The Seasons Blend Together
Over the past forty years, Cambridge resident Michael Mazur has created pieces in a wide range of styles, including expressionism, realism, and-in many of his more recent works-abstraction. While most well known for his printmaking, his expertise in a variety of media has produced an extensive and diverse body of work. Currently on display at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts is his piece entitled Seasons (1999, oil on canvas), which consists of four square panels (60 inches x 60 inches) set approximately three inches apart from each other. As with many of his paintings created around this time, the subject matter has withdrawn from the realm of the descriptive and entered into that of abstraction. With Seasons, the title provides a point of reference for interpretation, and the abstraction becomes understood as an expression of the natural world through its seasons, which in turn become understood in correspondence with the four panels of the piece. As a result, the internal compositions of each panel and their relationships with each other emphasize contrast and opposition as much as they do harmony.
While the artist employs a kind of all-over composition within each panel (in that there is no single, identifiable focal point), each seems carefully constructed in terms of weight, tone, and motion in order to lead the viewer's eye naturally to the adjacent canvas, allowing the piece to maintain an overall cohesion despite the gaps between its panels. In some respects, this bears a similarity to Ellsworth Kelly's Spectrum V-a continuous piece over multiple canvases), but whereas Kelly's clean, uniform transitions (dictated by the contents of the frame) deemphas-ize the individual panels, Mazur's abrupt divisions reinforce the integrity of Seasons' component parts, drawing out the contrasts between them. By allowing each panel to bleed into the next, he calls particular attention to the divisions themselves, which gives the impression of nature as a continuous landscape seen through a series of windows. Also, where Kelly concerned himself more with the formal relationships of color, Mazur seems more interested in its associa-tive qualities and how particular combinations in particular contexts recall elements of reality.
Keeping this in mind, Mazur's first panel gives distinct impressions of summer. While its cool colors do not particularly express the heat one might associate with the season, their crisp, full tone recalls a summer-like quality of light. The pureness of the colors, especially the reds, greens, and the blues, embody the richness of nature at the height of the season. While Mazur's point of reference-if one, in fact, existed-has all but disappeared, the use of organic shapes, soft edges and the particular organization of color (greens on towards the bottom with blues above) suggest a landscape, calling to mind a garden pond reminiscent of Monet's water lily paintings. Several forms in the upper left even bear a close resemblance to lilies. Similarly, the red shapes in the lower left recall Monet's paintings of wild poppies. Whether or not this parallel was deliberate on the part of the artist remains unknown, but the organic forms and the associations between color and the external reinforce the sense of a natural environment. Furthermore, the numerous layers of paint, some opaque, some transparent, give the distinct impression of a reflection on water-a sense of wetness compounded by the liquidity of the paint in the places where it was allowed to run. Despite these suggestions of the real world, however, the artist achieves the expression of "summer" through a purely non-descriptive language, relying on the spectator to make the association between the colors and the season.
This is perhaps more effectively demonstrated in the adjacent panel, whose evocation of fall is largely dependent on the connection one makes between oranges, yellows, and browns and autumn leaves. The same concept can also be applied to the whites and grays of winter. With it in mind that the piece's title has pre-established the context of "the seasons", the spectator is led to search for connections between what he sees (the colors) and what he is intended to see (the seasons).
Reinforcing the evocation of fall, Mazur also introduces in this second panel several thin, dark, horizontal strokes which give the impression of leafless branches. These he carries through the following two panels to varying effect-in the "winter" panel, several curve downwards as if burdened by snow, while in the "spring" panel they appear in lighter browns and yellow-greens suggestive of new growth. The blues from "summer" continue into this panel as well, though they become warmer, softer, and less prominent, giving way to a gray that evokes clouds.
The "fall" panel is particularly demonstrative of the notion of contrast that pervades the painting as a whole. Mazur emphasizes the differences between each panel, and in dividing and juxtaposing them as he does, the artist, in a sense, decides what the spectator will compare to what ("summer" to "fall", "fall" to "winter", "winter" to "spring", etc.). The seasons thus become understood in contrast to one another. As Lévi-Strauss claimed, the mind operates by imposing opposition-the spectator sees what is unique to each season, each panel, because it is different from the ones preceding and following it. Particularly with "fall", however, the surrounding panels seem to spill inwards, breaking the frame and blurring the edges of opposition. Here especially, the role played by the separation of canvases in establishing this contrast becomes apparent-the edge of each frame offers a precise, equal division between seasons, much as a calendar does, but by establishing a literal continuity between frames (with strokes beginning in one panel and finishing in the next), Mazur emphasizes the imprecision and fluidity of the seasons.
In addition, the concept of time holds particular significance with relation to both the sea-sons and the piece as a whole. The changing of the seasons is inextricable from the passage of time. In the piece, the sense of this progression is captured through the movement and directio-nality of the artist's brushstrokes. With the mind's natural proclivity to follow motion, the process of trajectory tracking, the artist can easily guide the eye of the spectator. In the case of Seasons, the movement of the strokes leads the eye from one panel to the next, from left to right, in a sequential flow emphasized, again, by the permeability of the panel frames. Fur-thermore, in following the motion of the stroke, the viewer reconstructs the physical process of its creation, and in doing so accesses the sense of energy it expresses, making the piece highly indexical. The amount of energy seems to vary in the painting from panel to panel. In "summer" it evokes a vibrancy of life, in "fall": a rapidity of change, which is emphasized by a downward motion mirroring that of falling leaves. In "winter" it reflects a slowing down, a sense of hiberna-tion, which then returns to vibrancy in "spring" where it suggests rapid growth following a melt-ing or thaw. Also, as with De Kooning and Pollock, the space of the canvas recalls time via supe-rimposition; the overlap of strokes gives the impression of sequence. And while this sense of time is less directional than that evoked by the motion of strokes, it compounds the sense of change and progression embodied in the seasons.
Another significant element within Seasons is Mazur's use of thin, watery paint which, in many places, he allows to run. The effects of these drips vary from panel to panel. In "winter" they call to mind icicles, whereas in "spring" they are more evocative of rain and melting. One particular drip in the spring panel even bears a resemblance to a weeping willow. The presence of paint drips, here and echoed throughout the piece, suggest the mutability and impermanence of the seasons and, as with Pollock and Louis, demonstrate a degree of improvisation and freedom. Here, by relinquishing a degree of control the artist allows elements of nature into the artistic process, which only serves to aid in the his expression of the natural forces of the seasons.
While Seasons draws on elements of both abstract expressionism and color field painting, it falls into neither category perfectly. It seeks neither the purity of art that Greenburg sought in the elimination of external reference nor a pure evocation of the artist's mental state (though what role state of mind may have played remains uncertain) that Rosenberg may have championed. Instead it explores color relationships through their references to the external and seeks to express intangible qualities of nature through non-descriptive means. It examines both formal and expressive elements of the medium, and the result is a piece that so effectively evokes the essence of its subject matter that one forgets it is, in fact, an abstraction.
1,462 words / 5 pages
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