Maud Gatewood
Poet of the not-so-obvious
Will South
The work of Maud Gatewood visually places the not-so-obvious before us.
A simple thought experiment serves to clarify this: pause and think of the everyday language we use to navigate our lives and see if that language isn’t fraught with cliché. “How’s it goin’?” (A common enough open-ended and non-specific greeting.) “Ok, I guess.” (What could such a statement possibly mean?)
We find our day-to-day conversations submerged in repetitive shorthand and convenient banalities. Fair enough, as describing the reality of quotidian drudgeries is just that—drudgery. Easier to indulge in prefabricated call and response.
Here, the idea of taking a journey is implicit. There is a tunnel through which cars pass, and though we see none, we immediately understand their past and future presence.
At the tunnel’s end, we see a snow-covered road. Indeed, snow is falling directly in front of us, sparkling across the expansive entrance to the overwhelmingly dark tunnel. Is the tunnel a temporary respite from the dangerous weather? The road ahead is little traveled; we know that as we see no fresh tracks. The road curves away—we have no idea what lies ahead but know the road will be slippery and treacherous. Is the enormous arch of the tunnel’s entrance a warning?
That arch is telescoped down to the shape of a closed eyelid cum exit. This indicates a stretch of tunnel—do I turn on my lights? Will it matter? There is no oncoming traffic. I am alone in this tunnel, with no other sign of life. Forest life, if I am in a forest, is wisely hunkered down in the cold. The most skilled (or the most desperate?) predators are naturally enough out somewhere, but they are hidden from view.
If we blink, we could almost mistake the falling snow before us for a sky full of falling stars. The snow beyond sits in quiet contrast, so quiet that our snowflakes fall straight to the ground, unbuffeted by any would-be wind. The only sound is the car in our mind humming along, perhaps the muted whoosh of the heated air inside. And memories have sound—the tires crunching along this country road. It must be a country road, yes? The design of the bridge speaks to a time long past when roads could be so narrow when you could be the sole traveler.
Continue with the thought experiment: Ask someone a genuinely difficult philosophical question: “What is life?” To begin to answer this admittedly very large question, one would have to be, as we say, “in the mood” to answer it, as a good deal of thinking is required. Any quick answer is bound to sound ridiculous: “It’s a fluke.” “It’s a gift.” Any long and considered answer is bound to be tedious and equally flawed. Easier again to default to everyday speak, perhaps the triteness du jour: “It’s a journey.” To which one might respond, “Yes, but wherever you go, there you are.” And Dancing with the Clichés begins.
Maud Gatewood, 'Genre II,' 1966, acrylic on plywood, 48 x 40 in. (121.92 x 101.6 cm.) Weatherspoon Art Museum, UNC Greensboro 
Maud Gatewood, 'Tunnel In Snow,' 1974, acrylic painting, 50 x 56 in. (127 x 142.24 cm.). Bequest of the artist. Asheville Art Museum CollectionSo far, so good. Meaning everything we have encountered here exists not only in the painting as an image but in the world as three-dimensional fact. We have experienced all of these things—tunnels, roads, and snow. Maud’s image taps our memories on the shoulder and awakens them, only in this particular reverie you are alone. No friends or family, none specified anyway, are elicited. This is your moment again, alone in the quiet. Where you can see risk (the unplowed road ahead), you hear snow against your windshield (maybe the scrape of old rubber wipers too), you must know where you are going—but where was that? Again, nothing specific is elicited. Just “somewhere.”
Tunnel with Snow suggests that yes, there is a journey, one full of snow that could pass for stars on a road that curves out of our sight. Risk mixes with uncertainty. Now, this is a commentary on life. There is beauty, beauty that can turn away from us and disappear. On our way to somewhere, wherever that may be. Poetic, sure; and utterly factual. Mostly.
There are people too in Maud’s repertoire, along with green grass and bright air. In Genre II (1966), an elderly man’s grimacing head sits very nearly dead center in the composition (once called the “bull’s eye effect” in art schools, something to be studiously avoided, which Maud ignored with considerable aplomb). Though he stands (apparently healthy) amidst a clean, freshly painted house with neatly trimmed shrubbery, he is unhappy. He is stiff like the tree he is affixed to. His arms are firmly crossed, tucked tight into his body saying “noli mi tangere” (fancy for “don’t touch me”). He looms large in our line of vision, but he clearly does not wish to see us. We are instantly intruding on this scene. Not wanted.
That this gruff gentleman has a bark worse than his proverbial bite is suggested by the pert young woman off to the right, pretty in pink, who smiles in his direction. She seems about to ask him to come back in, lunch is on. Time to eat. She has a face that tells us she knows him well; all is under control. Very quickly a story we all know has unfolded before us—the family drama. Though we can’t be certain of this, we are of course free to think it and do. Will the old man remain rooted out of doors like the tree he is equated with? Or join his daughter (granddaughter? niece? other?)?
What we are aware of is that drama rears its theatrical head even (and often) in the peace of the American suburb. We have all seen it, felt it, know it intimately. This man could be our uncle, grandfather—perhaps father. We remember that stern look, that impassivity. Every family has one. Or more. Maud knows this story too and summarizes it in a deft composition that could well be a Southern Gothic short story.
Will South is an artist and a historian of American art with over fifty publications in the field. He received his doctorate from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 1994 where he was awarded the Henry R. Luce Fellowship to support his dissertation which was published in 2001 as Color, Myth & Music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism. He is credited with writing several definitive studies in the field of American Impressionism, including California Impressionism for Abbeville Press, 1998; and Guy Rose: American Impressionist, 1995, for the Oakland Museum of California Art. His article, “The Unknown Henry Ossawa Tanner” for Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide was nominated for the American Art Museum Curators’ award for the outstanding scholarly article of the year.
Maud Gatewood’s storytelling ability, in combination with her lucid, muscular approach to composition and her strident use of color, is but one of the satisfactions to be gained from acquaintance with her work. It is altogether fitting that this art is periodically resurrected as it confirms so well a certain commonality to the American experience and speaks to us eloquently of those things, obvious and otherwise, that comprise the act of living.