Linda Day "Swimming in Paint"

EXHIBITION CHECKLIST

1. Untitled, 1985Oil on paper, 22 x 30” Courtesy of David Scardino

2. Untitled, 1987Oil on canvas, 18 x 18” Courtesy of David Scardino

3. Untitled, 1988Oil on canvas, 12 x 12” Courtesy of David Scardino

4. Untitled, 1994Gouache & mixed media on paper 10 x 7.5” Courtesy of David Scardino

5. Family Portrait: C Medley 1995. Oil on canvas, 36 x 24” Courtesy of David Scardino

6. Untitled, 1995Gouache & mixed media on paper 11 x 11” Courtesy of David Scardino

7. Bubbles, c. 1995Gouache & mixed media on paper8 x 10.75” Collection of Marie Thibeault

8. The Goods, c. 1995Gouache & pencil on paper36 x 24” Courtesy of David Scardino

9. Untitled, c. 1995Gouache & mixed media on paper11 x 10” Courtesy of David Scardino

10. Untitled, c. 1995Gouache & mixed media on paper10 x 10” Courtesy of David Scardino

11. Tantrum, 1996Oil on canvas, 63 x 40” Courtesy of David Scardino

12. Diplomacy, 1998Acrylic & oil on canvas, 72 x 58.5” Courtesy of David Scardino

13. Slow Burn (Mandala), 1999Scotch tape & cigarette burns on paper 17 x 22” Collection of Kristin Calabrese

14. Domestic Construction, 2002Acrylic, paper, staples, luan, 10.5 x 9.25” Collection of Phyllis Green & Ave Pildas

15. Pulse #12, 2004-2005Acrylic on panel, 21 x 39” Collection of Jeff & Jocelyn Foye

16. Corona #5, 2005Acrylic on panel, 48 x 35” Courtesy of David Scardino

17. Corona Study #3, 2006Acrylic on panel, 12 x 12” Courtesy of Carla Mussa Muldoon

18. Chime Study #2, 2007Mixed media on paper, 10 x 10.25” Collection of Brian Cooper & Susan Logoreci

19. Pulse: Between/Beyond #12 2008. Acrylic on panel, 60.5 x 60.5” Courtesy of David Scardino

20. Pulse, 2009Acrylic on canvas, 60.5 x 60.5” Courtesy of David Scardino

21. Visions (Delhi Series), 2009Acrylic & gouache on Duralar19.5 x 21.5” Courtesy of David Scardino

22. Ganesch, 2010Mixed media on paper, 30 x 22” Courtesy of David Scardino

23. Suraj, 2010Acrylic, mixed media, wood, 60 x 71.5” Courtesy of David Scardino

ACKNOWLEDGMENTSThe University Art Museum is grateful to the CSULB College of the Arts for generous support of Linda Day: Swimming in Paint. We wish to give especial thanks to Linda Day’s husband David Scardino and her nephew David Flynn for their dedication to the project and innumerable hours of hard work. We also acknowledge the important partnership with the CSULB School of Arts, which was instrumental in bringing this exhibition to fruition. In particular, we wish to thank School of Arts Chair Christopher Miles; Visual Resource Specialist Jeffrey Ryan; Information Technology Consultant Patrick Mullen; and graduate students David de Boer and Dane Klingaman.

Our gratitude extends to the individuals who graciously loaned artworks to the exhibition. We give warm thanks to Linda Day’s many friends and colleagues for critical help in identifying and locating artworks for the exhibition. We also wish to call out several others for their generous assistance and support, among whom include Beth Jones, Lynda Jolley, and Diana Bowers at JayJay Gallery, Sacramento; Tiffiny Lendrum; Carla Mussa Muldoon; Donna Napper; David and Cathy Stone of Another Year in LA; Marie Thibeault; Devon Tsuno; and Catherine Turrill at California State University Sacramento. Thanks also go out to UAM Director Christopher Scoates and Associate Director Ilee Kaplan—and to all the UAM staff: Christina Alegria, Angela Barker, Shirley Brilliant, John Ciulik, Amanda Fruta, Elizabeth Hanson, Ilee Kaplan, Pet Sourinthone, Brian Trimble. We also recognize student preparators Remo Bangayan and Miki Fujieda for the extra effort they made.

UAM programs are made possible by the  Instructionally Related Activities Fund; the Constance W. Glenn Fund for Exhibition and Education Programs; the Bess J. Hodges Foundation; and the Charles and Elizabeth Brooks Endowment.

Linda Day: Swimming in Paint was researched and organized by UAM Curator Kristina Newhouse.

Cover Image: Linda D

ay’s painting studio with Pulse. All photos ©

Gene Ogam

i.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHYLinda Adair Day attended Manchester College, Oxford, England and received her Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Colby College in 1974. Day was awarded a Master of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute in 1978. In 2010, Day participated in a residency at Sanskriti Foundation in New Delhi, India that would prove highly influential to her practice near the end of her life. In 1989, Day was awarded a visual arts grant from the National Endowments for the Arts for her painting.

Day is represented by Another Year in LA in Los Angeles and JayJay Gallery in Sacramento. Recent group exhibitions include Tomorrow’s Legacies: Gifts Celebrating the Next 125 Years at the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; Linda Day, Joan Perlman, Hovey Brock at Jancar Projects, Los Angeles; Some Paintings: LA Weekly Biennial, Track 16 Gallery, curated by Doug Harvey; and LA: A Select Survey of Art From Los Angeles, Center for Contemporary Art, Sacramento. Day curated exhibitions at Long Beach City College, Jancar Gallery, Another Year in LA, and POST.

University Art MuseumCollege of the ArtsCalifornia State University Long Beach1250 Bellflower Blvd. Long Beach, CA 90840562.985.5761 • www.csulb.edu/uam

Linda DaySwimming in Paint

THE TRANSUBSTANTIATION AND TRANSCENDENTALEMPIRICISM OF LINDA ADAIR DAY'S ART

The Painter “takes his body with him,” says Valéry. And indeed, we cannot imagine how a mind could paint. It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings. To under-stand these transubstantiations we must go back to the working, actual body—not the body as a chunk of space or a bundle of functions, but that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement.

—Maurice Merleau-Ponty in “Eye and Mind,” 1964

Though he alluded in “Eye and Mind” to the historic shift from naturalistic representation toward the emergence of modernist abstraction, Merleau-Ponty no doubt contemplated a maker of more conventionally representational images than Linda Adair Day in her 33-year career as a professional painter. But such is not to say that what Day did as an artist did not precisely change the world into paintings via the embodiment and the evocation of what Merleau-Ponty called the “intertwining of vision and movement.”

The first time I saw Day’s Pulse series paintings, they reminded me of two senses of “being” I have navigated in specific circumstances. One I would liken to standing on a crowded subway platform as trains come whizzing through the station. The other is something like standing on the edge of a large body of water or a plain and looking toward the rising sun. The paintings do not explicitly reference these scenarios—and I do not honestly know if Day ever once in the studio thought of fast trains or dawn skies—but for me, these scenarios involve a heightened, palpable, awareness of being and of being in awe. Both are analogous to two distinct sublimes that somehow are

reconciled in Day’s shifting, gridded, bit-streamed arrangements of insistently opaque paint and coyly allusive, atmospheric glazing. What made the Pulse series so powerful is Day’s capacity to grasp for a kind of painting that, without picturing the world, offers something indicative of how we experience, process, and come to some sense of the world through our eyes, minds, and bodies.

It must be noted Day was an insatiable reader and bibliophile, a life-time note-taker and keeper of journals, and that she studied English Literature as an undergraduate before becoming a painter during one of modern painting’s most complicated and conflicted epochs. She brought her literary mind into a discipline in which the word “literary” was used by art critic Clement Greenberg to categorize the kind of content to beeschewed, as painting was better off referencing only itself. By the mid 1970s, when Day was a graduate student at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, the field of contemporary painting was grappling with its role and capacity vis-à-vis referentiality and representation, and comprised myriad move-ments, trends, and isms.

Day, who was fascinated with hybridity and the mutability of forms, genres, and styles, seems to have developed a hope, desire, and intention to get much out of painting despite its plurality and attendant debates about the merits and capacities of any particular approach. Years later, she described her practice as one that “fluctuates between pure abstraction and a form that borders on representation” and is “consistently concerned with the structure of things unseen–from thought, to emotion, to memory.”

“Because depth, color, form, line, movement, contour, physiognomy are all branches of Being,” wrote Merleau-Ponty, “and because each entwines the tufts of all the rest, there are no separated, distinct ‘problems’ in painting, no really opposed paths, no partial ‘solutions,’ no cumulative progress, no irretrievable options.” In light of the motifs and styles that marked major chapters in Day’s practice, this statement resonates. While physiognomy was to Merleau-Ponty a branch of Being, it was to art historian Meyer Schapiro something of an identifying marker of state of mind and being. Schapiro believed the shape and style within an artist’s work hints at how an artist lives in and with a set of circumstances. Merleau-Ponty’s branches of Being become for Schapiro responses to the experience of the personal, social, and cultural.

Schapiro’s approach provides a framework for considering Day’s artistic range as she shifted from an introspective and intimate to a more macro perspective; from a personally, bodily, viscerally grounded practice to one that dealt in the navigation or confrontation of external space;

from works that displayed simple relationships to those of complex organisms or organizations; and from efforts that are at times modest to those that seek the infinite.

Of course, an artist brings into the studio a body with shifting psyche and identity. This makes a difference. Is it an idealized body, temple, vessel of the soul? Is it the abject body described by Julia Kristeva, grappling with its vulnerabilities and raw presence? Is the body comfortable in its own skin? Is it sensual? Is it the denied body of the Cartesian or shamed body of the Puritan? Does a Vitalist spark of life animate it, or as Dave Hickey says, is it “electric meat?” Is it the body of the artist or citizen? For Day, the mind-body package she brought into the studio was a matter of shifting emphasis. In her work, there are moments of solitude and connectedness; bursts of humor, reverie, and uneasiness about being; flashes of enlightenment; and dollops of confusion. And while Schapiro might have been inclined, almost in a diagnostic manner, to have seen the shifts as indicators of her condition, it bears consideration that what Day experienced was tempered by choices of where, and into what, she and her work would go.

Day’s willed bringing along of the body and the letting loose of the psyche is best exemplified in artwork produced during and after travels in India

in 2010, loosely organized under the title Ou-Boum. She references the sound/word “ou-boum” E. M. Forster used in his novel A Passage to India to describe the terrifying echo that reverberates within the fictional Marabar Caves. In an artist statement, Day commented, “I have begun to see Forster’s ‘ou-boum’ as touching upon the sublime,” adding, “To simplify, the sublime is largely experiential and the result of an overwhelming event in which we, as participants, are physically and emotionally engulfed. Unable to define our own boundaries within the experience, we are at once filled with pleasure and terror.” However, the sublime experience at Marabar—of reverberating sound, in the dark, in a cavernous space—is not only an intense sensory moment, but also a moment of culture shock, as a foreigner becomes lost within the context of a larger narrative of cultural displacement and contradiction.

Day’s choice of such a narrative framing for the series; of indulging in a palette evoking the color she experienced “everywhere–and burned even brighter against the New Delhi smog;” and of traveling to India for inspiration (which Merleau-Ponty saw as the companion in the creative act to expiration in the “respiration of Being”) suggests she took her body with her into the practice of painting, intertwining her vision and movement into artworks that were culturally guided and in-formed, willfully chosen before intuited.

In her embrace of the overwhelming that defines Day’s Ou-Boum venture into travel and art making, it is possible to see how she aspired to get in over her head, to grapple with experience that, more than immersive, exceeded her understanding. Day’s overall practice appears to be founded upon phenomenological immersion and to

aspire to transubstantiation—the conversion of one substance into another. Yet Ultimately Day’s aspirations may be defined by what Gilles Deleuze called transcendental empiricism, in which new and changing experience actualizes new ideas and forces fresh ways of thinking. It was the transcendental empiricist in Day who delved into precisely what the Forster character fled when she ran from the cave and its “ou-boum.”

As transubstantiation and transcendental-empirical outcome, Day’s work is decidedly literary and asserts abstract painting might have something to say. They may indeed function, as the painter Barnet Newman said of humanity’s first vocalizations, as utterances that were deliberate, but were poetic before they prose. As I look back upon Day’s years of output—in the clusters that suggest crowds; in the cartoon thought-bubbles; in the bit-streams, blobs, piles, and upwellings; and in the stray words that turn up in her last works—I realize that as Day transubstantiated being into painting, she always had a goal of freshly addressing something with which she grappled. The artist had simply abstained from prose in favor of poetry.

—Christopher Miles,Summer, 2012

LINDA DAY: SWIMMING IN PAINT SEPTEMBER 8 - DECEMBER 9, 2012

Pulse #12, 2004/2005

Pulse, 2009

Corona #5, 2005

Ganesch, 2010

Suraj, 2010