Sensuous Meditations: Recent Work by Bill Pura

Pura’s art attests to intense concentration and thought. There is in his work an intellectual quality, a meditative tone that is very attractive. His art does not bypass sensuality and feeling. Indeed, the exclusion of pictorial interest is redressed by restraint and balance, yet also an assertion, to arrive at a composition of pure form. Such deliberate procedure is at the opposite pole of expressionism. Here all is under control, but not irritably; a lyricism emerges to override the rigidities of abstraction. In some pieces there is a minimalist tendency, a risky venture which occasionally arrives at mere destitution. But more often Pura’s economy successfully conveys a calm and reassuring contemplative vein.

And yet the largest and newest piece in his recent exhibition at the Cardigan-Milne Gallery (February-March, 1984), called Spring Variations, gives off a resonance that is almost cacophonous. I have to admire the success of this effort even though my personal taste is for the more reflective works like Light Grey Ascending (1980), a largish oil in which some bright horizontals contrast with a very sensuous and vibrant grey field. I also like Diagonal Conjunction (1980), Vertical Calibration (1981) and especially the two Field Forms (1983). These paintings have colour, but convey a feeling of serene reflection. There is in them a kind of counterpoint and rhythmic contrast which perhaps only a musician could conceive. The uniformity of the predominantly grey diagonals is nicely broken by the blurred edges, and the sharp accents of colour are surprising and yet complementary, like the sudden eruption of a skylark’s song over the expanse of open prairie.

Bill Pura is a composer as well as a visual artist and he has specifically combined these approaches in a series of air brush drawings (Sequences) which attempts to fuse, in a sense, the two forms of expression. The drawings are meant to be complements to, not illustrations of, a musical score Pura created for the piano. In the concert, slides of each piece were projected in synchronization with the piano music. Perhaps Pura was inspired by Keat’s statement: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter.” Many of these visual counterparts, while stimulating to the eye, don’t relate adequately to the limits of the picture frame and suggest arbitrarily imposed sections of a more extended, suppositional field, the danger here being the lack of a centreing image. Perhaps the intention is to present a continuous flow, as in music, but other of the artist’s works achieve this more successfully.

The attraction for me of this kind of non-representational art is hard to define. It has the quality of music and corresponds largely to an inner state of mind. It is not tiresomely brash and badly painted like a lot of the action painting of the fifties. It derives from Mondrian and Tobey in spirit, not Kandinsky and Pollock. It is an art at once philosophical and yet jazzy, a tension of opposites.

Pura’s art is relentlessly thought out, a fusion of the quiet subtly punctuated by a discreet reverberance. The artist has produced a body of work over the last few years which reaches that level of accomplishment attained only by a discipline born of self-knowledge and rigorous dedication. ♦

Arthur Adamson is the visual arts editor of Arts Manitoba.