The responsibility of forms

This essay is excerpted from Maysha Mohamedi: yesterday I was a tiny tube of toothpaste (2024), available for pre-order from Pace Publishing.

The paintings of Maysha Mohamedi appear abundant, overripe with potential metaphors and figurative readings for what we know is an art of abstraction. The comparisons ramify and multiply, even as we seem to be looking at images of growth and generation in the first place. Are these maps of a sort, and if so to what kind of territory? Geographic? Neurological? Imaginative? If this is indeed an abstract space, why do the forms it contains seem to verge on significance, as if they are symbols or glyphs, requiring interpretation? Here, too, is an art of extraordinarily complex edges and borders, here and there casting the mind back to half-recalled knowledge of chaos theory and other mathematical generators of convolution and rigorous flourishing. Or perhaps that is not it at all, and what we are seeing is primarily a kind of drawing, all of it progressing from the line as starting point, as the seed of thought and composition. And what of color, these infinitely varied but flat shades, announcing themselves anew, repeating across a single canvas and onto others? An energy hard to identify—diligent or casual, determined or anarchic? Another vexing question: does all of this exist without source or precedent?

While I was looking at and thinking about Mohamedi’s paintings, I happened to watch, for the first time, Abbas Kiarostami’s short, early educational film Rang-ha [The Colors] from 1976. In a series of mostly static shots, the Iranian director leads his young audience through a limited number of colors and a seemingly limitless array of objects and surfaces to which they are affixed or from which they originate. The film opens with a spinning crystal, shedding sparks of prismatic color. Felt-tip pens, lollipops, cylindrical pucks of watercolor paint, clothes on a line with blue sky behind: these introduce the range of colors to come. They are followed by the reds: pomegranate, apple, watermelon, strawberry, lipstick, telephone; the greens: leaves, grass, cigarette lighter, mechanical pencil, plastic jug; and the yellows: mail box, phone box, daffodils, lemons, Volkswagen camper van. And so on, through blue and orange and purple and white and black (the non-color of adulthood and formal education): a parade of colors—and forms—that mixes nature and culture in simple but ravishing succession.

Interrupting this polychrome lesson there appears (as often does in Kiarostami’s films) a young boy, who performs or embodies some of the properties and possibilities of the colors in question. In the film’s longest sequence, he imagines himself driving a bright red racing car, colliding with cars of other colors and forcing them off the track. Elsewhere, with his bright blue sharpener he pares a pencil down to a couple of inches and uses it to pierce a cardboard color wheel, then sets this top spinning. Later, he conjures a rainbow with the spray from a garden hose, folds a page from his sketchbook into a paper boat, and sends the frail white craft down the greenish waters of a stream. Who is this child, and what does he have to do with painting, let alone with the work of Maysha Mohamedi? I think the boy is an agent of freedom and even a little chaos, the liberator of color from its attachment to already existing substances, objects, and images—the one who sets color in motion but remains unsure how or where it will settle again.

Despite all the meticulousness of Mohamedi’s art—her research, the matching and naming and listing of colors, the precision of her lines and complexity of her forms—isn’t there something of this unloosing of color in the translation from source image to sketchbook formula, and onward to the colors and shapes of her paintings? All of it, in Mohamedi’s case, effected through a detour into language, the near-poetry of names and titles and precise but evocative comparisons. Color becomes writing becomes color again—this is assuredly, alongside the delicate and intricate formal pleasures of her work, one of its most rigorous and radiant achievements. Mohamedi’s paintings emerge out of a seedbed of observation and discovery: the found images from which she selects colors to be deployed in a painting. Immediately these colors are ambiguous or questionable: they must be translated into the particular mix of paints the artist will use. And in turn all of this must be (must be—of course this is an artistic choice) named and labeled, matched in words as well as by eye: a process enigmatically connected to the titles Mohamedi attaches to the finished paintings.

To give a name to a color is to fix its mystery and mutability once and for all, to approach it with a certain scientific precision—and at the same time turn it into pure metaphor, a quality that is never quite itself. Can I describe a color—the color of my notebook page, or the ink with which I’m writing, for example—without comparing it to something else? There are varying levels of metaphoric insight or invention: the paper is advertised as “ivory,” which is apt if old-fashioned, but the ink is called “Presidential Blue”—which president? I am writing this essay a day or two after the global collapse of computer systems, and the “blue screen of death” that announces a crash in Windows is being compared online, as it proliferates in offices, lobbies, and transport hubs around the world, to International Klein Blue, to Derek Jarman’s monochrome film Blue (1993), to the distinctive book covers of a niche British publisher. Is it possible that our experience of color is nothing but a demand or opportunity for this kind of metaphoric leap or drift?

The history of efforts to delineate colors by naming is long, complex, and frequently paradoxical, even absurd. The most renowned attempt is usually known as Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours, though in its very title and authorial name attached it is misleading. The German geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner published his Treatise on the External Characters of Fossils in 1774; it includes a glossary of seventy-nine color names, but without any corresponding samples or illustrations of the hues in question. It was a Scottish flower painter, Patrick Syme, who three decades later extracted Werner’s tabulation from its mineralogical context and published it as Werner’s Nomenclaure of Colours, adding another thirty-one colors and a small patch of pigment to embody each one on the page. In most cases Syme endeavored to add to the named and numbered color three companion shades from the realms of the animal, vegetable, and mineral. (Some of the pleasure and fascination of the book is in figuring out if these are identical to the original or adjacent.) In each case the reader of Werner’s Nomenclature is presented with five competing interpretations of the color, four verbal and one visual.

The result of Syme’s expansion and retabulation of Werner is a rich mixture of scientific and poetic logics. Mineral substances or elements sit alongside unlikely animal neighbors and mundane or picturesque flora. Within each category—animal, plant, mineral—small adventures and encounters are implied among the things and beings that Werner (or Syme) compares. The aim is correspondence or affinity, but juxtaposition or even a kind of collage is an accidental outcome. Take, for instance, the various shades of white, of which Syme describes eight, beginning with snow white, which Werner had described as “the characteristic color of the whites; it is the purest white color; being free of all intermixture, it resembles new-fallen snow.” Its animal correspondent, according to Syme, is the “breast of the black-headed gull,” its vegetable twin is the snowdrop, and in terms of minerals it is closest to Carrara marble and calcareous sinter, otherwise known as travertine. Fifth in Syme’s list of whites: an orange white, which on the aged pages of an early edition of Werner’s Nomenclature looks very much like snow white. Its likenesses are the breast of a screech owl, the flowers of wild convolvulus, and the color of French porcelain clay. A question not answered by Werner or Syme: can the reader be expected to conjure all these colors in the mind, by way of comparison?

I am looking at some pages from Mohamedi’s sketchbook: the place where she works out her “formula” for a given painting, where found images are abstracted into (some of) their constituent colors and also into words. (Does a color become more or less abstract when we name it according to the place or thing where we find it?) In these pages, a source image typically appears on the left: extracted perhaps from a magazine or catalogue, a cookery book or children’s book. These images sometimes have the period garishness of a film stock such as Kodachrome, or the vivid look of a once-common printing process such as dye transfer, frequently used for advertising. That is, they look very much of their era (twentieth century), but that is not obviously a defining element in Mohamedi’s choosing them, or in the paintings to which these choices contribute. Still, the oversaturated hues find their way, transformed in Mohamedi’s art into a new nomenclature and a new constellation of forms.

From these images (taped roughly onto the page), arrows radiate: patches of color in the picture connect to captions or labels that name the shade in question, followed most often by a short list of the pigments mixed to reproduce it. (The history of manufacturers’ names for their paints is distinct from but parallel with the lineage of nomenclature among the likes of Werner and Syme; oil paints and watercolors still retain reminders of elemental origins and the names of long-dead chemists.) In the formula for yesterday I was a tiny tube of toothpaste, the source image shows a white electric-light switch on a blue surround decorated with three colored stickers depicting cute dogs. What draws Mohamedi’s eye in this image? First, the red bow tied to a basket in which one of the dogs sits. Mohamedi’s handwritten note: “Red Bow: cad red med / cad red light / cad yellow med / cad orange deep / raw umber / WB perm-red orange / P. warm grey.” (“Cad” for cadmium.) It is the plainest of the labels and lists on this page, but there is already a kind of poetry at work, and some room for ambiguity as well as acuity, in Mohamedi’s annotations and recipes. “Switch Plate Blue” is made of more suggestive ingredients: “phthalo blue / Payne’s grey / cobalt blue / titanium white / ultramarine blue / A. Crimson / warm white.” Elsewhere on the page, “Golden Paw” and “Shadow” are crossed out: chromatic possibilities shut down, rethought. “Dirty Paw Green” looks more like a muted yellow. Some pages on: an image of six fabric dolls with arms outstretched: “even a beginner stitcher will get show-stopping results.” In this formula, Mohamedi’s notes turn more enigmatic, giving the title orange-haired cats goofing off and not caring (or maybe they do).

“Poetic” is an imprecise word to apply to language, let alone to images. But in the case of Mohamedi’s formulas and her finished paintings, I think I mean something more exact by it: the combination, precisely, of precision itself (in word, line, or form) and a series of more or less subtle displacements. Color is repeated or imitated, divorced from its context, to become a square or lozenge of painterly potential. But color is also turned into text that won’t easily settle into the names and categories given to paints; it spills over into a delicate sort of excess in Mohamedi’s notes, names, and titles—just as the paintings themselves combine elegance of line and form with a constant movement of slippage and overflow. The source for Baby’s Breath is an image from the Family Circle Illustrated Library of Cooking, fifth volume, from 1972. A display of “cookie-jar jewels” gives rise, in Mohamedi’s hand, to a language of expressive précis or even vagueness at exactly the moment the words try to capture and control color: “minty white frosting… dirty grey white… white white… small bits: gooey red… small bits: gooey green.” Eventually Mohamedi’s language, at the far-right of the page, shades off into descriptions of a so-far-hypothetical painting: “lots of clustered and grouped vignettes… ornamental bobbles in small bit colors.”

It would be too easy to think that in this movement between the precise and the poetic, at the stage of Mohamedi’s preparations for her paintings, we have discovered something that can be traced back to her training in the sciences (specifically neuroscience) and the motivations for her migration toward art. The biographies of artists, and their intentions, are rarely expressed so obviously in the work. But it is not, I think, too much of a leap to say that Mohamedi seems fully aware of her work’s shuttling or oscillation between exactitude and freedom, between a rational determination of what a painting will be and the more unruly energy of composition and color. She has kept a diary most of her life, and in an entry written when, as a young researcher, she was in the middle of a funded stay in Japan, Mohamedi introduced a key term that points to how she thinks about her work and how it is made: “I guess the question becomes: is it worth doing if you can’t do it with care? Some things, no. Some things, yes. … Maybe I should just try to do one thing with care and that will create peace for me. Maybe it’s painting.” Care seems just the word for Mohamedi’s mode of attention to her sources and her formulas, and for their transformation into form, line, and color.

Mohamedi’s is an art that starts with writing of a sort—the elaboration of the formula, the appending of a title—and progresses to the composition of paintings that at times seem to share something with the logic and energy of writing. Of course this relationship, between the writerly mark and the painterly one, has a history. In a catalogue essay that he wrote for a Cy Twombly exhibition in 1979, Roland Barthes considered the relationship between writing and painting: an obvious subject in some ways when we consider Twombly’s word-streaked work. Eccentrically, Barthes abbreviates the artist’s name to “TW” and writes: “TW has his own way of saying that the essence of writing is neither a form nor a usage but only a gesture, the gesture which produces it by permitting it to linger: a blur, almost a blotch, a negligence.” The strokes of Twombly’s writing-painting, says Barthes, are “futile” and “vague”—they can be deciphered, but not interpreted. We should not make a direct or obvious connection between Twombly and Mohamedi, but there is something persuasive in Barthes’s idea of an artist’s writing as pure gesture or movement. Especially in his (somewhat fanciful) assertion that “Chinese writing was born, we are told, from the tiny cracks of an overheated tortoiseshell.”

Barthes’s tortoiseshell cracks make me think of the determined but vagrant lines that traverse Mohamedi’s paintings and that, once the initial stages of formula-making have been completed, are her starting point—or starting-over point. They make the large color fields and expanses in the paintings, but they also travel on their own accounts, snaking out among the solid colors. These lines she makes first in pencil; they seem at once to describe a composition, a set of larger contours for the painting to come, and also to advance tentatively, sometimes breaking off and starting again, sometimes doubling or knotting back on themselves, eventually altering their colors as they cross the larger forms. (In places, the distinction between a line and a form is not so clear.) They are the opposite, in a way, of what Barthes describes in Twombly’s work: a gestural smudge or smear, the ghost of a meaningful movement on canvas or page. Instead, in Mohamedi’s work, there is a sense, again, of infinite care with the line, but this care (which may or may not also be a kind of slowness) is not at all inimical to a certain gestural adventure; even when lines, like forms, roughly repeat across a painting, there is always some alteration, slippage, or breakage involved.

And what of the forms that hover and loom most insistently in the notional space of Mohamedi’s paintings? Recall the language of her formulas: bits, groupings, the gooey and the dirty—a language of matter and its combination, intentional or not. The elaborate shapes in these works are sometimes monstrous or animal: a pair of pointed forms comes together like antagonistic hummingbirds, pale grey and green tapered things dance in a trio like aquatic infants: tadpoles or elvers. Elsewhere, they call to mind explosions, ice-cream splats, clouds rising above a curved horizon, hands or claws reaching across maps of uncertain territory, flags or insignia for unknown lands and institutions. But quite aside from all this figural possibility there is the intense labor of form and its involuting frontiers, and the rhythms of repetition and rhyme between these shapes, the ways they overlay each other so that what seems a solid in one place turns out to be porous in another, or a hole in the space of the painting.

In the course of these paragraphs, I have been using and overusing the word “translation” to describe the action Mohamedi carries out on her source images and colors. It is not, in the end, quite right for naming the movement that happens between the shades of the found image, formula notes, and finished painting. It seems, to borrow a word the artist uses to speak about her own forms, to be rather a matter of invention—a word that in the history of science once signified as much an act of discovery as one of original production: the scientist (the artist?) invents what is already there. In its oldest sense, the word means simply to meet, to come upon, to find.