Do you remember the first time you looked out of an airplane window? Perhaps a childhood experience of staring at the clouds, your eyesight sharpened by adrenaline, gazing at endless stratus fields, or the anvil-shaped head of a cumulonimbus cloud, turned lavender by the descending light. , perhaps a mile in diameter? I remember a particular scopophilia, an urge to see, maybe because of the weird angle and behavior of the light, or maybe because you just didn’t know what it was like the other side of the sky. A similar feeling sets in when I look at Megan Rooney’s paintings. The newness and density of his paintings are as eerie as clouds seen from above. For one thing, it’s hard to know how far or how far to stand from them. If you approach the canvas directly, certain elements paradoxically disappear. Sneak on it sideways, and the pigment appears to change color, in a way quite unlikely for oil paint.
Rooney paints (mostly) large format abstract paintings. She is celebrated in the press for her use of so-called secondary colors. She is well known for bringing an orbital grinder to her canvases. But these facts do not reflect the density and complexity of his works. And photography is not much help: another factor in the strangeness of Rooney’s paintings is the non-reproducibility of their color relationships. You could call it the Golden Gate Bridge effect. Its secondary and tertiary tonal palette is simply outside the gamut of CMYK reproduction systems, let alone RGB. Computer screens can’t show what pictures look like in the flesh any more than the pages of a magazine can. This gives them a particularly shocking quality, an enduring ability to surprise, even when the composition should be familiar.
Given his use of abrasives to remove pigment, Rooney’s process is as much an excavation process as a paint application process. Painting becomes a subtractive process, like stone carving. Much like the story masons tell about carving stone (which they don’t make up as long as they ‘release’ a trapped image), Rooney speaks of the ‘discovery’ of painting. But even the picture of discovery isn’t quite right. On the contrary, the process is a selection of possibilities, as if one had started with endless paintings, and had gradually vanished them until there was only one painting left – one painting which contained the ghosts of all its possible alternatives.
Rooney’s subtractive method is reminiscent of printmaking as well as sculpture. About ten years ago, she worked in etching and printmaking. So cutting and removing material became a natural part of his image-making process. The coercive education she gives to each painting – adding to it, taking away from it, coddling it, mistreating it, straightening it, sanding it, laying it flat, applying it to the surface of turpentine – produces an image of a complexity more like that of a realistic novel than that of a lyric poem. Each canvas has absorbed so much of the painter’s time, so much of his attention, that it acquires a sort of personality. By his own admission, Rooney loses himself in the act of painting. The painting, meanwhile, is in the process of being worked on. Painting-wise, Rooney is like time: a series of climatic forces that build up the surface and then erode it. Time is the universal measure of care, and its presence is palpable here. The time she spends on the images is transmuted into the time we spend looking at them. The resulting feeling of immersion is an eye opener, as profound and obvious as a child’s discovery that clouds have no edges.
