Page 72 - Marlie Burton Roche : Landscape and Bread

AN ABSENCE OF FLOWERS

y artworks entitled UNA AUSCENCIA DE FLORES are dedicated
to the people of El Salvador who have sacrificed their lives in the

Mstruggle for peace with justice. Cólera Diagonal (Diagonal Rage) is
a painting from that series. The Salvadorans working for the revolution, in the
mass movement as well as in the insurgency, knew the risks they were taking on a

daily basis. But, as exemplified by the words of Herbert Ernesto Anaya, Director
of El Salvador’s Non-Governmental Human Rights Commission CDHES, in an
interview just a few days before he was assassinated: “The agony of not working

for justice is stronger than the certain possibility of my death; this latter is but one
instance, the other is one’s whole life.” Anaya was the seventh executive member
of CDHES to be killed by government forces while working for human rights in

El Salvador. He was 33 years old when he was gunned down on the street in front
of his home. His two young children were with him when he was killed.

At this time I was involved in a program of reconstruction for a community in an
area northeast of San Salvador, El Salvador. We organized a ‘special relationship’
between the City of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and the Municipality of Cinquera

in the province of Cabañas, El Salvador. The municipality consisted of a group of
towns and villages that had been devastated during the years of war. We funded
several projects, including the construction of latrines, a workshop, and the

rebuilding of their school. Their school had been bombed. We also organized (and
drove) a caravan of four trucks loaded with educational and medical supplies for

the people there.

My art became an integral part of my work in Central America. An ARTBANK
review of the painting Cólera Diagonal, published in New York, February 1993,

states, “Marlie Burton-Roche thinks big and paints big, the scale of her abstract
paintings paralleling the larger social issues that she is very much concerned

with. Although Ms. Burton-Roche uses figurative imagery, bent by a decided
biomorphic vocabulary of the surrealistic tradition, her paintings read on first
encounter as abstract paintings that dwarf the viewer with amorphous forms and
sensually stained areas of color. The drama at first unfolds as a visual one, then

as figurative images are discerned, a narrative one becomes recognizable. The
narrative is a psychic one and the viewer is invited to construct personal meaning.

But Burton-Roche brings us back to universals, that fittingly enough, given the
competing abstract format, defy literal interpretation.”

68 MARLIE BURTON-ROCHE LANDSCAPE & BREAD