from california with love
terzian galleries
625 Main Street
Park City, Utah 84060
info@terziangalleries.com
december 8 - 20 Mark Bowles Melissa Chandon Boyd Gavin Greg Kondos Pat Mahony
from california with love While New York is often associated as the pinnacle of American art movements, California’s rich plein air traditions and modernist painting approaches have been crucial to our country’s legacy in the art world. The San Francisco Bay Area was a major center for Abstract Expressionism in the 1960s, for example, and continued to develop the style in new and powerful ways with the sequential rise of the Bay Area Figurative Movement. Preceding even this era were significant early pioneers such as Maynard Dixon and the Society of Six, who brought an impressionistic and radical perspective to western landscape painting. California’s rugged mountains, lush valleys and barren deserts continue to inspire the region’s artists who carry the legacy and continue the conversation initiated by their mentors and famous founders. This winter in Park City, five such artists from the Sacramento Valley region will come together for the first time in a group exhibition that represents the past, present and future of the greater Bay Area painting traditions. From California with Love opens on December 8th at Terzian Galleries featuring Mark Bowles, Melissa Chandon, Boyd Gavin, Greg Kondos, and Pat Mahony.
“The idea was to select a group of artists and put together an exhibition that would relate to the rich California history of painting,” explains Chandon, one of the featured artists who collaborated with gallery owner Karen Terzian as guest curator for the exhibition. The chosen artists have painted together for many years and share prominent mentors and influences from their regional lineage. Consequently, their work is stylistically reminiscent of Bay Area Figurative Artists and strongly affected by early avant-garde innovators such as Maynard Dixon. “Taken as a whole, I believe it’s that mix of abstraction and representation that relates our work to the Bay Area Figurative Movement,” says Gavin, whose own paintings are anchored in the rhythmic geometry of the landscape and painterly improvisation. As its name suggests, the Bay Area Figurative Movement is largely credited with the abandonment of abstraction in favor of figurative painting. In actuality, what emerged from this movement is a style that embraced abstraction as an underlying presence in expressive renderings of the figure as well as the landscape.
“We look to Elmer Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn and David Park who made inroads with their bravura handling of paint and startling approach to the landscape,” says Chandon of the group’s Bay Area influences. While the artists share an overall modernist vision and mutual respect for California’s artistic trailblazers, each featured painter maintains an individualized artistic identity. Kondos, Gavin and Mahony offer tangible, fluid visions of the landscape while Chandon and Bowles utilize hardedged, reductive painting techniques that emphasize minimalist perspectives with saturated color palettes. “We’re all established representational painters with similar tastes and curiosities,” says Gavin. “Stylistically, we’re quite varied. I do believe our work represents the best of landscape painting in the Sacramento Valley region.” The five artists have collectively received countless awards; their work has been exhibited in private and public collections worldwide and collected by a number of museums. The most widely recognized painter and “Godfather” of the group however is Kondos, who at 94-years old is one of California’s most legendary living artists. Kondos has been a mentor to the other exhibiting painters and a professor
for thirty years at the Sacramento City College, whose art gallery bears his name. He is the recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the International Biennial in Florence and has been elected into the National Academy of Art in New York. Taking cues from the past, leading the present and influencing the future, this group of artists is an integral part of California’s iconic artistic history. Terzian Galleries and Melissa Chandon have organized this exhibition with the hope that it will bring to light the significance of the deeply rooted and widespread tradition of western landscape painting. Terzian Galleries, established by Karen Terzian in 2004, prides itself in representing highly regarded artists from across the region. Located in the heart of Historic Old Town Park City, the gallery showcases emerging and established artists who work in a variety of mediums in the areas of painting and sculpture.
- kelly skeen
Mark Bowles
My paintings are about the California Central Valley. As a resident of Sacramento and La Quinta (Northern California and Southeast California desert respectively), I travel back and forth several times a year looking at the California Central Valley, which has been a big part of my work for a long time. The ways I interpret or express it changes but there is usually a core of landscape. The foreground is a suggestion of space divided by irrigational fields -- crops, farms, etc. -- and is not intended to be a depiction or replication. The paintings also have a suggestion of water that ties to the many lakes of California and the Central Valley, which has a great water system (California Aqueduct) moving from Northern California to Southern California. In essence, there is a lot of flat land and a backdrop of the Sierra Range running down the state -- a beautiful, unique landscape always worth exploring. What immediately approaches the viewer and what makes my work unique is the palette. I use color for temperature. As a landscape painter, I like to let the viewer receive a temperate read first by color. This group of paintings about the Sacramento Central Valley represents the heat of summer in varying degrees. It is not abnormal to be 110 degrees in mid-August in the Central Valley; red, deep red or orange is used to suggest this.
Heat of the Day, 2014 24x30, acrylic on canvas
Southwest Ridge, 2012 20x16, acrylic on canvas
Desert Sunset #2, 2014 24x24, acrylic on canvas
End of the Day, 2015 40x40, acrylic on canvas
Melissa Chandon
I consider myself to be an abstract realist painter. My work could be best described as “Americana meets Pop Art.” I have found my own voice through a process of analysis and reduction. I look to a number of 20th Century painters, drawing inspiration from their imagery – the directness of David Hockney’s work of the 70’s, the romance of Edward Hopper, Wayne Thiebaud’s delight with color and surface, and the intriguing abstraction of Richard Deibenkorn. For this exhibition, I looked to Maynard Dixon and his inspirational, daringly minimal and modernist approach to the western landscape. Born as a child of the 50’s, road trips were my parents’ passion. They saw the American landscape as a means of educating their five children – exposing us to the humanity of highways, small towns, truck stops, and KOA Kampgrounds all across the US. To this day, I find roadside culture fascinating – motels, amusements, neon signs – and I feel it is important to document this era of U.S. history before it disappears. I’ve gathered my vision of Americana from across the country – from my early years in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to working on the family ranch in the Sacramento Valley, and onto urban life in hope that sharing my view of the American landscape may help to bring about a conscious effort to preserve the shared heritage of our recent past.
Route 66 Tee Pee Motel 40x40, acrylic on canvas
Boat for Alex 36x36, acrylic on canvas
Golden Clouds with Bluff 24x48, acrylic on canvas
Boyd Gavin
My work focuses primarily on still lifes and observations of suburban life, with occasional forays into figure painting. The paintings are worked up through direct study and bits of stored memory. All of it is contingent upon feeling. I want to draw the viewer close, in an almost conversational way. It’s not necessarily a common likeness that I seek, but the deeper, abstract complexity that lies behind appearances. As a painter, I take my cues from the discordant effects that emerge accidentally in the process of making. These shards help me to locate the space that I’m constructing. This strikes me as a very organic way of fleshing something out on canvas, and it also paves the way for expression to develop more intrinsically in the work. I compose with feeling as much as I do with color or line. In other words, the point is to work through feeling rather than towards it. As such, my work tends to be more about states of reflection than any specific narrative. My aim is to embody the spirit or ultimate reality of my chosen subject. For this exhibition, my landscapes draw on farm scenes and the Sierras for inspiration. The farm subjects reflect the geometric topography of the Sacramento Valley and relate closely to Maynard Dixon’s stolid, spare canvases. The mountain subjects are brusque and have a more relaxed, all-over patterning to them. I tend to focus on things rather than views. As a consequence, the Sierra landscapes are anchored in fragments of observed detail.
Floating Logs 31x26.5, oil on canvas
Melting Snow 62x42, oil on canvas
Trail Detail 24x18, oil on canvas
Parked Hoppers 18x24, oil on canvas
Colusa County Farm 24x36, oil on canvas
Greg Kondos
Gregory Kondos is one of the West’s foremost landscape artists. For over 40 years he has traveled the world painting landscapes as inspiring as Yosemite Valley, the French countryside and the islands of Greece. His signature works of the Sacramento Delta have become modern classics that boldly capture its sweeping beauty. Greg’s early work was influenced by abstract expressionists such as Willem de Kooning and his work in this style won prices at the Winter Invitational at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Later, he met Wayne Thiebaud who became a close friend and inspired the “painterly realism” that continues to distinguish Greg’s body of work. Highly collected and widely shown, his style continues to evolve as new landscapes are captured in his palette of simple yet vibrant colors. His lifelong achievements place him in the great traditions of American landscape painters that include Albert Bierstadt, Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe. His paintings take light from the Impressionists, form and structure from Cezanne, and energy and painterly power from the abstract expressionists. Wayne Thiebaud once described Greg’s paintings as “eloquently caressed landscapes of sweeping distances that transport us…” – from gregkondos.org
Bridal Veil Falls, 2010 11x14, oil on linen
Pacific Palasades, 2002 9x12, oil on canvas
Pat Mahony
My landscapes are a compilation of visual and emotional memories of the vistas I have seen. I do not so much paint the image in question, but rather render its essence on the canvas as if it were a feeling or recollection that has been developed through multiple exposures and observations. In this particular series, all of the paintings originated from memories of places where I have visited or lived. The rock pieces in particular are from memories of geologic formations I observed in Southern Utah. I have always been interested in the transitional characteristics of illumination. The contrasts of light, shadow and color on the rock were so inspiring as they were in a constant state of evolution. The farmland piece is an ingrained memory from years of living in the California Central Valley. My ultimate goal is to create a lush, abstracted view of the landscape that creates a perfect balance of light and dark.
White Rock 2, 2014 30x30, oil on linen
White Rock, 2014 12x12, oil on canvas
Farmland, 2014 10x10, oil on linen
625 Main Street Park City, Utah 84060 terziangalleries.com