Body Language by Marcia Morse

What is a body, and where does it reside? What does it know, and how does it speak of that knowing? In the last half-century, the body has been subject to multiple inflections that, by turns, personalize and depersonalize, sully and sanitize, wound and heal. Ever more intense in its sensuality, the body has also been absorbed into the ethers of a virtual world. So much spoken about, can the body speak for itself?

For Artist Lynda Hess, the concept of body language is more than an evocative metaphor. It is an astute paradigm for closing the rift between mind and body, giving the powers of memory and belief, knowledge and speech a home in the very locus–somatic and experiential–that gave rise to them. Hess’ paintings capture and concertize the more ephemeral and mobile aspects of body language. The artist understands that bodies don’t stay put–either in physical space or in the categories into which we might seek to assign and confine them.

Much of the strength and conviction of Hess’ work is grounded in her willingness to risk working from the inside, from her own corporeal experience, her own cycles of life changes. Her work is not autobiographical in a conventional sense. Rather, she invites us to consider more broadly based and deeply rooted human narratives for which the body is the vehicle of expression.

Hess began with dual interests in art and writing. These fields provided parallel and complementary means of expression and Hess was interested in linking them to a possible career. Hess ultimately came to painting along a slow, exploratory path that began in adolescence, broke for several years of varied life experience, and was reestablished with a new foundation during her extended undergraduate studies in art. This included a semester abroad in 1978 in London, where Hess became a devoted museum-goer, cultivating the appreciative and critical eye that also served to feed her own work. Hess came to Hawaii in the early 1980s, and entered the University of Hawaii at Manoa on O’ahu, where she completed her BA in Pacific Art History in 1986. A post-graduate course in methods and materials of painting would serve in particular to rekindle her interest and provide a new array of technical skills.

At this same time, Hess met and began a relationship with the artist Masami Teraoka. Encouraged by Teraoka, Hess began to take her work as a painter more seriously, working with a clear sense of the end result, the final image, and increasingly confident that she had the tools she needed to arrive there. The relationship has also been founded on a free exchange of critical commentary that has been integral to the evolution of both artist’s work–grounded in their studios at home in Waimanalo, Hawaii, but fed also by periods of international travel and multicultural immersion that provide new ideas and perspectives, as well as continuing exposure to diverse worlds of art. In the evolution of this enduring and symbiotic connection, Hess has served on occasion as model and muse for Teraoka, while rising to the challenge of independently cultivating her own work, her own vision.

Reinvested in painting, and possessed of greater capacity and experience, Hess now works in a more open-ended way, allowing the development of her ideas to be flexible, changeable, more attuned to the sensory and emotive aspects of the experience of painting itself. Each painting may begin with a focused ideal or an inspirational image or visual stimulus, but proceeds without a pre-determined sense of its final form. In Hess’ paintings, we can discern several interwoven strands of interpretation in relation to the central paradigm of body language from which she draws her core ideas.

First, the body may be perceived as a surface for inscription, written upon with projections that arise from viewers’ perspectives. The mechanism of inscription places the body in a passive and receptive position. In this context, we might consider the iconographic implications of art-historical  convention, with particular reference to the representation of the nude female body. Those implications are both sustained and subject to critical analysis in more contemporary encodings of, for example, the gendered body and the anatomical/medical body. Hess’ frame of reference includes an astute sense of art history, evident in the use of the reclining nude in Pocket Rocket and the Path to Heaven, and the standing figure, in martyred constraint, in Saints and the Sainted.

Second, if we pursue the structural aspects of language, what constitutes a vocabulary and a syntax within the context of the body’s capacity for communication? Are there gestures and postures, expressions and movements that may be generally understood? In this context, we may consider how representations of the body serve to mediate between private and public spheres, between personal and universal. On occasion, Hess may serve as her own model (most notably in her recent work Living Water), use references pertinent to the study of life drawing, or employ representations of non-western disciplines such as yogic practice, as in the enigmatic and meditative Temple, a work unique in the way in which it isolates the singular body. In contrast, the panoramic Body Conscious/Back to the Garden is laden with multiple, sometimes androgynous bodies and fragments, from the pointing hand of God at the right, to a figure emerging from the earth at left, each of which must be separately considered as part of an extended process of interpretation.