Wallace Stevens's Shaping of the Art of Painter Jake Berthot

At Hyperallergic, Tim Keane writes about the influence Wallace Stevens had on painter Jake Berthot. "I was reminded of lyrical poetry — its introspective urgency and quiet resonance — as I took in Jake Berthot: In Color at Betty Cuningham Gallery. Dominated by mid-career work, the exhibition’s outstanding range of paintings show how Berthot balanced formal abstraction and cold geometrics with reverie-inducing, liquefied coloration and dappled, earth-toned surfaces," writes Keane. "Of the current show’s 15 abstract paintings, 10 of them are oil-on-linen works made around the early 1990s. Each features a prominent, hovering oval." It is here that he turns to Stevens:

A clue to the meanings of these stealthy, meditative works might lie in this recurring oval. That object — and the suspended quadrilaterals featured in earlier paintings — function like the famous “jar” in “Ancedote of the Jar,” (1919) by Wallace Stevens, one of Berthot’s most cherished poets.

In Stevens’ poem, the speaker is an artificer who handles words in the same way an abstract painter handles color and form. The speaker places a jar into a rural landscape where it imposes a fortuitous order on arbitrary nature. But that order exists within the poem, not anywhere outside it. As any deeply realized abstract painting is ultimately about itself, “Ancedote of the Jar” is a poem about poetry; its meaning develops as its internally directed language manifests a harmonious interface between the manmade (the jar) and the undomesticated ( “the slovenly wilderness”) :

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

The bizarre positioning of this jar parallels how the oval operates in the Berthot paintings. Just as Stevens’ jar interrupts nature, Berthot’s recurring oval first focuses attention on itself before yielding to the rest of the picture — the earth-toned color fields and scraped and layered textures of paint suggestive of the unruliness of nature; still, our eyes return to the oval just as the reader’s attention is drawn back to Stevens’ jar.

The full piece at Hyperallergic.