Et in Arcadia Ego:
Wonder, Darkness and Ferment in the Paintings of Victoria Lewis
“Wonder is the experience of self between establishing that a reality is thus and that it is different, the melting point between liquidity or evaporation and opacity or petrifaction. Confronting reality at this point it is the state of suspension between the grasped and the ungrasped.
Cornelis Verhoeven, The Philosophy of Wonder [1]
“What a wonderful feeling to be bowled over by the world.”
Giles Hayter, In Wonder of Nature [2]
For artist Victoria Lewis, the Canadian landscape has always been both inspiration and fundament. She seizes upon, collates and conflates aspects of the landscape so as to arrive at a still point: a singular image that speaks volumes about our symbiotic relationship with the natural world now so much at peril.
She is a cobbler of unforeseen fragments, salvager of verdant icons, and, not least, a savant at seeking out the underlying order of nature. Hers’ is a process of almost ritualistic fermentation. She is able to elicit and evoke the numinous (from the Latin word numen which means deity, divine will or divine presence) with a brushstroke. Clouds, lakes, forests, rivers and rocks all come under her purview and are transformed into living, energised icons rather than static entities.
There is a restless alchemy at work here, in that while each work is an assemblage of landscape elements, each is also a vital distillation of what has come under her purview. If the studio table is her laboratory and what breeds in her unconscious its base metal, well, Nature itself is her alembic and its myriad features the means of transmutation, the fertile stuff of her woven skein of quintessences, canvas by canvas.
This work is predicated upon an overwhelming sensitivity and fidelity to the landscape. Here is no sentimental panegyric but seized moments of lenticular grace. Lewis magnifies and grasps nature’s bounty as witness to its Otherness and, in this sense, her paintings demonstrate a strange kinship with both the early and the later routed works of Paterson Ewen; namely, they demonstrate a sense of startled wonder in the face of nature. In his early work, Ewen demonstrated an innate love for the sheer excrescence of pigment itself, its sensuous materiality. Later, in the routed works on wood, he betrayed a wonder – an immediately lived astonishment, unvarnished and just plain true – in the face of beguiling natural phenomenon like sundogs, thunderstorms, comets and such. Lewis shares both the former proclivity and the latter tendency towards awe.
Also, and further, as was the case with Ewen, wonder here is not some orthodox tendency (I mean, a transient psychological sensation) but one that has something altogether stranger and more primordial about it. When Lewis confronts nature as her own significant Other, we have a sense that her fascination with the order of things – nature in its lived immanence – is paramount. There is something akin to oceanic fusion when she seizes upon something in the landscape and embodies it in paint, brushstroke by brushstroke. She demonstrates a phenomenal receptivity to what the natural world, and specifically, the Canadian landscape has to offer.
Lewis avers that her paintings are constructed from pieces of other landscapes and views in the outside world. But they are, in themselves, profoundly introspective, and knitted together as though from whole cloth, optic-wise. They invariably point inwards, and draw the viewer inwards as well by virtue of an activating regimen of marks and the somatic weight of the brushstroking. Through the sovereign medium of the hand, she wants to give voice to the unconscious – and successfully expresses all that is in mind to say.
She has said:
“An unconscious impulse that at some moment alights upon an image or object that I am then compelled to look at is the spark that apparently begins each piece. Each final image presents an assembled, deceptive unity, the location of which is the mind of the viewer. Each work is also a compilation of colours and shapes, applied with more or less evident movement. The energy of the artist’s hand apparent in the marks on the surface of a work is primarily what attracts me. My preference is for rough and uneven surfaces.” [3]
Lewis’s active imagination is highly evolved and allows her to pivot between appraising her own work in objective fashion – and fusing with it in a purely subjective way. Lewis says further: “When I am painting, I am also a viewer of my own work. The painting process occurs as a series of alterations between my conscious, viewing mind and my unconscious, creating mind.” [4]
The presence of the unconscious in her work is undeniable, and in this sense, however much rapture informs it or is held in abeyance there for us, her viewers, there is at one and the same time a sense of abiding darkness. In this respect, the phrase that is also the title for the present essay seems entirely apt. When landscape becomes still life, as it is presented here, there is a sense of the memento mori hidden just below the surface of painting or, better, in plain sight. One might suggest that the flotsam and jetsam that float to the surface of her work – worthy relics of the object world, paradigms of the natural landscape – have also found their way to the surface of her consciousness where they are lent radiant form and cohesiveness. Celebration of nature becomes one with an assemblage of elements that bring sobriety, sensuous self-presence and emotional depth into play. The phrase is just, I believe: consider the Poussin painting of the same title and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited wherein the narrator, Charles Ryder, describes his room being decorated with a skull bearing the selfsame words Et in Arcadia Ego. [5]
Lewis is a conjurer of rare epiphanies in the language of her paint. She can summon up a thundercloud or a tumultuous body of water or the darkness on the face of the deep with rare and wonderful acuity. Her work possesses a brutal, Socratic honesty that bears the imprint of astonishment and ardour. A process of ongoing fermentation is integral to the sense of wonder and Lewis the painter ingests copious details from the lived world, and always seems to be open to a startled wonder in so doing. There is nothing jaded whatsoever in her approach or working methodology.
Plato and Aristotle both famously held that philosophy itself begins in wonder. Lewis has a very introspective streak, after all, and her body of work in all its various media over the last several decades, is inordinately thoughtful. Plato and Aristotle meant, of course, an immediately lived astonishment in the face of nature’s perplexities and its profound phenomenality and transcendence. Bertrand Russell reiterated this idea in claiming that philosophy “keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect”. We might well say that implicit to Lewis’s practice is an art of radical wondering.
Landscape began appearing in Lewis’s work soon after she left graduate school when she lived in Essex county, on the shores of Lake Erie. She set up her still life beside an eastern window in a house with a view of a tree, field and curve of the lane and included these elements of the actual outside world in the painting.
She says:
“When I moved into urban environments I replaced the window’s view with rural images placed on to the still life table in the form of photographs, paintings on china or art work. “North and beyond: exploring common ground” may be seen as an extension and magnification of these previous still life sections. And in that sense these paintings continue to develop my predominant artistic preoccupation, the view of the studio table, a nonlinguistic metaphor for the I.” [6]
If we share Lewis’s sense of wonder as we regard her paintings in the precincts of her studio or the exhibition hall, it is in part because her views encourage us to look at them from above, from the perspective of vertical depth. The dovetailing in her landscapes leaves no evidence of the collage technique so integral to her process. They are seamless in their mien – consummately unfettered wholes.
When I was a child, I spent the summer months with my mother and father in a large stone house on a lake. Lewis’s images bring back to me with simultaneity endless hours of watching changes in the sky with the clouds in transit and the play of changing light on the surface of the waters. Fork lightning in the sky over the lake instilled a sense of how implacable nature is, and how easily it induces in the eye of the beholder a dumbstruck sense of awe. Lewis’s works are far from conventional landscapes and they bring back into the present tense of seeing the things we have marvelled at and that have heretofore rendered us mute.
When I look at her paintings long and hard, I think of painter Tom Thomson, a worthy antecedent, after all. I am reminded of Thomson’s painting of birch trees in autumn. His seemingly rough-and-tumble evocation of the landscape is by no means orthodox. It is a glimpse of the ineffable, a seizing of the glory of nature within the prism of his optic in a single image. Lewis has spoken of her preference for rough and uneven surfaces, and Thomson shared that. An excess of red, orange, grey and pigments lends the painting corporeal weight and his brushstrokes are thick and voluptuous. Similarly, Lewis informs her work with translucency and opacity, weight and weightlessness, and streams of cascading rhythms. There is textural and chromatic plenitude in her work and a fully adult dose of the Uncanny. Like the two tree sentinels Thomson has situated in the foreground of his painting, Lewis particularizes radiance everywhere.
She uses the language of asymmetry and various internal markers to push us towards an experience of unity and oceanic fusion. Vicariously, in viewing her paintings, we live once again our childlike but pristine and still-largely-unjaded astonishment in the face of the primordial order of natural things.
James D. Campbell
Montreal, August 9, 2012
Endnotes
Cornelis Vehoeven, The Philosophy of Wonder, trans. Mary Foran (New York: Macmillan, 1972), p. 27.
See www.gileshayter.com. Giles Hayter is a contemporary artist, musician, composer, producer and part-time maths teacher who received his maths masters from Oxford.
Victoria Lewis, “Artist Statement”, Stratford, Ontario, March, 2012.
Ibid.
“Et in Arcadia ego” is a Latin phrase that most famously appears as the title of two paintings by Nicolas Poussin (1594—1665). These are pastoral paintings depicting idealized shepherds from classical antiquity, gathering around an austere tomb. Et in Arcadia ego means literally “Even in Arcadia I (am there),” “I” being death, and “Arcadia” being synonymous with a utopian landscape. I use it here as well for its more contemporary but, to my mind, associated, and pertinent uses. As mentioned above, Et in Arcadia Ego is also the title of Book One of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited in which the narrator, Charles Ryder, describes his room as decorated with a skull bearing the phrase. It also appears in Cormac McCarthy’s haunting novel Blood Meridian when the character Tobin informs The Kid that the phrase is the name Judge Holden has ascribed to his rifle, noting “A reference to the lethal in it.” Finally, for my purposes, it appears in the splendid and highly addictive 2007 video game BioShock. Arcadia is the name of one of its stages, specifically a garden area. One of the designers involved in the design of the level indicated the full line “Et in Arcadia Ego” was to be spoken by the antagonist, Andrew Ryan, but the level title remained even after that line was removed from the dialogue.
Victoria Lewis, “Artist Statement”, Stratford, Ontario, March, 2012.
Ibid.
Ibid.