Critical Writings

By Anthony Haden-Guest, 2020

Donna Isham has two principal ways of making her paintings. Her first is to plunge into the mainstream of Abstract Expressionism and working within this tradition, she has made pieces that owe nothing to earlier pairs of eyes, except a gestural ambitiousness, a willingness to go for it. Desert Abstract, the slathery acrylic-on-canvas, strikes me as a persuasive example of this aspect of her practice and I am impressed that, unlike her AbEx forerunners, who tended to work their hits, get some mileage out of them, Isham seems to have felt no need to explore this particular success. 

Motion, one series of Isham’s pure abstractions, includes such strong and strikingly distinctly different canvases as Black Swans and Angry Sad Mad and Separated from Families During Lockdown and the name of the series directly reflects the drive that powers her work. “For me, I paint to create emotions in people,” Isham says. “To make them step outside of whatever their day to day life is. And whether it’s a historical context or whatever is going on with the pandemic now. It’s really important for me that people have another viewpoint. other than the Internet, other than social media. There’s a tactile sense, there’s a feel one gets from pigments on canvas, that is indescribable. When I listen to music, I cry, it’s very emotional for me, and it’s the same when I see a beautiful painting.” 

In another body of Isham’s work abstraction co-exists with figuration and the figurative element can be co-equal, as in SHE, a set of paintings she developed from actual images, both live and photographic. The work she made on canvas in charcoal and acrylic that are part of her series, Fragment, are largely figurative, being wholly based on the naked human body, but with its parts fantastically rearranged. Quite often though the figuration becomes an elusive partner. Moondance, for instance, may first strike you as a pure abstraction, but then you will pick up on the undulant graphic outlines, and, whoops, a woman dominates. And Restless is a painting I particularly admire although – or because - from the long scarlet slashes, shaped somewhat like flames, to the long bone-white presence that I take to be a naked woman’s back.

In the sometimes buried nature of her figuration Isham has Ab Ex precursors, most notably perhaps de Kooning, indeed she derives pictorial energy from our human predilection for finding faces and forms in such naturally occurring abstractions as shadows, clouds, stained walls. The strength of Isham’s abstraction/figurations owes a great deal to the flexibility of her procedure. When she began working on. Moondance, for instance, she had intended to make a pure abstraction. “But I was looking at it … and wait! There’s figuration in here,” she says. “And to me it was a woman, dancing in the moonlight. And that expression of freedom was so palpable that I thought, oh well, I’ll paint it.”

This openness, an appetite for risk, is fundamental to Isham’s practice. “For me it’s a dialog with the canvas,” she says. “The canvas interacts with me. And the things that come out of the canvas. While I have certain things planned or I’ll have a color palette planned, I’m going to do oils on this or I’m going to do a combination of work, but at the end it’s always like, oh, wow!  It really is a collaboration between me and the canvas.”

Accidents can be crucial, but so can pursuing a program and another Isham canvas was born from a specific search.  She had been focusing her attention on a not uncommon, but always slightly jarring experience, typically in the heart of a big city, which is to have your attention caught by a face in the crowd, a face you half think you know, whose eye you catch, with whom you can have a short, wordless connection.  And Isham was resolved that this uncanny feeling would be something she would capture without recourse to images, a pure abstraction, just shapes, colors, lines. And Strangers Passing by Seem Familiar, the end product, does indeed deliver the looked-for sense of uncertainty.

The title of the piece should also get a nod. Many artists are given to calling their work Untitled, meaning nothing needs to be added here. Other artists, though, see titling as an opportunity, as with Marcel Duchamp’s tongue-in-cheek drollery with Fountain and LHOOQ. Very occasionally, as with Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, a title will define a piece, furnish meaning and the title of Strangers Passing by Seem Familiar is certainly an added value here. Isham has a gift for titles.

There are no such seductive ambiguities in Isham’s other path to artmaking, which is wholly figurative and here too women dominate, particularly in the sequence called, yes, Women. The work surfaces a question. Do woman artists portray women differently? Well, of course they do. But these differences – and here another.  Of Course is demanded – are themselves different. Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits do not ignore the monobrow, the vestigial mustache, but they are unflinching rather than self-pitying and have enthroned Kahlo alongside Warhol as one of the most hugely reproduced self-portraitists of the period. I cannot think of a male photographer – even the inventive Richard Avedon – who could have/would have taken Annie Leibovitz’s shot of the pregnant Demi Moore for Rolling Stone. Which brings me to Donna Isham’s Women.

These are essentially graphic works. No textured pigment or other painterly flourishes are allowed to distract the viewer from the subject matter, which is a sequence of portraits of a number of women. They are clearly a diverse group, pictured in their prime, and they are shown full-faced, looking directly at the viewer. They are not depicted as soliciting our attention though, being unsmiling, but contained rather than indifferent, and absolutely not out to charm the viewer. One gets the sense that this is indeed the Female Gaze, and that these women are dispassionately taking the measure of the onlooker - Yes, us - which, I feel, is pretty much what Donna Isham intends.