COURT OF THE WIND’S EYE

Artweek, Clayton Eshleman, American poet, essayist, translator and editor.

To be clear in reflecting on this art, let’s recall that our word window is based on Old Norse vindauga, meaning “wind eye,” and that curtain goes back to Latin cohors, or “court.” Window, as an eye in the wind, suggests an opening for air to enter. It is also, perhaps more immediately, that which translucently or opaquely seals us off from what thus becomes an “outside.”

Linda Jacobson’s recent artwork, on exhibit at Orlando Gallery, are receptacles for an otherness that consists of the layered suggestions of bars, panes and veils in which a continual inversion is at work. Landscape opaques the glass area of the painting and beams though the bars; the curtains instead of concealing, billow and register vista at the same time that heir dazzling emptiness, in a work called Rainbow Sortilege, folds as a veil across some of the richly hued outside. There are no fixed points in these paintings and pastels; rather, there is a gentle, rolling becoming-vanishing in which even the geometrical bars participate, as if they were giving way, slightly, so as to go with Jacobson’s vision of the world. It is a curvilinear vision, based on stream and flow, in which water is also fire and which the snake is also winged and female.

I fantasize, looking at these delicate gorgeous releases, that they were painted by Jacobson while she was riding a dragon. Her curtains -- or -- veils are deeply mysterious; they appear to have the freedom to pass in and out of the glass and bars, and in this sense the curtains take on an almost muscular, if diaphanous, life of their own, resembling exquisite cyclones or even, at times, weightless stalactites. And as their subtle “serpent power” flashes and vanishes in a ripple of ruffled edges, a very feminine sexuality suggests that as we the viewers reflect on these vistas constructions, no matter how far out we are taken, the movement is within.

Several very recent works, most notably Wind of Midnight and Fragmented Window, open up a new range of associations contained in window and curtain e.g., that as glass, the window can shatter, and that as material, the curtain not only can come loose (Jacobson’s’ curtains are seldom pinned back), but can fray, shred and rip. To bring in such associations raises the stakes, so to speak, for even as the previous pervasive undulation is curtailed, a new, more jagged and complex grid of imagery is suggested –-with the risk of losing the window-curtain balance. To rend a veil is traditionally an apocalyptic act, and as Jacobson’s colors move into greater and more glaring contrasts, as curtains and bars become a bunch of shreds and sticks in the rip of a clenched fist, we feel the onset of contrariety without which there is no development in art.