An artist falls in love with Iceland

Scandinavian Review, Autumn 2003 by Perreault, John

WHY DO SOME OF US ARRIVE IN REYKJAVIK and suddenly feel at home? It doesn't make any sense. The artist Westman, who is as much a New Yorker as this writer, fell in love with Iceland. So much so that Iceland changed her art.

From her Boston-based, extremely popular illustrated books (The Bean and the Scene, A Beacon Hill Christmas, Leah Komaiko's I Like the Music) through her tenure as a much admired New Yorker cover artist, Westman has gained much acclaim for her charming and insightful art. Although her New Yorker covers did not illustrate particular articles, they certainly embodied seasons and times and places. Her best-selling cover reprint is a golden autumn tree in front of a spread of Upper West Side buildings. But also very popular are her flower district cover and her three musicians.

Illustration occupies a peculiar place within art. It is commonly relegated to a lowly status, if not totally denied. What is the reason for this? To illustrate something usually means to simplify, advertise or visually comment upon some pre-existing text. Equally as important as the pre-existence of the "meaning" of the artwork is that it is created by commission.

But one could say that pre-existent meaning and commission are the conditions of most art before the 19th century. Romanticism made art-on-speculation, personal expression and images removed from texts the norm.

Modernism favored the freedom of the artist even more than romanticism.

Deep within postmodernism or whatever has followed it, we now look at art with a more cynical eye. Even the most abstract artworks can be said to illustrate some text or another, often concealed from the layperson. The text is most likely something learned in graduate school or gleaned from skimming art criticism. Furthermore, most art is made for a particular taste-market. Whereas this is not strictly speaking working on commission, since a payment is not guaranteed, it is, as it were, commission-by-hope or, as I like to think of it, making art while looking over your shoulder.

Westman, in any case, has moved away from illustration per se to more free-floating representations, often verging on the abstract. She has moved from the page to the wall; from the magazine or the book to the gallery and the museum.

A changing of the guard at the venerable New Yorker may have been the immediate cause of a reexamination of goals, but Iceland was the inspiration. After an accident that left her temporarily bedridden, someone brought her an article about the heroic citizens of Heimaey. Heimaey is the largest of the Westman Islands off the coast of Iceland proper. The people of this rocky, fishing outpost, suddenly faced hot lava and the threat of being buried alive when a volcano unexpectedly erupted. The flow that threatened to close the all-important harbor was stopped by fire hoses, and the entire population escaped alive by boat. Images of that dramatic eruption, given much media play, scar the mind. A church buried to halfway up its steeple sticks in the mind. When one visits, as I did, the volcanic ground is still warm.

If the Icelanders of Heimaey can survive, thought Westman, then so can I, and when I get better I am going to that fantastic island. Don't feel sorry for yourself! Look at these islands and what happened to these people! They went right back to work as soon as they could and so should I.

Her first trip to Iceland and the Westman Islands, the latter a birthday gift from her husband, led to many more. Iceland has become an obsession with her and is now one of her favorite subjects. An exhibition of her Icelandic paintings opened last month (September) at the 473 Broadway Gallery in New York City's Soho section.

As an art critic and artist myself, I find the paintings remarkable. Westman's Icelandic landscapes, though equally charming, are not as whimsical as her book illustrations or magazine covers. For one thing, people never appear. They are more about landscape memories and meanings than about humorous particulars. She has moved further away from the decorativeness of the Paris School illustrator Raul Dufy to the more mystical nature poems of the American modernist Arthur Dove, or sometimes towards those wonderful, nearly abstract beachscapes of another American, Milton Avery.

Yet Westman does not deny her roots in populist illustration. As Karl Ludeking remarked during his lecture at the opening of Westman's 1997 exhibition at the ZIF (Zentrum fur interdisciplinare Froshung) in Germany, ". . . the pictures emerge from a long occupation with illustration. They don't deny this fact in favor of a forced attitude to produce 'high' art. . . . Abstraction takes place, but it is an abstraction not of a move in the modernist strategy; it is an abstraction of images out of personal experience."

Westman's husband, the philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto, in his introduction to her exhibition at the Kjarvalsstadir Museum in Reykjavik that same year, proclaimed that Westman "paints in the knowledge that art itself has become a concept of total openness . . . as open as the blank sheet of paper she works on."