Pippi

Pippi Explores Place
Ehren E. Clark

Seasoned artist Anne Watson, Utah native who has lived in New York City for the past 18 years as a professional artist and has recently moved back to her home, has expressed her anxiety that “I cannot make sense of place very well, or time, or sense or nonsense”. In the upcoming exhibit Pippi Explores Place at the Art Access Gallery, the artist uses various media to initiate a search for truth, her truth, a confrontation with reality, and trying to make sense of that “place” she has been searching for- her “place”, her sense of identity, her oneness with the world. This accomplishment is achieved through a very unlikely source: through the eyes of the fondly remembered mischievous, tenacious and lovable childhood icon Pippi Longstocking.
Watson’s canvases are angelic, whimsical, surprising, naive, clever, aggressive, and never predictable. Painted by the hands of an expert who has left traditional painting behind and abandoned herself to forms of pure meaning, Watson’s work in the exhibit is a series of paintings linked together by common elements. She explains “I don’t do work which stands alone...it is a narrative, a story, a series.”
But it is Pippi Longstocking, childhood misfit, who is the star of the show, and she leads the narrative -as Virgil leads Dante through Purgatory and Paradise. Watson, who remembers and cherishes memories of Pippi from her childhood, owns the books and shares them with her daughter, has an interesting relationship with the icon- “muse”, “misfit”, “her voice”. “She speaks to me and helps me understand things- takes me through the ‘landscape’...she is the voice.”
Watson grew up in the west coast, left for college and subsequently received her MA in fine art at NYU. She has lived in New York City for 18 years as a successful artist, and in returning to her native Utah, has come full circle. She and her daughter have lived now in Utah for 3 years and her integrity as an artist has led her to this exhibition- “trying to understand place”. As she has returned to America’s heartland, she has sought truth in places of thought, places of landscape, places of environment, and places of self.
Using Pippi, Watson is able to explore her “landscape”. Pippi wanders capriciously through the hinterlands of the Western USA (which Watson rediscovers from her childhood), in a way that is honest, unprejudiced and unbounded, allowing for a free flow of thought. A motif which runs through the cycle is a flow words, randomly placed, arbitrarily positioned, seemingly autonomous and express innermost thoughts and feelings of Pippi her discovery of the “landscape”. These words are free form -the voice of Pippi: childish ramblings- but prophetic.
These flows of thought are most predominate of war- a theme pervasive in the cycle - that reality which forms an integral part of “place” so relevant to the “landscape” in which we all exist. When Watson was asked how Pippi feels about the war, she quickly responded that “she hates it! She hates the war, she hates violence, she hates stupidity.” When asked of her own feelings on the war, she stated; “I don’t have answers, but that is truth- facing uncertainty about what we are doing.... and the harm being done”. Watson uses Pippi’s honesty to discover “place” through the eyes of a child, which are susceptible and sensitive to injustice and the subtle inhumanities we are so inured to.
Watson is “grappling with place” and hopes that others will embark on a similar search. What Watson gives inevitably is honesty, and “the more honest the work, the more universal it is”. Watson wonders, when the public see the show, if “she (Pippi) will see you and talk to you, or maybe some will just walk by and yell, or some will simply say -‘dumb puppet’.”
Maybe after seeing these works some may go back to their attics, dust off their books of Pippi Longstocking and reminisce on that crazy rambunctious youth we all read and relive those memories, thought, ideals, and hold on a bit more to that which so often seems lost.