by Ethel Gilmour (1940 - 2008)
Museum of Antioquia ~ Medellin, Colombia
The Complete Installation ~~~~~~ Detail of Girl Standing Beneath Tree
About the painting: "In this work we see fragments full of tenderness over the peaceful life of a town whose center is a flowering Guayacan. Ethel, tiny among the rain of yellow flowers, looks at the majesty of the tree. She tells us that the old people of the town sit to watch the Guayacan at the end of the day."
"Trees are sanctuaries; Who knows how to talk to them,
Who knows how to listen to them, learn a truth."
I cannot find much written in English about this painting or this artist,
but I did find this essay "The Yellow Guayacan"
by Alberto González
Those of us who have followed Ethel's work recall how the parochial world of Colombian art imitating what was seen in Art Forum or Art in America only three decades ago decided that the painting had died and that the Future belonged to the video, "proposals" and facilities, but even though the prophecy of the new gravediggers never came to fruition. An artist of this era who loved painting, needed to have strong convictions and be very brave to reject the tribal wisdom of criticism in the late 1970s, but fortunately Ethel had both, coupled with solid professional training, which allowed her to approach the world of her own experiences, to recreate it in powerful and meaningful images.
Our painter, a native of Charlotte, a small town in North Carolina, completed her academic training at the prestigious Pratt Institute in New York, where she had professors such as Erwin Panfosky, the father of modern iconology, and the painter George McNeil, who in turn had been a disciple of Hans Hoffman, the famous pedagogue who had opened, along with Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell and others, a new way to American art and "Abstract expressionism." After a rich experience at the University of the Sorbonne in Paris and in the field of lithography, Ethel arrived in Colombia and in 1971 we see her linked to the National University in the Medellin headquarters where she would share her teaching experience With the sculptor Germán Botero and the painter Saturnino Ramírez, thus becoming one of the career artists at the University.
Ethel Gilmour tells us a story to celebrate the joy of life and the beauty of the world. Firmly committed to the experiences of the new cultural medium, Ethel begins to rework her pictorial language; This is how his initial paintings, of strong brushstrokes and aggressive color, are transformed into images more purified but not less intense. At a time when much of the art is parody and parasitarily given to cite the mass media, Ethel's work goes against the current, opting for a difficult road, since its figuration will always be controlled by that fine abstraction of its own, Which comprises the rigorous arrangement of the planes of the pictorial surface and the care in the accents of color or of ways to direct the gaze of the beholder in an unforgiving manner; These elements, coupled with an elegant and refined handling of color, speak of a cultured but also readable painting for an unprepared audience.
It is important to note in Ethel's work that special tension between pictorial space and its objects that she transforms into emblems: tables, dogs, toys, or even reproductions of the great painters she loves: Gaugin and Matisse, And also the great painters, however, she is not a "feminist painter" in the ideological sense of the term, but there is no doubt that her work, like that of Paula Modersohn - Becker or that of Gerogia O'Keeffe, conveys a powerful feeling Of feminine experience, such as those forms and those spaces that suggest the sensation of protection and, above all, the construction of an imagery based on everyday objects that, as already said, our artist elevates them to the level of emblematic forms.
When visiting the last exhibition of Ethel Gilmour and bidding farewell to the fabulous yellow guayacan, there remains a different and peculiar visual impression: it is the presence of the aroma that emanates from her recent work, a work with which this great painter has wanted to thank her friends and admirers.
~ Alberto González (& google translate)
The yellow clusters are blossoms, not leaves!
Because mine is a blog of connection and coincidence,
here are a couple of loosely connected poems
from Chilean (not Colombian, I know) poet
Pablo Neruda (1904 - 1973)
This one is about yellow flowers,
though not about trees:
Ode to some yellow flowers
Rolling its blues against another blue,
the sea, and against the sky
some yellow flowers.
October is on its way.*
And although
the sea may well be important, with its unfolding
myths, its purpose and its risings,
when the gold of a single
yellow plant
explodes
in the sand
your eyes
are bound
to the soil.
They flee the wide sea and its heavings.
We are dust and to dust return.
In the end we're
neither air, nor fire, nor water,
just
dirt,
neither more nor less, just dirt,
and maybe
some yellow flowers.
found in Neruda's Odes to Common Things
translated by Ken Krabbenhoft; Bulfinch Press, 1994
(other ~ translations)
[*We'll have to revisit this poem come October!]
This one is about trees,
though not about yellow flowers:
The Tree Is Here, Still, In Pure Stone
The tree is here, still, in pure stone,
in deep evidence, in solid beauty,
layered, through a hundred million years.
Agate, cornelian, gemstone
transmuted the timber and sap
until damp corruptions
fissured the giant's trunk
fusing a parallel being:
the living leaves
unmade themselves
and when the pillar was overthrown
fire in the forest, blaze of the dust-cloud,
celestial ashes mantled it round,
until time, and the lava, created
this gift, of translucent stone.
~ Pablo Neruda
"If trees could build houses
they would build them out of our bones."
~ Michael Lipsey ~
****************
And lastly, remember these Golden Oldies?
"The trees are drawing me near
I've got to find out why . . ."
And this one:
If only it said "blossoms of yellow" instead of "white,"
it could be about the guayacan tree:
The Sweetheart Tree
They say there's a tree in the forest
A tree that will give you a sign
Come along with me to the Sweetheart Tree
Come and carve your name next to mine
They say if you kiss the right sweetheart
The one you've been waiting for
Big blossoms of white will burst into sight
And your love will be true evermore
Songwriters: Johnny Mercer / Henry N. Mancini
Sung by Natalie Wood / Johnny Mathis / many others
Medellín, Colombia ~ December 2016
Botero Plaza
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