Meadow I
George Tooker
GEORGE TOOKER, 1960. EGG TEMPERA ON GESSO PANEL.
Tooker told stories of anxiety. He became, and remains, known for paintings of claustrophobic urbanity, cubicled domestic life, and labyrinthine liminal spaces populated by the seemingly trapped city dweller. His images are often surreal, always disquieting, and filled with a profoundly modern sense of dread. Save, that is, for Meadow I. Painted in the aftermath of his mother’s death when the painter was racked with grief and loneliness, he moved his visual language out of the metropolitan and into the pastoral. The work speaks directly to Renaissance religious works, not only in the parallel he draws between himself and his mother to Joseph and Mary weeping at the crucifixion of Christ but also in the very medium itself. Using a 17th century technique of egg tempera, he painstakingly applied fast drying homemade paint over months to create a scene of misery and calm. Painting became, in this instance, a process of grieving for Tooker - a respite from his pain that existed not only in his self but in the paintings he normally produced were replaced with a meditation of rural beauty.