Diane Best & Gwynn Murrill Stillness in Motion paintings & sculpture
June 28 - July 18, 2018
Diane Best & Gwynn Murrill Stillness in Motion paintings & sculpture
June 28 - July 18, 2018
Contents /08
Stillness in Motion essay by Lindsay Preston Zappas
/11
Diane Best
/30
Gwynn Murrill
Stillness in Motion “I ended up painting landscapes,” Diane Best confessed, chuckling. “I never thought I would end up doing that—but I couldn’t help it…I had to do it.” Similarly, Gwynn Murrill confided in a 2007 interview that if she had told her 20-something self that she would be carving animal sculptures, she never would have believed it. Yet, Best and Murrill have each been steadfastly dedicated to their natural subject matters for decades. Both describe their work with a straightforward simplicity, as if so enraptured in nature itself, that there is no choice but to depict it. Shown together for the first time in Stillness in Motion, the two artists share an affinity for exposing the multifaceted conditions of the natural world and the haunting stillness that exists in the wild. Gwynn Murrill has been sculpting animals while living in the Santa Monica mountains since the ‘70s. Her knack for anatomy is uncanny; the complex hind legs of a fox or the flipped up ear of a dog in motion are rendered effortlessly. This sense of movement—the aloof posture of a dog lounging on his back, legs akimbo—belies the solid materials from which the sculptures are carved and forged. Bronze, steel, marble, or wood, her animals are paused in animation as if ready to take flight or resume a leisurely afternoon wash. While Murrill captures the particular energy and anatomy of each animal she renders, she also rounds out their edges, approximates curves. In her 2015 bronze sculpture, Abu Cat, a feline’s limbs are plump and extruded, exaggerated and soft, as if made of rubber. The cat’s tail is reduced to an elongated teardrop. In this way, Murrill’s simplicity of form contrasts with the responsive vitality embedded in each figure that she carves, conjuring the simple essence of each creature. Indeed, there is a certain amount of energy transference at play; Murrill has described the process as a kind of meditation to calm her own nervous energy. As the vibration of the carving
tails drape down tall rectangular plinths and birds are elevated skyward by natural looking armatures, as if the artist longs to return them to their airborne state. In Hawk on a Branch (2017), a raptor perches atop a tall, wandering branch, surveying an unseen landscape. While this type of armature feels natural to her bird subjects, in Wolf Totem (2018), a coyote, exiled to the top of a tall, blunt monolith, is dwarfed. With no way to escape, the small creature’s gaze toward a distant landscape takes on tones of despair and isolation. Likewise, when seen individually, isolated from their pack, Murrill’s creatures can feel adrift and solitary, though when grouped together, a strong group dynamic emerges. It seems her foxes or
tools enters her body, her mental energy is absorbed by the sculptures.
deer congregate cheerily. This is Murrill’s cunning proficiency: to animate cold and minimal materials, embedding them with complex emotions.
Murrill often uses pedestals in her work, as if her animals demand something to push up against, or a minimal mass to respond to. Tiger
It should be noted, too, that embedding these types of feelings in the harsh
6
mediums of stone and steel is the antithesis of the aims of other minimalist artists. Contrast, for example, a Tony Smith cube that is oppressively silent and devoid of much feeling. Murrill, instead, subverts the genre of minimalism by breathing life into it, allowing these severe materials to be expressive. Minimalist forms—cubes and plinths—in Murrill’s hands become props that support moments of life, playfulness, and nuanced expression. This raw energy is also what draws Diane Best to nature; she has lived in the desert for decades, dedicating herself to understanding its vastness. After a career in commercial animation, Best moved to Joshua Tree and has never looked back. For her, the desert is a wellspring of inspiration, constantly surprising and continually offering up the unknown. “Everybody knows how hot it is,” Best explains. “But it’s also extremely cold…extremely windy, extremely dry…” Best’s output of drawings, paintings, photographs, and videos, in many ways is a reflection of her earnest effort to understand the raw untamed world in which she lives. She can get caught up in the wonder of a twisting Joshua tree limb, or the looming stillness of a large bolder, as if the task of understanding a larger field of vision is unfathomable. In fact, her early works in the desert were zoomed-in, singular depictions of segments of the landscape before her: a tree, a rock, a cloud. Her black, mixed media paintings of Joshua trees are obsessive and prolific. Like a meditation, the artist returns to this familiar subject matter, year after year, rendering its spiky branches with quick splatters made with the flick of her wrist. The tree is always central in the composition, with a loose landscape unrolling faintly around it, like a photograph whose depth of field blurs into a cloudy mist at its edges. Yet, over Best’s time in the desert, her field of view has begun to expand in scale and scope, zooming out to depict the immensity of the landscapes around her. The triptych, Bristol Dry Lake, Sandstorm (2008), takes on monumental scale (at 174 inches wide), immersing the viewer in the scene. Clouds of dust spring upwards like specters over the barren landscape, evoking a ghostly absence. Best’s works, like Murrill’s, press pause on an ever-moving natural environment. Best acts as an observational conduit, faithfully documenting the world around her. Yet, the newest works, made this year, use the format of large-scale landscape to bleed into abstraction. In Untitled Black Painting and Untitled White Painting (both 2018), Best allows each landscape to be subsumed by a singular color. The monumental is conveyed here not through the depiction of the natural, but the masking of it. The viewer is left to wonder what magnificent mountains lay beneath the brushy layer of clouds, or amidst a jet-black foreground. In these new works, Best allows herself deviations from a photo-realistic depiction of nature, instead conceding to thick brush strokes. The Untitled paintings, in their dramatic color fields, and expressive brushwork, deviate from Best’s observational style, by allowing for more emotive connotations to emerge. For both artists, the natural world is dual a source of comfort and fear—a space that is constantly in flux. The unknown aspects of the natural world are perhaps those that beckon each artist to continue mining their subjects, searching to unearth unseen nuances. In short, each artist is adept at coaxing out the essential nature of the creature or landscape, aptly depicting the multiplicity that exists in all things. Shown together, Stillness in Motion portrays the rich complexity of the natural world, as a source of life and inspiration, but also its potential isolation, and despair. What remains is at once a celebration of life, and an acknowledgement of existential dread. We find ourselves somewhere within these dualities, searching for a moment of stillness in a chaotic world.
- Lindsay Preston Zappas
7
Diane Best “I am interested in preser ving or recording a single incredible moment of converging light and landscape while enjoying the space, beauty and quietness of the place.”
Telluride Whiteout, 2018 acrylic on canvas 36” x 72”
9
Bristol Dry Lake, Sandstorm, 2007 acrylic on canvas 22” x 174”
11
Stovepipe Wells Dunes 4, Death Valley, 2015 acrylic on canvas 24” x 72”
13
Racetrack, Death Valley, 2012 acrylic on canvas 24” x 72”
15
Mosaic Canyon Sky, 2018 acrylic on canvas 50” x 40”
17
Glacier, Antarctica, 2018 acrylic on canvas 32” x 72”
19
Iceberg, Andcord Bay, Antarctica, 2018 acrylic on canvas 32” x 72”
21
Trout Lake, 2018 acrylic on canvas 24” x 48”
Valley Storm, Telluride, 2018 acrylic on canvas 24” x 48”
25
J Tree #1, J Tree #4, J Tree #6, J Tree #9, 2017 acrylic and pencil on paper 50” x 38”
27
Gwynn Murrill “My interest lies in using my chosen subject as a means to create a form that is simultaneously abstract and figurative.”
Hawk on a Branch VI, 2017 (detail) bronze 148” x 24”
29
Coyote II, 2018 bronze 29” x 39” x 11”
31
Wolf II 5/8, 2018 (detail) bronze 63.5” x 6.5” x 1.75”
33
Deer 2 Maquette 5/9, 2009 bronze 11.5” x 10” x 2.5”
Deer 3 Maquette, 2006 bronze 15” x 14.5” x 6”
35
Abu Cat 3/9, 2015 bronze 17.5” x 34” x 11”
37
Tropical Bird, 2005 bronze 25” x 9” x 3.75”
39
Wolf on Short Base, 2018 bronze 14.5” x 8” x 3”
41
Coyote VIII Maquette, 8/9, 2005 bronze 6” x 9” x 2”
43
W W W .T E L L U R I D E G A L L E R Y. C O M