Rebecca Salter

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Anyone who has read the novels of Ian McEwan will know that his characters' whole lives turn upon the consequences of a single event that seems irrevocable. For Rebecca Salter that turning point, but a positive one, was her decision in 1979 to go to Japan. It has had a lasting and profound effect on her career and the way in which her work has developed. She was awarded a Leverhulme Scholarship to do research at Kyoto City University of the Arts. 'I was supposed to be researching Japanese Raku pottery', but she needed to be able to speak Japanese so whilst nominally continuing to study ceramics, she studied Japanese, and 'learned all about woodblock prints, Japanese pigment and paper'.

A guiding principal underpinning Rebecca Salter's work is a passionate belief in the importance of craftsmanship. This is born out of her natural inclination allied to her long sojourn in Japan. The traditional oriental way of learning any skill is physically. 'You have to train and be an apprentice for years to become anything in Japan. What you learn becomes part of your body so you do it with your whole body'. Watching her Japanese calligraphy teacher work, she was aware of 'an extraordinary synthesis between a physical and an intellectual understanding, not only of the history of what she was doing but also an incredible sensitivity to humidity, the dampness of the paper or the thickness of the ink, or the size of the brush. All those things that can be seen as obsessive'. Obsessive is a word that crops up frequently.

Salter 'feels it is for other people to decide' where her practice sits in relationship to her contemporaries. She feels set apart from the UK art scene perhaps because of her long absence in Japan and her non-fine art background. Her work has never been shown with that of other abstract artists of her generation, like Callum Innes or Estelle Thompson, and this may be because 'I've come from a direction that people can't quite fathom'. However in some ways she sees this as a positive thing preferring not to be labelled; although it amuses her that she has been called 'the English Agnes Martin'.¹

'Sometimes people try and make out that I'm a minimalist but I'm not sure about that'. She subscribes to Martin's philosophy of detachment but says, 'I think there is a difference between obsessional repetitive, which is what I do, and systems, which is what Agnes Martin does. For me the obsessional thing is actually all about meditation, and it's all about reaching a different level of consciousness through movement'. It is clear from close examination of her work that the repetition of small marks borders on the obsessive. Her large painting on three panels 'HH30' (2005) was made over a period of three months after a particularly traumatic event, and has a meditative quality, which is close to catharsis.

Rebecca Salter
HH30, 2005

In response to those who ask her if she is successful, her answer is: 'My measure of success is that I have to finish whatever I do to my satisfaction, then I have to take it up there (to her mezzanine storage platform in her studio) and put it away and if anything else happens after that it's a sheer fluke, but that's nothing to do with me. I feel very lucky to be able to do this every day and what happens to it afterwards is largely a matter of chance'.

Reticent about acknowledging the influence of other artists, she nevertheless admires the work of Agnes Martin, Richard Serra and Ad Reinhardt.

'I don't ever look at them in relation to my own work. I never have pictures of anybody else's work in my studio. If I feel the need to look at something, I will look at things or sky or something. Again this goes back to taking myself, as I did, completely out of Western culture and parachuting myself into a completely different culture. It was a wonderful way of wiping the slate clean. I stopped seeing any kind of narrative'.

One artist whose work does have a resonance for Salter is the Japanese sculptor Yayoi Kusama who lived in New York for eighteen years before returning to Japan.² 'She did these wonderful early paintings that she calls net paintings. It was as if she had sprinkled sand on them and then drawn round the grains of sand. They are massive and obsessional. It is the obsessional and repetitive thing which I find so interesting'. As an observer, Salter and Kusama also seem to be connected by the sense of displacement both experienced through living and immersing themselves in a different culture. One of the reasons Salter finally left Japan was because she wanted to prove to herself that her success was to do with the quality of the work and not to do with her rarity value. Ironically it was the Japanese element which initially made her stand out from her contemporaries and which still contributes to what she describes as a feeling of being 'semi-detached'.

At one stage Salter cut her drawings and some of her canvases into bits and reordered them. 'It is sort of ordering chaos. Smoothing over, making things better, stabilizing things, it's a bit like growing or planting things'. This is both a nurturing and a female characteristic which are contentious areas in contemporary art but particularly so for Salter because she has this fear of being pigeonholed. Talking about the labour intensive way that she works, she says:

'I think making a whole out of lots of little bits is what I think it might come down to. I have an aversion; I don't know if it is a fear or a suspicion, of the grand gesture. Since the Romantic notion of the troubled genius which we have bought into in the West, and of course that troubled genius is almost always male, there is this feeling of this specially endowed person with the answer, with the secret. It is almost as if it's a divine intervention so that person transfers that divine intervention to the canvas and you can buy into a little bit of that magic. Whereas the Oriental tradition is much more of an artisan's approach'.

Salter has taken elements of the Oriental approach to craftsmanship and fed it into her own work and in a sense Westernised the process. In many ways, her prints, most of which are one-offs rather than editioned, are like sketchbooks in the way that they give an indication of the development of her ideas.

Rebecca Salter
Grey Veil 1, 2007

Now a respected expert on Japanese woodblock printing,³ her paintings tend to be exhibited more than her prints and she feels that this is because of the higher status and price accorded to works on canvas. For her, canvas and paper have equal value as a support.

'If you take the difference between Western printmaking and Japanese printmaking and oil painting and oriental painting the difference is, in the West you have a surface on to which something is applied. So in etching the ink is applied to the surface and its sits on the surface. In oil painting, oil paint is applied to the surface and the surface is primed and they are separate entities. Whereas because of the absorbent nature of Oriental paper, the paper, the substrate, becomes one with whatever is put on it and so the thing itself becomes an object rather than a surface. They fuse. The colour soaks right into the paper. It's like dyeing; it's an extension of textiles. The whole thing becomes an object, not a surface with genius applied! The way that I work, and it is a much more Oriental way of working, is that I am trying to encourage something out of materials rather than imposing on them. It is listening rather than shouting. I see the works as becoming things which is why I have a problem with thinking that canvas is more important than paper or print because I approach them in much the same way. I can persuade certain effects out of paper and other effects out of canvas'.

We are back to the element of nurturing again.

There is a small canvas on the wall of her studio 'KK47' painted in 2007.

Rebecca Salter
Untitled KK47, 2007

Typically meticulously worked and exquisite, the canvas has been sewn across the middle. The line is so insistent that initially I thought that it consisted of two stretchers. 'I like the idea that it's sewing and then stretched afterward, it gives a different sort of line. It's going back to the line'. Much has been written about the space and light in her work, most recently by Anna Moszynska,⁴ especially in relation to Agnes Martin. Salter has come to the conclusion that line is very important. 'I have decided that my work is about line, not space or light'. Calligraphy and script have a different meaning for people educated within the Oriental tradition. Line comes with an associated meaning leading them to try and 'read' works that are inspired by calligraphic marks, such as Brice Marden's 'Cold Mountain' drawings, and ultimately finding them unsatisfactory because in their terms they don't mean anything.

In 2003 Salter spent three months as Artist in Residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Connecticut.


Interior of Salter's Studio at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.

The experience changed, and is still changing, her work. It also gave her time to reflect about her practice.

'I think I really discovered, what I knew all along, was that I'm really all about drawing. I think painting is really the wrong word. I think essentially I am drawing but when it is on canvas people think it is painting. In Japanese, draw and paint is the same word which probably has its origins in the word to 'scratch'. Painting comes out of calligraphy because they both use the brush. It's in the language because it comes from writing. That's what I think I do. I draw pictures'.

Ultimately much of Salter's working philosophy has strands linking it to the experience of being in Japan, something that she has finally allowed herself to acknowledge and is going to explore in an exhibition provisionally booked for 2010/11 at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven in the States.
Salter's next exhibition, The Unquiet Gaze will be shown at the Howard Scott Gallery, New York from 8 November – 8 December 2007. See howardscottgallery.com

Notes
1. Sister Wendy Beckett coined this phrase in conversation with Slater
2. A book about YayoiKusama by Akira Tatehata was published by Phaidon in 2000.
3. She has published two books on the subject: Japanese Popular Prints, University of Hawaii Press, 2006 and Japanese Woodblock Printing, A & C Black, 2002.
4. Rebecca Salter Bliss of Solitude. Exhibition Catalogue. Introduction by Anna Moszynska. London Beardsmore Gallery, 2006.

Bibliography
'Rebecca Salter: Paintings and works on paper' Exhibition Catalogue. Introduction by Andrew Lambirth. Jill George Gallery, 1996.
'Rebecca Salter: recent paintings and works on paper' Exhibition Catalogue. Essay by Andrew Lambirth. NY: Howard Scott M-13 Gallery, 1999.
'Rebecca Salter Paintings Drawings and prints' Exhibition Catalogue. Essay by Norbert Lynton. London, Jill George Gallery, 1998.
'Rebecca Salter' Exhibition Catalogue. Essay by Charlotte Mullins. London, Hirschl Contemporary Art, 2002.

More information on Rebecca Salter
external website rebeccasalter.com

Fiona Robinson, 2007

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