| Dorian's
White
Dorian Allworthy pulled a copy of Moby
Dick from her shelf and began to read from page 191:
All was now a frenzy. ‘The White
Whale – the White Whale!’ was the cry from captain,
mates, and harpooners, who, undeterred by fearful rumours, were
all anxious to capture so famous and precious a fish; while the
dogged crew eyed askance, and with curses, the appalling beauty
of the vast milky mass, that lit up by a horizontal spangling sun,
shifted and glistened like a living opal in the blue morning sea.
“What a really good writer,”
she said closing the book. “Isn’t he a really good writer?”
she asked, as if there were nothing particularly self-evident in
calling the author of the great American novel a ‘good writer.’
It’s not unusual to fall a step
behind in conversation with Dorian and it had just happened again.
I was still puzzling over the passage from Moby Dick, and she was
debating herself about Herman Melville’s place in the literary
canon.
Stop. All I had asked was why she painted
girls in white dresses.
I could see the point of my question
evaporating into a mist of obscurity, so (after quickly conceding
that Melville was indeed a very good writer) I pressed Dorian for
an answer. She rose and walked to her easel, laughing nervously
at my insistence. I suspected that she was buying time while she
formulated an oblique response or until she had thought of a way
to avoid giving any response at all. She extended both hands toward
her painting. In it, a sturdy young woman in a white shift and with
the pretty face of a barmaid looks up from ironing more white linen
(okay, with red stripes). “Why do I paint girls in white dresses?”
she posed the question rhetorically, but was still gesturing at
the painting as if the ironing barmaid might answer. “What’s
with all those girls in white dresses?” she paraphrased, affecting
a disdainful tone. “What is with those girls in white dresses?”
she asked a third time, picking up a brush, holding its handle to
her face for more than a few seconds, then setting it back down
again. She finally turned from the easel; I detected a slight shrug.
She snatched a bottle of wine from the counter on her way back to
where I was seated, and offered me a glass. White, of course.
I already knew the answer that Dorian
had deftly concealed in chanting my question three times. At least
I thought so then. White can be a surprisingly complex color or
non-color as the case may be, and therein lies the root of its complexity.
When something is nothing it can be almost anything. In most of
the western world, white is the symbol of chastity and purity, which
is why we pile mountains of white organdy atop virgin brides (wink,
wink), hoping it will protect their virtue at least until the end
of the ceremony. But in some parts of Asia, white is symbolic of
death.
White is often spoken of as an embodiment
of simplicity, innocence, youth, peace, and humility, none of which
are contradictory, but they’re not actually synonyms either.
White is clinical and precise, like a clean slate, a crisp winter
day, or a china cup. But it’s also warm and comfortable, like
a down pillow or the look of clouds on a summer afternoon. French
laundresses are called blanchisseuses, as if everything they wash
is white, or, in the insidious way that our languages ill-define
us, as if being white is the same as being clean. White is a blank
canvas: beautiful and terrifying.
Dorian Allworthy’s
Girls in white linen
Are never in a hurry
To turn into women.
My first guess was too obvious. I wondered
if Dorian’s girls and young women in white could be an expression
of feminine virtue – not a euphemism for virginity, but what
the word really means: honesty, integrity, and righteousness. She
would not have been the first artist to suggest essential goodness
by draping the feminine form en blanc. I thought of all those nineteenth-century
academic paintings in which women in classicizing robes hold nursing
infants in one arm and sheaves of wheat in the other.
I knew that Dorian’s paintings
had nothing to say about maternal charity – either literally
or as metaphor – but maybe there was a parallel in her symbolic
use of white. Perhaps the white dresses worn by her girls and young
women were meant to reinforce their youth and innocence, their nobility,
their values, virtues, and ideals, qualities that I, as a man, could
witness but not truly know, qualities that were intrinsically understandable
only to the sisterhood. Nice idea, but no.
Think about it: most of the men in
Dorian’s pictures are also wearing white. Think about it more:
white appears regularly in her still life subjects too. Does it
have some special, suggestive meaning when she is painting lilies
or koi or porcelain figurines? It could be just a favorite color
or a preferred formal device. Artists are allowed such pets, and
she does handle white beautifully. I strolled to Dorian’s
easel for another look at the young woman ironing. Yes, those stripes
were red.
Fishing for a clue, I reminded Dorian
of a conversation we had had about Francisco de Zurbarán’s
The Crucifixion (1627) in the Art Institute of Chicago, a painting
that we both know well. The Zurbarán is large and dramatic,
but it hangs in the same gallery as the museum’s iconic El
Greco and far more visitors scurry past it than stop for even a
glance. It’s an exceptional picture on any number of levels,
but three hundred miles removed from the work, we both remembered
the vividness of the white cloth knotted low around the waist and
draping to the side of the dying Christ. Zurbaran achieved a startling
variety of tones within the otherwise monochromatic whiteness of
the holy garment. The same could be said for Dorian, but did she
favor white just because she made it look so good? She wasn’t
biting.
I was getting no closer to the heart
of Dorian’s pictures. Whites blanch across so much of her
work; they must be catalysts for meaning, but to what end? The attractive
girls and young women in her paintings are often posed in nature
or engaged in some silent act of domesticity, such as ironing. Speaking
for male voyeurism and the empowered masculine gaze, the forest,
la toilet, and even the ironing board are perfectly pleasant places
in which to encounter attractive young women in white. But as conveyors
of feminine identity, these settings are not without their problematic
side.
Even in this (Post-)Feminist era, with
all that women have achieved in a century of reform, we continue
to live in an age of highly conventional gender identities that
seem to grow more deeply engrained with each new generation. Recent
self-help literature and at least one enormously popular work of
fiction have traded on centuries-old biases that identify women
as creatures of instinct and intuition, more attuned than men to
the rhythms and cycles of nature.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with
listening to nature, except that women are also bearers of intellect,
discipline, self-definition, and self-determination, traits that
Dorian herself possesses and that the earth-mother paradigm fails
to accommodate. Her young women and girls in white simply could
not be virgin priestesses, preparing Venus for the arrival of men
from Mars. Or maybe they were; I no longer knew. I had wandered
hopelessly lost into a blind alley. Dorian was smiling and a bit
too smugly.
Dorian Allworthy’s
Girls in white linen
Are in such a hurry
To turn into women.
II should have listened more carefully
when she was reading Moby Dick. As I was leaving her house, I realized
that the passage from Melville’s novel was the only direct
insight she had offered into the meaning of all that white in her
work. Once I got home, I opened my own copy of the book, and read
well into the night. It had been years since I had covered so much
of the novel, and I had not so much forgotten as somehow diminished
the degree to which the book is about obsession. And within the
very passage that Dorian had read lived the essential conflict that
was Ahab’s obsession for the great white whale. Two words
summarized and fueled his mad, futile desire and his simultaneous
attraction and disgust: “appalling beauty.”
It would be too simplistic to describe
all the white linen that dazzles across Dorian’s work as her
Moby Dick. She is no Ahab and for her, white is no obsession. But
I do think she sees in it the same tremor and frisson of opposites
that Ahab saw in his whale. Dorian’s white: the color that
is no color; simplicity and complexity; attractiveness and its concealment;
form and content, purity and something not quite so. White is Dorian’s
“appalling beauty,” capturing loveliness while swaddling
it in something less benign.
When I think of Dorian’s paintings,
I remember the muscular young woman in a white sleeveless dress,
who stands atop a rocky outcrop. Her knees are slightly flexed and
her hands are balled into fists. She looks straight out in utter
defiance.
I think of the little girl in white
standing before a tree, with more linen hanging on a clothesline
behind her. She is not intimidated by our presence, and the disarming
bluntness of her gaze connects the yard she inhabits to the space
that we occupy. A ladder leans against the tree almost waiting for
her to climb out of the picture.
I think of the world-weary eyes of
the seated little girl, slumped in a chair and wearing the hat of
a court jester. She is not amused herself and does not care to be
amusing.
And of course, I think of the ironing
barmaid, who freezes us in our tracks with nothing more than the
flick of her briefest glance. It would seem the singular look of
a woman interrupted. But in the barmaid’s charming gaze, surrounded
by white linen, Dorian invites us to peer into the terrible eye
of Moby Dick.
Kevin Sharp
Director of Visual Arts
Cedarhurst Center for the Arts
Mt. Vernon, Illinois
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