 'Tell Me Nurse Am I Dead', Mixed Media On Card, 2013 |
I think it would
be a mistake to regard this, ultimately, as a feel-good show, or exit with the
sense that ‘all’s well that end’s well’.
Nevertheless, by inhabiting the existential realities of his life in
this way, Marshall seems to demonstrate that, through accepting them and
assimilating them through his art, he stands some chance of moving forward and somehow
reclaiming some of the time lost to him.
There is certainly no shortage of courage and unflinching honesty about
the work and, if ever proof were needed that creative endeavour can provide a
path through, (if not necessarily, an escape from), the vicissitudes of life,
this show might be it. I can only wish
him continuing success in his future endeavours, and hope that this process of
psychic and artistic reconstruction continues.
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