FEVER DREAMS Sandy Moore and Rebecca Newman, studio conversation Los Angeles, Fall 2024, (www.rebeccanewman.com)
Rebecca Newman practiced her art long before earning her BA in Fine Arts at Yale University in the mid-70’s. She primarily paints, but she moves comfortably between media—paintings, photographs, collages— depending on what she aims to capture. She has studied photography formally but recently became comfortable photographing on a cellphone, taking notes on the fleeting phenomena of perception and the material in her studio.
She chooses subjects like a beachcomber might, just looking, with chance determining the larger part of what “washes up”. She turns particular attention to her seeing when she isn’t sure what she is looking at. This uncertainty is not only what draws her in—it is her subject. This interest in the quizzical subject and the uncanny object has roots in her her earlier artwork, for example when she moved west and the realized that the stark light of Los Angeles had upended her vision. High contrast light could create such vivid shadows that she says she would think, “that’s weird, I wonder why that is.” And then she would pursue that hallucinatory light.
One might experience a change in the brain, due to all kinds of outrageous fortune. Age entirely changes how we see, but transformations of that magnitude may occur several times during a life. Case in point—Newman experienced a thoroughly unexpected interruption in 2007—a ruptured fronto-temporal arteriovenous aneurism with a stroke. She describes this as a devastation, but also a turning point, thoroughly changing how she looks at the world. Some executive function like driving confidently was compromised and recovery has understandably been an uphill climb. But even during her initial hospitalization she continued to draw, although differently. She considered that this “brain insult” opened her into her brain’s functions, giving her the opportunity to re-boot. As she says “recovery recapitulates ontology”. One gets to rediscover the world. We thank the universe for art making!
Right now Newman is working on a series titled FEVER DREAMS. Here is a cell phone photograph of a BALL JAR, a water jar for watercolor sitting on the table in her studio. Ther’re something sublime about this everyday object, but not easy to pin down. Is it the refraction? And in here are Newman’s years of studying color after Albers.
Another jarring image which Newman includes in this set of images is a cup of SPILLED COFFEE—because, in this case “Spilled coffee is funny”. This is mischievous and the coffee has glorious light brown reflections.
Related to this is “SAW HIM AT THE SUPERMARKET”—a package of paper towels, opened just so. This image (captured on cell phone) is alternatively titled RIPPED BRAWNY MAN. It is sexual, perverse and hilarious. She went on to shut the Brawny Man in the cupboard and photograph that— perhaps to avoid thinking about him too much? These works hearken to Newman’s earlier series Domestica—objects in plain sight telling tales about “how much your mother hated being a housewife.”
These recent works are created on-the-fly by digital photographic capture, and can printed any size desired on rag paper. INVITATION AU VOYAGE is a photograph of a postcard from a Heidelberg library—a blue sky seen through glass coated with condensed water droplets. Again, this is perplexed looking. Herein lies the subversiveness of these works—they draw the viewer to the same perplexity that the artist is drawn to. After you have seen several of these, the pleasure (or the remote memory) of disoriented seeing begins to glimmer. Newman is attracted to perplexity and light that one can enter into, light that takes one in—so she is drawn to refraction, reflection, shadows, and perspective that are not at the service of logic. For example, GLASS WITH CORAL lures us into pure fascination without our knowing what it is that we are finding fascinating. And again, that deep sensitivity for color.
Evident in these images, Newman’s recent works play intensely with perplexity. She has made many more; her economy of making these on a cell phone allows proliferation. Whether watercolor or photography, Newman says she employs the medium at hand that best embodies her concept. She captures a lot of photographs and selects from this everyday river-of-seeing the ones that are most salient to her.
She shares her unsettled seeing with the viewer, some of whom may have perhaps become unsettled, differently, at how repetitive and static their all-too-familiar visual experience has become. So, images that show seeing without a sure footing can be a relief.
In this recent work—paintings and photographs—Rebecca Newman looks into and through what she sees and perhaps recaptures that openness and confusion which we all experienced before we were taught the names of everything we saw. For adults—artists and viewers-- that kind of seeing takes a leap of nerve. We might be thrown off balance, we might think—what the hell am I looking at? Is this the afterlife? Do infants think like that? The onrush of the entire universe into one’s brain in infancy may be so shocking and chaotic that we repress all of that—or rather, we are so busy myelinating and gaining the universe that we don’t—or cannot— spend neuronal material on remembering things which we cannot yet name.
Newman asked that I include a quote, here, from Kafka. “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” That is apt, and I would add—the seduction of color thaws us out better than an ax. And the seduction of thought.
That which can be explained about an artist’s work may be more about the wake left behind than the face of the work, which the artist alone stares at for hours in her studio. The viewer may see something very different from what the artist sees when she stares, and that may yet again be different from what the artist is trying to show. These are the unavoidable phenomenological chasms that are intrinsic in art making—especially if the artist struggles with seeing the irreproducible or the illogical. Wrestling with beholding the unseeable and sharing that sublimity means translating the invisible into the visible. Abysses abound; Rebecca Newman braves these depths. Her work does not try to make sense of the surface of appearances, but it does offer us a way into and through that. She opens us into this world, afresh.
About the writer: Sandy Moore (sandymooreartist.com) is an artist who lives in Hudson NY. She paints, and recently returned to filmmaking after a long caesura to practice medicine. In 2024 she completed a film about the nature of sleep, based primarily on observing her mind and her visual field as she ventured into sleep. She also writes about artists, especially those whose work draws us into awe, and those who create ephemeral artworks such as performances and transitory installations.
