W.M. Hunt

 #somereallygoodones, #janefultonalt, #stilllife, #illumination

“How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?” 

― Jorge Luis Borges, "Borges on Writing"

Think of the title of Jane Fulton’s Alt project “Still Life” as in there is still life to live. Life continues. It has not been stilled or stopped.

This garden of Jane Fulton Alt’s flora is intense. Alt takes us through her lily pond and garden at night. The darkness gives the work intentionality; it helps to see. It’s quiet and the heat of the sun has cooled and the daytime frenzy of insects and birds feeding has stilled. We can make our way through this hemisphere of the world and the artist’s head, calmly, with some stealth. Shhh. Is this real or imagined?  

The word illuminate as both a verb and noun describes the artist. She seeks light and enlightenment. She has a luminous soul. She wants clarity, intellectually and spiritually. There is tenderness here not despair; sadness yes, but not anguish. The artist is passing through, feeling her way. It’s a processing.

Of course, Alt is in search of transcendence. We all are. What is unique is that she lives in various dimensions of transcendence simultaneously and visits our earthly realm periodically and often enough so no one reports her missing. She seems like the most grounded soul in the world, but she is scudding through the clouds.

Another word is fecund . Alt has children and grandchildren, but for this discussion, it is her imagination and way of seeing that are fertile. Her garden is vital. She brings patience to her time in the garden so that she can truly discover, and by extension, show that to us.

One feels that Alt has the experience of having looked at and remembered the works of great American still life painters like Martin Johnson Heade or Raphael Peale that transcend their trompe l’oeil brilliance. We can include Georgia O’Keefe to cite an important female artist also in search of the sublime. There is some Henri Rousseau jungle too. Alt knows her history of art.

She brings her distinct way of searching, seeing.  

She likes surface, and she likes depth, the way the light travels along an edge or stem, how the color modulates subtly depending on the intensity of the illumination. She likes line, the ins and outs of petals overlapping, leaves folding in on themselves. 

She goes to the garden, or she sets flowers on the table in a vase or lays them out artfully like lab specimens as if she were the great grand daughter of Karl Blossfelt, here in color, just as deliberate but less dry and driven.

The Artist’s story is linked to her late husband Howard. Their’s was by all accounts a great romance and collaboration. It is brought to life charmingly in this sweet dance of white ranunculus Howard was the gardener, and he left it to Jane to cultivate the garden and find the treasure there. 

Jane Fulton Alt is our guide in this secret garden, a place of healing and still living.

Most of this text comes from the essay, “Illumination” commissioned for “Jane Fulton Alt, Still Life”, 2022.  

©2021