‘BREATH’
JILL TRAPPLER at ASSOCIATION FOR VISUAL
ARTS (AVA)
presents a solo exhibition of recent paintings
22 January to 10 February 2001
The Association for Visual
Arts (AVA) at the Metropolitan Gallery,
35 Church Street, Cape Town, is hosting
a one-person exhibition of recent paintings,
“Breath”, by Cape Town artist
and art educator, JILL TRAPPLER, in all
three AVA gallery spaces. The exhibition
opens on Monday, 22 January at 6pm and runs
until noon on Saturday, 10 February 2001.
JILL TRAPPLER, in this exhibition,
focuses once again on the non-figurative
in her paintings. This has been her chief
area of artistic output in recent years.
She has chosen to be free of the burden
of representation, of the material. Her
concern is with pure colour, form, surface,
texture and how these integrate, resulting
in composition, structure and the use of
space on the canvas or the paper. Her work
is never ‘easy’. There is never
a simple ‘explanation’ or a
‘message’ or an ‘issue’.
There is no attempt at didacticism or the
reduction of the artwork to a commodity,
no attempt to serve ‘the market’;
rather it is for her about beauty, seeing
“the wholeness of eternity, beauty,
usually unexpected, yet sought after. It
finds your heart and your guts, it is breathtaking,
abrupt, exhilarating, so fierce, so true
that you wonder if you can bear it, but
it is in the pattern of things, waiting
to visit, in time. Then it is true. So,
I try to find moments of this with colour,
because it is in life.”
On this exhibition the main
series of paintings is entitled “Breath”
and is characterized by the colour yellow,
immediately reminiscent of light, sunshine,
pollen, the life force, nature and energy.
It happened as follows: TRAPPLER was traveling
on a train on her way to an appointment
in a gallery in Switzerland in spring last
year and the countryside was full of strong
colour, yellow from the kolza or rape seed
plant. The brightness and clarity ‘of
the landscape fascinated her and she experienced
a brilliance that seemed almost artificial
- the fields of yellow edged with the blue
of the sky or the green on the trees and
the red of the daffodils? The buildings
and the rivers and train-lines were not
important or new, it was the surprise or
revelation “ that she wanted to paint,
“to copy the sense of marvel that
she felt from the colour”.
She went into the gallery
and was introduced to an old computer across
the screen of which walked a little man
with a beret and a smile facing her behind
his easel, (a studio picture). She typed
in her name, Jill, and he began to paint.
A short time passed and then the computer
printer started pushing out an image. It
was a rectangle of pure yellow! The gallery
assistant told TRAPPLER that she could keep
the image, but he asked to see it first.
It turned out that in twelve years he had
never seen a single colour image printed
out of that computer studio! Could the computer
have read her thoughts on the train through
her fingers? She returned home and began
the series, finding her way into those fields
of sun, warmth, slippery gold, and letting
the paintings take her where they wanted
to go, growing with their own life through
obedience, abundance, evidence, essence
to breath.
‘Breath’ is the
title of the exhibition and “Brand
New Day” the image on the invitation
– “the brand new day that always
comes, yet needs to be sought and celebrated,
internally constructed as a calendar.”
The “Jetty” series is yet another
component of this exhibition, jetty as in
“the crossing from earth to water
and water to earth, from conscious to unconscious
– bridging”, bridges. Dr David
Trappler, Jill’s husband, said, in
a previous catalogue, of her work: “
For Jill, the canvas is an arena where the
conflict between conscious and unconscious
processes assert themselves and are resolved
in a specific way, reflecting the unique
authorship of its creator, yet carrying
transpersonal value and therefore belonging
to the collective. It is about building
bridges internally and with others. It is
about a certain kind of containment through
linkages and interconnectedness.”
*
The artist, TRAPPLER: “I
see that I follow my heart and that an experience
speaks to me and I move with it. It changes
direction and finds a place, but it is in
this relationship that I work best. That
is why relationships generally are important……….I
am not so anxious now about the need for
explanations and metaphors. The intellectual
is in the experience as much as the looking,
sensing, physical. Again, I am not interested
in the reference to the object, but in the
experience of the object. So, a cup is interesting
because I want to describe its inner surface
and the space that it occupies. Then there
is a cup. This requires intuition and comes
in a language understood by the eye and
the hand and the whole experience. It is
actual and the evidence is there. It will
be felt in the work – a becoming of
a presence. A painting must have presence.
If not, it is not finished or needs to be
put aside for a while until you are ready
to bring a possible presence to it. This
is essentially a natural process, an equilibrium,
to be aware of inner space as well as outer
space
The initial impulse, the new
canvas, a space, on the field and an internal
space that I can wander in, venture in,
find new beginnings. An open-air existence
fed by close associations with nature, although
this always remains indirect. It is like
the boundaries, the containment that is
necessary for this exploration, which, of
course, is linked to memory, one’s
own patterns which are interwoven with others.
Newness and memory, past and present, again
inextricable. They make each other possible.
I don’t think that I
describe anything with my various mark making.
Rather I try to create direction, awareness,
so that the eye can move and inform. This
is like life, it vibrates, pulsates, each
gesture like an affirmation or perhaps a
reflection, a response. I think that if
enough care is taken, the mark and the doing
are not arbitrary, but can become attuned
to the order of the world, the cosmos.
I seem to continuously go
between the great and the small, the eternal
and the everyday, the inner life and the
dish-washing, and it all belongs. There
is a quest for unity, for a common language,
an undercurrent – a need to communicate.
I seek the human spirit, the human being
in each of us perhaps.
Eternal/particular, general/specific,
to and fro, back and forth – the rhythm
that I want to be a part of… Like
music, paintings unfold gradually if they
have life. It is of doing and being, it
is all real and present, yet ongoing.”
Born in Benoni, South Africa,
in 1957, TRAPPLER studied art with Bill
Ainslie at the Johannesburg Art Foundation
and through UNISA. A weaver by profession,
she has spent her adult life teaching Drawing
and Painting in a variety of institutions
ranging from FUBA and CAP to Baragwanath
Hospital, as well as from a ship and at
home.
She initiated and facilitated
the formation of craft, printing and weaving
employment projects for women in Crossroads
and Khayelitsha, as well as the papier mache
project for Wola Nani. For many years she
served as the administrator of the Thupelo
Workshops, regional and international, many
of which she facilitated and co-ordinated.
Currently, she is a trustee of Thupelo.
She also founded the Dorman Street Art Studio,
the Valkenberg Studios and later the Greatmore
Street Studios in Woodstock, of which she
is a trustee.
Since 1996 she has served
on the committee of AVA as vice-chairperson
and Artreach convenor, and as chair since
2000. In 2000 she was invited to lecture
at the Summer and Winter Schools of the
University of Cape Town, repeated in 2001.
TRAPPLER began exhibiting
in the late 1970s on group and Thupelo exhibitions
in South Africa and abroad, in Germany,
France, New York, Australia, Uganda, Luxembourg
and Switzerland. She has held five one-person
exhibitions. This will be her sixth. Her
work is represented in numerous private
collections around the world and in a variety
of public and corporate art collections
locally, including those of the South African
National Gallery, the SABC, Investec and
Vodacom.
She lives and works as a full-time
professional artist in Cape Town.
The exhibition closes on Saturday,
10 February 2001 at noon.
Gallery hours: weekdays: 10h00
to 17h00. Saturdays: 10h00 to 13h00.
