Anne Marchand: Painting a Journey of Wonderment

Marchand began as a figurative painter, working in an emotionally fraught Francis Bacon-like manner, then transitioned to portraying expressionistic cityscapes. Soon, however, the technique of stylizing figures and objects for psychological effect led her to pure abstraction. Her first non-objective works were angular and relatively schematic, reflecting the time- honored idea that the universe is based on numbers and mathematical correlations. Eventually she came to see—and, even more emphatically, to feel—that her art is really something quite different: a channeling of energy, a conduit for the universal life force. Her pictorial forms became progressively more gestural, with a strong emphasis on curves, ellipses, and circles. Both in their appearance and in the physical act of their making, these works evoke bodily movement and dance. Marchand frequently cites poet Federico García Lorca’s notion of the vitality of the earth moving up through the legs of dancers to animate their torsos and limbs with the radiant soulfulness called duende. This concept of the artist as spiritual medium has wide-ranging antecedents, from ancient shamanism to literati painting in China to Abstract Expressionism in mid-20th -century New York.

Renaissance artists made a firm distinction between drawing and color, and vehemently debated their relative importance. Disegno, sometimes translated as “design,” was generally held to be more intellectual, and therefore superior, because it presents the entire composition in God-like fashion, with all its parts in just proportion, from the largest formal relationships to the smallest observational details. Color, added later, was considered the domain of emotion. Since Modernism largely obliterated that separation, Marchand embraces the more typical contemporary method of, in effect, drawing with color. Rather than make graphite or chalk outlines to be filled in with pigment, she applies color straight to the surface in a spontaneous flow—albeit a flow subliminally conditioned by years of experience.

While Marchand does not posit a personified deity in her art, she frequently praises the 13 th - century Sufi poet Rumi, who sang that love subsumes all forms of being in the totality of God. The distant correspondences the artist intuits, the yin-yang life energy dynamic she senses, bespeak a transcendent unity that frees her from painterly premeditation and the standard rules of composition. Despite the formal variety of her compositions, she considers each particular mark, each discrete artwork, an emblem of a larger inexhaustible whole—a oneness that cannot be represented, only invoked.

Marchand’s holistic view of the earth’s cultures, historical periods, and ecological systems took on an intergalactic perspective when the U.S. space program began to send back images of our own solar system in its cosmic context. She was especially struck by the famous 1968 “blue marble” photograph of Earth, with its swirls of luminous blue and white, hanging alone in the black interstellar void. Never had the sheer beauty and vulnerability of the planet, nor the interdependence of its landmasses, oceans, cloud currents, and atmosphere, been more compelling portrayed. More recently, from 1990 onward, the Hubble telescope has shown us distant constellations and nebulae with unprecedented—and humbling—clarity. This is the wonder that Marchand seeks always to convey through her art.