Joan Taxay Weinger: Poetic Naturalist - Paintings, Drawings, Photographs, Prints...

A Diary of Roses

A diary is an intimate account of one’s daily activities, the quotidian that make up a life. Roses are the flowers of sweethearts, beauty queens and derby winners, the symbol of love, courage and beauty. Together the words suggest a thing that is both commonplace and grand and as such they make up a fitting title for a show that features Joan Taxay Weinger’s signature image.

"A Diary of Roses" presents Taxay Weinger’s forty-some year contemplation of a flower that is both fragile and tough, beckoning and repellent, transient as a single blossom, and yet, as a breed, long lived.

The paintings and drawings that comprise this body of work exhibit Taxay Weinger’s characteristic focus and density of observation. We view these flowers up close and in all their complexity. Whether bunched in a bouquet, abstracted or shown as single blooms, all her flowers are studied. If one accepts the notion that an unconsidered life is not worth living the same principle can be applied here to unconsidered beauty. Taxay Weinger’s approach to her floral subjects suggests that even the exquisite is more so when examined.

Like any life form, though, and particularly in the case of those known for their beauty, time is essential to appreciation. There’s no way around it – save petals in a jar as you will, there is the bud, there is the blossom, there is the wilt and then there is oblivion. Death is implicit in the beauty of a rose but the memory of it, rather than the moment of its perfection, may be where we appreciate it most. This inevitability – the paradox of time - is as much the subject of Taxay Weinger’s work as the phenomenon of beauty is. Dropped petals, faded blooms, sagging stems, withered leaves are all painful reminders of the process of decay and decline that are intrinsic to life. Peter Schjeldahl has written that beauty is an event that happens to an object and Taxay Weinger seems to concur, though by embracing death in these images, by making us look at it, she encourages us to consider the possibility, poignant though it is, that this part of the process is beautiful too. And if that isn’t stark enough she further abjures any sentimentality we might expect to attach itself to her chosen subject by often working in charcoal, rejecting the tender and seductive palette of nature for the structural mutability so evident in black and white.

For it is time and its melancholy edge that is Taxay Weinger’s real subject, not beauty at all. Her drawings and paintings challenge us to pay attention to the present and then to let it go and she makes it clear that the more we cling the more it falls away.