From The Collection: Joanne Mattera
Joanne Mattera, Uttar 158, 24” x 24”, encaustic on panel, 2004. Collection of R&F Handmade Paints. Image courtesy of Joanne Mattera.
Artist, author, and founder of the annual International Encaustic Conference, Joanne Mattera’s use of color is nuanced, rich, and deep. R&F is fortunate enough to have two paintings by Joanne in our permanent collection. In this conversation, we learned a bit more about Joanne’s relationship to color, the way she creates tension within her paintings, and how the element of surprise affects her work.
Has color always played a large role for you in terms of the way you sense the world? Or has your ongoing study of color in turn altered your perception? I’ve always been fascinated by color. One of my earliest memories is of the threads in my aunt’s workroom arranged from red through violet in the classic Roy G. Biv spectrum. I was forbidden to touch anything—she was a dressmaker—but I could look. Each color was unique but related to the one before and after it. Imagine the surprise to the four-year-old me when one day, through a prism hanging in a window, I saw the same arrangement in light. That “coincidence” piqued my interest in and perception of color. One of the great gifts in my life is to be able to work with color as a painter.
Joanne Mattera, Silk Road 248, 12” x 12”, encaustic on panel, 2016. Collection of R&F Handmade Paints. Image courtesy of Joanne Mattera.
Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan said, "color is not so much a visual as a tactile medium." How would you respond to that? Painting is a visual medium. We perceive color through the eye and brain as it is reflected from the surface of an object. Pigments have substance, as do the mediums in which they’re suspended, but for the most part they are applied with a tool, so we are tactilely at a remove.
Certainly the process of artmaking is tactile and kinesthetic—preparing panels and surfaces, mixing colors, and the like—but unless you’re collaging or weaving or working dimensionally with dyed or painted materials, I don’t see tactility as being the primary element of color.
On the other hand, color is vibrationally powerful. Johannes Itten, the Swiss color theorist, posited a relationship between color and emotion: “Colors are forces, radiant energies that affect us positively or negatively, whether we are aware of it or not.” And the visionary Swedish painter Hilma af Klint employed color as a spiritual medium. Those ideas resonate for me. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Color is a formal element of artmaking. For me, the relationship of one hue to another is what makes a painting.
Installation of six new 18” x 18” Silk Road paintings for upcoming solo exhibition at Addington Gallery. Image courtesy of Joanne Mattera.
Your paintings, particularly the Silk Road series, seem most powerfully strong when viewed in multiples as a grid, and yet each, as you note, is a small color field unto itself. You describe your intention as “setting in motion a small-scale dynamic in which more and less jostle for primacy." Can you say more about the tension you are trying to create? A series reinforces the power of the idea that drives the work. Placing together a group of my small Silk Road paintings—usually a grid of four, nine, or more—creates a kind of visual polyrhythm.
Music is a good analogy, because while every instrument works together, each typically has a chance to solo. That’s what I mean about more (the group) and less (the individual paintings) jostling for primacy. It’s also true of the field (more) in relation to the limned edge (less). It’s not a fight, more of a jam session.
For an exhibition I’ll create a number of small paintings, and they all work together because I’ve intentionally chosen a related palette. But the entire series is not “mix and match.” Hue and saturation must have some relation to the other paintings in the group. And the work has evolved over time. My early paintings, with their weavelike slubs, look quite different from the chromatic nuance and topographical texture of the more recent ones.
Studio view of new Silk Road paintings for Addington Gallery. Image courtesy of Joanne Mattera.
Would you say you use color expressively, conceptually, compositionally, or perceptually? How do you test color? Does it drive your aesthetic? Color is the essence of my work. It drives my aesthetic because it is my aesthetic. Color is content. I approach it intuitively. I learned color theory in art school, and it continues to guide me, but I don’t let it lead me. A successful painting for me gives back more than I put into it—a gestalt of idea, material, and technique—and nudges me to the next painting in the series.
Swipe 11, 30” x 22”, painting on paper, 2016. Swipe 11 is traveling as part of the exhibition Blurring Boundaries: The Women of American Abstract Artist, 1937-Present. Image courtesy of Joanne Mattera.
What has it been like to spend so much time on the same theme? I am thinking of artists, such as Agnes Martin, for whom minimalism, reduction, and repetition are also primary. I'm curious about how one continues to deepen a body of work over time? Are there times you feel more strongly pulled to work with one or the other? I think of myself as a miner who digs deep and follows one ore-rich vein rather than, say, a farmer who tills many acres just a few inches down. I am challenged by the depth. I have always worked in series. I think that when the work is relatively reductive, you need a series to work out the ideas. One idea leads to another leads to another, so maintaining interest is easy.
However, even with a series there’s a point at which you say basta. For instance, I worked on my Uttar series (of which the orange painting, Uttar 158, is a part) for seven years, 2000 - 2007. About 70 percent of the paintings in that series are 12 x 12 inches, so I could let the ideas flow. At a certain point the chromatic squares and rectangles that comprised the majority of the compositions suggested another direction: What if each of these little shapes became its own painting? Could I create a reductive chromatic composition with visual depth and physical surface of sufficient interest to stand on its own as a painting?
Thus Silk Road came into being. I have been working on it since 2005. (There was a bit of an overlap between Uttar and Silk Road). As I noted, Silk Road has morphed over time, most recently into a bisected color field rich with texture. I think I’m ready to explore that direction as a new series. But I’m not ready to relinquish Silk Road yet—color offers endless possibilities—so I suspect there will be a similar overlap between Silk Road and the soon-to-be new series.
Silk Trail 367, 8” x 8”, unique digital print on 11 1/2” x 8” archival paper. Image courtesy of Joanne Mattera.
Silk Trail 342. , 8” x 8”, unique digital print on 11 1/2” x 8” archival paper. Image courtesy of Joanne Mattera.
Surprise plays a role in your work, both intentionally and unintentionally. You describe how the horizontal division of some of your Chromatic Geometry paintings ushers in a figure-ground relationship and deepens the interaction of hues, which you refer to as "a welcome surprise." Your Silk Trail prints began unexpectedly when one of your color cartridges ran low. In 2012, you began exploring a diamond-shaped support after decades of working with squares. How do you allow for the unexpected in your work? I would say that serendipity is always there in one’s practice. The questions I would ask are: Do I acknowledge the surprise? If so, do I embrace it? And most importantly, what do I do with it? There are many surprises that never get farther than, “Oh, that’s interesting.”
What happened with Chromatic Geometry was indeed a surprise. I’d decided to divide the color field in half horizontally as a chromatic challenge. Two colors had to either challenge each other or work together—sometimes both—while supporting the geometry I would place into the field. Within each half of the field I placed triangular shapes aligned along a diagonal grid. My thinking was purely formal: Create a composition of larger and smaller triangles within that grid. I am a 2-D thinker, so I didn’t even see the suggestion of perspective until Sharon Butler, writing about my work in Two Coats of Paint, noted “the possibilities of figure-ground relationships and the illusionistic space conjured by dividing the square into two horizontal rectangles.” I continued working on my own formal terms, yet aware that it could be read differently.
The Silk Trail prints were one of those mind blowers that occur in one’s practice. The first one happened when my little office printer, chugging to complete its programmed task of printing a Silk Road image, yet running out of ink, yielded a print with striations and bands of color nothing like the original image. I liked it! For a long time I lived for the end of a cartridge so that I could make some prints using archival paper, which I then overprinted until I got what I wanted. I’ve since codified the process into something I can control (sort of). It’s an ongoing series, but each print remains unique.
Silk Road 480, 24” x 24”, encaustic on panel. Image courtesy of Joanne Mattera.
What are some of the questions you ask yourself as you work? When I’m in my painting zone I can’t say that that I’m asking myself any questions. I let 50 years of color intuition and paint handling (including 35 years of working in wax) take over. However, there is a visual give and take between me and the painting. I suppose you could call that a non-linear conversation.
The linear thinking comes when I put the painting on the wall to look at it. Does the color work? Is it as interesting from a distance as it is from close up? How does distance change what I see? Is it technically adept? Does the surface maintain traces of the hand and brush without looking labored or sloppy? Is this painting sufficiently unique to my oeuvre that it deserves to take up space in the world? Do I like it?
I’ll put the painting on the wall several times while I work. When I feel comfortable with the answers, I limn the painting with a color that charges the field, a color that holds its own in the visual conversation. And, believe me, there’s nothing arbitrary about that color choice. I am aware that these paintings will find their way to other people’s walls, and I want their experience to be one of beauty, color, and light—a little slice of visual nirvana.
Except for The Art of Encaustic Painting, published by Watson-Guptill in 2001, Joanne publishes exclusively through Well-Fed Artist. Hue & Me, designed by painter Karen Freedman, was created to accompany Joanne’s 36th career solo exhibition of the same name, which opens at Addington Gallery in Chicago on September 12, 2020.
With the exception of her memoir, Vita, all Well-Fed Artist Press publications can be viewed online at no charge. joannemattera.com/well-fed-artist-press