Dead End Painting

An Encounter with "Dead End" by Michele Whiting: As I recall, when I stood in front of Mike Newton’s "Dead End" , seeing it for the first time and waiting for the artist to return, I realised that for a brief moment I had left the studio too, not in a physical way but in an imaginative one. I had momentarily left the room through a mechanism of encountering this painted landscape as an event in space and time that has drawn me into itself. Now, I acknowledge that I am partial. I know who painted it. I can imagine his smile. Smell his frustration through the odour of turps. See his hands working in my minds eye. But I also know that to be conscious of the unusurpable other in this painting means that this first and powerful encounter is for me the real event of the artwork, requiring me (the viewer) to perceive truly outside of any aesthetic definitions. To feel and sense the painting as a response to perception. Now, I accept the image as intrinsically bound to emotion, felt by its very impact as an experience of witnessing with all the senses and like Aby Warburg before me I am transformed through being given the chance to re-live my own fears and suffering in his game of sensing. But what has provoked this response, what has alerted my senses to the push and pull of the visual? Maybe thinking about Holbein’s Dead Christ perhaps reduced to horizontal line by Gerhart Richter (1), shares similarities with this particular dead end, which has brought the viewer to a full stop through the play of the horizontal being repeated, as if to re-inforce the viewers’ position as outside of the work, as denied access. This apperceptive device halts us and in halting we are jolted awake to the abandonment and isolation of the caravan, which acts like a little shock that is felt in my body (as the viewer). Sensing disquiet and something much more intimate my eyes are drawn to the road as a possible means of escape, but here blocked by the framing (the composition) of the overall image. Paradoxically, only by wandering towards the painting am I forced back, only by relinquishing aesthetic norms and instead embracing it for the evocative matter that it really is, can I move forward. The power of the painting, its intrinsic value, resonates in mid space between us and it, between here and there. And it is in this in- between or elsewhere space that sense is comprehended, and it is precisely here that we begin to know the painting, to feel its landscape. ©Michele Whiting (1)von Drathen, D. 2004.Milano,Charta

Painting:Oil on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:55.1 W x 39.4 H x 2 D in

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