Works on paper

Vivienne Shark Le Witt's work has always been literary in conception. Not only has she in the past taken her subjects directly from works of literature, but her paintings are literary in the sense that they provoke narrative or allegorical readings - they are pictures which tell a story. 

In the 1980s she created images with a romantic mythical weight. Engaged in obscure dramas her figures inhabited a timeless dream world landscape. Recently LeWitt has shifted her attention to the temporal and everyday world, replacing the symbolist atmosphere of her earlier work with the sharp observation of the painter of modem life. 

The watercolours in this exhibition constitute a series of vignettes of contemporary life and manners: character and type, demeanour, situations, behaviours and attitudes. They are executed as quick sketches, reflecting the momentary nature of what is being depicted, the fleetingness of a gesture, an expression, a feeling. The force and delight of these images as well as their humour springs from their exact rendering of the inconsequential and unacknowledged, the small moments which are nothing, and everything in life.

The reduction and brevity in these images, rendered in a few deft strokes, recalls the Zen art of brush painting, Sumi-e. Acutely observed, in both conception and execution these works rely on the simplified but telling detail. Paralleling the way his legs are described simply by two vertical brushstrokes, everything there is to know about Bob's personality is given by the single detail of the mug he holds in his hand, with his name, his identity - Bob - printed on it. These works are like the pictorial equivalent of Haiku: the Bobness of Bob in 3 lines and 17 syllables.

The sensibility of Le Witt's work is perhaps more aptly read through its affinity with the graphic style of 1950s illustration and cartoons - the hep and jazzy beatnik line of artists like Jules Pfeiffer. The world LeWitt conjures seems to me, on reflection, very much rooted in that time. The contemporaneity of these images is in fact established through an historical reference, recalling the confident and self-conscious modernity of suburban life in the 1950s and 60s.

Le Witt's work focuses on the domestically scaled unpleasantnesses and joys of life, and the numerous, indeterminate moments in-between. Her observations are droll, their satirical edge tempered by a complicit enjoyment of the foibles and quirks of human character depicted: twofacedness, disdain, uncertainty, having fun, being mean, getting into it.

Robyn McKenzie
May 1994