The Hidden Logic of Touch and the Self-Arising of Discovery: The Paintings of Jo Ann Rothschild

My first meaningful encounter with visual art came at the age of three, when I saw a painting on glass by the American artist Irene Pereira and was fascinated by the layering. As a child, I saw early 20th-Century European art at the Art Institute and in my great aunt Maxine’s collection. Paintings and sculptures made sense to me in a way that the conversation of grown-ups did not. I imagined the artists were talking directly to me.

I went to Bennington College as a writer, but the opportunity to create art thrilled me. I switched my major to painting. In my final year in college, which I spent in absentia in Chicago, I saw a doe and two fauns running across a field and realized I cared more about the rhythm of their flight than their stationary form. I made my first mature work: an etching with marks corresponding to the rhythm of the deer’s flight. This began a lifelong interest in rhythm and mark.

I care about touch. I want evidence of the human. Although I am primarily an abstract artist, I draw the figure, drew my mother in her last year, and I paint myself as I age. I am interested in history, in one layer seen through another. My paintings can be slow to see and slow to make. They depend on the interaction between the formality of the rectangle and the richness of oil paint. I look for consonance between what I feel and what I see.

Much of my work evolves over a period of years. Since time can play an important part in my work, many pieces are named for the date finished. My method is always exploratory. I don’t know how something will look before it’s finished. I learn as much as I can on the way. That’s what keeps the process interesting for me, and hopefully makes work rewarding for the viewer. Looking is a matter of discovery.

My younger self-painted no matter what was going on outside. But there were periods of great loneliness and uncertainty. I would remind my younger self that the best paintings come from who you are, rather than in spite of you. Good work comes from allowing the incomplete painting to speak to the imperfect painter and allowing that flawed artist to respond to the painting. It is a constant conversation. This doesn’t guarantee good work, but these are the minimal conditions for grace.

—Jo Ann Rothschild

About her first mature painting, “Word Chart,” from 1971, Jo Ann writes, “The marks can be seen as sprouts, corners, body parts, sores, intersections, or words.”

For several months at the beginning of 2012, I made large mixed media drawings. In the past, my focus had concentrated on touch, mark color and rhythm, but the new works on paper introduced shape. A shape has an inside, an outside and an edge. Several shapes may instigate momentum. Two shapes demand comparison. The relation of one shape to another can imply intimacy, overlap or distance. A solitary shape may invite stillness. The Garfield Park conservatory in Chicago contains large, small, exotic, and familiar plants. I spent a morning there this Spring making small drawings that focused on the interplay, specificity and variety of the plant specimens… Often, what I see influences what I make, but in this instance, the work I made determined what and how I saw.

—Jo Ann Rothschild

Perhaps there remains for us some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take into our vision;
there remains for us yesterday’s street and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease
when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.
Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space gnaws at our faces.
Whom would it not remain for—that longed-after, mildly disillusioning presence,
which the solitary heart so painfully meets.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, First Duino Elegy

Joy and sorrow
aren’t two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.

We can count on it
when we’re sure of nothing
and curious about everything.

Among the material objects
it favors clocks with pendulums
and mirrors, which keep on working
even when no one is looking.

It won’t say where it comes from
or when it’s taking off again,
though it’s clearly expecting such questions.

We need it
but apparently
it needs us
for some reason too.

— Wislawa Szymborska, from “A Few Words on the Soul”

Who are you?
Early successes, Creation’s pampered favorites,
mountain-ranges, peaks growing red in the dawn of all beginning,
pollen of the flowering godhead, joints of pure light,
corridors, stairways, thrones, space formed from essence,
shields made of ecstasy, storms of emotion whirled into rapture, and suddenly alone:
mirrors, which scoop up the beauty that has streamed from their face
and gather it back, into themselves, entire.
But we, when moved by deep feeling, evaporate; we breathe ourselves out and away…

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Second Duino Elegy

About 2020, Jo Ann writes, “It was a year of looking back, and painting forward. Collages and drawings often respond to political climate. Painting about painting—as I tend to see my approach—is putting one mark in front of the other, and hoping to see what works. I’m not after anything known in these paintings, rather than wanting them to teach me something new—something I haven’t seen. Nothing is very dramatic. They are exploratory… From time to time, ideas, myths, love, panic, anger, and ambition have generated paintings for me, but learning that all you need to do is begin is the understanding that makes work possible for me.”

Life on Earth turns out quite the bargain.
For dreams, for instance, you don’t pay a penny.
For illusions—only when they’re lost.
For possessing a body—only with the body.

And as if that’s still not enough,
Without having to purchase a ticket,
You get to spin around on the carousel of planets,
And with it, crash in, on the intergalactic blizzard
So dizzyingly astounding that before anything, nothing here on Earth
can even utter a twitch.

Take a good look:
The table stands where it stood
On the table, a piece of paper, exactly as placed
Through a slightly ajar window, wafts a wisp of air
Yet, the walls host no terrifying cracks
Through which you could be blown out to nowhere.

—Wislawa Szymborska, from “Under One Small Star”

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