THE ART OF LORNA MARSH ARTICLE CREDIT: GALAS FOR CHARITY MAGAZINE.
Lorna Marsh: Cage Paintings by Diane Thodos
Lorna Marsh, Mounted Head 1996. mixed media on paper, 22 X 30 inches
All three artists share a similar artistic background, with the classical approach to drawing which was standard in South Africa. The emotional impact of their work comes from shared desperation born of social and political turmoil but tempered through the perceptions of individual lives. “It’s because of the social repression,” Marsh states “that our emotional core is the same. It’s pretty much the same experience the German Expressionists had. The social mindset was very “verkrampte’ which means narrow minded in Afrikaans.” Lorna Marsh continues by saying that South African society was “controlling, repressive and very Calvinistic in a way that people in America don’t have a consciousness of. You don’t want your sexuality, place in society, and personal choices legislated for you, and this is what they did.”
In the two years since 9/11 mainstream American artists have failed to confront the tragedy in any significant emotional depth. Peter Plagen’s statement in a 2002 Newsweek web exclusive, that “so far no impressive works about the attack have made it to public view,” essentially remains true. Arguably, it is the deconstructive bent of the art world with it’s focus on irony has suppressed the possibility of direct emotional content. In contrast, contemporary South African artists like William Kentridge, Marlene Dumas, and Lorna Marsh have made emotionally significant art about trauma and social tragedy. Just as these artists have developed their perceptions on the periphery of South African society, so, it could be argued, their expressionism remains outside the conceptually based mainstream of contemporary art. Both forms of marginalization are a source of strength.
Lorna Marsh, Woman with Head in a Box 2003. mixed media on canvas, 36 X 24 inches
Marsh avoids postmodern distancing devices. Consequently the emotional invective found in her work does not become anemic or insubstantial. This point cannot be underestimated, particularly because the narrative elements in her work is informed by the unsettling pulse of the artist as a living witness to unresolved dilemmas and dangerous turmoil. Marsh creates parables of a destroyed world using invented symbols and situations in much the same way that Eastern European animated films from the 60’s and 70’s commented on the folly of human nature trapped within the political Communist dystopia of that time.
In her current exhibition, Marsh examines the repercussions of living in a state of imprisonment. As in her previous exhibits Africa Within and Birds of Prey, Marsh uses animals to express the condition of society while portraying human beings as insubstantial shadows bent on their own self destruction. A similarly bleak and unredeemable view of humanity is found in Kentridge’s animated films where the only symbols of hope are the constellations in the sky which are far from earth. Previously the animals in Marsh’s paintings portrayed the violence of instinctively wild predators, or became prey as decapitated or limbless victims. Her current images are ghostly disembodied forms of animals who are muzzled and caged. They are imprisoned as much by literal cages as by symbolic ones of social iconography, where mounted heads and tamed “bunnies” exist as empty signs of the animals wild counterparts. With instinct lost, the animal’s memories of their previously wild nature does not survive the conditioning process they have been put through. Comparing previous exhibits to the current one, it is as though the volcanic intensity of the artist’s burning landscapes have erupted into a white blanket of ash that has covered the stage of her work, freezing feeling imbedded within her painting’s surfaces and snuffing out the sense of life.
Marsh’s work has also always engaged issues surrounding the role of women within rigidly Calvinist South African society. This is a theme she shares in common with Marlene Dumas which is most acutely portrayed Marsh’s Eve series from 2001. The current exhibit portrays women as caged and conditioned creatures in much the same way her animals are portrayed. In Woman With Her Head in a Box a nude female has covered her head in a box so as not to see a menacing snake twined around her ankles that threatens to violate her. Clearly Lorna Marsh is presenting a cautionary tale about women not taking a part in their own empowerment; by accepting repressive socially dictated roles women can also become blind to the social and cultural traps which victimize them.
Marsh adopts a direct approach to her materials, refusing to fetishize them. Her handling of paint and media shows a kind of rawness and brutality that reflects the society she wishes to portray. Her scratched, smudged, and scumbled surfaces become a metaphorical way of showing the dirty underbelly of the world, presenting it as edifice supported by rusted scaffolding which has cracks in its plaster. In the Cage Paintings series her formerly expressive colors and marks on the canvas surface have curdled into a disquieting snowfall of numbness.
CREATURES OF THE EARTH: The Art of Lorna Marsh by Robert P. Metzger, Ph.D.
The epic, ambitious paintings of Lorna Marsh deal with the continuous human condition which has relentlessly resisted discernible modification throughout the past millennium. Her thought-provoking meditations on how little the heart of man has changed after so many centuries is evident in her numerous series of paintings, including: "Man is the Trap Against Nature" (steel-jaw lion traps), "Tethered Flight" (kingfisher, sparrow hawk, and kestrel bound by string), "Cage" (muzzled animals), "Shrouded Visions" (draped people, animals, and landscapes)," Africa Within" (scavengers: jackal, hyena, dog, baboon, lion, and vulture), "Discarded Landscapes" (ecological warnings), "I am the Choicemaker" (Eve in the Garden of Eden), and "Firebirds" (conflagration of birds). Her unrestrained improvisation is apparent in her understated approach of eschewing the paint brush and applying her materials directly with her hands and arms. Using acrylic paint, oil stick, graphite, and wood stains and varnishes, she approaches each canvas with a masterful technique and ecstatic passion.
Marsh's astonishing series of paintings are cautionary tales, reminding the viewer of the pitfalls of an Orwellian group-think. Her work advocates strongly for the logic and necessity of courageous individuality. Throughout our long history, each emerging generation has struggled to affirm life's full possibilities and to regain anew their common humanity. Marsh is keenly aware of mankind's shared longing for belonging and better ways of living. Life's very precariousness underscores her intense connection for the "Everyman" and with all of God's creatures great and small.
Reforging the unity between art and meaningful existence, Marsh chronicles our mutual dreams and nightmares which expose our frailties and vulnerability. Her deep distress over human destruction of the earth and the subjugation of nature for self-centered greed place her in the vanguard responsible, principled artists worldwide. However, unlike the over-kill of much "in-your-face" overtly political art, Marsh's more subtle approach speaks to both the heart and the brain. Her quiet indignation is especially effective in exposing the evils of the catastrophic atrocities of war. The dark side of life is evident in many of her works, yet even the most brutal of these pictures contain a flicker of what Wordsworth referred to as "the still sad music of humanity." The universality of her voice is confirmed in these profound, brooding paintings and her background on two Continents has informed and enriched her ideas.
Marsh's figurative expressionist style, with its roots in German Expression and European Surrealism, is also informed by the work of Robert Motherwell, Cy Twombly, and Antonio Tapies. In much of her work, such as in the Eve series, the human face appears partially or even fully expunged, heightening the sense of universality through the body. The female nudes exhibit interior anguish and turmoil and display the enormous toll of their difficult struggle. Each figure is distorted for peak emotional impact and dramatic effect. The extraordinary animal paintings, largely drawn from her native South Africa, are imbued with a hallucinatory intensity and ferocity. She convincingly conveys the tension of movement and counter movement of African herd animals such as wild dogs, hyenas, and baboons who forage for food and survive by traveling in packs. These animals, surrounded with abstract swirls, becoming a part of the painterly background of barren landscape. Marsh is especially attracted to these animals because of their endurance from ancient times, their freedom, and their ability to withstand severely discordant conditions. These creatures are the antithesis of commercially cute Disney animals. It is their very rough-hewn appearance that gives them a distinct dignity and nobility. Man's relationship with animals is a persistent and potent theme in Marsh's work, personifying the words from the Book of Job; "Ask the beasts and they shall teach thee, and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee." Marsh's images are a reminder of the beast within each individual and the divine spark in all living things.
ABOUT ROBERT METZGER
Robert Metzger, Director Emeritus of the Reading Public Museum, served in that capacity at the Aldrich Museum, the Allentown Art Museum, and the Stamford Museum and Nature Center and worked as Curator for W. Hawkins Ferry in Grosse Pointe, Michigan and for Lydia Winston Malbin and Richard Brown Baker in New York. He taught Art History at the University of Detroit and Bucknell University and studied at Columbia University, University of California, Los Angeles, Concordia College, River Forest, Illinois, Wayne State University, Detroit, Museum Management Institute, Berkeley, California, and the Victorian Society Summer School, London, U.K. He is the author of St. Petersburg Realism (U.S.S.R.), Ronald Reagan: American Icon, Abstract Expressionism Lives!, Edward Hopper: Early Impressions, Franz Kline: the Jazz Murals, and British Romantic Art and monographs on Arakawa, Nakian, Stamos, Boghosian, Tobin, Stubbs, Stuempfig, Murray, Namingha, Meneeley, Press, Coyer, and Strauser. In addition, he was the subject of the George Furth-Stephen Sondheim Broadway musical Company.