Ryan Lee Gallery is pleased to announce When the waters break, an exhibition of five paintings and eleven works on paper by May Stevens (b. 1924 Quincy, MA - d. 2019 Santa Fe, NM), made between 1994 and 2009. These works derive from Stevens’s final body of work and most have not been exhibited in New York for nearly twenty years; some will be exhibited for the first time ever. Rooted in her enduring connection to rivers and oceans, these works depict bodies of water — both real and imagined — that were important to Stevens throughout her life. Stevens often added words to the surface of the water, drawing inspiration from women’s writings including passages from Virginia Woolf and Julia Kristeva.

The title of this exhibition comes from a 2006 lecture Stevens gave at Rutgers University that focused on the creative process, relating the struggle of an artist as she works and the sudden realization that the artwork is complete. Stevens explained, “You realize that this has been a dialogue between you and the living organism that is a work of art. It is beyond you, outside of you. You are its handmaiden, its doula.”

Stevens used a wide array of colors in these works, depicting the swirling and rippling movement of water in blues, greens, grays, and purples and adding text in eye-catching gold and silver to approximate the reflection of light on water. Ruminating on the introspective power of words, these works combine the impact of water and writing as a way to harness and process her grief following the death of her husband, artist Rudolf Baranik, and son, Steven Baranik, as well as celebrating the beauty and fullness of life. These paintings extend to the edges of their unstretched canvas, which Stevens felt gave the work an expansive openness to envelop the viewer into the painting.

The title of This is not landscape (2004) gives us perhaps the clearest instruction on how to interpret this body of work, clarifying that they are not merely what they appear to be on the surface. Inspired by Wallace Stevens’s poem The irish cliffs of moher, which examines the relationship between nature and one’s family history, the watery drips of this painting evoke a mystical, abstract space.

In Her boats (1996), the viewer is placed below the water, gazing up at the golden sunlight from the murky, mysterious depths. Women in boats float on the surface. Stevens said, “I became annoyed with the fact that if you ever wanted to represent a human, you have to use a man. I didn’t see why that had to be the case. So these are women, but they are not specifically to be thought of as women because they are humans, people.”

Among the last prints Stevens created, Into the night (2009) depicts a solitary boat drifting on the water, where atmospheric color washes blur the boundary between water and sky. Deep greens and rich blues evoke a nighttime scene that, while mysterious, is more promising than ominous. Stevens’s characteristic metallic script shimmers on the water’s surface surrounding the boat, accompanying it into the night.

Some of the text in these works is legible but much of it is asemic writing that cannot be deciphered, adding to the sense of mystery evoked by these paintings and works on paper. Stevens said, “These words create color, texture, movement, an articulation of the surface of the canvas, making it breathe, giving it life, light, a changing inflection; the possibility of seeing the work differently at different moments; of surprise, of finding new things in it, of more than meets the first encounter, of suggesting depths of feeling and connection. The canvas hangs like tapestry, like cloth; the color flows like water, its paths apparent. Water is life.”