Circumscribing the Horizon in Jane Urquhart's The Underpainter (original) (raw)

Commonwealth Essays and Studies 33:1 (Winter 2010), 2010

Abstract

Canadian author Jane Urquhart has never ceased to reflect upon the cultural prisms that mediate our perception of landscape and its representation. Her ekphrastic novel The Underpainter calls for a thorough examination of the prevalence of the visual in our experience of space which can be traced back to the etymology of the word landscape. As a pictorial composition, landscape, in figurative art, is structured by linear perspective and the imaginary line of the horizon. In The Underpainter, Austin Fraser, the narrator, is an American landscape painter who retraces the steps he took in his quest towards originality, a quest characterised first by the paradoxical desire to possess the horizon, to “bring it up close for inspection”. His pictorial experimenting with the structure of perception bespeaks a will to control experience by rational understanding. In that sense, his interpretation of the “eye/I” of Robert Henri’s teaching partakes of an intellectualisation of vision, namely vision as the projection of the mind on a world that can be grasped and mastered by the subject. The novel’s emphasis on voyeurism and thieving leads to a more disquieting interpretation of the tensions between what is seen and ways of seeing it. The parallel between the canvas of the painter and the grid of the entrepreneur sheds light on the power relations underlying Austin’s representation of his Canadian mistress and her landscape. His turning both into “finished, saleable” pictures is a form of colonial exploitation which is underpinned by his obsession with distance between the subject – the artist – and the object offered to his gaze – be it his model or, by metonymy, the landscape of the north. Striving to detach himself from the “perfectly composed view[s]” of his early career, Austin develops the concept of “formal ambiguity” inspired by pentimenti, those faint traces of a previous work painted over by the artist. To the optical illusion of depth composition aims at creating, he substitutes the materiality of the hard surface, the superimposed layers of paint veiling the underpainting. His series The Erasure evinces an interest in the indivisible link between revelation and obscuration, the limits and the enigma of the visible. The subject of his paintings becomes the horizon itself, as understood by phenomenology: the horizon against which the visible stands out but which is itself invisible.

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