sarah sutton paintings nightwater (for david foster wallace)

 

Nightwater is part of a (silent) conversation with david foster wallace. It has a companion piece, frozenwater, not pictured because it needs to be seen in real life. It represents a turning point in sarah sutton’s work, when she turned towards more explicitly rejecting or perhaps making visible for consideration the invalid polarity between the material and the immaterial.

The abstract expressionist movement – the new york school of which sarah sutton sees her work as a continuation – particularly rothko, seems to have seen exploration of the interior self as a search for freedom from the grip of family history, indeed of history itself. 

The abstract painter of the early twentieth century has been seen as abstracting artistic qualities from represented objects and their meanings, and looking on these as unavoidable impurities, imposed historical elements with which the artist was burdened and in spite of which he finally achieved his underlying, personal abstract expression.

This pursuit of an unencumbered truth, a Platonic essence, turns out to be illusory. The historical relational context is formatively expressed in – and neurologically wired in by – the qualities of relating the intergenerational history entails. This is the water we swim in. The personal has proved to be historical, and vice versa. We cannot help but carry our histories, our emotional landscapes, within us. Especially when they’re unknowable. Hence nightwater, when we’re in the dark.

Exploring the inner landscape involves finding a relation to parts of self experience, internalized from experience of the (m)other’s state of mind, the qualities of her gaze, as the work of Marcus Rothkowitz attests.

See landscapes of the interior and the female gaze for more on this thinking, which arises from sarah sutton’s psychoanalytic training and practice.

 

nightwater