Color of beaten earth: instability and love in Paula Siebra’s work
I am a girl who dreams of leisure, always have. Reverie has always been necessary to my existence. [...]
Always one wedded to the couch, the back porch, the swing, I want to see the world standing still. — bell hooks
In Paula Siebra’s studio, a fresh house in the historic center of Fortaleza, some of her works are finished, others in progress and also a considerable number of studies: on paper, on canvas, writings; fragments of ideas, lives and things that populate the artist’s imagination. Although restricted to an increasingly smaller number of people, a workplace that is pleasant and quiet “is as necessary [...] as water is to growing things”,[1] in the words of the great intellectual bell hooks, according to which love is a political act, a transforming force.[2] I remember discovering notes on one of the walls of the studio about “people of my street”: Juvenal, a suspicious-looking man; the portrait sketch of a white-haired woman on a green background; another who poses seated, with her hands in her lap and a timid smile. In this case, painting is not abstract work that can be done anywhere, but an exercise of belonging, deeply anchored in the material reality, both of the craft itself and of the reality around it. In this case, painting is not abstract work that can be done anywhere, but an exercise in belonging, deeply anchored in the material reality, both to the craft itself and to the reality around it.
For hooks, unlike a passive feeling, love represents a constant practice of “care, commitment, trust, responsibility and respect”,[3] which does not mean denying the reality of institutionalized injustice, but making a conscious choice of how one responds to it. In fact, comfort, beauty and care (both in material and symbolic terms) should not be exclusive to an elite, but on the contrary: the political horizon of society as a whole. “Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.”
On one of the studio’s tables, there are ground pigments, oils and tools for the preparation of paints: a slow, artisanal and meticulous activity, which carries a centuries-old tradition. It is not a matter of technical preciosity, however: the matter of painting and the sheer exercise of this craft — quotidian, reiterated — carry within themselves a knowledge that is profoundly connected to the images produced by Siebra, along with her conceptual research, in a broad manner. A wisdom that is drawn from the body, from time itself, and which is decanted in fragments and in superimposed layers.
Despite the apparent calmness of the images, the colors are unstable, whose optical effect can change depending on the others with which they are combined. The earthy backgrounds applied to the canvas before or after shades of gray produce a subtle conflict, perceptible only to those who choose to observe the works for a longer period of time. It matters little. Tensions will be there, independent of the “subject”, which the Western tradition elected as the center of the universe.
On the surface — and the surface is fundamental to painting — Siebra’s work dialogues both with ordinary and often handcrafted objects, such as vases, saints, mugs, laces, and with a tradition of painting that flourished above all in the Netherlands in the 17th century. Philosopher Tzvetan Todorov, in his book Éloge du quotidien, states that the genres of painting are not only distinct but are part of a hierarchy established “over the centuries [...] , a reflection of a conception of the world’s order”.[4] According to this scheme, “the inanimate, mineral and vegetable world is the lowest.”
Contrary to hierarchy and deeply influenced by Protestant religiosity, painters from Northern Europe began to represent ordinary life from an ontological dignity: “women who do the cleaning are placed on the pedestals of the saints and heroes of antiquity”,[5] as if banal events were as important as, or even more so, prominent historical or mythological personalities. “Dutch painting”, states Todorov, “does not deny virtues and vices, but transcends them in delight in the face of mundane existence.”[6]
Would this praise of beauty receive a similar meaning to that of care in bell hooks? It is difficult to say, but perhaps there is some point of contact, in the sense that it is pleasant to look at a painting by Johannes Vermeer, which extrapolates sheer delight: “The solitary space is sometimes a place where dreams and visions enter and sometimes a place where nothing happens [...] It is this stillness, this quietude, needed for the continued nurturance of any devotion to artistic practice,” says hooks.
However, this is not an uncritical praise of ordinary life, as if it were possible to sublimate the profound inequality that structures society. If the artists of the so-called Dutch “golden age” could neglect that the country’s wealth was the result of brutal exploitation — including the physical distance from the plantations —, avoiding such conflicts in a former colony like Brazil, the red-hot country, is much more difficult.
For this reason, in Siebra’s work, not only are the colors unstable, but the images themselves suggest a permanent, albeit subtle, tension. In Duas Estacas [Two Stakes] and Ilha [Island], for example, the fragile pieces of painted wood seem to support the mountain, creating a strange landscape. But not merely are they stuck in the soft, shifting beach sand, they barely touch the island. They are millimeters, capable of destabilizing the entire landscape, even more than the sinuous volumes of their shadows projected on the ground.
Many of the paintings are developed on layers of color and memory, like peeled or sun-bleached walls when maintenance funds are scarce and other things are more urgent than a well-finished facade. Perhaps these are a testament to the precariousness of existence, but even so, someone took care to draw two symmetrical little boats at the door. Or stars.
In addition to tradition, memory and time, there is also humor, showing that nothing is quite what it seems, despite the traditional (and elitist) solemnity of oil painting. In Nu na rede [Nude on a Hammock], a man is lying down as described in the title, with the view from his window in the background. Of the same orange color, skin and fabric almost intertwine, and an unsuspecting spectator would hardly notice his erect penis, a rare iconography in the history of art, whose sexism privileged nudity and the “availability” of female bodies for the spectator’s delight, ideally a white man.
In another image, a yellow lamp — a more or less direct reference to the tradition of still lifes — is supported by an iron structure that resembles four rolls of toilet paper that are not at all solemn, and, in a third, the figure of the girl with a mirror does not respond to the expectations of contact — her oblique gaze returns to herself, creating a promise of complicity, never achieved. In Cascavel, a bouquet blooms on the roof of the house; in Merenda com suspiros maybe only Brazilians (and some Portuguese speakers) will understand the two main words of the title. The image is there in its rawness, seemingly without mysteries. But to decipher this supposed “crudeness” it is necessary to experience it: a snack is not just any meal; the suspiros are sweets made from egg whites with sugar, whose name also means a sigh of homesickness. What can we say about Café com pão [Coffee with Bread], an almost tautological painting, in which a cup of coffee and a loaf of bread are represented? (In São Paulo we say “French bread”, in Ceará it is called “carioquinha”, in an affectionate reference to the inhabitants of the city of Rio de Janeiro.)
This instability, this paroxysm that permeates the artist’s work are significant: to understand the painting, it is not enough to have a literate knowledge that deciphers — arrogantly and taxonomically — the delicacies represented. Café com pão is much more than just coffee with bread. At the same time, they are not “exotic” images, neither to foreign eyes nor to those from other regions of the country. But knowing the names will be as superficial as the almost flat surface of the painting, as if the artist were proposing a game between the objects and the spectator, whose understanding also depends on a previous experience of affection. In other words, Siebra seems to make fun of the indifference or “neutrality” desired by Western art, or the supposed objectivity of still lifes. Someone who doesn't know Brazil will hardly be able to grasp the deeper meaning of the paintings and their atmosphere, even if they don't present themselves as the exotic customs of a strange people. However, the care with which the meal table is set remains, as well as the suggestion of the fresh breeze, and we can all experience it.
In her paintings, Siebra uses earthy tones reminiscent of Siena, a pigment widely used during the Renaissance (the name refers to the Italian city) which, when raw, has an ocher color and, when heated, turns reddish brown. The sites where this compound of iron and manganese oxides were traditionally found are depleted, and it has been synthetically produced since the mid-20th century. It is interesting to think that European extractivism also destroyed — literally — one of its most symbolic lands.
In Brazil, earthy tones may recall the recent destruction by mining waste in cities like Brumadinho, an announced tragedy that claimed the lives of hundreds of people. It was also mining that, in the 18th century, destroyed the lives of thousands of other people, and built on their mostly black bodies the cities that are now considered “heritage of humanity”, such as Ouro Preto, Tiradentes, Mariana and Diamantina.
Colors, in the context of a colonial-extractive society, are never exempt. At the same time, and despite the violence, the Jequitinhonha Valley region, where Diamantina is located, is one of the most important places for the production of ceramics, where people invent their existence from clay. This imagery also feeds Siebra's work, for example in Imbuzeiro, in which the woman's arms and the tree's branches seem to be consubstantiated, sculpted in soft orange-brown clay, just as the artist’s self-portrait dialogues with some long-necked ex-votos, made in ceramics in several states of the Brazilian Northeast.
Thus, the color of the earth can be a testimony of a profound pain, but also of affective experiences and an exercise of freedom, aesthetic creation and emancipation from the moist, fertile clay. As in the verses of another great intellectual, Beatriz Nascimento: “Joy of sitting on the earth / From the top of this hill / Carefully shooing insects away / With a lot of heat inside and out / As it hasn’t been for a long time, / My original beauty / Not rushing for anything.”[7]
bell hooks, in the memoir about her childhood — whose title, Bone Black, refers to the black pigment obtained from the carbonization of bones — says that, in her rural school, students sold tickets to performances in order to raise funds, and that rich people bought many of them. She recalls that “their flesh [of rich and white people] is often the color of pigs in the storybook” and that children learned about color from crayons:
We learn to tell the difference between white and pink and a color they call Flesh. The flesh-colored crayon amuses us. Like white it never shows up on the thick Manila paper they give us to draw on, or on the brown paper sacks we draw on at home. Flesh we know has no relationship to our skin, for we are brown and brown like all good things. And we know that pigs are not pink or white like these flesh people.[8]
In addition to the destruction engendered by mining companies, gold panning and colonization in general — including in our imagination — the earthy tones out of which most of Siebra’s paintings are made can also signify the browns of “all good things.” The yard of beaten earth on which pau-de-fita is played, the clay that will shape the utensils that filter water and keep it at a pleasant temperature, the brushing of vegetables and fruits that allows some autonomy to smallholders — nothing further from the modernist stereotype of the “Brazilian worker”: poor, alienated, sufferer, and who would rather be dependent on guardianship. After all, as the carnival artist Joãozinho Trinta used to say: “those who like poverty are intellectuals.”
If the society in which we live is marked by profound violence, there is also love, as responsibility, respect and knowledge, of those who seek to face this state of affairs. It is a daily effort that requires commitment and patience. The love of someone who weaves bobbin laces to decorate their own home and also as a source of income. Sitting on the porch, feeling the breeze from the sea.
Notes
[1] hooks, bell. “Women Artists: The Creative Process. In: Art on My Mind (New York:The New Press, 1995): 125-132.
[2] hooks, bell. All About Love. New Visions. New York :William Morrow, 2000. In page 13, the author states: “To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than afeeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumesaccountability and responsibility.” hooks, in a sad coincidence, left us on the same daythat I discovered Paula’s work.
[3] Idem, 2020, p. 7.
[4] TODOROV, Tzvetan. Éloge du quotidien: Essai sur la peinture hollandaise du XVIIe siècle. Paris: Points, 2009, p. 12.
[5] Idem, 2009, p. 110.
[6] Idem, 2009, p. 109.
[7] NASCIMENTO, Beatriz. Rocio. In: RATTZ, Alex; GOMES, Bethânia (eds.). Todas (as) distâncias: poemas, aforismos e ensaios de Beatriz Nascimento. Salvador: Editora Ogum’s Toques Negros, 2015, p. 32.
[8] hooks, bell. Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood. New York: Henry Hold & Co., 1996, p. 7-8.