The Mysterious Rooms and Enigmatic Journeys of Diane Whitehouse

The painter Diane Whitehouse exhibited at Winnipeg’s Plug-In Gallery a series of eight canvases introduced by the title “Rooms, Journeys, Paintings”. A house in England, with uneven interior walls, a mirror on one wall reflecting the garden and human activity in the garden, acts as the central reference point for most of these images. In visual terms, through the eyes of Whitehouse as a painter, the room space (with the mysterious doubling of the mirror) suggests a puzzling metaphor for the enigmas of life. Individual titles such as Wall with Two Shadows and a Kite in a Mirror and Dark Mirror and Curtain offer guidance in approaching the images.

But for the viewer to effect a complete entry into these room spaces, it helps to refer to a previous group of paintings exhibited at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in 1982. These earlier works with titles such as Tomb and Passing of an Emperor—Catacomb, dealt with interior spaces of a more melancholy nature. Of these paintings the artist says, “The language that is in Roman and Early Christian painting was a source of inspiration for these works. I found within those ancient works a form with which I could express my own present…The pale and fading colours, the crumbling surfaces, the broken and disjointed shapes, the fractured and ambiguous spaces floating within the ancient crypts became the elements from which I structured my paintings.”

The pictorial space described in the “Tomb” series made use of shapes reminiscent of chipped and shattered surfaces of Roman wall paintings. These shapes moved in stately progression, in shallow space, mostly parallel to the picture plane. A growing dissatisfaction with the spatial suggestions of these paintings, and also with certain implications regarding the abstraction of the images, led to the figurative presences in the “Journey” series. Some viewers had regarded the “Tomb” paintings as gestural in their approach. This was a misreading of the images, and Whitehouse felt a need to emphasize the deliberateness of the drawn and considered shapes. As a transition series, the elegant and relaxed “Journey” paintings suggested formal solutions to the problems of space and abstraction as experienced in the “Tomb” paintings.

Two canvases in particular, A Walk from Bodini and Two Travellers with Green Dog and Cloud, form the transition, the journey from the tomb interiors to the room with mirror interiors. These two works are diptychs; the actual physical division between the joined canvases presages the vertical, drawn line that acts in the “Room” paintings as the corner join of the two walls. Both create a stage-set illusion of space, a partial evolution toward the more fully evoked interiors of the “Room” pieces. And with equal intensity, these two “Journeys” begin an emotional transition from the stately melancholy of the “Tomb” series to the beautiful and poetic quality of the “Rooms”. With formal change, the emotional quality of the images shifts simultaneously. Whitehouse’s artistic discovery of the corner of the room offers, at the same time, the formal means coupled with the poetic content of the enigmatic mirror. The image from life, insignificant in its real-life context, becomes meaningful when given painterly form.

What happens in these rooms? How is life lived in these interior spaces? They seem to be havens, with the implication that a haven is needed. A slight sense of threat is also communicated, particularly in the heaviness of the darkest blue-grey shapes. (Although dark in the context of this group of paintings, they are still relatively light in value.) To a great extent colour defines emotional response in these works—close value, high key mother-of-pearl pinks, tans, violet pinks, light greens, and mostly, an incredible number of blue-greys and green-greys. The subtlety and infinite variations in the slight chromatic changes in these greys is sensually overwhelming and seductive. In the most lyrically beautiful of the “Room” series, seven violet-red calligraphic marks float downward in a blowing curtain dream titled Dark Mirror and Curtain. In Tree Painted on a Wall and Two Trees in a Mirror, in an otherwise close-value mother-of-pearl tonality, the surprise of a dark green slightly diagonal line occurs near the bottom edge of the canvas; representationally the line of the floor meeting the wall, emotionally, due to the colour, a shocking gash.

In surface texture, these are the works of a painter’s painter. Watery washes predominate, enlivened with colour scumbled over small and exquisitely placed areas of thickly brushed paint, heavily impasto. Vestigial evidence of reworking and rethinking remains in the final statements like the mark of a foot on the earth. Spontaneous though the paintings may appear, these ‘tracks’ give evidence of a spontaneity subjected to analysis and searching study. In Room in a Mirror with Wall, for instance, a small grey L-shape is covered with scratched irregular crosshatching, incised into the paint with a marvellously restrained eloquence.

The farthest incursions into the realm of figuration would seem to occur in Wall with Two Shadows and a Kite in a Mirror and in Goodbye to the Cat and the Lady with a Big Stick. Particularly in the latter, a shape, almost more symbol than image, acts as a condensed and vivid self-portrait, capturing the gesture and stance of the artist herself. In the former, the most beautiful and poetic of the “Room” series, a human shape tilts very slightly backwards, as if menaced by the central diagonal non-kite-shaped kite, which advances to almost touch the figure’s ‘face’.

In all the “Room” paintings, the sense of lived-in interior space encourages the viewer to participate in the suggested room space. The greatest illusion of depth is created in Corner Mirror, by means of the more sharply delineated mirror shape. The mirror is clearly defined on all four sides, making the spatial reference more exact and precise, a more consistent illusion. This room is a sun-lit space, suggested by a small, pale, peach-coloured shape floating in the cool, pale grey-green room.

Maurice Tuchman, writing about the American painter Richard Diebenkorn, has identified Diebenkorn as “an artist whose vision is directly tied to the perceived world”. This could be said as well for Whitehouse. If we think back again to the earlier “Tomb” series, the “Rooms, Journeys, Paintings” are no less concerned with the form of painting, but they are more insistent on what Tuchman, again in relation to Diebenkorn, has referred to as “a heightened ‘situational’ characteristic”. The images express their urgency through the formal language of painting, but they are not primarily about formalism. They deal with intimately human concerns; the room spaces which serve as stages for the banal routine of everyday domesticity, the small duties and conversations which form so much of each lifetime. More rarely, the room spaces contain life’s most intensely emotional moments. The mirror holds and reflects these moments but offers no explanation; the reflection is both a replica and an illusion. Whitehouse creates a mystery parallel to the mystery of those encounters in life which move us most. ♦

Sheila Butler is a Winnipeg painter whose most recent work was exhibited at the Thomas Gallery in June.