Josephine Halvorson. As I Went Walking

About

As I Went Walking includes a series of life-sized oil paintings made in the western Massachusetts town where Halvorson lives and votes. The exhibition’s title is borrowed from the first line of a missing stanza from Woody Guthrie’s anthem, This Land Is Your Land, rediscovered in the 1990s.

As I went walking I saw a sign there / And on the sign it said "No Trespassing." / But on the other side it didn't say nothing, / That side was made for you and me.

The lyrics echo Halvorson’s artistic practice and subject matter. Wandering the woods near her home, she encounters signs of neighbors, dead and alive. Naturalized marks of ownership animate and declare themselves. Wherever one’s eyes land, there are human claims and natural reclamations.

Halvorson makes paintings from direct observation, en plein air. She finds herself working at the limits of private and public property. The feet of the easel, the table and the artist trespass and straddle invisible boundaries. A day’s work leaves its physical imprint in the tamped-down ground. But the painting itself, in its portability and self-contained rectangle, leaves the site of its making without a trace. Once removed from its original context, the painting metaphorically extends the boundary line. 

Working within arm’s length of her subject over the course of daylight hours, Halvorson’s position foregrounds attention, experience and locale. For the last decade she has employed the mediumistic quality of paint to connect with the world, rendering visible that which is felt but not necessarily seen: time, emotion, history. Touching the surfaces of her subjects through the thick, short strokes of her brush, she gets up-close and personal. This intimacy is conveyed in a face-to-face encounter with the paintings themselves.

For this exhibition, Halvorson is also presenting works on paper made with gouache and silkscreened elements. Alluding to other visual and informational formats, such as maps, calendars, and newspapers, these works include a measure and printer’s marks as keys for calibrating the unquantifiable. Standardized units are drawn by hand, reminding us of the abstraction in every act of description. Through perceiving a patch of ground and translating it to scale, Halvorson registers what lies before us.