To experience non-representational visual art is passing through a magical portal into an enchanted landscape.
Entering the enchanted land of Tamar Kander’s art offers the viewer stepping-block paths through a rich interior landscape of life’s possibilities and the sense of satisfaction at the end of those steps — while we are sitting or standing right where we are.
I attempt to expose the beauty hidden in the so-called mundanity of everyday life.
And Tamar does. In soul-stirring hues, Tamar’s paintings reveal beautiful shapes and textures that provide a progressive motion fluid as music.
Tamar states in her Artist Statement on her website:
My work is neither figurative nor abstract, rather I see it as a metaphor for experience. We all have collective memory, as well as highly individual thoughts and associations. The statements embodied in my work come ultimately from a place that I believe is present in all of us - a central core or spiritual store-house unique to each of us.
Tamar’s statement would resonate with nineteenth-century French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire, as he defines “pure art according to the modern idea” as “the creation of an evocative magic, containing at once the object and the subject, the world external to the artist” and also including the artist, meaning, to me, the artist’s humanity and “spiritual store-house.”
At the time Baudelaire wrote his famous art criticism – in the mid-1800s – the public rejected the depictions by avant-garde artists using intense color and abstraction, which, at that time looked like loose brushstrokes or nearly “blurred” images. Baudelaire’s mission was to explain to art viewers the “the evocative magic” of color and shape (also called color and form).
In the Modern Era, beginning around 1800, recognition arose of color and shape – which constitutes everything in nature (look at all the great colors and shapes of minerals and rocks in their natural forms) — as being the basis of all visual art. For example, the representation of a sun is actually the circle shape with a color (often hues of yellow or orange).
Also prevalent in modern thinking is that the experience of viewing color and shape in visual art is similar to the experience of hearing music. We do not expect music to represent the figures we associate with sound, such as the flow of a river or the song of a bird. Music can and sometimes does.
But we do not expect music to do so. We enjoy music as a non-representational art form that lifts us out of ourselves to a transcendent place. This type of joyful lifting is what color and shape (the “notes” of visual art), like the tonality of music, does as well.
If can be said that “non-representational” music and art do represent feelings, which is how Tamar describes her art. (When my son Sean, years ago and at that time very young, was looking at Tamar’s art in her studio, he asked her what she was painting. She answered, “I paint feelings, Sean.”)
In a video on her website she states:
I’m taking a feeling and I’m finding a way to represent it. That’s the fun.
I came from a place where I could render things in a very traditional way, and I moved away from that and became really interested in using texture and color to interpret how I was feeling.
Although primarily non-representational, my work is influenced by landscape and architectural symbols, and our relationship to these factors.
As Jungian and Gestalt psychologies suggest, simply-stated, humans are meaning-making beings. Thus, we love symbols because from them, we make meaning.
Music notes are symbols for sounds. (Letters and words are symbols, letters spelling a word that then puts a “spell” on us with meaning, as I state on my website homepage.) In the color and shape of visual art, we see symbols. Sometimes symbols have collective meaning; sometimes individual.
And here we see the layers of beauty and meaning in Tamar’s paintings that take us on internal journeys with their symbolic, textured pathways. Her paintings are literally layered.
I’ll put something down, it’ll ask for something else, and it’ll just proceed from there.
Tamar sculpts her paintings with powdered gesso, cold wax, dry-wall compound, acrylic medium, marble dust, oils, sometimes attaching materials as with collage, then scratching into the surface, often through the layers.
Scratch the Surface, Tamar’s current exhibition, started as a solo exhibition by Long-Sharp Gallery in February.
In March, it became a virtual exhibition, so you can experience Tamar’s art by “entering the gallery exhibition” here:
Hear Tamar speak of her work and process — this brief (only 2:22 minutes) video should not be missed:
This e-catalog from Long-Sharp Gallery features stunning examples of Tamar’s work. Though I love them all, one of my favorites is Light on Water, 2018.
Which of these are your favorites?
While we are fortunate to have virtual opportunities to see art and to visit with Creatives no matter where they are, viewing visual art in person is always a more effective experience.
So, to see more closely the layers of paint and various materials and the scratches and pasted pieces of collage of Tamar’s art, and when galleries in their physical spaces are allowed to reopen, you can:
Stroll on Canyon Road in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to see her art at Ventana Fine Art. Today, you can stroll into to the gallery webpage to see her art:
Visit Long-Sharp Gallery Indianapolis/New York. See Tamar’s art at the Indianapolis Gallery. Today, you can view her art here:
Travel to Vivid Art Gallery in Winnetka, Illinois. Today, you can enjoy her art here:
Tamar Kander in her divine studio. Photo by Jamas Brooke
Artist Tamar Kander. Photo by Steve Raymer.
Tamar’s impressive resume and website can be found here:
Note: Poets like Baudelaire, understanding the intrinsic human need for symbols and meaning-making, have often been modern art critics. To read more about this topic, see my essay “Poets As Modern Art Critics: Stating the ‘Redemptive Power’ of the Abstracted Image.” Published by the Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature and found here on JSTOR.
For much more about poets and poetry inspired by art, I will soon be publishing my website poetryaboutart.com.
Baudelaire quote from: The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, by Charles Baudelaire, translated and edited by Jonathan Mayne, Phaidon Press Limited, Second Edition, 1995, pg. 205.
More about the galleries that represent Tamar:
From the Long-Sharp Gallery website: “Long-Sharp Gallery, a fine art gallery in downtown Indianapolis, caters to fine art collectors new and experienced. As a division of Modern Masters Fine Art, the gallery's roots rest in works by important post-war and contemporary artists such as Pablo Picasso, Joan MIró, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Indiana.”
From the Ventana Fine Art website: “Since 1983, Ventana Fine Art has been featuring collections of contemporary art from artists all over the country. Located in beautiful Santa Fe New Mexico, our art gallery is housed in a 112-year-old schoolhouse; it’s the perfect setting to celebrate creativity.”
From the Vivid Art Gallery website: “Welcome to Vivid Art Gallery, a new destination on Chicago’s North Shore where art is presented with passion and energy. At Vivid we know that acquiring art should evolve from discovery, not shopping. That’s why we created this space, more like a living room than a traditional gallery. It’s a place where the works of many artists, not just a few, will be displayed at all times, so there is always something new to see. A place where you can hear the stories of the artists and their work.”
About the blog author: Mary Dezember, PhD, is a poet and author of fiction and non-fiction. She earned her PhD in Comparative Literature with an emphasis in Comparative Arts at Indiana University in 2000, with PhD minors in Art History and Performance Studies. Professor of English, she teaches Comparative Arts, Art History, Creative Writing and Literature at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. Her publications include several non-fiction essays and articles and two books of poetry: Earth-Marked Like You (Sunstone Press) and Still Howling (CreateSpace Independent Publishing). Her novel, Wild Conviction, is in the works to be published by Inkshares.