A ti, caricia que el color colora,
fine estelete en el operar fino,
escoba barredera del camino
que te ensancha, te oprime y te aminora.


Caress that the colors have colored,
stylus that tempers its point for a master's employment,
broom to sweep clean and open the way to a journey,
enlarging, confining, diminishing itself for your pleasure.


Rafael Alberti 1

The mark of the brush is a trace of movement. That is already enough, in the space opened in the act of painting, to be an analogue of one's other movements in other spaces. The space of painting is the correlate of the equiprimordial spaces of the life of being in the world and the spaces of the worlds within one's being. The trace of the brush in movement is enough to be a language, with a syntax of the dichotomies of slow and fast, light and heavy, thick and thin, opaque and translucent, gloss and matte, dense and ephemeral, smooth and rough, physicality of the material surface and the apparent immateriality of perceived depth. Slowness conduces to and yet presupposes agency mediated by deliberation and reflexive contemplation. Speed suggests agency entailing in its action the intuitive and the immediate. The facture of artworks is an enterprise subsuming the quotidian distinctions of deliberation and intuition, 2 of a vita activa and a vita contemplativa.

The trace of the brush in movement is a record of the performance of a gesture. 'Gesture' is not, in McManemin's works, simply the function of the hand mediated by the brush as the hand's extension; the introduction of paint sprayed through a stencil, prominently in All Things Change, shifts the level of mediation so that the trace of the hand mediated by the brush is as if unmediated in contrast to the overt mediation of the spray and stencil passages. Spray paint and stencil evoke the syntax of photographs, both in the 'graininess' of the sprayed paint, and the indexical character of the photograph, and its manifest mediation by a mechanical entity. Peter Plagens has urged that we all are at once barbarians and antiquarians, inclined both to "savoring and contemplation, the two great antiquarian pleasures" and the barbarian pleasures of "the now, the fleeting moment, simultaneity, interconnectedness." 3 Something of this dichotomy resonates in the juxtaposition of brushed and of sprayed paint, slow and referencing the hand, fast and denying the presence of the hand. The scraffito produced by dragging an instrument, perhaps of the blunt end of a brush handle, in the wet brushed paint of All Things Change are still more direct traces referencing the hand in movement, the equivalent in painting of the finger moving through dust or through condensation on glass.

There is of course more in Corinne McManemin's paintings: color preeminently. Color assumes various functions: the definition of form, the correlate of perceptual experiences, the distillate of a memory, as Kierkegaard said of his life in the end melding into "a mood, a single color". 4 The space of All Things Change is framed by the vertical yellow-orange brushstrokes at the left and right edges, repoussoirs pulling forward to iterate the image plane and thus to push back the largely blue green field. Yet the dark, thick, glossy blue green brushstrokes pull out, or pop out, confounding the simplistic expectation that they will recede because of the coolness of their hue. In part, this effect follows from the relative glossiness of the strokes compared to the matte blue and yellow ochre stenciled sprayed paint, in part because of their scale relative to the size of the stenciled elements, and in part because of the greater texture of the brushed strokes compared to the sprayed paint.

Color and mark qua shape and line interact to produce and to subvert perceptual depth. For the artist in the act of painting no less than for the viewer (for the artist is always the first viewer), perceived depth is the consequent of the differentiation of the surface. This differentiation entails the twofoldedness of seeing-in: to see the surface qua surface, and to see the differentiated surface as have elements which precede or recede from the plane of the surface. 5 This is to say that the sequential marking of the surface in the act of painting that results in the differentiation of the surface so as to evoke the perception of surface and depth is prior to representation. Representation follows from the twofoldedness of seeing-in, ensuing when thematization obtains in the facture of the work. As Richard Wollheim urges:

For in real life, or when painting is conducted as an art, thematization occurs within that fragment of our psychology which is essentially embodied. And this turns out to be crucial. Thematization requires an eye. It requires an eye that can make fine distinctions within the thematized feature. And it requires a hand. It requires a hand that can generate fine differences within the thematized feature. 6

To priviledge the hand, indeed to emphasize the role of hand in painting by incorporating and juxtaposing passages sprayed rather than traced by the hand, is to acknowledge the agency of the painter as efficient cause of the artwork, present-to the canvas in the act of painting, which as Richard Wollheim has noted is a posture of some significance. 7 One might well press the matter farther than does Wollheim, and urge, as I would, that the complementary position of painter and canvas in the act of painting is not simply that of subject and object, but of subject and quasi-subject, to use Mikel Dufrenne's fellicitous term for artworks. 8 And this is no less to priviledge the hand than to priviledge the eye. Indeed, hand and eye taken alone are synecdoches for the embodiedness of the agency of the artist. This underwrites Dufrenne's notion of the artwork as a quasi-subject, which like the artist qua subject, entails surface and depth.

The mark of the brush is a trace of movement. That is enough, in the space of a painting, to be an analogue of one's other movements in other spaces. It is enough to be a correlative of life.

There is of course more, in Corinne McManemin's paintings.

Corinne McManemin studied at the Ridgewood School of Art and Design, and received the Bachelor Fine Arts from West Chester University, West Chester, Pennsylvania, with post-baccalaureate study at the National Academy of Design, The Art Students League, New York, and Southern Methodist University. She received the Master of Fine Art, Summa Cum Laude, from Southern Methodist University. Recent exhibitions include: Corinne McManemin, McCormick Gallery, Midland College, Midland, Texas, 2001; Corinne McManemin, Lago Vista Gallery, Richland College, Dallas, Texas, 2000; Alumni Exhibition, Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, 2000; artstravaganza 13, Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, Tennessee; Critic's Choice, Dallas Visual Arts Center, 2000; Texas National 2000, Stephen F. Austin State University, Nacodoches, Texas, 175th Annual Exhibition, National Academy of Design, New York, 2000.

1. Rafael Alberti, A la pintura (West Islip: Universal Limited Art Editions, 1968-1972); livre d'artiste with twenty one aquatints by Robert Motherwell and selections from the Spanish poem cycle by Rafael Alberti with English translations; edition of forty plus eight artist's proofs. Reproduced in Stephanie Terenzio, The Prints of Robert Motherwell, Dorothy C. Belknap, A Catalogue Raisonné 1943 - 1984 (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1980, 1984), pp. 184-196. The four lines by Alberti, from "Al pincel" ["To the paintbrush"] are on the penultimate sheet. Return
2. The distinction of deliberative analysis and intuition is common, but fallacious, as Stanley Rosen urges in The Limits of Analysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980, 1985. Return
3. Peter Plagens, "Barbarians and Antiquarians," Keynote Address, Mid-America College Art Association Conference, Indianapolis, Indiana, 19 October 1995. I am indebted to Peter Plagens and Steve Mannheimer, Professor of Painting, Herron School of Art, IUPUI and organizer of the conference, for making the text available. Plagens utilizes the distinction of "antiquarian" and "barbarian" as a metaphor for high culture on the one hand, and something like Guy Debord's notion of the spectacle, on the other [see Guy Debord, La Société du Spectacle (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1967; Éditions Champ Libre, 1972; Gallimard, 1992). Translated by Fredy Perlman, John Supak as Society of the Spectacle (Black & Red, 1970; rev. ed. 1977); by Donald Nicholson-Smith (NY: Zone, 1994). Available online in French and in English linked from http://www.nothingness.org/]; I stretch the terms, and especially the latter, a bit in this application. Return
4. Arthur C. Danto obtains substantial mileage from this metaphor: see The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 1 et seq. Return
5. Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art [The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1984, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.], (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987) p. 46. Return
6. Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art [The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1984, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.], (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987) p. 25. By 'thematization' Wollheim refers to the recognition and conscious utilization of features of the work in progress so as to enable meaning. Return
7. See Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art [The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1984, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.], (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987) p. 39 for the significance of the perduring traditional position of the painter standing in front of the canvas. Return
8. See Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward S. Casey et al. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 146. Return