Linda A. Day: As Painting As This

by Peter Frank

There are certain artists whose work defines a medium by defying it — by focusing on the properties of the medium, even taking those properties as the rhetorical content of the art itself, and questioning the practical constrictions of those properties, distorting conventions associated with that medium and finding possibilities where there aren’t supposed to be any. Robert Rauschenberg with printmaking, for instance, or Alexander Calder with sculpture, sought constantly to explore the limitations of technique and tradition— limitations not only inherent in the art form, but embedded in our thinking about it, limitations that, in the end, don’t need to be there. The 20th century was full of such innovation, but only a relatively few artists made it their business to experiment purposefully, methodically, continually, and self-reflexively rather than impulsively at the service of a different (if perhaps related) goal. 

Linda Day was an envelope-pusher in that most daunting of media, painting. As the predominating discipline in Western art, painting has attracted the lion’s share of challengers and innovators and rebels. In Europe and the Americas, painting changes every generation and continually rides off in all directions. At any given time, there will be somebody whacking away at painting’s boundaries. More than most in her generation, Linda Day was that boundary-buster. And as often as not, she was breaching borders not simply between conventional painting technique and experimental approaches to material, but between conventional pictorial reasoning, that of abstraction, and that imported from outside painting altogether. Day was not simply trying to have, but was having, it all at once; her oeuvre is a grand celebration of what painting can possibly be and even impossibly be.

Day’s allegiance to painting — her faith in its simultaneous variability and integrity — resulted as much as anything from a childhood spent in European as well as American museums and an emerging-artisthood spent in New York at a time when painting was being at once trashed and treasured. For Day, thus, the discourse around painting was worshipful in her youth and contentious in her salad days — but was fixated almost to a fetish on the medium. Nobody could fabricate a more magical apparition than an Old Master. And nobody could argue about the viability of painting in the wake of conceptualism — or, conversely, pop art and abstract expressionism — like a Punk-era New Yorker. Such exposure to evident (historical) perfection and equally evident (contemporary) imperfection can prove daunting to most artists (not to say audiences), resulting at best in withdrawals into formula and at worst withdrawals from artmaking altogether. But Day was by nature undauntable; and, as is clear from the roiling effervescence, the tumultuous, in-your-face playfulness, of her work, she viewed her chosen discipline as an arena for bold strategies and irreverent solutions — indeed, as a framework precisely for tweaking expectations and redefining, not just solving, problems. 

Seeking to challenge the entire historical as well as material gestalt of painting, Day oscillated in her career between depiction and non-objectivity, simplicity and elaboration, and even two and three dimensions. Some of her most radical work, effusive surrealistic landscapes populated by what seem comic-book plant life from the late 1990s, run counter not only in image but in spirit to the grittiness and palpability of so much of her other work before and since. For her, the two extremes were equally sensuous, one by suggestion and one by material presence — and they were both exercises in what could be done with paint, and with the history of painting. Day was willing to paint pictures, not only paintings — and to depict nothing as well as something. In fact, the discrete bodies of work, representational and presentational, came off in Day’s practice as two sides of the same effort, to make paint cohere into self-contained, sufficiently rationalized objects that affect their beholders deeply and mysteriously. Painting is a source of magic, Day demonstrated — and a source of more than one kind of magic, at that.

Having earned her undergraduate degree at Colby College in Maine, Day — a native New Englander (born in Worcester, MA) — gravitated to New York in the late 1970s to receive an MFA at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute. This rooted her in what was then the world’s primary art scene, at a time of profound aesthetic, economic, and social change directly affecting the making and exhibiting of art. The mantle of post-modernism was being wrested from orthodox conceptualism by a host of experimentalists (and would-be experimentalists) engaged in everything from performance art to public sculpture to new modes of painting. In a sense the surge toward painting at the end of the 1970s was the most radical development, as it repositioned what was considered an “outmoded” practice at the forefront of the discourse. Moreover, a strong representational, or at least referential, element powered painting’s resurgence. Painters in New York were challenged initially by the Neue Wilde coming out of Germany and the artists of the Italian Transavanguardia, both groups stressing the fanciful, even playful, rendition of pictorial thinking and the integrity of paint as a conveyor of sensual experience. 

Among so many other New York artists, Day was notably influenced by this approach. She also responded to locally prominent painters (and more than a few sculptors) working in and adjacent to “neo-expressionism” such as Joan Snyder, Louisa Chase, Jedd Garet, Rodney Ripps, and Judy Pfaff. The bright colors, fanciful (and often doodle-like) images, and vigorous painterliness that characterize Day’s work from the early-mid 1980s fall squarely within the neo-expressionist tendency, certainly as it manifested in America — and, more importantly, as it manifested among women painters, who stressed a relatively lighthearted and fanciful approach carried over from the ‘70s-era Pattern & Decoration movement and reaffirming aesthetic principles associated with feminism. Clearly, Day — whose high-keyed pictures often depicted moments of domesticity and objects in domestic contexts — was asserting her own adherence to feminism, in life as in art, with her youthful emulation of neo-expressionist women painters and their pattern-painting sisters.

Sometime in the middle of the 1980s -- underscored if not occasioned by her catastrophic accident in 1983 -- Day determined that her drive to paint was a drive not to produce images, but to make marks and to complicate pictorial structure and space — in other words, to work abstractly. Among other things, this meant leaving coloristic exuberance behind and restraining her palette to a kind of soiled gray scale, overlaying sooty black with marks of taupe and confounding depth with massed and coiled or latticed lines lying on the surface, pushing the brushstrokes beneath into a constricted atmosphere. When these trails and daubs coalesced into clearly defined objects, such shapes suggested but refused to describe landscape or still life elements. That condition remained as fundamental as it had been in Day’s previous, more colorful style, but it now displayed a visual and manual sophistication that gave the paintings a new-found gravitas. The work had moved closer to postwar abstract expressionism — Philip Guston’s painting was being reassessed at the time — and also to a rudimentary environmental consciousness. Most of all, however, it can be seen as a response to a near-death experience, literally being hit by a truck This instilled not simply a new-found seriousness but a new-found lease on life that demanded commitment to an inner vision. What didn't kill Day helped make her a stronger artist.

As Day occupied this coarser, more forcefully urban style, she was presented with the opportunity to teach in Los Angeles. She came west in 1992 intending to stay a year and then return to New York. What she found in southern California, however, was an art scene whose tenor and direction was dictated by artists rather than by the art market and which put a premium on education and discourse. If the ethos among New York artists emphasized art-world success, among Los Angeles artists it emphasized respect among one’s peers and the growth shared by teacher and student alike. Day was not the first artist to abandon New York for LA, but for her the newly respectful status as artist-educator brought her home, intellectually and spiritually. 

It also gave a new dynamism to her painting, a broader and less pre-determined sense of investigation that allowed her to follow and develop eccentric forms and associations in her imagery and brushwork while evolving through various compositional formulas. Having found her own voice, you might say, she found her own song. The canvases of the early ‘90s, produced in New York and Los Angeles alike, are clotted with paint which Day has whipped up into a turgid blanket. Out of this dense, sinewy froth emerge the oddest, most incongruous shapes, locking into one another and more than occasionally revealing cartoonish objects and even faces. In this regard Day was following Guston’s lead into a comic-strip aesthetic, and as the decade progressed the density in her work slowly melted away to reveal florid, antic imagery whose sexual frisson had become almost crassly overt. But Day assiduously avoided Guston’s narrative figuration; his stylizations never became hers, rather she returned to the childlike abandon of her late-70s painting, this time capturing it with a much more complicated sense of space and time. 

At this point, and up until her fateful trip to India, Day was relying on her drawing activity to “loosen up” her approach to painting. For her, the realm of paper was a realm without rules, and she could follow brush or pen — or collage elements — wherever they led her. Many of her works on paper are, especially for her, simple and airy, direct and insouciant as the work of a child. That buoyancy found its way into her painting as she passed through an extended phase in which she relied on so many floating ovals to comprise her compositions. A marked departure from her thickly painted canvases of but a few years before, these configurations — part fruit cluster, part UFO squadron — became her “signature style,” the visual “breakout” by which her work established itself in Los Angeles, and ultimately countrywide.

Day did not carry the ovals over into the new century, but she did maintain their reductive formal language in the 2000s, applying it to a sequence of paintings composed entirely of colored stripes and, often, blacked-out areas that lie athwart the bands of color. A well-established Minimalist and Color-Field trope, the stripe formation allowed Day to counterbalance, or at least reflect on, the noise, visual as well as sonic, that fills our hours and constantly reformulates our consciousness. The earliest of these stripe paintings, the “Pulse” series, present themselves horizontally. By contrast, two series that emerged slightly later, the “Chime” and “Corona” paintings, are vertical; the latter group consists of straight up-and-down color bands, while the former contain bands of unequal lengths, stacked vertically and comprising shaped paintings that brim with architectural suggestions, whether modern skylines or, as Day noted, centuries-old Hindu temples.

The evocation of architectural structures associated with the Indian subcontinent proved prescient, not least in the disruptive presence it established in Day’s oeuvre. In 2010 the artist scratched a long-time itch and visited India, where, as she attested, her whole concept of time, space, and order was, unexpectedly, set agog. The result was the “ou-boum” series, named after a significant phenomenon described by E. M. Forster in Passage to India — an echo in a cave that has the same disorienting (or, if you would, reorienting) affect on the protagonist’s world view as Day’s experience with India had on her. In the works in the series there is a newfound sense of disorder maintaining its own order, the artist serving not to keep things in line but to let things grow and evolve naturally. Many of the ou-boum works are as much sculptural as painterly — and as front- or top-heavy as they can be without tipping over. A spirit of improvisation, of letting things develop according to their own logic, pervades as never before: the play in Day’s approach has finally taken over entirely, and for the first time the resulting art object seems open, dynamic, inconclusive, not a depiction of a circumstance or condition but an embodiment, and an inexact, potent one at that.

Day herself said that such processual chaos was foreign to her practical Yankee nature, or had been until she experienced a whole other civilization and came away with sensations and insights, she didn’t know were possible, much less available. That she had so little time to manifest such experiences subsequently was a stroke of cruel fate, of course, but there is poetic justice in the fact that Day was able to produce these last works at all. These vibrant, errant painting-objects, wild and sensuous and dangerous, are an affirmation of new-found life, a different definition of making and thinking and living, a break with the norm. Thanks to India, Day was able to liberate herself from what had been normative to her mindset and practice, a passage even more emphatic than giving up New York for Los Angeles. Her last work not only explodes with such unfettered perception, but points back at the rebellious energy that had powered Day’s entire journey as an artist. 

In retrospect, we can see that, from the first, Day was an artist of conventional strengths and unconventional perceptions, and that her art was always the site of a dialogue between the strategic and the inspired, the instructional and the revelatory, the known and the unknown. Day lived long enough to let the unknown engulf the known; what waited for her beyond was a resulting redefinition of the known, a redefinition that burns like a pilot light at the heart of the ou-boum works but whose heat can be felt as far back as her paintings and (especially) drawings of the 1980s. Methodical and chimerical at once, Linda Day’s art bespeaks a thoughtful yet vigorous spirit devoted to the world of art, but even more to the larger world understood through art.

Los Angeles

December 2019