File Note 02: Verne Dawson

Verne Dawson has been out walking. He has been walking in the past and the future. He has seen Manhattan long before and after it became the heart of New York. He has seen ancient rites and the birth of myths and folklore. He has seen what will become of us, and he has seen all this against the intricate shifts of deep time mapped out in the stars.

This scenario should be quite ridiculous of course. People don’t travel in time apart from in science fiction. Verne Dawson confesses to being “woefully under-read” in this form of literature which should make it doubly ridiculous to imagine the American painter as even a metaphoric time-traveller. But despite this implausibility, Dawson does travel in time. For years now he has immersed himself in mathematics and astronomy and has succeeded, within the last decade, in opening a number of ‘portals’ into the past and the future. The nature of these portals tends to be fixed, both in space and time. They are not doors through which he or we can physically pass. Nor are they windows through which we can see a changing vista and perhaps be seen by the people who may inhabit that vista. They are instead fixed in time and space like a painting. And perhaps due to their passage through space-time the images they give us are less than perfect compared to the high-definition photographic yardstick against which we habitually judge the visual. They are somewhat soft and blurry. What should be solid has a certain liquidity. Grass and snow run like icing over the darker substance of the land. Dawson’s pictures are visions of peculiar lands in far-off times, yet their effect is no less significant for this: looking into them we are struck by how all this difference seems peculiarly familiar.

But what are we to make of all this continuity? And how are we to set it against the fluctuations in and eccentricities of style that drift through Dawson’s body of work? His more recent paintings of trapeze artists, or as Dawson terms them, Aerialists, are predominantly painted in a style that seems to owe a debt to the perfect arrest of the photograph. They seem to bear little relationship to the narrative composition or offbeat charm of the Cycle of quarter-day observances. But first impressions can be deceiving. The breadth of Dawson’s subjects — from the tools of painting to the planets, calendars to futuristic communities — and his tendency to vary his style can seem confusing, but beneath most of his paintings is a concern with the way mankind has marked time throughout its history. Beneath a surface of time and culture that can seem infinitely varied there are patterns that continue. Our culture is still predicated on astronomical relationships even if we don’t know it. We still make images as we always have although we sometimes forget the continuity between our oldest and newest ones. Dawson’s painting is a physical embodiment of this connection. Its appearance changes but patterns reside below the surface. Sometimes they are clearly discernible, sometimes they are teased out by association. In Solstice Procession in the Magdalenian Era we find an acrobat balancing on his hands on the back of a bull whilst a massive lion parades amongst the assembled people. The combination of human and animal performers is reminiscent of one form of contemporary entertainment — the circus. In paintings such as Circus, 2001, Dawson depicts an open-air circus in which every performer corresponds to an ancient personification of astronomy found in the Zodiac. Similarly, in their stylised ballet with the heavens, Dawson’s Aerialists freeze images of the age-old daring of the acrobat, found as early as in the Minoan era, against the contemporary backdrop of the circus big top.

Verne Dawson’s paintings are hopeful things. They suggest there are other possibilities that coexist with the apocalypses we busy ourselves with making. They tell us there can be continuity; patterns between culture and nature if we care to maintain them. But they also wryly suggest that in  some ways it won’t really matter if we don’t. Time and the stars will still continue their procession even if we are too busy to notice the lessons a 30,000 year-old culture might have to tell us about our relationship to the past in the making of our futures. It will be our loss, after all. Time will still travel, we just won’t be here to see it.