Calculated Color on Cape Cod

.

Merged image of Calculated Color at the Higgins Gallery in the Tilden Art Center of Cape Cod Community College

When artist Jane Lincoln asked me to participate in Calculated Color, the exhibition she was curating on Cape Cod, I was interested. Color, as you know, is one of the things that moves me--personally as a painter, and visually as an art viewer. When she told me the roster, I said yes. The concept plus the artists make for a strong exhibition. While the group is geographically diverse--the Bay Area and the Bay State, plus me with one foot in Manhattan and the other in Massachusetts--conceptually it is cohesive. All of us are focused on color, geometry, abstraction and a more-or-less reductive sensibility.

"Color in its many contradictory, bold, and subtle forms is the focal point of the exhibition," writes Lincoln. "Calculated Color invites you to observe what may not be visible at first glance and to embrace how color defies description."

With that invitation, let me take you around the gallery. We start at the entrance, where my work is on the left. You can't see everything from the entry point, but the sequential pictures will take you into the smaller rooms and alcoves so that you'll get to see a bit of everyone's work.

From the Entry: Ten paintings from my Uttar series, specifically those selected for their swatch-like combinations, each 12 x 12 inches, encaustic on panel. This is intuited color, its calculations springing from retinal response rather than theoretical planning
.

Jane Lincoln, four woodblock prints: Lincoln's grids explore hue, value, temperature and chroma. Each print is based on one selected color and then expanded in 36 one-inch squares. Within each print there is a pair of identical color squares. The two are positioned side by side, horizontally or vertically. The placement of the pair varies so as to invite the viewer to closely examine the differences between colors. Color interaction can make the pair surprisingly challenging to identify.

The white-line print was developed in nearby Provincetown in the early 1900s. Jane describes it on her website.
.

Nancy Simonds, gouache-on-paper paintings: Their Scully-esque blocks are juicy, bursting with beauty and visual energy as the hues rub up against one another as well as nestle into a colored field. The paint surface, which you can't see well from the image above, is sponged off selectively to reveal a visual texture that varies in density and intensity

At the end of the long, narrow gallery is a smaller exhibition space where the work of Chris Ashley and Rose Olson is installed. We'll enter there in a moment. Continuing clockwise around the main gallery are alcoves that contain the work of Susanne Ulrich, Nancy White and Mel Prest. We'll get to those, too.

From left, above: Nancy Simonds, Rose Olson, Suzanne Ulrich

Above, a peek into the smaller back gallery and Chris Ashley's digital prints. Chris creates images on the computer using HTML code, one a day. Each image is built up line by line--"not the result of software tricks," he says. The image is meant to be viewed on a monitor as pixels of light, but digital printing renders a crisp and luminous image which, in relation to the one on the screen, becomes an actual object. The installation reflects the calendar grid of the month in which the work was made

Below, the full installation

Rose Olson shares the same gallery room with Chris Ashley. Rose paints veils of color on a maple or birch ply surface using interference pigments, so the painting changes both as the light changes or as you move in relation to the painting. The wood grain, barely visible beneath the surface, challenges the strict horizontality of the image, yet the mood of the work is dialog--perhaps even contemplation--not confrontation.

Back in the main gallery, continuing clockwise around, we come to an alcove containing the collages of Suzanne Ulrich. Made of torn, cut and pasted papers, the work is both rational and romantic

Continuing clockwise in the next alcove is the sculpture of Nancy White. Nancy calls her small painted aluminum constructions "a personal conversation with the viewer," but there is also the conversation between the object and its shadow, which is an integral, and mutable, element of the work. The sculptures were difficult to photographs, so I have included an image from her website, below

Coming back around, the work of Mel Prest is contained both within an alcove and on the wall facing you as you enter the gallery. Working with a spectrum of achromatic hues, Mel uses small-scale elements in repeated geometric formation to focus your attention on the richness of the grays. The edges of the work are painted with fine parallel lines, so there's an optical energy that powers the work. A combination of natural light on one side and incandescent on the other creates a sense of disorientation--all the better to challenge your viewing

If you find yourself on Cape Cod, the exhibition is up through October 2. Be sure to pick up the small catalog, which is a gorgeous little color object on its own.

.

A Gift From A Friend

The first week of 2008, I received the e-mail below from Chris Ashley, a good friend from Oakland (and my writing partner in the now-languishing-because-we’re-both-too-busy blog, Two Artists Talking) to announce an online solo show, I Made This For You, at the Marjorie Wood Gallery. Here’s his e-mail. Pay special attention to paragraph four:

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Each day during December 2007 I made an HTML drawing for my online exhibition I Made This For You at Marjorie Wood Gallery. The final drawing was uploaded on December 31, and all thirty one drawings are on view until January 31, 2008.

The exhibition was reviewed by Timothy Buckwalter for San Francisco public television station KQED's Arts & Culture blog: Art Review : Chris Ashley: I Made This For You.

I'd like to extend special thanks to artist and MWG proprietor Chris Komater for this opportunity, and for taking on daily upload duty.

Special offer: in keeping with the spirit of I Made This For You, I'd like to offer a free 11 x 8.5 inch inkjet print to the first ten people on this mailing list who reply to me with the date of the print they'd like and a mailing address. . . . .

.

I didn't read more than that. I got right on line and sent Chris an e-mail, hoping to make it into the lucky 10.

I am a huge fan of these drawings. (I curated his work into a summer show last year for the Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta--similar name but different venue from the one that hosted the online show). If you follow Chris’s work, you know that he makes one HTML drawing a day, which he posts on his website. These geometric images are made on computer using code, and originally they were meant to be seen only on a monitor. Eventually they migrated to the wall via inkjet prints. As a painter, I love the tangible as well as the visual, so I was delighted with the way pixels of light became spritzes of ink on paper. When Chris posted his offer, I knew exactly which one I wanted: December 27th.

I lucked out!

My print arrived on February 1. The paper he printed it on is velvety and thick, so the work looks very much like a gouache painting. Two weeks after it arrived, I had a mat cut at the framer. Since then it has taken me some weeks to actually frame the piece, but here it is—in tangible form—in my loft:

A home for Chris Ashley's print; a print for my home. December 27th, 2007, inkjet print

Thanks, Chris, for your splendid gift!

.

Awash in Color: More Friends of Mr. Biv

Click here for "No Chromophobia."

So a friend e-mailed me the other day to ask, "Who is this Mr. Biv?" If anyone is similarly confounded, think back to third grade. It's the mnemonic used to help you remember the spectrum. Remember?

Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Indigo Violet

Since we're discussing Roy (and in the interest of equal representaton, it could just as easily have been Rona, you know), I'd like to show the work of a few more of his friends. Most of these folks I know, a few others I don't. I'm motivated strictly by the chromatic intelligence of their work. For some of these artists, color is not necessarily the dominant element, it's the geometry. But we don't have to take sides, as color and composition are perfect complements.

.

Julie Karabenick, Composition 71, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 30 inches

I curated Julie's work into Luxe, Calme et Volupte last year at the Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta. I'm impressed with the intellectual rigor and physical demands of her work. On such a pristine surface, there's no going back and painting over. Decisions made are decisions maintained. This is a breakthrough painting, because there's now a figure-ground relationship in the work, and the color has a chance to interact with the viewer's eye from various points in a visually dimensional space. Julie is the editor of Geoform. You can see her work there, or on her own website, Karabenick-Art.

.

Marcia Hafif,TGGT 12: (Red-Gold, Violet), 22 x 22", oil on Canvas, 2006. Image from the Marcia Hafif website

.

I've seen her work in person here and there over the years--Larry Becker in Philadelphia, the now-closed Baumgartner Gallery in Chelsea, and a few months ago at a gallery showing at Pulse in New York. Though relatively small--modestly proportioned easel size work--each painting has a huge presence. Her newer work is divided vertically, each section containing a different hue. Considering what she said about painting in 1990, her more current work is positively image laden:

"Having taken into consideration years ago the consensus decision of the art world that painting was no longer acceptable as an art form, it seemed necessary to move my awareness to a second level. Accepting the idea that one could no longer paint in good faith, I thought it would be possible to paint on another level, one providing a certain distance, in order to look at the paint rather than at its subject. It would be possible to paint "as if" one were painting, using the materials and techniques of painting, but without referring to a separate subject. This thinking led me to monochrome. Thus I do not paint with the intention of making a painting as such, but I work from the outside of painting using traditional methods and materials to discover a new image. " (Why Paint: Marcia Hafif from the catalog Marcia Hafif: Red Paintings, Verlag der Galerie Conrads, Neuss 1990 ).

In this relatively newer work, the vertical created by the abutting of two colors creates an image--a "painting as such"--but it does so on Hafif's terms.

.

Chris Ashley, Cluny, 2008, HTML image

Chris works in a unique way, creating "drawings" directly on his computer screen using HTML code. They could easily be called "paintings," but I'm using his preferred word. The work is created using, I think, numbers that translate into blocks of color, so it's keystrokes rather than brush strokes that make the work. Lately, the work has made the leap off the screen and into a printed image, which makes me call them "paintings," but I suppose technically that would make them prints. In this new incarnation the saturated color on creamy paper has the look and visual feel of super-saturated gouache on watercolor paper. Visit his website, Look See, to see much more.

BTW, Chris wrote about my work in his blog a couple of years ago. Then I curated him into my Luxe, Calme et Volupte show. (You see how my blog world has very few degrees of separation; but then, that's true for the entire art world, where three degrees will probably take you back to the Cave Painters). In the fall we're going to be in a show called "Calculated Color," curated by the painter Jane Lincoln, at the Higgins Gallery on Cape Cod. Oh, and we're both part of the Geoform.project, along with Lyda Ray, below. Full disclaimer, yo.

.

John Tallman, Color Stack, 2007, polyurethane resin, 1o x 10 inch diameter

Tallman is a painter and sculptor for whom materiality is essential. Indeed, you can't disentangle the painter from the sculptor any more than you can disentangle the color from the form. Visit his website and his Color Chunks blog to see what I mean. I don't know him, but when I found his blog I felt an instant affinity for what he's doing.

.

Bill Gusky, Crush, 2007, enamel on urethane, 21 x 19 inches

I didn't know Bill until we we showed together in the Blogger Show, organized by John Morris, in the East Village last fall. That's when I saw this painting and purchased it for my collection. (More no degrees.) I've still not actually met him, so I don't actually know him, but I feel as if I do, partly because I wake up to his painting every morning and partly because I read his blog, Artblog Comments, regularly. Anyway, I like the way Bill combines color and form and material. See more at Bill Gusky.com

.

Lynda Ray, Float Copper, encaustic on panel, 14 x 18 inches

I was introduced to Lynda's work when I was looking at images for my book, the The Art of Encaustic Painting. Her slides vibrated right out of the envelope. Like John Tallman and Bill Gusky, above, Lynda mixes color, form (via sensuously slathered paint) and materiality--and she maintains a geometric sensibility as well. See more on Lynda Ray Art.com

I suppose "Friends of Mr. Biv" will become a recurring feature on this blog. Stay tuned.