TO CREATE the “Worship Paintings” of this exhibition, Tanya Ling takes her line for a walk. These large, single-colour, abstract canvases contrast ultramarine blue with white by means of sinuous fluid flowing lines of oil paint. In some images, there is dense covering of the canvas, and, in others, a framing of the blank spaces.
Ling uses an intuitive process in one creative session. She completes the painting when she feels that it has left her, and, as a result, thinks that these images are given to her and that, as she paints, she is rediscovering lines that have already been laid or that already exist. She compares her experience when beginning these line paintings to that of turning on a tap as the lines flow like water.
This intuitive process has been described by Andrew Renton as “faith in motion”. Ling says that it is “almost an out-of-body experience”, as “five hours can go by, or three hours, or seven, and it feels like only a moment has passed.” Then, when “the work seems to say, hey, leave me alone,” the tap is turned off, and the painting concludes.
While abstract, her lines have the fluid feel of wispy hair or tendrils of foliage or blood coursing through veins around a heart. Abstract art, as Sean Scully has often emphasised, can have figurative inspirations or, as with those equations that I have suggested, may refer to figurative elements without leaving abstraction behind. These paintings also walk that line. As a result, they share some common ground with the work of an abstractionist such as Cy Twombly, who integrated cultural, historical, and poetic references with abstract forms and a scrawled line.
In a recent interview, Ling spoke of her line paintings as “pointing somewhere else, somewhere outwards”, while her densely layered multi-coloured paintings “seem to be more introverted, about their own universe”. Renton again is perceptive, noting that “Ling’s practice evokes the infinite: a seemingly inexhaustible capacity to generate variation within strict formal limits. Each painting arrives like a spoken prayer — not composed, but received. A gesture toward eternity, enacted one line at a time again, again and again.” Ling’s blue lines on the white expanse of the canvas are like maps of pathways in eternity: never-ending routes of exploration, which are endlessly repeated, but are never the same.
Ling has had a varied and successful career, which has oscillated between art and fashion design, giving another figurative reference for her sinuous line: that of ribbons or the folds of material. She worked as a designer in the Parisian fashion industry before returning to London in the early 1990s to set up a gallery, Bipasha Ghosh, with her husband, William Ling.
After an exhibition of her drawings, presented in the studio of Gavin Turk in 1996, and a commission from British Vogue, she became known as one of the world’s leading fashion illustrators. During that period, she also designed and produced an eponymous ready-to-wear collection. An exhibition, “Lines”, in 2014, marked her departure from fashion.
She has contrasted her work as a commercial artist, for whom editing and discarding featured strongly, with the freedom to include and not discard which she now enjoys. She views all of life as worship (essentially, in the way described by St Paul in Romans 12.1). As a result, she “understands painting not as an object of veneration, but as an act of worship — a channelling of something beyond the self, offered through repetition and restraint”. Therefore, “these paintings are not images of worship, but the result of it.”
“Tanya Ling: Worship Paintings” is at The Mayor Gallery, 9 Bury St, London SW1, until 6 September. Phone 020 7734 3558. www.mayorgallery.com