Gus Blaisdell Collected

Passion’s Pine Breeze: The Paintings of Terry Conway

∙ 150 ∙ Passion’s Pine Breeze the Paintings of terry Conway ■ Poetry and vehement feeling are but two ways of entering Terry Conway’s lyrically formidable paintings. What is it, the heart? It is the sound of the pine breeze there in the painting. Pellucid; utterly transparent while attaining astonishing depth; a surface so simple that the reader seems to memorize it upon first reading: here, in this rare moment,clarity,not obscurity,becomes profound,and thus eludes us.The meaning we would deepen recedes even as we sink toward it. By plain words are we carried away, immersed in the hushing motions of the pine breeze, in the periodic quiet of the beating heart, and in the intelligible silence that is the heart of painting.Within the compass of words any child has mastered, Ikkyū spontaneously gives formal expression to one great moment of awakening. It seems impossible that there could be a simpler poem of greater power. Passion is a kind of suffering few of us bear. Where passion is an affliction , like anger or unrequited love, it takes great composure to maintain something so intense. An even greater mastery is required to articulate and display such feelings in all their elementary wonder—to analyze the self even in the process of exposing it, providing the partially dismantled heart with just enough substance so that it can stand alone translucently, forced thereby into depicting simultaneously its beauties and its faults. Call this the condition of opalescence, because an opal’s beauty is as great and as fragile as its flaws are deep. It is within this condition and out of its spectrum that Terry Conway commonly achieves his faultless paintings. Terry Conway, Untitled, 1978, acrylic and charcoal on canvas, three panels, 72 in. × 24 in. Private collection. 152 ∙ on painting Imagine someone in the grip of a great passion who, even on the point of being swamped by it, is able to remain self-possessed enough to turn away momentarily from the cause of that passion and, while fully maintaining his (say) towering rage and completely comprehending within it the original grievance, turns to you and finds room for you, embracing within his passion your own wonder at it.You are drawn in; your furious friend struggles to maintain the fierce composure of his mood, which wavers, threatened by its encompassing acknowledgment of your presence. Compassionate, dauntless, nearly indomitable, and sometimes beyond endurance or control, his or our own, Conway’s pictures seem to exclude everything that has not been already absorbed into their interior ardency. We are reminded by them of a mutual contingency—there is no need for either of us to be here—a mood which underscores the evanescence of emotions , causing the depiction to waver, as if a consequence of acknowledgment is discovered in the unraveling of monstrous feeling. Capable of remaining cool in the midst of spiritual conflagrations or fiery in the calming subsidence of torrential confluences, composure of this intensity testifies to a composition beyond disdain, contempt, and condescension. This is the point at which excellence and flaw can flare up incandescently. Here, for example, rage and grief and anger, vengeance and sorrow, and pride and power all fuse, embodied and incarnate in the great sweeps of Conway’s gestures. Conway’s pictures combine the look of willful—at times heedless; at others, ruthless—spontaneity with a mastery of value. Like Ikkyū’s poem, the wonder is that something so powerful can be attained on an angry surface, thin and light. As they spread across the surface his shapes often remind the viewer of flayed skins that have been mysteriously absorbed until they are now identical with the surface upon which they were laid. With the aqueous, fiery sibilance of the paint itself as it forms diaphanous shapes, spills and pools of color, making the picture as a whole—right now, hiding nothing, marking and remarking the process, here identical with the result—these pictures achieve a contradictory presence, as they seem both to assert and deny the importance of the very stuff necessary to their materializations .They are as emotionally pure and evanescent as pictures can be without becoming transubstantiated into their content.Their achievement is to demonstrate that a painting can dematerialize without having to reduce itself to the literalism of photographic conditions. Momentary, indeed, but the moment of these paintings is anything but photographic. They have passion’s...