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Painter among Poets: Cynthia Charters and the Myth of Place

By Julia Connor

The Greeks once defined the word idea as the “thing seen.” Later, the poet William Carlos Williams was to offer “…no ideas but in things.” His remark refers, of course, to poetry to the very “stuff” of it, and his famous poem, “The Red Wheel Barrow,” illustrates the art behind the remark.

So much depends/upon/a red wheel barrow/glazed with rain/beside the white/chickens. We can take Williams’ remark and the poem born of it as instruction, as a poet’s way of pointing toward what it is upon which so much depends. For the intention was, I believe, to strip away the comfort of “ideas as such” in order to reveal the phenomena that simultaneously forms the thing and the “idea of the thing” seen. It is not wheel barrows, rain, or white chickens that are central but their complex juxtaposition, their gestalt. Cynthia Charters is a painter in whom something similar is at work. Her painting is, in a sense, an homage to Williams and a return to the Green notion of idea as embodiment, felt presence, thing seen. Her canvas, like Williams’ line, is pared to a sparse elegance so that what remains is a dense notation, as if the painter turning poet had said “…this much I have found to be real.”.

One is appreciative of any artist who musters the courage to disclose process. Charters often works large paintings from studies done on location. What is informative here is process. Clearly thestudies are entrances. They are the “things” of Williams’ maxim—behind which or within which ideas lie. Moving back and forth from study to canvas, one can feel the transition from objectivity, atmospheric stillness and reliance on craft toward the more risky interior engagement, turbulent movement and temperamental dance that the painter and her canvases have, together, made.

Yolo Slough Edge

One concern central to Charters’ work is a sensitivity of edge. I do not mean “edge” in the customary linear, tactile, graphic sense. Rather, Charters’ concern is one of boundary as epidermis—that place of subtle resistance where what we call “Other” can be met. Her paintings deal with the reflective quality of light upon water and are balanced by a use of color that performs a translation between the languages of light and dark, transparency and weight, water and mass. What these paintings assume, in fact, is that it is this very polarity of extremes that constitute the nature of the whole.She calls her work landscape. I would argue to call it simply “Place.” I’m after something beyond semantics here. There is a core to this work that haunts the viewer the way history haunts a people, events a biography. Her paintings capture something behind the scene they depict, something interior and formative that operates like the echo of a distant thought emerging out of ancient memory to restate a vast and primal integrity. I quibble over Charters’ title because it is, in fact, not landscape, but the myth of place that she paints. The difference may at first seem academic, but closer scrutiny will disclose that it is not an arrangement of things but a kind of mythic absence among them that she pursues. Her subjects of specific trees, sloughs and waterways, though studies of a particular location,

Yolo Slough November

are never insular, for the lure that Charters attends is not the preciously scenic. Rather, it is in a mood of ripe disintegration and fertile entropy that she manages to paint, metamorphose, and finally name the terror within the beauty that she seeks.

"That is the poet's business," Williams tells us. "Not to talk in vague categories but to write particularly, as a physician works upon a patient, upon the thing before him in the particular to discover the universal."

One can only imagine the painter nods.