Catherine MacLaren

CATHERINE MACLAREN

PAINTING AS A SPIRITUAL GESTURE

An essay of discovery

By Andre Seleanu

I caught sight of Catherine Maclaren’s singular paintings for the first time, when I had the opportunity to visit her beautiful apartment in Westmount. On opening the door, the enveloping and haunting quality of her canvases impressed itself upon me, and in retrospect this is a clear case of the enduring strength of the first impression. Spontaneously, the word warmth comes to mind. Oranges, shades of brown, blues - colours known either as warm, or perhaps as cold - are applied by her in the intense mode of a generous gestural approach. Through some transformational alchemy, tonalities in her painting always appear as warm on canvas. Attractive textures, a granular nature of paint that comes across as pleasant, contribute to the sense of an esthetic that is above all heartfelt.

Not tributary to passing fads or fashions, Maclaren’s purely abstract expression possesses rhythm, hence musicality that harks to a very personal spiritual life. All of her paintings seem to convey either qualities of the earth or those of a Cosmos bestrewn with stars and planets. It is perhaps not too much to say that the artist is in a state of communion with a positive cosmic force – one that touches both upon the microcosm and the macrocosm.

Unity versus fracture in contemporary art

Such reflections bring me one step closer to the core of Catherine Maclaren’s esthetics. Let us hence go further in this exploration. While for at least twenty-five years now, at the time of writing, international academic and museum art has in some way encouraged discontinuous expression, mélange or métissage - and in general has exalted the intellectual and perceptive dissonance, or even shock, that the partition of the visual domain entails - Catherine Maclaren organically expresses unity in her abstract paintings.

In agreement with late twentieth century post-structuralist philosophical ideas, installation and multimedia have described or recreated a world of fracture, friction and dissonance aiming to be realistic. Wasn’t an early sixties Parisian art current named “Nouveau réalisme”, while proposing twisted shapes and crushed and compressed metal pieces in accordance with the perceived social environment? (such as in the work of Arman, César) For quite awhile now, painting “without frills”, or an appurtenance of commentary to it has appeared as a poor cousin in the ranking of artistic genres - at least in the world of academia and prestigious biennales (Venice, Kassel Documenta, Montreal… ) -still, even approved painting now describes states of physical and psychic fracture, or reflects an intellectual distance between the painter and depicted themes. The commentary on the work, the encoded text, is equally part of the work, it belongs to the artistic expression. Nevertheless, apriori or according to common sense, there is nothing that prevents the painter from conveying inner spirituality marked by unity of feeling, as was often done throughout history - or in the history of religious art.

Painting and yoga

This kind of approach may have a soothing, centering effect on the viewer. If we believe (as I do) in the accuracy of the field of knowledge underlying in the practice of yoga - a physical and mental exercise within Hinduism - then Catherine Maclaren’s painting appeals to, in fact it kindles the energy level, the chakra associated with the heart, as part of a mysterious process of transmission of psychological energy from the canvass to the viewer. We may thus associate the qualities of individual and universal love, tolerance or empathy that radiate from an energetically awakened heart chakra with Catherine Maclaren’s pictorial expression.

In fact the artist is a practicing Buddhist, who also spent several years in Asia, including Sri Lanka, a world center of living Buddhist practice. Abstract painting came to her in life as a spontaneous avenue of conveying spiritual experiences.

Her painting is characterized by a form of simplicity - a deceptive simplicity, may I say - because most, if not all of her paintings emanate something, a constant energy… The painted sign is hence the medium for an expression of energy. This isn’t granted to all artists. This painting is a proof of the inexhaustible nature of painting, of its ability - as in literature, as in music - to convey a multitude of spiritual states, of man’s ability to be, to vibrate as microcosm.

I shall quote here a thought expressed by Jean Bazaine, an abstract French painter of the second school of Paris, whose paintings, stained glass and murals constitute a humanist expression of Catholicism: “Abstraction means discovering in each object, signs that point to something deeper, something beyond this object…”(1)

Deeply aware of Oriental religions and forms of spirituality, Catherine Maclaren engages in a pictorial practice marked by an initiatory experience - a personal initiation, not mediated by others - lived through in Sri Lanka, in 1998. The three quarters circle open to the right with a dot inscribed in the open quarter of the circle constitutes her signature. In addition, the very archetypal circle or disk is to be found in many of her paintings…it is part of our perceptive background and it may point to the earth, the sun, the moon, wholeness… it certainly has spiritual connotations.

An initiation

On the evening of the high holiday of Vesak, Buddha’s birthday, on a spectacular beach in Sri Lanka, the artist had the following experience she later put in writing: “I entered into a complete state of oneness, deeper and more profound than I ever experienced before”. (2) Painting is hence an almost ritual practice akin to prayer; she writes: “painting takes me to that beautiful state of oneness, where I am closest to God”.

There is an unmistakable Oriental spirituality conveyed by this painting, that we, the viewers, perceive, feel in a confirmation of the phenomenological (or shamanic, using another frame of reference) property of painting observed by Husserl, restated by Merleau-Ponty, by the French existentialist philosopher Henri Maldiney…

Art and oecumenism

While her spirituality is linked to the round or circular archetypal form, Christian spirituality often follows the upward, vertical vector as in Gothic stained glass and in the modern work of religiously-inspired French painters, such as Bazaine or Bertholle. Léon Zack, also a Parisian abstract painter linked to the informal school, who identified oecumenically with Judaism, Christianity and Zen spirituality combined what I would consider a Christian luminosity with the interplay of full and empty space of Taoist esthetics.

In this wider context of painting with a spiritual subtext, Catherine Maclaren’s expression uses the circle as its basic figure: halo, disk, sphere, wholeness… there are many readings. Catherine Maclaren also relates the three quarter circle with the archetype of protection.

Painting may thus be linked with the striving to expand human consciousness, and that in turn to breathing, and I shall quote in this regard the spiritual modernist painter Bazaine: “Painting is a way of being: the temptation to breathe in a world that is irrespirable”. (3)

Références

(1) Jean Bazaine quoted by the philosopher Henri Maldiney
Penser l’homme et la folie p.157 Googlebooks

(2) The birth of C – text by Catherine Maclaren

(3) http.//fr.academic.ru/dic.nsf