Margaret Wall-Romana

My piece “Painting Painting (with van der Weyden)” weaves together my interest in various periods and genres of painting, from 15th to 17th-Century Dutch and Flemish, to Mannerism, the Hudson River School, Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting.  I took as a starting point Rogier van der Weyden’s 1432 Deposition From the Cross, one of my favorite paintings.  It’s a work in which formal invention and the expression of emotion are perfectly dovetailed and executed through the act and the medium of painting.   Thinking past the religious narrative I marvel to myself – this has got to be the most beautiful painting of people crying that’s ever been made.

When I looked at this painting upside down (an old trick painters use to gain some distance from narrative, the better to see a painting’s formal qualities) the Christ figure took on the feeling of a sleeper who dreams of other spaces and times. It reminded me of the mythological figure of Persephone, who dreams of returning to earth from the underworld, from another cosmological story of death and rebirth.

Van der Weyden broke with the convention of his time, which dictated that this oft-depicted scene should have a landscape setting. Instead, he set it in a shallow, almost shadowbox-like space barely big enough to contain its figures, and orchestrated ingeniously layered rhythms and repetitions that loop and sweep back and forth between the inward-curving figures bracketing the painting’s left and right edges. The ten nearly full-size figures have a startlingly sculptural quality, and thrust out towards the viewer.  At the same time, somehow, their crisp contours and the linearity of the angular folds of their garments seem to sit on the picture’s surface and emphasize its qualities of abstraction. The way the figures take up the picture plane, both from side to side and bottom to top, is another of the aspects of this painting that I find remarkable for its time. I used echoes of these aspects in my own painting.