The Eternal Moment: Mary Pachikara’s Watercolors

Essay by Angela M. Reinoehl,  Professor, Department of Art and Design, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL,  62901

A young woman with her hair in a loose bun wrapped in a sari gazes at an elaborate lantern. Another looks lovingly into the eyes of a baby cradled in her arms. Yet another stands alone, gazing from a balcony, with her back to the viewer. The women Mary Pachikara paints are caught in quiet, reflective moments. Her subjects are friends and family sometimes holding children, other times by themselves, but always serenely gazing.
The figures are naturalistic, but the backgrounds often give way to the fluidity of the medium of watercolor or sepia ink or a quiet swath of white space. There is a tension between control and chance – order and chaos – that creates a sense of balance in the final work. Pachikara clearly revels in allowing the paint to find it’s own way. Yet, there can be a crispness to a sleeve or a nose in profile. In the figurative works, the palette is often limited to variations on one or two colors. This choice furthers her desire to convey a meditative mood in her artworks.
This sense of capturing a moment is not limited to Pachikara’s figurative works. Her landscapes, inspired by her evening walks in her hometown of Murphysboro, Illinois, stand at the threshold of abstraction. There is always a horizon line or a tree to anchor the scene to the natural world. But, unlike her figures, the landscapes tilt the scales toward the nonrepresentational. The crispness gives way to amorphous clouds of beautiful color that just barely suggests leaves on a tree or wild flowers. A smudge of an electric orange horizon separates what appears to be a swirling expansive sky and sliver of earth.
Pachikara’s interest in the figure and landscape is inspired by Impressionism – particularly Mary Cassatt. She takes up some of the same themes, like the ‘mother and child’ works, for example. But, Pachikara chooses a different medium – ink and watercolor – and the overall mood is more intense and reflective. Much of Cassatt’s work is a painted snapshot of daily bourgeois life in 19th century Paris. Pachikara’s work does invoke the everyday, but also the timeless and sacred. This may be conveyed by the quiet singular colors that refuse to distract the viewer from the form.  The distant, faraway gazes also counter Cassatt’s quick glances away that seem to be more motivated by social conventions than introspective thought. Pachikara conveys what is best described as the essence of a given scene or model through the push-pull of naturalistic representation and abstraction.
Mary Pachikara is as immersed in her media as she is in her subjects - whether it is wild grasses on a fall afternoon or a young woman lost in a book she is reading. For her, art is the “ability to capture things as I want others to see them.” Her work is an expressive, emotional response to what she encounters as well as a collaboration with the media that results in a sense of meditative presence for both the viewer and the artist.