Time, Tide, Tempest

TIME, TIDE, AND TEMPEST, the title painting of Linda Graham’s current [2005] exhibition, takes on the elements once again with the inescapable immediacy of exposed skin, chilled by an ocean-whipped wind. Once again the artist has comprehended sky, sea, and land, and spread them out on canvas in utterly convincing images that no one has ever seen before. Her representations of the movement of air, the turbulence of water, the resistance of earth in their eons-long fandango command our gaze. With brush and knife, she imitates and initiates unseen forces that trick the sky into shades of grey that are blue, that compel the sea to a riotous order, that charges water to burst white upon land. It is a lonely power to face and then to trace unstopping and unstoppable movement, sort of how Jehovah passed the time when “brooding over the deep.”

The fragile light of moonlit atmospheres is a universal trance- inducer, even among city dwellers. Linda Graham has distilled uncanny absorption in her night scenes. The subtle silver of NIGHT TIDE is a white that unifies her tri-partite vision of the Kerry coast. Subdued moonlight dwells within cloud, water, and sand. The viewer need not resist the spell of seamlessly linked streaks of cloud, mist-soldered horizon, and silvered surf upon an inclined beach. If the Ancient Mariner had washed up on Reenduff Strand, Coleridge would have lyricized the scene as Linda has painted it.

The artist bristles at being compared to William Mallord Turner, mainly out of modesty, but – like it or not – she is the Turner of Tralee, having weathered the elements she paints. Though she has not, as far as I know, lashed herself to a mast of a sailboat during a tempest as her idol did; nonetheless, she incorporates the perilous powers of Siren- serenaded seas – not to mention the ethereal blendings of pasteled light that accompany Irish sunrises – on occasion. The SUNRISE painting of this show is certainly Turnerish, but not the Turner of London or Venice. If he had ventured as far as Iveragh, however... The pregnant movement of molten light somehow inhabits this painting, just like it moves through a cloud-draped sunrise on the west coast of Ireland. Happily you do not have to get up before dawn to witness these gleams.

When asked to write a “few paragraphs” about TIME, TIDE, AND TEMPEST I was a bit dubious as I thought I had shot my word-wad on Linda’s previous Origin Gallery show; however, the new paintings took me over before I had a chance to demur. Her work has the power that Walt Whitman claimed for his poems: “Nature without check with original energy.” Once again I was flipped out of daily preoccupation and into a sounder reality.

James Bogan
Ozark Plateau
Missouri, USA

James J. Bogan is a Distinguished Professor of Art History and Film at the University of Missouri, U.S.A. He is one of the world’s leading authorities on William Blake and has several books and documentary films to his credit.

Time, Tide, Tempest