Jake Berthot / The Ridge, Night Haze and the Moon / 2008 / Oil on linen / 35 1/8 x 45 1/8 inches / Betty Cuningham Gallery

I hadn’t intended to walk into this show when I went down to Chelsea last week, but I’m glad I did, and I’ve been back a couple of times since. This is a great show. Unfortunately, the web images do a grave injustice to the paintings. These are paintings that you have to sit with and look at for a long time in an area where there is natural changing light. As the light changes the paintings change. This is oil painting at its richest. Each is a quiet contemplative, typically dark, space with reference to landscape. Landscape entered into Berthot’s painting following his move from from New York City to upstate New York in 1996. These new works continue to have the central deep meditative space of his earlier work, in the 1970’s a gently touched rectangle, in the 1980’s a bar or hovering oval, and now a quietly emerging tree or glimpse of light.

Entering from the street on a bright sunny day, at first, it was hard to see anything. Impenetrable dark rectangles on the wall, flat geometrical black masses. As my eyes adjusted the paintings slowly began to reveal themselves. In the dim lighting of the first room ochres and venetian reds began to glow, prussian blues flowing and vibrating, the solid masses of chromium oxide green standing still against all this movement – trees against the wind. I was mesmerized as my eyes strained to see more. To make out shapes and forms, a tree, a lake, a horizon, a forest, a scene. Dark moody lighting. Dusk. Ominous. Tumultuous nature. Contemporary echoes of the Hudson River School.

Jake Berthot at Betty Cuningham Gallery, 541 West 25th Street through 5/10

 Read John Yau’s review of the show in the Brooklyn Rail

Stuart Davis (American, 1894–1964) / The Mellow Pad / 1945–51 / Oil on canvas / 26 1/4 x 42 1/8 in. (66.7 x 107 cm) / Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of Edith and Milton Lowenthal, 1992.11.6 / www.brooklynmuseum.org

This morning I was reading Hans Hofmann’s essay, ”The Color Problem in Pure Painting-Its Creative Origin,” which I can read over and over and get something new every time I read it. But, today it got me to thinking about Stuart Davis, a pioneer of American Modernism and abstract painting, who wrote extensively about abstraction, but whose writings are not easy to come by. Davis identified what termed the “color-space” problem. While I’ve been unable to study his writings, metmuseum.org writes the following:

Davis postulated that color could be used to indicate spatial relationships through its positioning next to other colors. Some colors advance, while others recede, which suggests the illusion of a three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. [Read more...]

Now this theory sounds a lot like what Hofmann discusses, and while it is not important who was first, it is helpful to see that two important 20th abstract painters were thinking deeply about color and we know their ideas have had a significant impact on contemporary painters over the last 50 years. In fact, it was Stuart Davis’ paintings, more so than Picasso or Matisse, that first got me excited about the possibilities of abstraction. While I was in art school studying illustration, heavily involved in anatomy and figure drawing, I went to the Brooklyn Museum and was completely transfixed by Davis’ The Mellow Pad. I stood in front staring at the piece for about 20 or 30 min and it was all I could think about for days – the movement, the colors, the energy, the shapes and forms dancing and swinging across the surface were a revelation to me at the time.

In terms of abstract paintings that are built on flat shapes/planes of color, Davis’ work offers and interesting contrast with the work of Stanley Whitney’s or Hans Hofmann’s. While all three artists use flat planes of color to create spacial tensions and rhythmatic movements across the surface, in the examples of both Hofmann and Whitney we see color formed into geometrical shapes and planes, while Davis’ shapes are more organic (not biomorphic like Miro). The expression in each is totally different and unique.

Bill Jensen / LUOHAN (PERSONA) / 2005-2006 / Oil on linen / 28 x 23 inches / © Bill Jensen. Courtesy ofthe artist and Cheim & Read Gallery

I read two reviews of the paintings of Bill Jensen, a painter living here in NYC and an instructor at the New York Studio School, over the past month – Bill Jensen Notes from the Loggia by John Yau in the Brooklyn Rail and Art in Review; Bill Jensen By Martha Schwendener in the NYTimes. InJohn Yau’s review in the Brooklyn Rail of Bill Jensen‘s recent painting exhibit at Danese Gallery here in New York City. He discusses the centrality of drawing to Jensen’s practice and his debt to both Chinese calligraphy and Abstract Expressionism, both important sources of inspiration for my own work. Yau also goes on to state that Jensen is, “…exploring a territory that is connected to very divergent aspects of Abstract Expressionism (Ad Reinhardt, James Brooks and Jackson Pollock)—lightless light, the interplay between order and disorder, and gesture as form. In all three areas of this territory, which abut and overlap, larger chaotic forces emerge as the shaping feature.” For Schwendener this means that, “Bill Jensen has never settled down with one style,” a trait usually frustrating to galleryists and historians.

A frequent topic of conversation in the studio is what we refer to as the two schools of abstract painting – on the one side there are the gestural, expressionist painters and on the other side are the geometrical, color-field, lyrical abstactionists, and minimalists. This leads to a lot of useless conversations about left brain vs. right brain, emotion vs. intellect, expression vs. conceptual, etc., that really have nothing to do with painting, and devolve into figuring out which camp you belong to and sticking to it. However, I am more interested in mining the territory between the two poles and Jensen’s paintings are a great example of the many possibilities available. In his work we see both gestural marks, bimorphic or automatistic shapes, as well as brilliant colors and transparencies, shifting planes and moving spacial relationships. Jensen will lay in a gesture in a rich pure color opaque color and then come back and run a transparent right over top. Or lay in a thick opaque colorful gesture and then while the paint is still wet scrape it to create a film with transparent and opaque areas.

Finally, Schwendener indicates that while Jensen paints in oil he makes his own paint, allowing him to regulate its viscosity. I think this is a particularly important point for painters and something I have tried to bring into my own practice (I’ll talk more about this in the future). The ubiquity of artist supplies has lead to a plethora of easily available tube paints and painting mediums, the quality of which varies from brand to brand. While this frees up the artist from having to spend copious amounts of time and energy grinding pigments, cooking mediums, and making paint, it brings a certain uniformity and homogeneity to color and surface of paintings. Making ones one paint not only allows the artist to control the viscosity but to control pigment content, pigment mixtures, fillers, etc., as well as the drying time, finish and whole lot of other qualities that come into play in the process of painting. Jensen’s work shows us how important mastering the craft of painting really enables us to explore the limitless complexities of painting.