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Translation from Polish into English:
THE MIRROR
No: 38 (1720), 9/20/90
A FIGURE IN THE LANDSCAPE
by
Monica Teresinska

“My art is linked with reality, but also with impressions, illusions and dreams that make up a human existence. The color in my pictures defines the emotions stemming from love and hate, beauty and ugliness, light and darkness, places and events. The picture synthesizes these emotions to form just one viewpoint: my own. Painting, therefore, is my own way of communicating with the world; it is the language I use to talk to people; it is my handwriting,” says Beatrice Findlay whose paintings are currently on display in Warsaw’s Zacheta gallery.

Rare as it is among painters, the artist can precisely describe the idea behind every picture she has finished. But are her pictures really finished? They seem, especially recently, to form consistent, never-ending variations on the subject of a man caught in a certain emotional state, or a landscape indirectly or directly influenced by man. This is reflected in the titles of Findlay’s pictures which often repeat either the word “figure” (Diptych with Two Figures, Triptych with Robed Figure) or words of color (Blue Lagoon, Green Masque, Blonde in Purple Skirt). Sometimes the title is a short note only, a kind of semantic key. Long Black Dancer, Carnivale, Urban Composition, Alameda Street, Dusk Runner these titles hide no literary associations or metaphors. They provide information for the viewer, whom the artist expects to be imaginative and inventive. The viewer shouldn’t merely register the dabs of paint on the canvas in a passive way.

Beatrice Findlay has been painting since she turned 18, the time when she was able to decide on her own what she wanted to be and what kind of life she wanted to have. However, in her solid middle class Canadian hometown, the painter’s profession wasn’t recognized as one holding good prospects for human respect and money. She resolved to pay herself for her art education at the University of Manitoba by combining studies with work. And with painting— the hurried, feverish work down as if she wanted to cheat the time and immediately reach her goal— the free interpretation of form and color. Findlay’s figurative style slowly gave way to a more abstract form of art but she has never abandoned the motive of a human figure: that most essential point in the universe.

The artist’s main inspiration is a big city— Los Angeles, New York, Paris— its riches and poverty, beauty and charm, but also its murky violence, the incessant crowds and the urban stuffiness that drives the people out into green suburbs. The light here has a special disquieting intensity. Whatever is conventional, orderly, trimmed or fenced is of no interest to the artist and it puts her to sleep. It may be enjoyable to work in a quiet home on a Los Angeles hill or on the top floor of a New York high-rise where the metropolitan hum is hardly audible, but that real, pulsating, living city must be right behind you, within your reach. That is the source of Findlay’s cityscapes which show the outlines of city fragments and the people, half-rendered like the landscape, passing and disappearing.

However, the seemingly unclear eventually creates a coherent and unified whole with a rich texture and a depth of color. Art critics all too eagerly search Findlay’s art for inspirations and borrowings from Monet, Ernst, Kokoschka, Bellrner, Mucha and Munch— a typical endeavor in the case of art which doesn’t lend itself to easy classification. Without denying these influences, Findlay acknowledges her enchantment with two contemporary European painters, Arnulf Rainer and Gerhard Richter and a Californian artist, Terence la Noue. She is fascinated by their achievements in form and color, not by the emotional content of their work. The artist must of course find his or her own truth independently, otherwise they will be no more than skillful craftsmen.

Beatrice Findlay talks fast and gets her meaning across to you; she gesticulates and smiles; she communicates. But her straightforward manner doesn’t mean that painting comes easy to her. That is why it counts so much in her life. But so does her husband— a university professor and financial adviser, and so do her faithful friends and the beautiful art deco home. The driving force of Findlay’s life, however, is her work. Financially independent for the past several years she is now painting more than ever before. She works every day for many hours painting several pictures simultaneously, so that she can judge each one of them better every time she returns to paint it. But she is never really satisfied— the word simply does not exist in her vocabulary. This may be the reason why she often changes the format of her pictures from the traditional square and rectangular shapes to diptych and triptych formats, which underline the subject and divide the picture into independent sections. Findlay usually uses oil on canvas but she sometimes dabs acrylic on wood— the old-time masters’ material and adds paper collage to enrich the texture.

As any contemporary artist whose work transcends the boundaries of realism, Beatrice Findlay is aware of the communicative barriers existing between the picture and the viewer. However, she believes that the impact of applied arts and visual propaganda, such as advertising, movies, television and fashions, has prepared the public to co-exist with sculpture and painting better than before. On a sunny summer morning Findlay and I are visiting an exhibition of Japanese avant-guard sculpture at the County Museum of Art in Los Angeles. Surprisingly, the museum is full of visitors. A museum trip instead of the beach? It could be sheer snobbery, but it could also be a genuine need to depart from the noisy run-of-the-mill trivialities of everyday into something different and more interesting.

Findlay gives frequent exhibitions. Apart from a number of collective ones (including three Polish shows: in Warsaw, Zakopane and Suwalki), she has had nine individual shows over the past several years in such renowned galleries as Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse or the Shiller-Wapner Gallery in New York. The titles of her exhibitions— Resonances, Dreams, Delusions and Realities, Body Consciousness— never fail to define quite clearly the areas of her interest and penetration. Many of her works have found their way into American museums, even more are in private collections. Warsaw’s National Museum also has one picture entitled Seated Figure. With her intensive way of life, Findlay needs professional agents to coordinate the schedule of her exhibitions and business contacts. One of them is Eva Pape, a well-known art consultant in New York, who co-organizes all Findlay’s exhibitions in Poland.

The art of painting— a window onto the world and a way of communicating with it. The figure which appears in Findlay’s pictures, whether motionless or moving, in sunlight or in the shade, and the pulsating aggressive color reveal the artist’s way of perception and understanding. They put across to us her beliefs and ideas. Some people will adopt them for their own, others will reject them. That is the risk forever inherent in the painters’ profession and life. Beatrice Findlay is fully aware of that. It is risk that triggers progress and helps create a new art, the art which approaches the twenty-first century.