Watching the Skies

Art in America, April, 2000 by Lilly Wei

These drawings--abstractions that have become proven representations of reality, existing at the nexus of the imagined and the real--are self-sufficient works of art and not preparations for paintings, although some of the images have also been used in paintings. Made from watercolors, colored pencils, Aquacryl, raw pigments, silver paint, gold leaf and powdered metals on handmade paper or gessoed panels, they are evidence of Rockburne's continuing investigation of structure, line, color, shape, light, and of materials and methods. They also embody a synthesis--based on the artist's temperament and training--of the traditional and the innovative and her rigorous, unrelenting search for perfection of her craft. In her reconciliation of mind and matter, imagination and reality, the physical and metaphysical, Rockburne has been using an increasingly expansive formal language, an increasingly chromatic complexity to visualize her speculations. In this age of infinitely expanding systems of reproduction, to picture the cosmos through painting might be considered irrelevant, but it is not. Many of us are still seduced by material pleasures and meticulous, at times even miraculous, craftsmanship, by sensuality and intelligent, intelligible beauty, by the illuminations of artistic invention and intuition. In choosing the cosmos as her subject, Rockburne is guided by a passionate curiosity and by an esthetics of the factual. Her work affirms the age-old concept that a singular, simple beauty governs the structure of the universe, that physical laws are also spiritual and that a profound elegance shapes both.

[1.] Rockburne attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Montreal throughout her childhood and early teenage years and studied at the renowned experimental arts college at Black Mountain, North Carolina, in the 1950s.

[2.] As a child, Rockburne owned a flipbook that showed the bridge breaking up. She recalls wondering about the cause of the bridge's destruction. Later, learning that the cause was resonance, she was led to think about resonance between the planets, atmospheric pressure and a scientific version of the music of the spheres, as well as string theory and its attempt to describe the beginning of the universe as resonance.

"Dorothea Rockburne: Ten Years of Astronomy Drawings 1990-2000" was seen at Lawrence Rubin Greenberg Van Doren Fine Art in New York [Mar. 1-Apr. 1]. Other works by Rockburne were included in "Six Abstract Artists at the Millennium" at David Dorsky Gallery, New York [Jan. 30-Apr. 23].

Author: Lilly Wei is a New York-based critic and curator.