Nancy Selvin
spaces between Irene Nelson
Tempo, acrylic mixed media, 48” x 48”, 2019 (Detail on front cover)
Nancy Selvin
spaces between Irene Nelson
reading between the lines I. A vessel is formed from a lump of clay with care—but it is the empty space within the vessel that makes it useful. -Lao Tzu When Irene Nelson first saw Nancy Selvin’s work, she realized that there was a strong visual kinship between Selvin’s massive vases and the curving forms emerging in her own abstract paintings. e two women, near contemporaries, have followed different career paths. For Nelson, painting developed out of a successful design practice from which she retired a decade ago. In contrast, Selvin has made and shown her signature arrangements of ceramic containers since the mid-‘70s, teaching and lecturing widely. But Nelson saw other common ground, as she studied Selvin’s work. Both use a kind of linear punctuation: Selvin’s flamboyant handles emerging from vases and process-related crevices and cracks, and Nelson’s drawn charcoal lines and painted black marks. Finally, both artists create rich, painterly surfaces strategically, balancing areas of visible brushwork with bare clay or solid color. The idea of an exhibition that featured both of their work intrigued Nelson. She contacted Selvin, and the rest, as they say, is history. For the pieces included in “Spaces Between,” both women have started with a set of givens: philosophical and material parameters established in their daily practices. Nelson begins with a predetermined palette. She acknowledges that viewers may have their own
Sonata, acrylic mixed media, 48” x 48”, 2019
relationships with the vivid oranges, reds and pinks that dominate this group of paintings, and welcomes all the possibilities that such associations may represent. For her, however, these warm hues evoke memories of India, where she traveled in 2018, fulfilling a lifelong wish.
Big Pink, 33”h x 20”w x 20” deep, 2015
The vessel form has been a place of departure throughout Selvin’s career. The idea that a shape is associated with doing something, containing something, has always been important to her. Form, she states, is content—but by removing actual usability, the language of function becomes a metaphor. Selvin is best known for domestically-scaled groupings of containers, most often displayed on shelves or in small cabinet-like settings. e almost life-sized scale of the ‘trophy’ vases in this show came out of a desire to make singular, freestanding monumental works. Yet, as she points out, making them still requires dealing with inner space, with containment, in a way that much sculpture does not. Vessels, Selvin’s forms remind us, are often described with the same language used for bodies: shoulders, lips, bellies.
For Nelson, too, a more expansive scale has shaped the direction of her current work. On each four by four foot canvas, she begins with a quickly-sketched set of charcoal marks (some still visible in the finished paintings), over which she begins to paint. Calligraphic lines and vigorously brushed marks of black paint serve as a kind of counterpoint or anchor to reds and pinks. A few strategically-deployed areas of green, whether soft or bright, balance and complement. Still, what distinguishes these compositions most from her prior work might be the way in which she uses white. Overpainting extensively—in part, as she has put it, to reduce the amount of
‘chatter’ or information—she deliberately cultivates a kind of empty, quiet space in each picture’s composition. Selvin’s vessels assert the importance of imperfection: of visible flaws that leave the work open, literally and figuratively, for the viewer to enter through holes and cracks that are testimony to process. Rather than hiding the way she makes a form, she reveals its genesis. We see the seams where one section of clay coil meets another in the top part of Rough Ochre 2015, or the straightforward—if unorthodox—way in which she has screwed on the handles of Big Pink 2015. A strategy born of necessity (the arm’s dramatic shapes make conventional attachment methods impossible), this unusual method of joining one clay element to another reflects her innovative approach to the cycle of making.
II. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. -Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 1929 Selvin’s piece Trophy for Sonia (Gechtoff ) 2017 celebrates the little-known Abstract Expressionist painter, once described as the most prominent woman working in California in the ‘50s and only recently brought back into the public eye through a number of exhibitions and publications. By creating this monumental vase in the artist’s honor, Selvin reflects on the way history has largely been written to reflect the
Detail, Lines and Sketches
achievements of those who have control over the narrative, pushing everyone else (women, people of color) out to the margins. Her massive ‘Trophy’ contributes, both literally and metaphorically, to the visibility of Gechtoff and her female contemporaries, making a return to obscurity that much more unlikely. Women, Selvin’s series of trophies suggest, will never again be “all but absent.” Nelson’s recently-completed studio expansion suggests that Woolf ’s assertion about the importance of dedicated space for artistic practice remains as true now as it was nearly a century ago. Vastly expanded, Nelson’s new ‘room’ has made it possible for her to work on three large paintings at once, moving back and forth and allowing a dialogue to take place—both between herself and the paintings, and between the works themselves. e development of color and line can be more organic, and has resulted in a series that suggests a collective composition, an idea hinted at in the titles Nelson has given to this group of works, all completed in 2019. All describe musical forms or terms—some classical (Arpeggio, Sonata), some drawn from jazz (Backbeat, Syncopation). Studying the open spaces in these works is a reminder that in all music, the room around the notes is the fabric that holds them together. As Julian Barnes once suggested, a net is a collection of holes tied together with string. —Maria Porges
Red Improv, acrylic mixed media, 48” x 48”, 2019
Honoring Grace, 34”h x 22”w x 20”deep, 2019 Courtesy of Patricia Sweetow Gallery
Backbeat, acrylic mixed media, 48” x 48”, 2019
Syncopation, acrylic mixed media, 48” x 48”, 2019
Lines and Sketches, 30”h x 24”w x 18” deep, 2019 Courtesy of Patricia Sweetow Gallery
Trophy for Sonia (Getchoff), 29”h x 20”w x 16”deep, 2017 Courtesy of Patricia Sweetow Gallery
Arpeggio, acrylic mixed media, 48” x 48”, 2019
Rough Ochre, 31”h x 28”w x 17” deep, 2015 Courtesy of Patricia Sweetow Gallery
“With my work I attempt to maintain the ease of the unfinished.” Nancy Selvin, Berkeley CA 2019
“My work is about the dance between action and the stillness of each moment.” Irene Nelson, Piedmont CA 2019
Photo Credit: Nancy Selvin's work, Kim Harrington, David Schmitz Irene Nelson's work, Laura Hill
Copyright 2019 Nancy Selvin and Irene Nelson. All rights reserved.
Gearbox Gallery, Oakland, California October 17-November 16, 2019