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

Fifty years is a long time to be an American painter, long enough to have seen the comings and goings of isms and institutions, long enough to lose your faith unless it’s in yourself. Joan Taxay Weinger has been a painter this long and then some and appears never to have lost her faith or her way. Though she has meandered through styles and mediums and formed long lasting relationships with many of the major art institutions in the city including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (student), Exhibit A Gallery (founding member), Columbia College (professor, 26 years), Sonia Zaks (gallery artist, 35 years) and The North Shore Art League (teacher, 38 years), her main loyalty has been to her artistic vision, which has remained remarkably unswayed by doctrine or trend.

Although she doesn’t fit into any neat category Taxay Weinger can be loosely called a still life painter in that she uses objects - rather than figures, landscape, geometry or ideology - as her inspiration. This choice has allowed her to embrace issues of abstraction while at the same time making paintings that respond to the sensual attractions of the natural world and the themes those attractions suggest.

It is an approach that sheathes truth in beauty. This seductive mix of intellect blended with poetic emotionality is evident in her collages and photographs but is probably most obvious in Taxay Weinger’s big complex still life paintings. Here we see crowded conglomerations of collected objects – shells, flowers, books, photographs, figurines and fluff - amassed into a near hysteria of memory, yearning, regret, hope and sentiment while underneath it all lurks an objectified cool.

Part of her technique is to create extremely dense, shallow compositions, forcing everything to the surface, as if seen in a pool of shallow water. This flattening of space is familiar from Impressionism, but Taxay Weinger pushes it to a level that feels more intense and intimate. The harder we stare, the more her edges dissolve, and the less her subjects seem like discreet objects than like some pulsing energy field. Whole passages soften into abstraction as ephemeral matter is distilled into something purer, into a sustaining idea that will outlive these mere objects.

Taxay Weinger is an original but she has ancestors too. One day, when I was thinking about writing this essay, I found myself wandering aimlessly though the Rice Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago where, by happy coincidence, I encountered my old friends, two Ivan Albright paintings I hadn’t looked at in years. Though I hadn’t been thinking about Joan, all of a sudden I wondered how many times she’d passed these paintings as a student and absorbed their lessons without even thinking about it.

Here seemed to be her mentor, though one with a far harsher world view. There was that same melancholy edge. There was that jam packed composition where it appears a whole life is compressed between two sheets of glass, and there, even, was her central theme, time, that sense that the more one clings to things the more they fall away. And there were those roses!

Who knows what really happened but I like to think that some 60 years ago Joan Taxay rubbed psychic elbows with Ivan Albright and took on a little of his spirit even as she discarded his morbidity for a softer but still sad sense of impermanence, one in which ruin and loss are mixed with ecstasy.