Mountain Songs: The Bear Went Over
Oil on Canvas 84" x 120"
©Dale Fairbanks 2004
On November 20, a remarkable exhibition of paintings by former Fairbanks artist Dale Fairbanks opened at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art. Dale is a dear friend of ours, so Missy and I went to Anchorage for the opening reception to celebrate with Dale and her husband Bill. I had anticipated this exhibition for a long time, knowing that these would be the biggest, boldest, most brazen paintings shown at the museum in a very long time, and it exceeded my high expectations. Dale's huge canvases lit up the huge, tall, barrel-vaulted gallery east of the museum's atrium. Rather than ruminate upon them and their impact afresh, I include here the text of the essay I wrote for her exhibition catalog. If there is any way you can see this exhibition before it closes on January 22, it is worth the trip:
Southerners and Alaskans have a number of surprisingly similar traits. They love the land. They maintain their independence, often in spite of practical consequences. They tend to have an ambivalent attitude toward tradition and to be uncomfortable with authority. These and other marked tendencies run strongly through the cultures of both the Deep South and the Far North. But perhaps no predilection is as widespread and pronounced in both as their love of stories—tall tales, fables, ballads, narratives of misery, joy, pain, and rapture.
Born in Natchez, Mississippi, Dale Fairbanks lived in Fairbanks, Alaska for ten years before the inexorable call of family reeled her back to Pensacola, Florida. Rooted in the South and enkindled as a painter by a decade in the North, she makes paintings that embody in an extraordinary way the signature traits of the cultural traditions that shape her even as she wrestles with them. Much like Jacob wrestling with the angel—a story as powerfully attractive to individualist Alaskans as to proud, secretly rebellious Bible Belt Southerners--Dale takes on life and art with all she’s got, holding nothing back in the battle to make sense of a world that infuses us with desire and then tries to impose restraint.
Like the seemingly simple, familiarly melodic songs whose names she attaches to her paintings somewhere in the process of the long struggle that leads to their completion, Dale’s paintings are filled with repetitive shapes, readable rhythms, bold colors, and lung-filling expanses of air and space. But like those great old songs, the paintings carry in their bright accessibility a wealth of not-so-simple human feeling, and depths of personal, social, and spiritual joys and sorrows. Songs like those of the paintings’ titles became and remain a part of American tradition because they speak to us of things we understand, but they remind us that the familiar emotions they describe are never simple ones.
Of course highly abstract, often nearly non-representational paintings are not as easy for the average American to embrace as jaunty songs sung in Sunday school, summer camp, and elementary classrooms. Scale that ranges well beyond the reach of our outstretched hands, hints of three-dimensional illusion that quickly contradict themselves and remind us of the canvases’ persistent flatness, and shapes that tantalize our desire for recognition more often than they fulfill it are qualities that make many viewers unfamiliar with modernism and its aftermath uncomfortable. Some will look at these paintings and find their size, their abstraction, and their almost wanton physicality threatening.
It’s always easier to walk away from images that threaten or challenge us than it is to grapple with them, puzzle over them, or just lose ourselves in their richness and beauty. But like all very good paintings, these reward openness, attention, and patience. Fields of color that appear homogenous and simple from a distance reward closer examination with hints at the archaeology of the many lower strata that led to their final appearance. Boundaries struggle to contain the forms and energies they nearly encompass, almost invariably failing to do so, surrendering to the pressures they can’t contain in a boundless varieties of ways.
River Songs: Shall We Gather
Oil on canvas 96" x 96"
©Dale Fairbanks 2005
Nothing is certain in these paintings but life and eagerness to take it on. The ground is always shifting. Just as color, surface, and texture are one thing from a distance and another up close, representation and abstraction toy with our human propensity to recognize things, name them, and attempt to construct of them a coherent narrative. In Shall We Gather, what were once perhaps reflections of trees in mirroring water become paired shapes, playing with likeness and difference. Rushing schools of forms that might have become fish squeeze and break through barriers that might have been rocks, or twist sinuously in invisible currents, while slashes of color and form might suggest turtles, seedpods, and other sources of life. Everything is in the process of becoming or dissolving, and ultimately, Dale keeps reminding us with the bravura of her handling and the sheer volume of pigment, it’s all paint.
The paintings’ titles, then, give viewers, especially those uncomfortable with abstraction, a way into these potentially daunting canvases. But it’s important to remember that the songs for which they are named are only doors, and that within are to be found a host of other delights and challenges both visual and visceral. Though all obviously painted by the same hand, mind, and heart, they are remarkably diverse paintings. In the language of modernism, there is a constant push-pull toward and away from figure/ground kinds of compositions to allover, color-field abstraction. Geometry and organic expression wrestle in each piece, one winning provisional dominance in this painting and the other reasserting its hegemony in the next.
In the realm of reference there is an even more emotionally charged tug-of-war ongoing, between whimsy and war. Dale is deeply connected not only to her own family, home, and friends, but to a larger world in turmoil and unrest. The three hurricanes she and her family have endured since returning to her Southern roots in 2003 surely play a role in the storms that lash the surfaces of these paintings, but she is constantly aware of the equally devastating forces that lash our country and others with social, political, and military conflict.
Mountain Songs: Go Tell It
Oil on canvas 84" x 135"
©Dale Fairbanks 2003
Not a polemicist, she takes no political stand in her paintings, but the evidence of her conscience, and her frustration with the limitations of human power in the face of nature and other people drive these paintings as much as her painterly skill and narrative inventiveness. As she says, “Whatever is churning inside me has to come out,” so it is no wonder that flag-draped coffins invaded the 7’ x 10’ field of the The Bear Went Over when she painted it in 2004. The largest and newest work in the exhibition, America the Beautiful, is not only a painterly tour de force, but a paean of both praise and longing, sung loudly and a little desperately for a nation and world that has seemed often of late under siege.
While pain, anger, and sorrow do play a role in Dale Fairbanks’ paintings, they are ultimately hopeful, filled much more with exultation than despair. It’s not the exultation of ease, however, but joy at the chance to join the fray. More often than the work of anyone else I know, Dale’s paintings remind me of Henry James’ famous statement of the artist’s calling:
“We work in the dark. We do what we can. We give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”