Author Lauren Willig
Response to Morgan Everhart's Down on All Occasions
One of the elements I find so impressive about Morgan Everhart’s work is her ability to conjure, not only a mood, but a sense of time and place—and a story beneath it.
Down on All Occasions takes me right to Britain between the World Wars. There’s something very art deco about the bold colors and striking shapes. But it’s more than that. The contrast between the exuberance expressed through flowers and the lurking darkness of the background conveys to me that that same combination of wild exultation on the surface and deep trepidation lying beneath that marked the generation that came of age in the Great War, who partied their way through the Roaring Twenties with the fear of death and desolation underlying their revels.
The faint lines running both ways across the painting provide the impression of window panes, a world seen through glass. We’re standing there with the flowers on the proper side of the panes, but just through the window (a window cracked?), something, or someone, is moving. Has the viewer paused to just twitch the flowers into place and caught sight of that shadow beyond? Is that a hand moving a black velvet curtain? Or simply a trick of the light, a branch of the flowers?
Looking into the painting, I, the viewer, and now the protagonist, can’t be sure. I’m peering past the flowers, trying to figure out what lies in the darkness beyond. I can practically feel the slinky folds of a 1920’s evening gown, cut low in the back, and short curls escaping out of feathered band. I can hear the music in the background, music to go with cocktails served in wide glasses, the sounds of a party somewhere—and I know that at any moment, the viewer, the character, will go back to the party, turn her back on those flowers, paste on a too bright smile, and return to the light and the heat and the dancing.
But that darkness—that question—in the background remains….
Am I the only one who wants to know what’s back there, and how the story ends?