Transferred energy
Published Saturday June 6th, 2009
The late Philip Iverson, known for his limitless vitality and use of colour, was an envy to artists twice his age. A new exhibition of works in Fredericton celebrates the man.
Past the bland, corporate reception area, the massive loft is quiet, still as a mausoleum, doors to dozens of padlocked storage units lining long, empty corridors. When Yukari Hazama opens the door of the unit she rents on a cold grey day in Montreal in January, the sterility is intruded upon by the sight of piles of books, a jumble of tools and hardware, and her late husband's bicycle, which still has dirt on the tires and a plastic bottle sloshing with stale water from Philip Iverson's last ride.
But mostly there is art.
Stacks of smaller works take up one corner, while big paintings on board dominate the other.
Hazama is slight to begin with; next to some of Iverson's canvases she appears positively diminutive.
"I cannot do this by myself," she says, of sorting through the works.
The physical weight of the paintings alone is daunting, never mind the emotional pressure they exert on her.
"It's still very hard to look into it."
When an artist is young, crackling with vitality and making great work, it rends the heart to know that life and that career was cut short.
When that artist is Philip Iverson, a painter so present, so pure, so energized by his work that those who saw him paint describe his actions as a wild dance, the loss feels even greater.
But so is the gain.
A show at Ingrid Mueller Art Concepts in Fredericton opening Friday presents about 30 works from Iverson's estate, most from that storage locker in Montreal. With the exception of a retrospective Mueller mounted just after his death in August 2006, it is the first major show in his native New Brunswick since he died of a brain tumour.
The works, many of which have never been shown, range from drawings on paper to paintings on board. They run the gamut from small to gigantic, including a huge triptych. In some, the symbols and markings take recognizable form - a tree, a mountain, maybe some text.
In others, the purely abstract works, the frenetic swirls, gloppy layers and wild streaks are a visual alphabet that maybe the artist himself couldn't fully translate.
They could be anything. Which is probably why you feel like you could look at them for an hour, a day, maybe even a lifetime, that if you take this work home you will never tire of it, never see the end of it.
Death has made Iverson an abstraction, too, at least to those who did not know him. For those who did, his absence is sad, and they miss his sweetness. Those who didn't know him may feel sad, too, at the thought of an artist in his ascendency dying at just 41, a premature end to a life of art-making that began so early, and with such prodigy, even the staunchest determinist might be persuaded to believe in fate.
Teased as a kid, and epileptic, art was a refuge for Iverson, Hazama says.
"He needed to express himself in some way."
As a boy, Iverson studied with the celebrated Fredericton artist Molly Lamb Bobak. During his career, which began in earnest in 1987, when he was part of a group show at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, he received numerous awards and scholarships. He exhibited widely in Canada and was just starting to make inroads in Europe when he became ill.
Hazama believes his epilepsy contributed to the depth and perceptiveness of Iverson's painting. He had told her that when he felt a seizure coming on, his senses were heightened. "Taste would get stronger, lights would get brighter and sound louder," she says.
He saw art - and beauty - everywhere, Hazama says. Rust, age and patina, the marks of age that most people would think of as marring a surface, intrigued him.
"Philip had a unique way of seeing the world."
Iverson's portraiture is the work that most explicitly relates to seeing. Iverson had mastered the trick of putting living eyes on a canvas. They feel glued to you. Move around a room and they follow you. The effect is unnerving and striking and intriguing: how did he do it?
There is a sense of imploring in those eyes, along with boldness and a bald curiosity: the eyes look at you, and you look back and then you start to really see the work, how the image is composed of colours that don't occur together in nature, at least not in any human face you'll ever see, and how the texture of the paint, its ridges and edges and curls, only adds to the effect.
He was generous, immensely so, with his gifts of paint to board, giving no thought of economy toward his medium.
Ingrid Mueller says that even though he was often broke, he would delight in using great quantities of paint, relishing the extravagance of using $20, $30 or even $40 worth of paint in one go.
"That was his luxury."
The faces Iverson painted are generally more sombre than the expression his widow sees when she envisions him.
"When I think about him, I see him smiling."
The pair met in 1995. Hazama had left a job as an agent at a steel company in her native Japan to come to Canada. She was boarding at his mother's house while she studied English in Fredericton.
He was excited to discover she was interested in art. She enrolled in an art class he was teaching.
Before she studied with him, her drawings were "rigid," she says, and she aimed for realism over expression.
"Get loose, get free!" he told her and his other students, echoing the advice he received as a student in the fine arts department at Mount Allison University, which he graduated from in 1990. "You can paint with anything," he would say, "from ketchup to clay."
Hazama had done a little pottery in Japan. With Iverson's encouragement, she pursued professional studies, enrolling in the ceramics program at the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design in 1997. Today, she runs a thriving pottery business, selling her pots and dishes in galleries in Quebec and New Brunswick.
"It's so nice to use something that you made with your hands," she says in January during an interview at her studio as she serves mugs of coffee and almond cake from a local pâtisserie.
The couple married in 1997.
"(Iverson) said he always felt a hole in his heart and she filled it," Mueller says.
"When we met, I think he was happy," Hazama says. "He started to paint flowers."
They moved to Montreal in 2001. He loved biking on Mount Royal, Hazama says, as well as partaking of the city's café culture and its thriving arts community.
He was so prolific, his output would be the envy of many artists twice his age, although some think he didn't get his due in his life. Gary Michael Dault, a Toronto-based art critic, wrote in the Globe and Mail in 2007 that Iverson was "vastly underrated and, consequently, undervalued."
Hazama says she and Iverson joked about artists having to die to sell their work.
Money was never a motivator in Iverson's work, though. Now that he is gone, it isn't sales that Hazama hopes for, either.
Instead, what she would like to see is a retrospective of his work mounted at a public gallery, such at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, that could then go on tour across Canada.
"That would be nice," she says. "It's kind of my dream."
Most commercial galleries cannot accommodate much of his work.
"Philip's paintings need a big space," she says.
Indeed. His gargantuan installation Boat is the most extreme example. At 34.8 by 2.9 metres, the massive work, which was installed at the Beaverbrook in 1999, is perhaps still the largest single piece of art in New Brunswick.
Not long after Iverson's death, it was installed in the cafeteria/auditorium at Leo Hayes High School. It is so big, members of the football team had to help carry the 28 heavy panels into the Fredericton school.
Anyone who ever saw Iverson paint was astounded at the raw physicality of his practice, the unfettered convulsions he went through to transfer formless blobs of paint into wild, expressive paintings. "Gestural," he called them, his feet moving all the while to keep the energy flowing.
"I would watch him and think, "Oh my God, where is he going?" Mueller says. "I think he could transport himself."
In a journal entry dated March 12, 2004, Iverson wrote: "In creativity it is important to let out the wild beast from within, because only when it is running freely can it be tamed."
He compared his expressive movements to a "ritualistic dance."
Hazama once filmed him painting.
"It really adds to the value of the painting, when you see how he paints," she says. "He dances."
Gary Michael Dault called him "an almost unbelievably physical, bodily" painter.
"Iverson's way was to grasp the inner meaning of his subject, almost as if he had to lay hold of it with his bare hands," he wrote in the Globe and Mail in 2007. "He would dance and growl before the canvas, finally leaping at it with a loaded brush, like a combination of Bruce Lee and Vaslav Nijinsky."
Trudy Gallagher, the Fredericton jewelry designer who founded Bejewel, took art lessons with Iverson years ago as a way to relieve the stress of running her own business. The two became very close friends.
"I specifically chose Philip because I didn't understand his art. I knew he was a great painter. I knew everyone held him in high esteem, but I didn't understand why," she says.
"The first class I felt like an idiot. I didn't know if I was going to go back, because he had me do what he does," she says. "He just put me in front of a very big sheet of paper and said, 'I want you to scribble, I want you to draw, I want you to handprint, I want you to do whatever.' "
She kept going back and, as the lessons progressed, she had the chance to see him work, and question him about it.
"He explained to me that all the jumping he did with his canvases was about energy transfer, he was summoning up all this energy and he was trying to transfer it onto the painting, he was trying to stay up in that space."
The movement, the mood, the music he cranked as he painted would find their way onto the canvas.
Hazama points to Adagio, a 2000 oil and acrylic on wood.
"He was listening to that music."
His expressiveness extended to the way he spoke, too, Gallagher says.
"He would say things to you like, 'Oh, yes that painting - Zip! Oooh! It's leaping off the page. It's growling at me. That colour just says, 'mmmmmm.' "
Gallagher says Iverson was a sort of spiritual teacher to her, "teaching me that I thought I was creative and I thought I knew about the world of art, and he just totally took the top off my mind and opened me to so many other things and so many different ways of looking at things."
He was possessed of a rare purity, Hazama says.
"I feel he could see the truth of everything."
Kate Wallace covers the arts for the Telegraph-Journal and is a frequent contributor to Salon.
Disabled
More CE Network Sites & Partners:
