WANDA KOOP
Plywood Paintings
1981-1990
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Text by Robert Enright
I have been looking at and writing about Wanda Koop’s art since 1982. Over the course of that four-decade long period there has been much to see. Throughout her career, Koop has produced bodies of work that are remarkable for their number and quality. Her energy and her imaginative range have been prodigious. She does nothing in moderation. In 2003 she began “Green Zone” a body of work in response to the Iraq War that resulted in over 200 paintings. Over the course of six years beginning in 1990, she produced 21 different bodies of work. She has made her paintings with liquid plastic, Rhoplex and (mostly) acrylic on a variety of surfaces, including canvas, vinyl tarpaulin and convertible cartop fabric.
But the surface that held her attention for a ten-year long period was plywood. Her initial reason for using it was because the ideas she had for paintings exceeded her economic resources to realize them. She simply couldn’t afford canvas to match the scale and number of paintings she wanted to make so she traded art for stacks of 4 x 8 plywood sheets, which began a major body of work called “Archetype” in 1980. She continued working on plywood — a surface she began to appreciate for its rough immediacy — through “No Words”, a series she began in 1987 and finished in 1990.
During what I’m calling “the Plywood Decade” she completed 10 substantial and individual bodies of work, including “Building in the Pool of the Black Star” (1982), a 144 foot long circular sequence of paintings that was installed in the rotunda of the Manitoba Provincial Legislative Building; “Flying to the Moon” (1984-1987), 91 paintings in five different sizes (from the smallest at 24 x 24 inches, to the largest six panel painting at 144 x 192 inches), and “No Words”, a series comprised of 74 eight by eight foot paintings. This last series included a range of subjects from a baby’s face to Christ’s face imprinted on the veil of Veronica, and from a Catellya Orchid and a Brazilian Hummingbird to a rivered landscape with two effulgent flames, the first of her Native Fires, a subject she has continued to use and transform to the present day.
I first met Wanda Koop 47 years ago at a dinner party and near the end of the evening, when everyone was talking about their immediate plans, she said something that struck me as remarkable then, and that has stayed with me. She remarked that she wanted the effect of her art to be “… as if I had taken a camera and spun around 360 degrees, so that I can take in everything in all directions”. She wanted her art to reproduce what she could see in the round of that apprehension. On the evidence of a distinguished art practice with 100+ one-person exhibitions, including highlights like “In Your Eyes”, at the Thetis Foundation, Venice in 2001 and “On the Edge of Experience”, a major survey co-organized by the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Canada in 2011, her comment went from wish to achievement. She has taken her capacious looking at everything and turned it into a painted and drawn world of uncompromisingly high quality.
Her engagement with space has been fearless. Prairie space is a vast, minimal tabula rasa which seems to have challenged her to fill it up. In an alternating series made in 1995 called “Paintings for Brightly Lit Rooms” and “Paintings for Dimly Lit Rooms”, she used a simple dialectical frame to produce paintings in which bright objects were countered by meditative landscapes. Taken together, they articulated a rich tonality. Large bright red cherries, or the top half and lip of a gorgeous blue vase were matched by moody clusters of trees and shining waterfalls. Koop has always referred to her painting as a language and she has become a talker who, within that developing language, has taught herself to speak a range of compelling accents.
The 8 paintings that will be shown are from two bodies of work, five from “No Words”, one from “Building in the Pool of the Black Star” and a pair of large landscape paintings that are not part of any particular series. The Black Star work is an arrangement of objects – a satellite dish cradled in a wooden frame, a windowless building and a post — that stand in a pink, lime green and yellow-tinged landscape. The paintings from this body of work connect to a confluence of interests, including destructive urbanization and her admiration for the paintings of Giorgio Morandi. They began as a response to seeing construction hoarding built around demolished building sites in her neighbourhood. She built hoarding frames for her paintings and installed them in the Legislature’s Neo-classical building in a way that transformed Morandi’s domesticated still lives of vases and jars into a running architectural still life. Another Untitled landscape locates the satellite dish on top of a building set in a cluster of buildings that form a floating abstraction. There are small, perfect touches — a thin pink line topping a white square, and two small red marks hovering above and below a green line — that move the image away from being a landscape to being a painting. Another Untitled landscape shows a candy cane silo or rocket in the centre of a gathering of towers and buildings, including one building in the background that could have been designed by the office of an architectural firm led by Philip Guston. Koop is drawn to a group of artists, like Georgia O’Keefe, Giorgio Morandi, and Emily Carr, who place simple forms on uncomplicated grounds. Landscape (1990) can easily be read as a straightforward landscape, but Koop adds quietly emphatic touches in the purple smudging of the tree leaves, in the turquoise highlighting on the ground at the point where the two panels meet and, especially, in the red accent at the horizon line on the left hand side – it is a clamp ensuring that land and sky hold together. You look at the painting and think John Constable, but Koop’s nocturnal rendering is atmospheric, more painting than landscape.
While Koop’s subjects are most often simplified forms, they are not without drama. In Screen (1980) one of her earliest works on plywood, she has used the painting’s subject, an empty white screen, as a space where the idea of a painting can be realized. It coincides with her interests in framing devices — like rock formations, curtain devices, goalposts, bridges, or sticks in pairs. In Stage, another of her early plywood paintings, a proscenium opens up to reveal a rained-upon landscape. In a dramatic large painting called Lookout, we are looking out less than we are looking in; the painting focusses one space to open up another. Tunnel adjusts that process of focusing: it situates the drama not in the massive surface of the mountain, but in the small black opening which inexplicably attracts most of our attention.
In a “Small Panel” from 1981 called Powerline, she painted an electrical tower standing behind three stone pillars that assume the shape of a tabletop. Nine years later she returned to the same combination of subjects but re-named the painting. Now called Stonehenge, it additionally sported a smiley face on the right-hand side of the top stone slab; the work is a playful combination of the serious and the ridiculous. Icon as eye-con.
This careful selection of 8 paintings is taken from larger bodies of work. Each is a kind of hieroglyph inside a coded language; each has its own integral meaning and each also speaks to, and echoes, the larger and fuller language of which it is a necessary component. Even though they come from different stages of a ten-year period, together they contain the range of subjects and painterly issues that continue to hold the artist’s focussed attention. Wanda Koop has found a way to hold in balance what she can take in from that world turning around her with her own process of making art. She not only sees the world but for her seeing is thinking. Then what she sees becomes what she makes. Seeing, thinking, making is her special and passionate trinity.
Robert Enright is the Research Professor in Art Theory and Criticism in the School of Fine art and Music at the University of Guelph and the senior contributing editor with Border Crossings magazine.