by William Peterson
The striped format of Lisa Nankivil’s sumptuous abstract paintings evolved in 2004 while she was concentrating on certain figure-ground relationships in her work. “I was searching for ways to make the background as essential as the image,” she says. “I began to explore qualities such as motion, ascendance, and hierarchy through painted stripes, and eventually the image fell away leaving me to navigate the implications of the vertical and the horizontal by painting only the orientations with stripes.”
A phrase in the art writings of John Berger—“Home is where the vertical meets the horizontal”—helped her as she began to explore the physical, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of her discovery. “To me,” she says, “this phrase refers to a sense of spiritual well being: finding ground in which to prosper.”
The essential principle of variety within unity instills in these paintings a feeling of action inside stasis, of accumulation and of movement in place, like the regular linear rhythms of falling rain, waves along a shoreline, concentric tree rings, or the multi-colored mineral strata within the earth‘s surface.
The varied widths, colors, and textures among the paintings’ stripes—the variations of wash and scumble, wet and dry, and of blurred and hard-edged lines—create a richness of multiplicity within the relentless regularity of their structure. “In the times we live in,” Nankivil notes, “marks that are organic and searching, imperfect, but ever reaching, seem relevant.”
When she was awarded a Jerome Fellowship in 2005, she traveled to Venice to study the paintings of Tintoretto. “Sudden, brilliant, and astonishing,” is how Renaissance scholar Linda Murray describes the color in Tintoretto’s painting, “strong, singing, and unexpected in its contrasts and harmonies.” These same terms apply to Nankivil’s color. She has found a close kinship with Tintoretto in her stripe paintings, imbuing their tonal range with the luminosity of Murano glass and the chalky earth tones of weathering Venetian façades. And just as the church bells of Venice can invoke an unchanging and everlasting spiritual presence through the repetitive redundancy of their sonorous tolling, Nankivil’s rhythmic stripes imply both multiplicity and stasis, an eternal recurrence within the fullness of time.
About the author:
William Peterson is an art historian, critic, and editor. From the mid-1970s to the early 1990s he was the editor and publisher of Artspace magazine, a critical journal of contemporary art published in Albuquerque and later Los Angeles.