UPCOMING
ExHIbition

Unleaving: works on
used and found materials
October 4–29, 2023

Location:
Touchstone Gallery, Washington, DC

Artist Reception:
Saturday, October 14, 2023 4–7 pm

In Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem Spring and Fall, he writes of a girl, Margaret, who weeps upon seeing the autumn leaves falling, what he calls the trees’ “unleaving.” For Hopkins, the little girl is unable to say or to understand that which “heart heard, ghost guessed,” that what she is mourning is in fact the passage of time itself, the inevitable death of her loved ones and, eventually, of herself. To my ears, the word “unleaving” is packed with meaning, with paradox. It is loss and death, as Hopkins suggests. But taken literally, it is the opposite of loss, a transformation of loss into something else.

During the pandemic, I was painting all sorts of things and putting them in my backyard: parts of a cow skeleton found in the snowy woods behind a farm, old pieces of plywood from a dumpster, decaying gourds I had left over from a previous series of work. When a young weeping redbud tree failed to bloom in the spring of 2021, I painted its bare limbs with bright red and turquoise. It has occurred to me that I was attempting to unleave the tree’s unleaving.

In many of the paintings in this show, used-up notepads, old tabletops, discarded paintings, rotting limbs populated with dried up lichen, are revivified in a way that accentuates simultaneously their spentness and their potentiality. In fact, I make use of their deadness, brokenness and uselessness to bring new life to them, to create something new from them, to transform them.

I was drawn to many of the branches I painted for this show because they were covered with lichen. I liked that the branches looked adorned. I’ve since learned that lichen proliferates on dying trees for the reason that these unleaved trees allow in the light that the lichen needs to live and to thrive. With paint and resin, I transformed these swaths of tree. I found them denuded of leaf and life, in gradations of grays and browns, and I gave them glossy coats of vibrant purples and blues and pinks and greens that call attention to the ridges and valleys of their skins, of the interplay of growth and decay. Unleaving begets unleaving.

In my work, I have always gone back and forth between real and fantasied faces. The real faces are, so to speak, taken from photos. They are faces that once were. But I have stolen them into the present so that they both were and are. The fantasied faces I paint tend to have eyes that look at once inward and outward or, as a friend described it, “otherward.” This otherward gaze is mirrored in the materials I use for this exhibit, the dualities they embody: outside and inside, past and present, deadness and aliveness, uselessness and potentiality. Unleaving and unleaving.

PAST EXHIBITION

Pillow book: Pages from
a Pandemic
MARCH 2021

Online Exhibit

It has been almost exactly a year since we closed Touchstone Gallery in response to the spread of the virus. At the beginning of March 2020, I hung two shows there side by side: mine and that of my dear friend and mentor Steve Alderton, who had died suddenly just six months earlier. Of course, these two shows never opened.

For several months, I uncharacteristically stopped painting. Then, in October, I came across the empty guest books from the show and started to fill them with small paintings, fleeting thoughts, and dreams. I had not thought about showing this work, as I was more aware of trying to fill the book’s blank pages with whatever I was thinking and seeing. When it came time to consider showing my work, I thought of The Pillow Book. The Pillow Book was a collection of inner thoughts and feelings about everyday life in Japan written around the year 1000 by Sei Shonagon, a court lady to the empress. I have entitled my show, Pillow Book: Pages from a Pandemic, as a nod to thei earlier collection of musings that reflect a time in history.

Past ExHIbition

TRANSITIONAL SPACES
March 3–29, 2020

An interview with painter and psychologist Dana Brotman
Interviewer: Michael Krass, psychoanalyst

Dana Brotman, a painter and member of Touchstone Gallery, who is also a psychologist, intended to share an exhibit of her paintings with her closefriend as well as her fellow painter and Touchstone Gallery member, Steve Alderton. Tragically, Alderton died quite suddenly this past summer at the age of 67. Even before his untimely death, however, she had been exploring the liminal space between herself and Alderton, a person she considered her "art mother," a mentor who encouraged and inspired her in her painting. In doing so, she had been experimenting with painting atop his discarded and half-finished paintings, allowing his original colors and textures to bleed through into her work. Since his death, she has continued to explore this combined space, a space created between self and other. She has been doing so by, for example, adding many colors from his palette to her own, even using some of the half-used paint tubes she found in his studio while cleaning it. In thinking about whether it was even possible to show her work with a friend and fellow artist who is no longer present, she delved into the places between the two of them, into the places where, through countless conversations about their art, their minds met, melded and came away with a renewed creative vision. She had to find a way to paint alongside someone who was both ​not there and ​there at the same time. As a result, many of the works she has painted for the exhibit seek to remember him to​ ​the exhibit's viewers.

Brotman's view on her creative process and the role of interdependence between the self and another in enriching creativity will be explored in an interview with Michael Krass. Krass is a psychologist and psychoanalyst who is a training and supervising analyst with the Contemporary Freudian Society and a Clinical Assistant Professor at the George Washington University. He has written on the unconscious aspects of creativity and is, himself, a musician and poet.

PAST EXHIBITION

beg borrow + steal: 
works on cardboard
October 4–29, 2017

Director Jim Jarmusch wrote, “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination ... Authenticity is invaluable, originality is nonexistent.” In Dana Brotman’s latest show beg borrow + steal: works on cardboard at Touchstone Gallery, her paintings crackle with authenticity even when their origins lie elsewhere.

Some of Brotman’s paintings are begged from her imagination; the portrait of the woman in Woman with Hat, ridged and mottled by the ribs of the cardboard on which it is painted, and staring, as Brotman’s people often do, in that space between near and far, outward and inward, contentment and preoccupation. Some are borrowed from people she has met; Ana, a portrait of a Barcelonan gallery owner whose scarf is flattened into clumps of avocado green and who sits, surrealistically, against a wall of bold red. Some are stolen from photos; a 2-by-2-inch Aretha Franklin framed into a triangle by a Klimt-like yellow veil. And some are stolen from other artists’ work, such as Boy, where Brotman removes the boy from Picasso’s Family of Saltimbanques, and places him, with his little suit of blueberry and rust, on a scraped-on yellow backdrop (she often paints with a scouring pad) as if it were a piece of a graffitied stucco.

Brotman uses materials in the show intended to capture the confluence of material finiteness and the ephemeral, both what merely glances our awareness, flitting in and out of our lives, and what is sublime and permanent and universal. These pieces (including miniature works on iPhone® boxes, portraits on flattened-out cereal boxes and the leaves of Amazon packaging as well as larger pieces on the sides of furniture boxes, some enclosed within thrift store frames re-fashioned with garish orange and fluorescent red) play with borders and with depth. Some spill over to the sides of the box, some are edged by ripped pieces of hastily cut cardboard that echo the curls of the subject’s hair, others she painted over another artist’s discarded paintings.

In these works, the past and present, the now and then are constantly merging and intertwining. Brotman makes use of materials not noticed, discarded, innocuous, un- wanted on which to stage her portraits of men and women who, whether real or imagined, testify to the profundity of everyday life.