THE Magazine - Water/Nymph
ERIC TILLINGHAST: WATER/NYMPH
By Diane Armitage
THE Magazine / September 2013
Reflecting on these musings that produce unexpected images allows one to understand that the imagination needs a constant dialectic. For a thoroughly dualized imagination, concepts are not centers of images which come together because of their resemblance to each other; concepts are the points where images intersect at incisive and decisive right angles.
—Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter
Eric Tillinghast’s recent body of work, Water/Nymph, is both curious and compelling. For one thing, it compelled me to track down the meaning of the names he gives his cohort of bathing beauties—a group of sixties-era women featured on some of the appropriated postcards that the artist used in this show. The women had names like Clytie, Vila, Iasis, and Nixe, which were also the titles of individual pieces. In the past, Tillinghast has worked not only with the theme of water, as he does here in the forty altered postcards that constitute most of this exhibition, but also with its actual substance in complex and stunning installations such as Rain Machine, seen at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe a few years ago. However, Water/Nymph emphasizes a strong sense of conceptual detachment from the actual experience of water and its often forceful properties. With the exception of one small installation of black cast-iron bowls filled with water and positioned on the floor—and here the water looks like ink—this show of small-to-very-small works on paper enlisted a different part of our perceptual brain.
Every postcard has been altered by a process of elimination as Tillinghast has applied acrylic paint so only a body of water is left in the image. What remains is either a natural body of water, like Havasu Falls, Horse Creek Falls, or Niagara, or the water is contained in that man-made entity known as a swimming pool. Most of the artist’s pictorial interventions have used white paint to isolate, for example, a svelte woman by or in a pool. Or he has applied a flat black that surrounds instances of a more dynamic pictorial nature, such as a plunging waterfall, as he has done in the piece Angel Falls, the largest image in the show and one of the most dramatic and abstract. It is Tillinghast’s odd focus on abstraction, both on a conceptual and a visual level, which proves the most interesting aspect of his project. But who are all the nymphs, and how do they relate to what appears as both a cliché in a postcard reality and something else deeper, more mysterious, and even mythical?
Delving not only into Greek mythology, Tillinghast has referenced Roman, German, Slavic, Chilean, and even Pre-Columbian myths to contextualize his water sprites and nymphs. Mythology was, of course, our first organized form of natural history, and it served to explain to a pre-empirical age the origin of water-based phenomena: like where springs came from, or lakes and ponds, or what lived in the cascading foam of waterfalls, or presided over sites such as Delphi in Greece with its oracular Pythian Sibyl. For something as bland and innocuous as 1960s kidney-shaped swimming pools with women perched on the edge, Tillinghast has overlaid tiny slivers of ancient knowledge that associate the mutability, poetry, and mystery of water with the female psyche.
Sea nymphs, the goddesses and water sprites who resided in rivers and streams, and the female oracles who got their inspiration from the spirits within underground springs are the presiding deities in this exhibition. But however resonant their names might be—Thetis, Calliphaea, and Pagea—the postcard size of these supernatural beings renders them no bigger than insects. And here, too, is another level of association embedded within the artist’s own hydrologic cycle: The nymph state in the insect world is the stage where the immature insects resemble adults but are not quite there yet.
In another section from Gaston Bachelard’s book, he wrote, “Though forms and concepts harden rapidly, material imagination still remains an active power.” There is no elemental substance as suggestive and potent as water. In its movement and sound, in its restorative and destructive properties, in its colors, reflectability, and refractive nature, water and its fluid dynamics is not just a stage in the development of Tillinghast’s artistic practice; for him, it is also a psychic bond and a ravishing mirror with endless permutations. Even in these postcard images of seaside, pond, lagoon, or waterfall, the artist has altered their conceptual substrate and drawn their liquid essence to himself, isolating not only an inherent beauty, but also an openended suggestibility in the making and altering of images that revolve around a particular theme. In this work, the process of abstraction fits the representation like a glove. It’s important when viewing Water/Nymph not to be misled by Tillinghast’s relatively simple means for exploring a huge topic. Like a deck of fortunetelling cards, there is no beginning or end to the narratives born of myth and wild imaginings—each story becoming an intimate piece of a puzzle extracted from a cosmic set of universal reveries.
