ANN KRAUS "ILLUSTRATING INFINITY"
ESSAY
To draw a line in the sand is to dare someone to cross it. It’s a challenge etched not only in myth but in the imagination. The earth is covered with marks drawn either intentionally or instinctively either by both men or creatures of all sorts. The notion of an invisible line demarcating the limits of a moral imperative is an inspired notion that also animates the paintings of Ann Kraus, who started as an abstract artist but who has in recent years turned to the sky as a subject. If one can imagine any landscape more marked by exception, overt to topical inspection, and yet mutable beyond comparison, it is the sky. The sky draws its own lines, which attract the creative imagination, and they are also lines to be crossed, to open ourselves to an infinite range of inspiration. Kraus provides the impetus by illustrating her own versions of this grand palette.
Clouds are eternally changeable, and their portrayal alters according to other elements interacting with their perception, such as environmental dynamics—air pressure, wind, moisture, and extremes of light or darkness. Details on the edge of the horizon—water or land—also characterize the great mass of space above it, and even if the clouds in a given scene lend it greater gravity, the scene as a whole cannot help but be affected by the composition of the scene below it. Kraus seems to be more actively challenging herself in the new work, by emphasizing scenes in which visual complexity and ambiguities indirectly portray the aggressive nature of environmental dynamics affected by Climate Change.
Kraus’s paintings have become more topically complex, as she tends to choose subjects for interpretation that portray a greater degree of expressiveness, while also depicting more extreme weather patterns. Of course, the painter is under no direct obligation to any particular set of dramatic circumstances, though overall, the choice of subject matter can characterize an artist’s thematic sympathies. Kraus is mindful that too many beautiful sunsets, for instance, may limit her active viewers, who don’t merely desire a sun-filled vista. If anything, a sky filled with clouds is one that does more than catch the eye—it brings the entire mind, including memory, into the experience of looking. Also Kraus has to take into consideration which sorts of people are viewing her paintings.
The sort of person who may prefer a more complex and possibly depressing scene is looking to get access to a certain kind of emotional energy that is needed to get through other issues in everyday life. Given the overwhelming degree of crisis that has bled into our shared experiences, any role that art can have in redressing emotional issues dormant in the mind of the viewer, allowing them to give vent to them merely by appreciating a painting, is one of the most important gifts that Kraus’s oeuvre can deliver. Not only to develop a discipline that reflects a variegated relationship to the natural world, but to use it as means of interacting with viewers in an ameliorative capacity. Violent or turgid scenes like this one possess a similar character to intentionally abstract paintings, like those by Jackson Pollock for instance, which narrate the instinctual conflicts in the mind of the artist. That Krause may rely upon, or spin a stronger impression based upon real events as she witnesses them, makes the affinity required of it no less potent.
As a painter of nature’s effects, Kraus is dedicated to a dual context—first, to be true to her experiences, and to bring the fullness of that experience into a painterly achievement; second, to illuminate and illustrate that experience by making it also an abstract construction of the highest order. We are both transported to a moment of heightened sensory immersion, yet we can also appreciate the technical mastery that transforms a real scene into an object of aesthetic complexity. We can both find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
In MISTY LOW TIDE MORNING, we look out over what looks like a wide river or a bay, with the tide quickly receding, making the water look brackish. The sky is filled with a heavy blanket of clouds, which completely blank out the horizon, and despite a large break in them directly above, where a dirty blue sky attempts to emerge, it somehow cannot. The overall scene is one of moody obscurement, in which a dramatic elemental narrative feels strangely opaque.
TRANQUILITY presents a large sky half-covered in swirling white clouds. The tranquil aspect on hand is the blue sky background that permeates and frames the clouds. Such an open perspective is proof of a developing consciousness that begins to see ameliorative qualities in an area defined by elemental activity unaffected by the iniquities if human agenda. Like watching tides or winds blowing in upper branches of treetops, the moisture currents and the diaphanous forms they alternately process and dissolve are an intimate manifestation of emotional currents which, similarly unverbalized, define who we are as human beings.
If there’s anything that skies impress upon an extended viewer, it’s the concepts of time and immensity. LONG JOURNEY AT DAWN presents a scene in which the earliest moments of liminal consciousness and the evidence of its illumination are by turns calming and transcendent. The light that blasts out from a single point in front of the viewer makes itself known in a cornucopia of hues and tangents. We don’t see it yet, but dawn will obliterate the darkness that only minutes before still reigned supreme. What Kraus makes us see is the day taking shape, like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon. These silent fireworks are a reflection of all that’s seen and otherwise sensed in the world of daylight. Very few moments will ever feel like this one.
THREE GOLDEN CLOUDS presents another scene that could only happen in the sky, where neighboring clouds take on disparate moods, dictated by a slight separation or infinitesimal tangent of two fleeting cloud forms. The larger cloud is ominous and dark, as if it carried within it some primaeval force, summoning storm-clouds or withholding the fullness of night. Perched nimbly, like some golden bird, is one cloud, while in both the middle distance and far horizon there reflects a similar golden color. The golden cloud in the foreground is like a thicket of luminescence, and one can imagine all the life that thrives within such a dense territory. The other layers of clouds are like echoes of whatever ambience travels above the upper gray reaches, fading away and in some way, saying goodbye.
FARMLAND is an example of how Kraus merges sky with landscape, so that the viewer can be made to understand that they are never completely alien to one another. The land gives dimension and offers planar counterpoint to the effusive forms swirling above it. Farms themselves create a humanistic narrative connecting history and society to what would otherwise be another vertical perspective. The sky in this case is populated with both light gray and dark clouds, but in an action that describes a lowlying storm system moving over the land with seeming malevolence, while the upper reaches calmly frame the approaching dusk. The last hues of translucent daylight are fading behind these clouds. The land remains, golden and constant below it.
Nature may have it seasons but the sky is eternal, always presenting gradients of a horizon that is the last line we can never cross. Ann Kraus’s paintings dramatize the natural world in dimensions that we can take in, allowing us to be challenged by the complexity of existence.
Gorgeous report. Thank you.