Samantha Fields, "Portents" by DeWitt Cheng
The
British Romantic landscapist John Constable (1776-1837) once declared,
“It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is
not the keynote, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of
sentiment.”
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Samantha Fields, “The Path of Totality,”
2024, acrylic on canvas, 41 x 27”.
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All images courtesy of Traywick Gallery, Berkeley. |
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Samantha
Fields’ exhibition of recent paintings, “Portents,” with their multiple
layers of airbrushed pigment, focuses on the skies of Fields’ Los
Angeles as their “chief organ of sentiment.” In the 21st century this
organ is one brought about by natural forces subject to physical laws,
not the judgments of celestial overseers. Even without God in his
heaven, however, the skies retain their fascination and awe. Fields has
returned to the skies — and their associated clouds, fog, celestial
bodies, fires, and fireworks — after a transitional period of domestic
interiors realized during the pandemic lockdown.
“Portents”
includes eleven medium-sized to small paintings, all derived from
“failed photographs,” i.e., flawed snapshots, replete with photographic
‘mistakes,’ like lens flares, but adapted and perfected during the
artist’s lengthy painting process. All are beautiful and mysterious, all
imply something that is not yet evident, the promise of a withheld or
ambiguous revelation, as Jorge Luis Borges put it. In the aftermath of
the recent wildfires, a subject that the artist has explored before, it
is easy to interpret the paintings secularly as environmental warnings
to Angelenos to get our minds right about rebuilding in the naturally
fire-prone Southern California ecosystem, especially given our poisoned
political culture.
The
gallery notes that “Portents” evokes a fractured world that may be
slipping away — a reality that is constantly in flux and just out of
reach. “Fields,” they assert, “uses the metaphor of celestial phenomena,
such as a total solar eclipse, to articulate this elusive feeling.” The
transient phenomena of the natural world are thus caught and preserved
in paintings that freeze and condense time for our leisurely
contemplation. “Portent,” the show’s eponymous painting, depicts a dust
storm or tornado as seen from afar, darkly foreboding swirling masses of
muted color that evoke recent natural twister disasters in the American
south.
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Looking
at this ominous image I could easily imagine the desperation felt by
pre-scientific people who anthropomorphized such brutal force in order
to explain it. |
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Samantha Fields, “Whole Sky,” 2024, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24”. |
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“The
Path of Totality” presents a wide-angle view of a total eclipse, with
the blacked-out sun at the top encircled by an aureole of clouds, and
echoed by a tiny sun at the bottom, just above the dark horizon — a
scientific anomaly, given poetic license: the heavenly and earthly
realms suggest the Latin ut supra ut infra,
as above, so below, and the bipartite composition of Raphael’s
“Transfiguration.” “Prominence” and “Cathedral” focus on the blackened
solar disk in eclipse surrounded by clouds. In reality, the danger of
eye damage prohibits us from staring at a solar eclipse without eye
protection. Fields’ image allows us to stare fixedly, the black disk
metamorphosing into our eyes’ pupils, as in Magritte’s 1928 painting,
“The False Mirror.” |
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Samantha Fields, “Portent,” 2024, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24”. |
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Fields
depicts doubled celestial bodies in “Twin Solo,” with its overlapping
Venn diagram of partial eclipses, and “The World Is Not as You See It,”
with its twin crescent moons, one seen from a clearing in the cloud
cover, and the other seen through it. In “Whole Sky” and “A Light Hurt”
the bokeh balls or lens flares beloved of photographers multiply,
suggesting optical phenomena like auroras and glories, sun dogs and moon
dogs, all of it spiritualized. |
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Samantha Fields, “The World is Not as You See It,”
2024, acrylic on canvas, 34 x 28”.
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Samantha Fields, “Cathedral,”
2024, acrylic on canvas, 12 x 9”.
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Fields’
paintings, with their mood of quiet absorption, are also reminiscent of
the skyscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, with their rapt, enchanted
viewers turning their backs on us. Fields reminds us that we are now
those silent witnesses to the mystery of the universe, reminded once
again that we and our culture are part of nature, not always its masters
but its subjects. We are not inevitably — as the status-quo fatalists
rationalize — victims of our own nature. As Shakespeare’s Cassius says
in “Julius Caesar:” “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in
ourselves, that we are underlings.”