“In a profane world, drawing is the ultimate source of the numinous.”
Pierre Schneider, Matisse1

“Birth not death, is the hard loss.”
Louise Gluck, “Cottonmouth Country,” Firstborn2

In recounting an actual imprisonment, James Turrell has described how he worked through claustrophobia by giving himself up to the confining darkness. Following that act of resignation, “the mind manufactured a bigger space,” and he saw “the light that is always within darkness.”3 That paradox underlies Turrell’s exploration of color and introduces Anne Scheid’s investigation into the dualism of darkness and light. Just as a floodlit room can “open” to the illusion of a window, a dark space can hollow itself so that it seems a frame. The frame, elongated, becomes a door, a portal that is not only a place but a passageway. In Scheid’s A Step In The Dark, the doorway opens to a succession of metaphorical thresholds: the sequence of suspended scrims that the viewer walks around and the indivdual scrim that he can, up close, see through.

Twisting into darkness, the spiralling path is radiant with light. Its components are sheets of waxed paper (12’ x 40″) suspended from the 12-foot ceiling. On these long banners, Scheid has drawn figures in charcoal. Giant, they confront the viewer. Upside down, they throw him off balance. Translucent and wavering, the screens are cloudy windows and ironic mirrors.

While the screens emanate light, the deep red walls absorb, deflect, and cast it back. On the walls, the charcoal lines of the scrims give way to white chalk. More abstracted than the figures on the scrims, the walls’ lines investigate, turning into and tracing back. Hectic and elegant, Scheid’s line is a species of inquiry. As such, it recalls Eva Hesse’s comment on her drawing: “It is my main concern to go beyond what I know and what I cannot know.”4 On the red walls of A Step In The Dark, the metaphor of moving through darkness becomes literal. The line here exemplifies the Judaeo-Christian explanation of creation as an act of division: the progressive separation of light from darkness, firmanent from water, order from chaos, etc. In a similar way, Scheid’s line divides form from space, being from non-being, the figure from the ground.

Life-size figures overlap and intersect each other. The white line that describes the form also, at times, blots it out. The ambiguity between the line that delineates and the line that dissolves recalls Scheid’s breathtaking installation, Meeting (1989) that followed from her journey to Japan. Again, the drama of becoming is enhanced by the process of erasure. The white scrims that individually mimic doorways and successively imply a path, recall, too Scheid’s recent series of vertical pastel drawings (8’ x 36″) in which she juxtaposed an obscured figure with a similarily suppressed typos or sign. While the Westerner imagines duality as one thing alongside another, as if in opposition (e.g., the diptych: two sides of a question, etc.), the Eastern mind positions one thing on top of another, as if to imply completion (e.g., the ideograms of I Ching; the symbol for yin/yang, etc.) Thus, when a chair floated on top of a figure, as in Nothing Bit Questions And This Moment (pastel on paper 1989), the top and bottom images implied a state of balance, if not a resolution or an answer.

If that series, entitled Inquiries, meditated on a state of tenuous equilibrium, A Step In The Dark, in contrast, addresses what it means to be cast forth—off balance (falling) and alone. The spiraling light path contained by the red walls suggests both the birth canal and the death tunnel—the separation of the self from its physical origins or from its emotional past. Because th figures are upside down, they replay manifold versions of the Fall—from godhead, from good, from Paradise, et al. By flooding the falling figures with light, however, Scheid implies an ironic transfiguration.

Finally, Scheid’s eloquent, gestural line does not contain, as Matisse’s did, the form. Instead, it indicates the form’s dissolution and, at times, its metamorphosis. Scheid’s line moves; it describes movement. As such, it resists closure. Because Scheid’s drawing is charged with both anxiety and exhilaration, it diverts attention away from itself and toward the artist. It is what Zucari called disegno interno, inner drawing.5 It chronicles an internal event; it is process. Invoking the forma spiritual, it moves toward light, toward the epiphany of light.

Maureen Bloomfield*

1 Pierre Schneider, Matisse (New York): Rizzoli, 1984), p.384
2 Louise Gluck, “Cottonmouth Country,” Firstborn (New York: New American Library, 1968), p,41.
3 James Turrrell, Perceptual Cells, exhibition catalogue edited by Jiri Svestka (Dusseldorf: 1992), p.57.
4 Eva Hesse, Lines Of Vision: Drawings By Contemporary Women, edited by Judy K. Collischan Van Wagner (New York: Hudson Hills Press), p. 74.
5 Charles de Tolnay, History and Technique Of Old Mater Drawings (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1972), p.7.

Maureen Bloomfield’s art criticism has appeared in ARTFORUM, ARTnews, Dialogue, The New Art Examiner, and Sculpture. The Ohio Arts Council has awarded her four grants for criticism.

Exhibition Catalog for A Step In The Dark
Fresno Art Museum September – October 1994
By Maureen Bloomfield