The Wedding Willow

The Wedding Willow has a centre, but you have to find it. Somewhere just above the middle of the canvas, the black strokes thicken into a dense knot, and inside the knot there is a small pale cleft, a split of bare ground like an opening in bark. From there everything moves outward. Short strokes fan out in every direction, and long ones fall from the centre to the bottom edge, hanging straight like willow fronds or the folds of a long veil. The tree in the title is not depicted, but its gesture is: a crown that bursts and a curtain that drops.

The rest of the canvas is weather. Strokes curve in loose arcs around the burst, and the brush is often nearly dry, so that the black breaks up into grey and lets the canvas weave show through. That dryness is what gives the field its speed. Wet paint would have pooled; this paint skids.

Faces appear in it the way they appear in clouds, but more insistently. Near the top, just right of centre, a face with half-closed eyes and a long nose seems to drift sideways through the strokes. At the far left there is a single large eye, drawn with a dark iris and a heavy lid and lashes, staring out of a swirl. Elsewhere there are suggestions of profiles that could as easily be accidents. The painting never confirms how many are there, which is part of what makes it hard to stop looking.

In the lower left corner is a small signature: a monogram, with the figures 12/28 written beside it. It is the only steady mark on the surface.

A wedding is a ceremony of fixing something in place, a vow said in front of witnesses. Here the witnesses are half-formed and the ceremony is a storm. One possible reading is that the picture is about how unstable that moment really is, joy and fear and family history all moving at once around a small pale point that holds. Another is that the willow, a tree of mourning as often as of celebration, keeps both meanings in play. The painting holds the knot at its centre and lets the rest blow.