Liza Gough Daniels: Watching Paint Dry

The studio of Liza Gough Daniels is on the edge of The Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, a setting which makes complete sense of her art. Standing on the ridge-top you at once experience the fast-changing sky of river weather: the cloudscapes in particular, as vast shadows traverse the landscape; the sound of the wind and the rain, the birds, the creak of the buildings. The view from outside her studio is dramatic, reaching far over the Severn plain, the huge expanse of river turning in a great horseshoe bend. Looking the other way, the eye encounters the oak and beechwoods of The Forest of Dean. Once within the studio, the windows fill with sky.

 

Gough Daniels’ work is distinguished by a singular continuity of interests. ‘All the time I’ve been painting, I’ve been trying to work towards the same picture - and never quite getting there. The paintings that do exist are different aspects of that one picture. The work that I was doing as a student in New York [at Cooper Union, 1982-4] is very close to what I do now.’ That struggle towards a perfect picture is evidence of a remarkably tenacious nature. A nature attuned to plastic expression through paint, but also attuned to a particular place, a particular landscape. Although by no means a literalist, Gough Daniels has become a landscape painter. Her work is closely informed by what she sees around her, but it is not straightforwardly descriptive. It is evocative and suggestive, but not naturalistic; ultimately, the landscape she depicts is an interior one.

 

The work proceeds through a series of dialogues and digressions. Each painting is a reaction to previous works. Ideas cross-fertilize and interweave, side-step and advance. How to record them all? Gough Daniels goes through periods of using sketchbooks. When she worked in egg tempera, which she did for some seven years (1990-7), she filled sketchbooks at the end of every day with abstract images made with left-over paint which would otherwise have gone rancid. She found this a fruitful way of examining ideas, particularly through the exploitation of chance conjunctions of colour and form. Currently she is using small circular MDF panels as a sketchbook equivalent, primarily to experiment with edges and overlays. The format of these panels - and sometimes their texture - is reminiscent of a face powder compact, and can be just as intimate.

 

Gough Daniels also uses the camera like a sketch book, to record surface qualities and particular colour relationships. A photograph might focus on a emerald lichened stump amidst fallen beech leaves, or the reflection of bare boughs in water. A still moment, to counterbalance the emphasis on movement in the paintings - the cloud-race and light-change indicated by strong contrasts of light and shade.

 

Gough Daniels is scrupulous in her determination to test out the uses and limits of her materials. Her investigation into egg tempera was driven by the need to learn about pigments, binder and support, without taking anything for granted. At one point she used PVC as a support, working on it in acrylic with aqueous dispersions. In effect it took her 10 years of experimentation to decide that oil paint was in fact the medium best-suited to her art. And inevitably, some of the lessons learnt from years of using acrylic and egg tempera have been adapted to the handling of oil, with a consequent enrichment of the medium. Gough Daniels uses oil paint in a particularly fluid and distinctive way. This, in turn, ensures that most of her work is done on the horizontal, except when she is pouring paint down a fixed vertical surface such as a wall.

 

Similarly, Gough Daniels extended her research into shapes and formats, experimenting with differently proportioned rectangles and finally with the circle. She has been working on a circular format now for eight or nine years, dating from the egg tempera days. The tondo offers a completely different sort of space: it is de-stabilizing, yet at the same time it is a perfect form. As Gough Daniels remarks: ‘The tondo has been used since antiquity to represent other-worldliness, a release from the physical body or an appropriate form for the carriage of the soul.’ The circle or tondo stands also for the globe. It is macroscopic - making the world visible to the naked eye - while at the same time suggesting the microscopic, for this is the shape of the barrel and lens of a microscope (or indeed telescope). Examining the pocked and cratered surface of one of Gough Daniels’ panels, we might be looking at a deep space photograph of a distant planet. She continues: ‘You’re not grounded as you are when you’re looking into a rectangle. You lose your sense of gravity when you’re looking at a circle or a diamond. I like to hang the panels quite high on the wall, too, so that you get a sense of suspension, of a sky space.’

 

At the moment, Gough Daniels works primarily on shaped panels. The geometry and scale of these are long pondered. As panels, the current series of stretched diamonds -  such as Supersilk and Micalight - remained in the studio for two years before she began to paint on them. She knew that she wanted to work on such a shape, but was unsure how to proceed. Is it a coincidence that the diamonds echo the shape of her studio roof with its spacious skylights and tremendous view towards May Hill and its crowning pine trees? Gough Daniels designed the studio herself. She has always wanted height above her (she refers eagerly to ‘aspirational space’), an expanse to think in. This is art which is open to the elements.

 

The panels are made to measure by a skilled furniture maker, and fabricated like a drum. There’s a thin skin of MDF on either side with a strip of wood or MDF holding the two surfaces apart. Each panel has its own subtle irregularities, and when the surface is inundated with liquid paint, these slight dips and promontories emerge to make their own demands on the imagery. Gough Daniels responds to the specific life of each individual panel, its characteristics, its resilience. The idea is to place the panel in position before starting to work on it; after that it’s mainly a question of letting the paint settle. The resulting paintings are also intended to be read as objects in space, their objecthood enhanced by the penumbra of coloured light emanating from their imagery. A new shape has now been commissioned, a diamond stretched even further on its horizontal axis, extending to seven feet in width. The increased physical tension in the shape proposes a redoubled challenge.

 

The stretched diamonds operate with a reduced palette so that emphasis falls upon the simplified new forms within them with which Gough Daniels is experimenting. The palette refers to nothing observed in the natural world, being entirely composed of modern laboratory-made pigments, utterly synthetic. There are no earth pigments, and in certain instances Gough Daniels has mixed mica with the paint. ‘You make up a mix: you might use zinc white for its transparent qualities and you want it to flow. You lay it down on the panel but it might not flow exactly as you want it to. So do you scrape it off or go with it? I tend to find that what I’ve got is more interesting than anything I could impose, so I work with it. There’s always the question of what will happen if I do this? And then the excitement of actually watching it change over time.’

 

There may be no overt references to the natural world in terms of the colours used in these paintings, but shapes remain intensely suggestive. For the stretched diamonds, Gough Daniels has made stencils and occasionally used a brush. She at once combines an intimation of the organic - leaf-filtered light or aquatic vistas - and the man-made: the swirling clouds and colours of chemical reactions, whether in solution or gaseous. The iron rule of not touching the surface is thus subverted, and the painting language correspondingly enriched. Previously she had wanted to ‘take out the element of composition by touch as much as I could’. She would throw or pour her liquids, knowing their behaviour as far as possible and relying on hunches. By deliberately breaking her self-imposed rules, Gough Daniels demonstrates her increasing authority over her subject-matter and materials.

 

Quite a lot of her time is spent watching paint dry. Contrary to popular belief, Gough Daniels finds this not merely absorbing, but in point of fact, completely engrossing. Yet the unfolding of the process can be a frustrating one. For instance, observing the change that cannot be arrested even when the artist would wish to fix a particular moment as the final image. By her decision not to intervene, it has become a hands-off process. Gough Daniels divides her time between the Forest of Dean and London, leaving the wet panels, after prolonged periods of observation, to continue to dry slowly - or cure - in the studio. This change of venue she finds very useful, for it allows her to return to the paintings with fresh eyes.

 

Each particular mixture of varnishes, pigments, oils and solvents takes a different length of time to dry. As a result, Gough Daniels has as many as a dozen pieces on the go at once. She might make just one or two very careful pours and then not touch a panel for a month or more. In other cases, surface textures are broken down by solvents. (She uses a range of solvents from turpentine to white spirit and the new safer chemicals, such as T-sol.) Crusty and cratered surfaces are only achieved over many months of different applications, ranging from the gentle pour to the literal bombardment. These are carefully structured despite the employment of accident, and the variable behaviour of different pigments. The evidence of the process, its history, can sometimes be glimpsed running down the side of a panel in drips and overlays, like the strata in an archeological dig.

 

Gough Daniels finds the same sort of spontaneous delight in discovering a title that she gets in laying down colour. Sometimes there are doubts: about whether the title sounds too light or flippant, or about the ways in which it could be mis-read. ‘That title ‘Sense’, which I used for a current series of paintings (1999-2001), seemed the right title, because the surfaces looked so pollinated. You feel you can almost smell them. They engage the senses.’

 

Cultural references balance the sensual. Her work relates directly to the Old Masters and the languages of painting and architecture. Gough Daniels regularly travels abroad to see specific paintings; having experienced  the Tiepolos in Venice, for instance, with their satisfyingly opalescent skies, she is keen to visit the Archbishop’s Palace in Wurzburg.

 

Tiepolo’s great fresco cycles were always firmly and coherently related to the architectural context for which they were commissioned. Gough Daniels for her part is keen to work more on a large scale, with architecture. She has already created Curved Landscape, an elliptical courtyard with a series of interconnected arcs, and Poured Wall (red iron-oxide plaster punctuated with four white poured paint columns) for the Norden Farm Centre for the Arts at Maidenhead, but she would welcome more environmental projects of this sort. Gough Daniels has the right collaborative temperament - the necessary mix of freedom and control - to envisage and then instigate further interventions in building proposals. Her name should become increasingly familiar to architects.

 

This is landscape painting for the 21st century, active on many layers, and no longer entirely reliant on direct observation. Its indirection is actually what makes it so effective. Instead of making a verifiable record of the visible world, Liza Gough Daniels offers an abstract yet personal interpretation of a particular landscape very dear to her. What we see are the traces of her response - as from a stone cast into a pond, the broadening ripples of imagination, emotion and cultural cross-reference, flow outward from the long experience of looking. As she says, painting addresses ‘the physical memory of the senses’. We must direct our senses to reply.

 

Andrew Lambirth                                                                                                            London: August 2001