Seeing Nature: Painting by Janise Yntema
Frances Guerin
Return of the Nightingale, 2011
Oil & Encaustic on panel, 60 cm x 60 cm
For American artist Janise Yntema, the vastness of painting is not dependent on the size of the canvas. Small paintings create depth, open universes to the viewer, and suggest possibility. Yntema's small encaustic paintings on wood and canvas invite entry into a world in which to roam emotionally, spiritually, and imaginatively. Rather than having someone else's emotions thrust upon us, in front of Yntema's paintings, we are beckoned to form a shifting, intimate relationship with small encaustic worlds.
Yntema typically paints seascapes, landscapes, cloudscapes, and indeterminate “scapes” that could be any one of the three. The picture often verges into abstraction, but it is not inconsequential that Yntema's paintings resemble oceans, land, and sky extending out of sight, often behind or under low-lying clouds. In some instances, the works depict a deceptively simple luminosity that is not quite definable. Light can be lustrous or translucent in Yntema's paintings, but it is always just out of reach. Light is to be bathed in, not understood. In these works, nature offers an occasion for reflection, beyond our routinized world.
Yntema also paints larger canvases that can be equally expansive, at times, creating a disquieting mystery. Her paintings of land and seascapes, and also, of dense wooded forests without skies, are haunting spaces in which to get lost. Whether dreamy cloudscapes or unsettling forests, dense with foliage, Yntema's paintings consistently depict undulations of the natural world. Similarly, they are unique for their execution in all natural materials. Yntema works with the ancient materials and technique of encaustic: colored pigments in a heated wax binding.
Hallwood, 2016
Oil & Encaustic on panel,40 cm x 40 cm
Encaustic: Method and Material
For Yntema, painting began a long time before spray guns, oils, and egg whites. In the fifth century BC, the ancient Greeks discovered that pigments fused with resin and beeswax, bound by heat, not only made painting possible, but permanent. They discovered that, for the first time, painting could endure the elements, over time.1 The encaustic technique and materials create art in its most natural form; painting not simply connected to nature through encaustic but made from all natural elements. Wax from bees, color pigment from plants, rocks and dirt, and resin from trees are heated and manipulated on canvases or wood to create smooth, tactile surfaces. Yntema's work stays close to the sustainable, lifegiving materials of the ancient Greeks.2
Yntema explains that most art supplies are petrochemical biproducts: oil production offshoots, such as polymer emulsions, synthetic resins and mylars, plastics and acrylics.3 These materials explicitly, though invisibly, contribute to the destruction of our natural world. She talks about the tragedy of what is happening to the earth; the slow change and erosion of the environment over the long twentieth century. The material expansion and financial accumulation that motivated us after the industrial revolution have left us in dire ecological health. Even as works by artists in different media have begun to implore us to end our destruction of the environment, these pleas for ecological sustainability themselves often use materials that pollute and contribute to the degeneration of the ocean, landscapes, plants, and vibrant worlds of nature. Yntema's art subtly rebukes this destruction by embracing encaustic, an all-natural alternative.
Yntema claims that she was initially drawn to beeswax for its historical relevance. Quickly thereafter, her commitment to a sustainable process gelled when she discovered what was happening to bees. She found that colonies were being factory farmed, genetically mutated, and exposted to systemic chemical dousing during enforced pollination. Queen bees with clipped wings were artificially inseminated and forced to overporduce eggs; the enture delicate and complex ecosystem of the hives was thus interrupted and destroyed. Yntema chooses to use beeswax procured through environmentally sustainable methods pursued by natural beekeeping. She insists on using naturally bleached wax as her medium and heat from a blowtorch as the binder of her encaustic painting.
Yntema's preference for natural wax and resins transforms painting into an artform of time: the value and meaning of painting are not measured by space and place, or the dimensions of a wall on which her work is hung. Yntema's paintings are about bringing the past into the present in the interests of safeguarding the future of the planet. The temporal narrative that commenced centuries ago is transferred to the making of her artwork. The encaustic process takes time and can be difficult to manage. For this reason, from the fouteenth century in Northern Euorpe, tempera was preferred by artists and celebrated as a more efficient and economical means to fix colour. Tempera was subsequently replaced by oil paint in the fifteeth century. The preparation time for tempera and oil paint were a fraction of that of paintings in encaustic and, at first sight, gave the same results.4 In the frenetic rush of the twenty-first century, acrylics became the preferred medium for paintineg. Fast drying, flexible, durable, vibrant, cheap, and on goes the list of why acrylic is the paint medium of our time. Encaustic offers no speedy solutions.
Yntema's painting is not totally removed from technological advance. Her work embraces the modern world through a use of photography. She takes photographs of landscapes, seascapes, and forests, thus, uses the medium of modernity as an inspiration. Back in the studio, Yntema takes the cheap, mechanically produced-in-a-flash image and copies it to make paintings through the long, drawn-out process of encaustic. Over time, pursuing a process that has been used by artists from ancient Greece through industrial modernity, Yntema restores the placelessness of the natural world through painting. Once landscapes appear on her canvases, they are no longer tied to a location, but to a feeling—anything from quiet reflection to a sense of unease, even impending threat. Whatever their tone, her paintings show natural worlds apparently unspoilt by human endeavor.
In this, Yntema's paintings recall German Romantic images of nineteenth-century wanderers looking out across unspecified oceans and landscapes. However, in Yntema's work, the water is calm, if unpredictable, and unobserved by humans within the painted world. Here, nature is undisturbed, in conversation with itself. Most often, misty skies verge into sea or land, fusing. In these paintings, nature is free to exist beyond anything that we can understand or rationalize, even if we are visionaries. It is impossible to know what will come next underneath the blue-grey surface of Yntema's oceans. Left to their own devices, the oceans can behave as they want and will. It is only when we come along to interrupt them with our ideas about industry and economic advance that their stirrings become a threat, promising Iashings and sprays of bitterly cold water on our skin. In encaustic works, Yntema navigates the ocean and other natural landscapes, reminding us that small and quiet can be vast and surging.
Chuchotis, 2015
Oil & Encaustic on panel, 30 cm x 52 cm
Small Openings to Big Worlds
Towards the end of the 1940s, postwar American artists started making bigger paintings, shifting the boundaries of abstract art into spaces and places that it had never before occupied. Abstract painting became imposing and increasingly visible to mainstream audiences; size was understood as a confirmation of importance, alerting us to take it seriously. Artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Robert Motherwell made pictures to revere, to look up to, so big that we had to across them, and emotionally charged enough to fall into. These American painters announced on oversized canvases that abstract painting was here to challenge tradition and conservatism. Painting was no longer compelled to represent a thing, but rather, swathes of colored paint pushed and pulled around big canvases had the capacity to bring new experiences of the world. Following World War II and the art world's move to America, abstraction was not simply to be experienced visually, but in space. And so, viewers walked along and around them, stood back and marveled at the transformation of space through abstract painting. Ever since, the art world has applauded big canvases for challenging the status quo. Yntema's encaustic paintings might be seen to claim that small is, in fact, enough. Particularly when used to represent the enormity of the natural world.
In front of little paintings, we peer into big psychological and imaginative spaces that are never quite real. For Yntema, space is not actual. Space is infinite and unfolding. Space is a thing to be discovered and remembered. Space is something we occupy and, thereafter, remember for the way that we feel inside. We rarely recall the dimensions of space when we revisit a place in our memories. Dimensions are the business of real estate agents. Space is the territory of philosophers, the physical size of a painting on the wall is the concern of art dealers. Capitalism tells us that we want to own the land—or a painting—to have it as ours and sequester it from the general public. Ownership of a thing, an artwork, land in the wild, makes us wealthy, in many senses of the word.
For Yntema, wealth is defined by time, by how we use the time that we are given. Richness is in the time spent with painting, in a place, together with nature. Before Yntema's paintings, we discover what is hidden, ethereal, beautiful, a world living and breathing behind and underneath the surface. The encaustic material is important, especially for its rich texture, its sensuous reality, inviting us to stand still, remember places, and wander in our imaginations, over time.
The tussle between large and small is painting's age-old and ongoing preoccupation. The contested space of the canvas is as topical as the trafficking between material and meaning; it is as rehearsed as the push and pull between figuration and abstraction. The multiple dimensions of an image, the surface and its imaginative depths, the color on canvas and the world that it reveals to us, are there to remind us of the reality and materiality of our mortal existence. The physical presence of a work of art reminds us of our own physicality, particularly when we rail against it, convinced that we see something that isn't there, particularly as we yearn to overcome our physical limits. Face to face with nature, the effect can be the same: our inadequacy and imperfection becomes clear.
A painting is never anything more than pigment in binder, and yet, we want painting always to be and represent a thing, something familiar and recognizeable from our everyday lives. We are determined to make abstraction figurative. Yntema's encaustic seascapes, cloudscapes, and misty landscapes continue the conversations and disputes of modern art in a unique and timely way. Namely, they demonstrate, on reflection over time, how far we in the industrial world have departed from the freedom and possibility that painting can offer. Simultaneously, their substance and depiction confront us with the extent to which we have wandered from our empathy and understanding of what is real: the natural world and our insignificance within it.
Looking
Dawn, 2019
Oil, Encaustic & mixed media on panel 15 cm x 15 cm
Somerset, 2019
Oil & Encaustic on panel 40 cm x 40 cm
The experience of Yntema's works is significant for its challenge to the contemporary practice of looking. The works ask that we stand still before them and reflect. Critics remark on the Romantic nature of Yntema's paintings.5 But, in fact, her works do something different from those of seventeenth and eighteen century predecessors. Yntema does not search for mastery and insight into the everyday world through looking at land and seascapes. Unlike the work of Casper David Friedrich and British Romantics such as J.M.W. Turner or John Constable, there is no storm brewing on Yntema's horizons. And we will recall that no one is watching inside the painting; there is no trace of human life. Modernity has been emptied from her canvases. These are not paintings that ask us to look at the limitations of being human through the eyes of a visionary. Rather, we must take responsibility ourselves. Death is nowhere visible, but rather, it is up to Yntema's viewer to bring an anticipation of a time before destruction to the paintings. If we stand still long enough before these paintings, we recall another time, stretching our minds back to an era when nature was not burdened with the violence and ruin that we have inflicted on it. Of course, as Friedrich reminds us, nature is inherently violent, but Yntema's natural worlds are quietly contained, offering an invitation for our contemplation of a kind of destruction not pictured. We are asked to find the historical narrative in our hearts and minds as we contemplate the ravaging of our environments that do not appear in the paintings.
The Other Shore, 2018
Oil, Encaustic & mixed media on panel 60 cm x 60 cm
Perhaps the contemporary artist whose work is closest to Yntema's is the Brazilian painter Lucas Arruda. 6 Arruda does not use encaustic, but he does something similar – creates light and air in intimate paintings of the natural world executed flat on a table. Yntema's works converse with Arruda's through their depiction of unlocatable natural worlds that tip over into illusory spaces somewhere at the edge of our sight. Through the ineffability of these spaces, both artists explore the sense of mystery and unknowability of the nature. Skies become carpets of airy white light, a wake left by a speedboat moving into infinite time and space is shrouded in a misty sky (The Other Shore, 2018). In another example, the wake races our eye into an unseeable distant horizon in a study in blue said to be the arrival of moonlight (Moonlight Arrives, 2022). Whereas Arruda's intimate paintings verge into abstraction at horizons along the bottom of the canvas, Yntema's pull our eye into the depths of the landscape or seascape, towards an effulgent light on hazy horizons. Thus, Yntema's verge into abstraction makes her painting mystical and haunting, while Arruda's are more confronting in their complexity, not allowing our eye to sit for long, or giving us only a slither of light at which to explore.
Lucas Arruda, Untitled, 2014
Oil on canvas, 24 cm x 30 cm
Lucas Arruda, Untitled, (from the Desert Modelo series) 2017
oil on canvas, 34,5 cm x 30 cm
Encaustic Objects
Yntema is not the first or only contemporary American painter to use the ancient process of encaustic in her art. Jasper Johns comes quickly to mind, as does Lynda Benglis who was making wax works on narrow wooden supports when she came to renown in the 1960s. Johns's use of molten wax speaks a dynamic energy, the paintings are materially sumptuous and sensuous, the surfaces rich in texture. 7 In a Painting Bitten by a Man (1960), for example, Johns puts the body back into painting, and his body with it. As we examine the tooth and tongue marks left on the glutinous surface caked in wax, it is all we can do to hold back our fingers from tracing the mouth. Johns was interested in restoring the multi-dimensional to painting, to restore the objectness that was discarded with abstraction in the 1950s and 1960s. Johns ignited the pop art movement with his encaustic depictions of flags, bullseyes, and numbers, giving the viewer a thing in the world with which to identify. For Johns, encaustic with its dimensionality and sensuality facilitated and complemented a turn away from abstraction. Yntema's explorations of looking in time, although related, do something different from Johns's use of encaustic. Yntema's works are both tantalizing on their surface, and they also lead us on a journey away from space as a place, a thing that can be experienced by our whole body.
For her part, Lynda Benglis also made wax physical in her sculptures. Indeed, they were about the body in its material and sensuous manifestations. Like Johns, the shape of Benglis's work is determined by her body: the sculpture never longer than her outstretched arm, nor wider than the brush. The luscious material is designed to stimulate and excite our senses. In her Embryo works, for example, encaustic is manipulated to an erotic, even ecstatic, form. It looks porous, filled with crevices and craters. It is as if we are looking in close up at a surface made palpable by different viscosities; that is, inside the body. Yntema might be using the same material, but her method and intentions are also distinct from Benglis's. Yntema's painting as objects are manipulated to ensure that we look outside of our own bodies, at the vastness of time, air, and the elements. Her material encourages insight into who we are in that world.
Linda Benglis, Embryo II, 1967-76
Uniqueness
Yntema's paintings as unique conversations between painting, natural world, and viewer are most profound when together with each other, sparkling in a community. Hung on walls together, a larger piece radiates when next to a small sibling work of a related ocean or landscape. In an exhibition at the Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh, small next to large, clouds beside a forest, a bulging grey sky next to a brilliant but moody seascape. Together, these paintings exude a curiosity that they might not have on their own. The paintings speak to each other, the light moving from one to the next, day passing across the wall as the light finally fades into darkness and nighttime on the space of a gallery wall. They follow the natural rhythms of time passing. While Yntema paints diptych and triptych forms, the paintings are most interesting when they are placed next to one of their relatives, out of order, in ways that might suggest their individuality and relatedness.
Yntema's are also paintings about blue. Blue interacts with white pigment as light to create hazy, warm, and ethereal worlds. Blue is the color, but the light emerging when it is together with white collaborates with wax to make painting radiate and seduce. Together with white, blue can ponder, reflect, and encourage imaginative journeys. By contrast, in a painting such as Diffused Light I and other works from 2009, blue is the rain on a summer's day. In this, the works are as akin to Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens' Rain, 1929. They are poetic and dreamy, simply appreciating the glimmers of light on water. All different types of blue. Blue is the earth, the shoreline, sky, and forest. Blue is winter and summer, day and night, and in a work such as Above 2020, blue itself becomes the light streaming through translucent clouds. Most surprising of all is when blue becomes fleshy, skin-like, and glowing with moisture. In a painting such as Faraway Blue (2023), the texture of color reminds us of the body—human and earth—in its absence.
Alternate Realms, 2021,
Oil encaustic and mixed media on panel
30 cm x 50 cm
Faraway Blue, 2023
Oil encaustic and mixed media on panel
l30 cm x 30 cm
