Words

Moving On: Hollis Heichemer’s Tumbling Through Space Paintings

Essay by John Howell, all quotes are from conversations with the artist, March 2024

What is the experience of looking at painting in these days of milli-second attention spans? What kind of exchange can be had standing in front of hand-crafted, painted objects hung at eye level on a wall after endless hours of staring at constantly changing digital screens? What can reflecting in slow time and at length on a static, original image offer to the inquisitive mind? Hollis Heichemer's recent series of paintings, Tumbling Through Space, suggests emphatic answers to these questions. The series uses her singular personal vocabulary of brush strokes worked into suggestive shapes with a green-weighted color palette to arrive at its purpose: the offer of an exchange leading to the exploration of the viewer's individual inner space at the moment of viewing.

Space Is the Place
A core concept in these paintings is what Heichemer calls "space." The artist explains:
I usually have an "in" somewhere in my works, a space for the viewer to "enter" into the painting, if they are willing to go into and travel within my painting. There's always been a lot of space in my work. The paintings in the Tumbling Through Space series are connected to a larger, more infinite space where they can go wherever they want to go, because that space just keeps on going. I'm reminding the viewer of their own space, the one that they spend time in, that they re connected to within themselves. It's the place where they're living from. The paintings connect them to a space inside that already exists, reminding them of the view of that infinite energy within that they may have forgotten about, or that they see in themselves when looking at the painting.

Tumbling: A New Way to Move
What's different in this series is a major shift in the artist's experience of that space. The change was caused by a concussion Heichemer suffered in a fall while ice skating. This more recent accident evoked feelings from a serious concussion suffered over thirty years ago. That incident, due to a biking crash, was disabling for months, a time period which is still mostly a blank to her to this day, except for a feeling of being lost in space. The second event generated its own dislocation while reviving sensations from the first one, of which she has no detailed memory.
While she was not painting at the time of that earlier accident, its intensity is the base from which she painted the Tumbling Through Space series.
Heichemer describes her experience of that initial concussion as "being in and also a part of an infinite, dark space" as though she's "tumbling through it— none of it is stable." This long-ago physical dislocation has resurfaced following her more recent incident, and has resulted in a paradigm shift in how she expresses her work.

Making Her Marks
Where does Heichemer begin in making visible this sense of moving through a jumbled inner space? She starts "in the moment" (so easy to say, so hard to do), where her brushstrokes are determined by "the energy of something that needs to be expressed." She continues, "That energy itself informs what the movement is going to be." She has no particular shapes or forms in mind, no preset of a format to direct the flow into a pre-conceived pattern. Each gesture informs the next move. The guiding principle is the motion itself-in the case of this series, it's activated by the overlapping layers of disorientation from the two consciousness-dislodging events:
I have to trust the remembered experience of that space to guide me through the painting. I can't get too heady, or it will block me by separating me from the experience. If anything blocks me, I'm thinking too much. So, I staple the canvas to the wall and start going at it. As it goes, there's something about a part of it which captures more of the energy. in these paintings, you're seeing more space because the space is so big. I'm in that space and I want to share with you that experience.

Taking Shape
In Tumbling Through Space, the shapes generated by this approach share a common sense of gesture driven by an overall sense of energetic motion but in a variety of forms. Cloudy whisps and congealed blobs collide, layer, overlap, and yes, tumble in the roiling space within the frame. They can seem wind-blown or piled up, drifting or condensing, freely floating or driven by an unseen force. They express the energy of their making in the sweeps and stabs of the brushstrokes from which they are created.

Her Green World
There is a variety of color throughout these works, varying from feathery yellows and ghostly whites to streaks of purples and flashes of reds and oranges.
Choices are made, she says, based on a sense of energy that she feels a painting needs. But a predominant hue is a range of greens. Green is dominant in a number of Heichemer's paintings. She applies several shades of the color and in shapes that can seem vaguely referential to flora but not to any natural shade of plant life that occurs in nature. Sometimes, its a misty green that seems almost liquid, like kelp waving under water. In other works, it conjures abstracted foliage that appears to be windblown. In
some, its a dark, blackened shade that evokes dense rain forest plants. None of them are the greens of the pine and hardwood forest that surrounds her studio and home in the New Hampshire woods. There is no direct connection between what is visible in her sur. roundings of thick forest in either color or shape but rather, nature is used to initiate a constant cascade of recreating the experience of it having been seen Heichemer admits to a fondness for the color. People who have seen my paintings over the years say. "You and your green!" There's something about the color that I just like. Even when I lived in a city, I wanted to see green. It's not a natural green. I think maybe it's about the light at sunrise or sunset, which can have a tinge of green in it.

Working It All Out
Heichemer works on several paintings at a time Because she moves from one to another according to her intuition, paintings created at a certain time will inter-relate, as do those in the Tumbling Through Space series. She jumps from work to work during studio time:
Sometimes, something goes on in my dream world that connects to a painting, and I've got to get to that painting, because I see something that needs to be done. Other times, when I get into the studio, I sit for a while and just let it be. Then something happens and connect to a painting and stuff starts to happen.
This connection between works that results in a related series is not planned out. She keeps the other paintings facing the wall while she works on a partic ular one. Its "too much information" if all the works in progress are facing out, visible. So, influence across works is subjective, not a strategy.

Snapshots to Panoramas
Scale determines one important aspect of the viewing experience of the Tumbling Through Space series.
As most of the paintings in this series are not large, they call for the viewer to get up close. It's as if the works are speaking quietly, mimicking Heichemer's actual soft-spoken voice. They invite an intimate, concentrated experience in an attention-deficit age. That relationship echoes Heichemer's agenda of an undefined engagement. Their square framing evokes snapshots to be scanned for triggering entry into the moment of viewing:
I'm not grabbing you and telling you to pay attention to this or that because I feel that's what you should be doing. Instead, I'm opening you up to what already exists within you.With these paintings, you reflect on your own expenence.Three works are much larger, thirty-four-by-eighty-four inches, and stretch out horizontally. The literal space of these bigger canvases extends past the peripheral vision at close range; they require more distance to view. Within the fields, there looks to be a bigger, less defined space. The brushstrokes are substantial, and so are the more open areas. Colors are more saturated, and the forms more turbulent. In these panoramic images, Heichemer refers again to the aftereffects of her concussion which ungrounded her inner sense of being.

Words about Thoughts
Titles in the Tumbling Through Space series serve as verbal hints, as is often the way with such abstract works. These paintings display two kinds of titles.
Some are allusions to place, such as "between two storms" and "long wide slope." Here, the artist gestures to a specific location but in the most generic of terms-the viewer is to fill in the blanks within these descriptions with their own experience of a multi-storm event or sloping ground. But most titles refer to movement: "wriggles," "slip slide," "ebb and flow,""swerve," "twisting and turning." They reference the kind of motion in the specific expression of energy that Heichemer is trying to capture in paint. They imply a "space" that is in perpetual motion, one that is off-balance, askew, rotating, at a tilt, like a wobbling gyroscope:
Because of the "tumbling through space" theme, I thought the titles should be about movement.
For this series, I was thinking "beauty in motion." I considered: what is movement like for a bird?; what is movement like for water or things in water, through air?; how do we experience movement? I came up with the words one day and wrote them down. Then, in the studio, I looked around at the paintings, and said, "This is that, and so on" and assigned out titles that seemed to fit each one.

Wrapping It Up
Heichemer shares how she decides when a painting is "finished": the moment when the process of depicting that particular expression of movement is achieved:
If it has a life, a memory of that experience in it, and if I see that memory expressed, then I think, that's got it. The way I would describe it is that the painting is dead, then becomes alive. That's when it's done. It's a moment in life at this time. When a painting gets to the point where that's all I know or all that can be known right now, then I just let it be and move on.

No Direction Home
What Heichemer is getting at in the Tumbling Through Space paintings is an opportunity for the viewer to connect with the possibilities made visible in these works. There is no story, no direction except that of offering an exchange with the works while viewing them. The only guidance is that of the artist's hand in action as it has recorded the experience of expression by marking canvas and presenting the results for the viewer's interaction:

I'm opening up to the viewer what already exists within them, their experiential self. And they do it because it's just a natural thing to do.We all do this all the time. Each person is an individual and has their own personal experi-ence. Abstract painting tunes us in to that.Maybe we don't understand one another's experience, but painting allows us the opportunity to be quiet with ourselves and simply be.

Many painters have described their end game in amorphous terms of the ineffable, even the cosmic.
Heichemer, here, is spelling out something much more secular, more of the everyday although no less profound. In a visual riff on William Carlos Williams's credo of "no ideas but in things," the Tumbling Through Space series presents a chance to seek meaning beyond thought. That's an experience as concrete and as meaningful as moment-to-moment living itself.

More Words

Painting and drawing is an investigation into the edge of where reality and imagination are blurred and where tragedy and beauty are interconnected. I find an expression of this blurred line can be explored through an association with the time of day when night is falling, when the sudden darkness is at once confusing and threatening. Through painting, I am creating a space where one senses, experiences something which then alters our relationship within that moment.

The colors of my paintings are drawn from my relationship with the outside world which I then connect to a bigger picture, to a series of reactions—responses that begin once the colors are on the canvas. I am drawn to painting in order to go into a deep space, colors I can look into and want to look into because they invite me with hints of finding something. My paintings are the experience of this unknown space.

This edge of darkness gives both a sense of beauty and tragedy. Shadows, when we see them, can take on forms and suggest objects. Only later do we realize that those forms/objects are put together in our minds. The shapes in my paintings and drawings come from reflections, light, shadows, times of day—all those occasions that are overwhelming because of the way light appears. It's the idea of the shape that attracts me, not the exact form or perfect representation of a form.

All these experiences and the beauty and the tragedy of them drive my need to paint. Painting, because it creates space through color and form—a space to explore this beauty and tragedy. And drawing is the immediate record of what is experienced. I am looking to connect with the experience of feeling that it all looks familiar, yet not knowing what that "familiar" is. A time that is not all clear, that has elements of what is known and what is felt but not known.