When it is the cosmos you are dealing with, what is art history? 

When it is the cosmos you are dealing with, what is art history? 

by Hall W. Rockefeller

Though Vivian Springford’s diaphanous color washes are often misidentified with the dominant aesthetics of the American Color Field movement of the 1960s, these works are at once more expansive and more traditional than their temporal counterparts, as they address the heavens as their subject.

Abstract Expressionism, into which Springford’s work is often grouped, had much more human concerns, however. Its innovation lay in the limits of the body, the canvas an “arena” in which it could perform, wielding a paintbrush. But Springford’s artistic performance has a higher ambition: to transcend her body, rather than to embrace the thrust of its movement. “Painting is my attempt to identify with the universal whole,” she revealed in a press release for a 1979 exhibition of her work [1], admitting to an ideal perhaps more in line with the Romantics than with the action painters. 

“Painting is my attempt to identify with the universal whole. I want to find my own small plot or pattern of energy that will express the inner me in terms of rhythmic movement and color.”

-Vivian Springford

These words of cosmic connection are a philosophical rhyme with the words of Carl Sagan, whose books stood on her library’s shelves: “We are made of star stuff,” the astronomer wrote, “We are a way for the universe to know itself.”

To our earth-bound selves, the stars are no more than abstractions, randomness on which we can heap our legends and our myths, familiar shapes––a lion, a bear, a mythical hunter––we can only make out if we squint. But for Vivian Springford, they were not a vehicle for meaning, but her muse and subject, something for her to identify with, the way a portrait painter might her sitter. 

Springford understood material as essential to the task she set out for herself and eschewed the trend of her time to paint canvases on a scale bigger than the body, an especially pointed choice given the magnitude of her chosen subject. Instead she used Archers paper, which she knew to absorb color in ways canvas could not. Her dedication to paper was a shrewd decision to play to the substrate’s strengths and reveals the artist’s keen attention to material. After all, if you are to paint the heavens, you cannot be sentimental about arbitrary earthly values.

This material was key to Springford’s Expansionist series, which references the ever expanding universe. We can almost see this movement as Springford’s colors seem to seep outward, drawn out by the paper’s absorbent pulp. For these works, she turned her eye to images she would have found in her copies of Burnham’s Celestial Handbook [3], which visually illustrated the “universe beyond the solar system.” Though Springford left many of these works untitled–– perhaps to preserve some of their mystery––what initially look like abstractions to the untrained eye can be identifiable as specific formations within the known universe.

In one, the distinctive shape of the Horsehead Nebula [4]––whose hooked top looks like a knight in a game of chess––floats in a space of darker washes. Though we can identify Springford’s source material, the layered depths of these shadows, rendered in purple and blue, let us know we are far from knowing the secrets they hide.

The Expansionist series reveals Springford’s remarkable dexterity with her chosen medium, further evidence of her separation from the more laissez-faire Surrealist inflected techniques of Abstract Expressionism. The unusual shape of the Horsehead Nebula, for example, would have required a knowledge of how to manipulate––quickly and precisely––the unruliness of her liquid material. This skill is demonstrated to an even higher degree in an untitled work based on images of the Antenna Nebula. In it her layered washes seem to miraculously stand proud of each other, giving us a sense of the magnificent space the real nebula occupies, its gossamer layers sliding past each other in deep space.

Springford was not beholden to a single mode, however, but learned to play the amorphousness of her stains with the precision of a definitive mark. Instead of painting a line directly on the canvas, Springford created hard edges by cutting around her stains and reassembling them in new works. In the series “Star Stuff” (after the Sagan quotation), she pushed her medium further by creating assemblage works, which united several disparate nebulae and mounted them on to board. [5]

Though this series remains more or less in two dimensions, these works approach the sculptural, not only in the tactility of their layering, but in the way their edges do not abide by pictorial conventions. [6] Again, she is able to evoke the vastness of the cosmos by hinting at the unseen galaxies obscured by the visible.

Though they evoke the almost impossibly vast universe, these works seem to return to Springford’s initial occupation with understanding herself within the context of the cosmos. Sometimes, they can feel almost like abstracted portraits of human life. After all, we are all just star stuff––reconstitutions of the universe, recycled and reformed by forces beyond our control.