‘Consumed with that which it was nourished by’: Will Gorlitz's Literary Landscapes

PETER O'BRIEN fConsumed with that which it was nourished by': Will Gorlitz's Literary Landscapes A watery, vertiginous landscape. No horizon line, other than the edge of the canvas, to delineate an upper boundary or localize the purview of the gaze. Our feet all but capable ofwalking upon and through this constructed sea-edge. Transient intellectual lichens - twenty-five sheets of paper ,coloured by word and image -languishing for a time on the rocks and on the skin of the water, yet even now being absorbed back into nature. An in~istent colouringby nature of these human pages already underway; and a tentative colouring of nature by the papery tools of hand and mind. Yellow flowers -long-stemmed freesias - perch like little feet on the surface of the pages. Each rectangular leaf a raft of fleeting information. And env'eloping all this, s'eeping through the scene before us, is the materiality of paint that has ushered these things into existence. Small hatch marks that fashion and open up a site of distance and definition. The gallery's lighting reflected in narrow shards off the individual bristle strokes of the brush. Is it possible to separate this visual image from language: both the texts that we use to explain this expanse to ourselves and the words that the painted pages conjure and intone? Is it possible to gather this work into our senses ('music heard so deeply / That it is not heard at all, but you are the music / While the music lasts/ said T. S. Eliot in 'The Dry Salvages/ lines 210-12) before language gathers us and defines our response? Is it even desirable to remove words, those engines of thought, and their attendant historical heft from our visual apprehension of an abstract turn of colour or an object we see presented on the surface before us? Are we so contaminated by words - flirtatious at times, lugubrious at others; these strange things that are always desirous of definition, are forever tapping 'us on the shoulder - that we can only absorb the world's forms through these little knuckled marks on paper? This work, a random carpet of textual influence and image, needs words, seems to revel in their intervention, their meddling. Perhaps it's not so much 'contamination' as it is 'colouring.' Litteratus with Flowers, like many of Will Gorlitz's paintings and installations, records the half-audible conversation between the represented image and the word-saturated language that we permit ourselves to be formed by. The painting was originally part of an installation that consisted of six paintings: four large paintings each measuring 201 em x 267 cm (the other three were Litteratus with Flames, Litteratus with Vessel, and Litteratus UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 66, NUMBER 2, SPRING 1997 404 PETER O'BRIEN Will Gorlitz, Canadian (1952-) Litteratus with Flowers, 1989 oil on canvas, .201 x 267 em Farulty Club, University of Toronto with Fruit); two smaller, narrow paintings measuring 201 ern x 97 em (Litteratus with Concealed Face and Litteratus with Face Concealed); and book covers hot-pressed by sueh words as JEXILE' and 'REFUGE' that were placed on the wall on either side of each painting/ the entire construct forming a sort of expansive library of two books. The two narrow paintings - each of which showed two stacks of books below and above two hands holding, 'like quotation marks,' an opened book on which was pictured a handconcealed face - functioning as monumental book spines (Gorlitz, Conversation ). The installation was not so much about literature and its methodological presence. Rather, the work was litteratus: a more abstract, generic understanding of the way words form themselves into and out of narrative, commentary, and theory. This specific painting, Litteratu5 with Flowers, is Originally, Garlitz had titled this collection of paintings CatJuzrsis, and this individual painting Catharsis with Flowers. He now considers the original title 'a mistake'; the group of paintings 'was not meant to be a catharsis on my part' and the 'convoluted sense of humour' of the original title, he thinks, just gets in the way. Gorlitz quotations are taken from a conversation with the artist, August 1996. WILL GORLITZ 405 but one page of...