Alison Hall

Clear water.

About a year ago Amy Pleasant (a gallery artist at whitespace) reached out to ask me if I would be interested in a show in a peculiar little space in Atlanta, a shed. Not just any shed, one that she said ‘felt like a small chapel and had incredible natural light, all of which are beautiful atmospheres for your paintings’. An important non sequitur—I purchased a small painting of Amy’s in NYC several years ago. I have since enjoyed sharing a correspondence with her. We both are living down south and I recognize a work ethic, a llabor, that I think is particularly southern. I feel connected to her through our seriousness in the undertaking of such a profession. I have loved living with her painting. It’s powerful but relaxed; and clear, clear as a bell. I look at it every day, it’s held up—and I’m tougher on painting than anything. She makes decisions in an exquisite way, an intuitive rigor—her hand is relaxed and her mind is sharpened like a blade. I like that she imagined my work in this shed.

The shed is a chapel. What a chapel can hold.

My obsession with chapels, begins with my obsession with Giotto. Most of his work is found inside of religious spaces, his paintings depicting religious scenes, chapels everywhere, but the thing I like about his work most is the low-down inside of the high-up. Meaning: regular people are found in these old pictures that record biblical histories. A single woman, pregnant, a wild young man, perhaps schizophrenic in his ideas, these folks in our current world would certainly be on medicaid or snap. Like some new testament verbiage, ‘the least of these’, the low, are found emblazoned high-up in a most sacred place. Giotto was a real outlaw in my opinion. I often think the characters are his own family, his mother is Mary on her deathbed, his friends gathered around tables for feasts. The intimacy, the empathy is undeniable that they are the people closest to him. I think abstraction can hold this kind of intimacy. At least, that’s my reality in the studio.

The shed is a spring.

I love titles; I had wanted to be a poet. I always think of a ballad as being a narrative and usually sung by a single person, a female singer. It’s really a surrendering of a very private space, very vulnerable. And I imagine generations of my family singing them to babies, to themselves as they worked. I love the idea of the ballad as a narrative form that can tell a story. I think abstract painting can do that. My work is a place where whole histories reside in terms of my connection to the work of my family, to the current state of things in my life. They hold so much. And poems do that too with such efficiency, such economy. The title of this show, is a source, ancient like painting, like family history, The Spring. Shedspace at first look conjured a well house. My father was raised by his grandparents (born in 1896) in Wentworth, North Carolina. They grew everything they ate and they would only buy a few things, like coffee, salt, and sugar. They had no running water in the house, and my dad would have to go down to a spring on the property to get water and carry it back to the house as a child. Every time he goes back to Wentworth he walks back to the spring. My dad wants to drink from the spring. That’s kind of what the paintings want to do, too. I want to drink the water. As a young woman, I wanted to run from all of this. It wasn’t the world I wanted to be from or to be a part of. I really tried to escape it so many times, but as I’m aging, I want to go back to the spring. My dear old dad has had some health issues of late, keeping a close eye on him- hence, sleeping with one eye open. It’s a Dolly Parton song, a ballad, country music.

The painting is a chapel. The painting is a spring.

The diamond shape I use in my paintings is my granny—in an old photograph she is wearing this beautiful skirt that I imagine her mother made or that she made and she’s fanning it out in front of this clapboard house as she takes on the shape of an imperfect diamond. The more I think about my paintings, I think about how they connect to this place my mother and father are from. When you look at the paintings, they look monochromatic, like nothingness from a distance, and you could say that about an uneducated person from the South, from a distance. Let’s say they have no formal education. They are missing some teeth. They have a drawl that might make them be considered dumb and the paintings kind of do that too, from a distance. They say, “I’m nothing. Then, as you approach them, they are covered in these very intricate, careful, deliberate decisions and if you stick with it long enough, they open up. They are really wide. They are very generous paintings. As I’ve grown older, I appreciate this beautiful, saturated, multidimensional reality that exists within things that appear to be so plain.

Alison Hall, with excerpts from an interview with the artist’s best friend, the poet, Annie Woodford. How to Write a Ballad

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