GRAY presents the work of American artist Evelyn Statsinger (1927-2016) in the solo exhibition Currents.

Organized with writer and curator Dan Nadel, Currents presents Statsinger’s paintings and drawings from the 1980s and 90s, a period in which she developed her most immersive and otherworldly compositions.

“[For] fifteen years, I have intently watched [the] daily life of plants and animals in both the forests and the fields… Bits and pieces of specially observed things begin to represent the whole, and juxtapositions of real things make imaginary combinations. Combinations are open and ambiguous to interpretation, so that the viewer may wander in the same state of grace as the painter.”

– Evelyn Statsinger

Tides

By Dan Nadel

Statsinger also mentions that this area was all dune land at one time, and that it was all Lake Michigan, and that it still has “diatomaceous earth around and so forth.” Diatomaceous earth, a term Statsinger deploys so casually that she might’ve invented it, is a sedimentary rock composed of the fossilized remains of algae. Relatively soft, it can be crumbled to a fine powder. It is an everyday reminder of the velocity of time on the earth—slow time, something built only to crumble, the same something she lived on. Moving dunes move with the wind, of course, and some are more precarious than others; pine trees help to stabilize the dunes and slow their strolls. The landscape around Allegan is a network of sand and shrubbery that has morphed into a kind of maze over time. There couldn’t be a better summary of her work since the 1972 purchase of the Allegan property: tender snapshots of time and movement that evoke nothing human or immediate, recalling the title of John McPhee’s profound book about geology—practical, philosophical, and, in a sense, theological—Annals of the Former World.

I arrive at John McPhee from two directions. The first is my grandmother, who kept a complete set of his books just to the left of a comfortable chair in her living room. She, like Statsinger, was a Jewish woman born in the 1920s. Pictures of the artist in the 1940s and 50s—her hair coifed short, her smile wide—remind me even more of my grandmother, who was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, and longed to live in New York. Born in Brooklyn as a somewhat frail child, Statsinger took yearly sojourns to the countryside with her family, leaving an indelible impression on her:
 

We used to go to the country once a year. And we’d leave at night, and I remember I thought I was going to the end of the world. It was dark, and I was sitting on somebody’s lap and, you know, eventually falling asleep, and in the morning, I woke up, and I could hear birds. And I went for a walk, and there was this pond. It was one of the most beautiful days, and the birds were singing, and the butterflies were flying, and all of the sky was very blue and so forth. And I remember thinking, here was—and the crickets were all around, and I remember thinking here was everybody. Everything was doing something, but what was I—what was it could I do? What was it I could do? And I solved it by saying, “I could think,” which really surprised me.[iii]

Maybe with Allegan the artist found a way back to a place where she could think, or maybe, as a kid raised in the city, she longed for the country.

Like so many other artistically inclined Jews of her generation, Statsinger attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan. After graduating in 1944 she did a six-month stint at the Art Students League of New York, then bounced to the University of Toledo for a year, during which she visited Chicago and was entranced by the painting collection at the Art Institute. She had a friend at the School of the Art Institute (SAIC) who wanted some company, so Statsinger sought admission and a year’s credit and graduated in 1949. After that—save a few years in Southern California, Mexico, Japan, Allegan, and some rather astonishing world travels—she made the city of her alma mater her home.

The young Statsinger found support from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in particular. As a juror for the 1950 edition of Exhibition Momentum, the architect was impressed by her work and recommended it to his students, some of whom made purchases, and to gallerist Katharine Kuh, who spread the word about the unusual young artist. Statsinger found a creative community among her fellow SAIC graduates and later still a community of artists and instructors including Leon Golub, Cosmo Campoli, Miyoko Ito, and Barbara Rossi.

She was also affected, as many were, by Kathleen Blackshear, who taught her students to not only look at art globally but also on the same register as artifacts of the natural world. Statsinger married Stanley Cohen, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Nuclear Studies of the University of Chicago and later the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, where he developed Speakeasy, an early and highly influential computer-programming language.

At one point the character Glenn Ganges reads a sign along Interstate 196 in Allegan County, a sign that the artist Kevin Huizenga passed on his frequent drives from Grand Rapids, where he attended college, to his family home in the southern suburbs of Chicago, forging an identity through patterns and land in the process. In the second half of The River at Night, Ganges reads Annals of the Former World, wherein McPhee focuses for a spell on James Hutton, an eighteenth-century medical doctor who is thought to have made the first geology-based claim that the earth might be more than five thousand years old. Indeed it took some personal might to proffer a beginning that did not begin as the Book of Genesis would have it. “Instead of attempting to imagine how the earth may have appeared at its vague and unobservable beginning,” McPhee writes, “Hutton thought about the earth as it was; and what he did permit his imagination to do was to work its way from the present moment backward and forward through time.”[iv] Hutton imagined the time it might take to form the earth, and on March 7, 1785, he read the resulting dissertation to the Royal Society:

"We find reason to conclude, 1st, That the land on which we rest is not simple and original, but that it is a composition, and had been formed by the operation of second causes. 2dly, That before the present land was made there had subsisted a world composed of sea and land, in which were tides and currents, with such operations at the bottom of the sea as now take place. And, Lastly, That while the present land was forming at the bottom of the ocean, the former land maintained plants and animals . . .  in a similar manner as it is at present. Hence we are led to conclude that the greater part of our land, if not the whole, had been produced by operations natural to this globe; but that in order to make this land a permanent body resisting the operations of the waters two things had been required; 1st, The consolidation of masses formed by collections of loose or incoherent materials; 2dly, The elevation of those consolidated masses from the bottom of the sea, the place where they were collected, to the stations in which they now remain above the level of the ocean. . . .

A theory is thus formed with regard to a mineral system. In this system, hard and solid bodies are to be formed from soft bodies, from loose or incoherent materials, collected together at the bottom of the sea; and the bottom of the ocean is to be made to change its place . . . to be formed into land. . . .

Having thus ascertained a regular system in which the present land of the globe had been first formed at the bottom of the ocean and then raised above the surface of the sea, a question naturally occurs with regard to time; what had been the space of time necessary for accomplishing this great work? . . .

We shall be warranted in drawing the following conclusions; 1st, That it had required an indefinite space of time to have produced the land which now appears; 2dly, That an equal space had been employed upon the construction of that former land from whence the materials of the present came; Lastly, That there is presently laying at the bottom of the ocean the foundation of future land."[v]

“Menace against a tranquil natural background” could mean many things. One of them might be the East Asian autumn olive trees that she planted, which are known for their dual-colored leaves and invasive growth. Another might be the looming threat of nuclear destruction that hatched, in part, in the program that became the Argonne National Laboratory. Still another could be a couple of city slickers—Evelyn still with a detectable Jewish-Brooklyn accent—erecting their fortress on what used to be underwater.

When Statsinger writes elsewhere that the title of her work Random Paths is “a metaphor for the life of the mind, a kind of strolling through the actual present landscape, as well as remembered landscapes,” such a statement could be taken as a Surrealist prompt. And she did indeed like Surrealism—Chicago was practically suffused with it, after all. It is ultimately neither the Europeans nor their local descendants to whom Statsinger is most aligned, however. When one imagines a painter of nameable things in Chicago, she is closer to, say, the process-oriented pictures of apprehension by Terry Winters; the post-1960s organism-oriented Lee Bontecou; or, to take a more contemporary example, Edie Fake’s desert-scape paintings (and of course there are the emotive, biomorphic abstractions of the aforementioned Miyoko Ito). And she is closest of all, I’d argue, to what Hutton imagined, McPhee wrote, and Huizenga drew: a walk through the present landscape to find the different terrains, time zones, and views.

This process meant that Statsinger would find an image by arraying her vocabulary of marks and forms—tonal clouds, buttercups, threads, stems, fossils, shells, husks, ripples—but never in a way that any of these things become individually identifiable. Instead they interlock and accrete with the texture of graphite on paper or oil on canvas. This accumulation vibrates like the sway of pine trees, pleasantly and perceptibly altering one’s view. The motion is meditative, and the drawings ask of the viewer the same absolute and unwavering focus that the artist gave a rock on a beach. Because of her precision the images are crisp but remain ambiguous. They are pictures of something, that is. Perhaps they are what guides us into the spiral, the sensation of ever-present time and matter. But Statsinger was not an image maker per se. She was sui generis and focused—perhaps most of all, once she’s walked and imagined—on touch. Touch rocks, touch shells, touch paper, touch canvas. It’s touch that brings me back and allows us all to enter that “state of grace” she so loved.

For Suellen Rocca and Karl Wirsum, with gratitude.

D.N.