Color Play: Primacy of Color in Contemporary Art

COLOR PLAY

PRIMACY OF COLOR IN CONTEMPORARY ART

COLOR PLAY

THE PRIMACY OF COLOR IN CONTEMPORARY ART JANUARY 30 - FEBRUARY 22. 2015

LewAllenGalleries Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | info@lewallengalleries.com cover: John Fincher, Earthly Delight, 2014, oil on linen, 58” x 40”

Dan Christensen, 5 or 6 P.M., 1994, acrylic on canvas, 47” x 99”

Color Play PRIMACY OF COLOR IN CONTEMPORARY ART Examples of works contained in the show include painting by four well-known New York School Color Abstractionists: Emily Mason, Ronnie Landfield, Dan Christensen, and Robert Natkin. Each came to prominence during the height of the style’s importance as the successor to Abstract Expressionism, the more kinetic and ego-driven predecessor of this lyrical, color-focused direction within the realm of nonrepresentational painting.

The history of color use in art is as ancient as the history of art itself. As a visual means to elicit wide ranges of emotional response, color has always been at the core of artists’ work.

Whether used to energize, relax, surprise or delight, color enlivens the experience of the world and consequently the engagement with the visual arts. As the great 19th century critic John Ruskin wrote in his canonical Stone of Venice, “The purest and most thoughtful minds are the ones which love color the most.”

With work included in numerous major museums and private collections around the world, each of these artists is recognized as occupying a significant place in American art history. Each presents a different approach to the use of color as a pictorial means for expressing inner feeling and energetic gentility that engages the edge of mystery. All four employ color relationships to engender transformational

LewAllen Galleries, long regarded as a gallery whose artistic program privileges outstanding painting and the marvels of color, presents Color Play, an exhibition designed to illustrate the various uses and rich possibilities of color within various genres of painting by artists whose work the gallery shows, both abstract and representational.

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The show includes vivacious canvases of Dirk de Bruycker who works both in Santa Fe and Nicaragua. His work engenders a sense of mystery and intrigue coming from blending penumbras of dense hue, drawn pattern, and luminous translucent wash stained onto canvas. These elements combine to form graceful blooms of powerful emotional expression and painterly fluorescence.

power to extend the boundaries of self into unknown territory.

In different but equally wondrous ways, these artists create engaging works of beauty that arrest attention even as they evoke meditative equanimity.

Color Field painters like those included in this exhibition presented a quiet faith in radiant color and their marriage to the canvas. Color Field appropriated the intensity of Abstract Expressionism but refined it with a desire and fluency for a visual vocabulary rooted in purity of color and devoid of the ego-centric modalities of unconstrained gesture. Color Field paintings had the potential of a transcendental expansion of the mind that the Abstract Expressionists intended, but with a more lyrical eye toward meditation and exploration of self.

The power of color as a mode of representational expression is engaged in the work included in Color Play by noted American Modernist painter, Bernard Chaet. His still-life and seascape paintings are known for their enormous chromatic vitality and painterly conviction in which there is manifest an obvious delight in the energy and tactility of the paint itself. Chaet’s work joins other examples, contained in the show, of how color is used by realist painters to clarify and accentuate image and narrative.

John Fincher’s unique application of intense, contrasting colors, into playful crépons-like flower blossoms confer an exuberance of spirit. Imbued with a profound concern for structural and poetic dynamics, the energy remains vivacious and peppy.

The interaction of color strategies with light is illustrated in the work of West Coast painter Jimi Gleason. His light and space-filled minimalist canvases employ hues and textures of subtle variation to meld and shift as ambient light and the viewer’s perspective changes. The synergistic possibilities between artistic media and the specific properties of light are demonstrated in the luminous glass sculpture of John Kiley. Working in Seattle, Kiley examines in his sculpture the relationship between interior and exterior form, incorporating both color and transparency to blur gradients between hues.

Kiley blows and cuts glass spheres and dyes segments to poise color variation adjacently and to achieve a dynamic spectrum of tinged light that responds to shifts in observational position.

Color Play also includes works by Jeanette Pasin Sloan, Sammy Peters, Tracy Rocca, Forrest Moses, Scott Bennett, Connie Connally, Henry Jackson, and Steve Klein.

Emily Mason, Flagship, 2009, oil on canvas, 54” x 48”

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Scott Bennett, Corn Field, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 24.5” x 46”

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Jeanette Pasin Sloan, Teacup, 2014, oil on linen, 26” x 26”

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Ronnie Landfield, Iridiris, 1999, acrylic on canvas, 18.75” x 14.25”

John Kiley, Emerald & Steel Overlap, 2012, blown, carved & polished glass, 10” x 8.5” x 10”

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Robert Natkin, Ella Fitzgerald, 1991, acrylic on canvas, 65” x 48”

Dirk de Bruycker, Crimson, 2013, asphalt, gesso, cobalt drier & oil on canvas, 30” x 24”

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Brad Ellis, Dash #1, 2012, encaustic & collage on canvas, 48” x 48”

Bernard Chaet, Long Red Table, 1975, oil on canvas, 22” x 44”

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Steve Klein, Exploration 169, 2012, kiln-formed and blown glass, 18.5” x 18.25” x 6.5”

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Henry Jackson, Untitled #1088, 2010, oil & cold wax on canvas over panel, 40.25” x 42”

Sammy Peters, Variation: specific; contribution, 2012, oil & mixed media on canvas, 40� x 40�

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Ed Mieczkowski, Collage 1, paint on panel, 16� x 14�

Forrest Moses, Mountain Water, 2008, oil on canvas, 50” x 60”

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Dirk de Bruycker, Fall, 2014, asphalt, gesso, cobalt drier & oil on canvas, 30” x 24”

Jeanette Pasin Sloan, Complement, oil on linen, 32.5” x 46”

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John Kiley, Strait, 2011, blown, carved & polished glass, 12” x 12” x 12”

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Tracy Rocca, Dive Study I, 2014, walnut oils & alkyd on polyester over panel, 20” x 20”

Ronnie Landfield, Season of Changes, 1985, acrylic on canvas, 59.75” x 37.5”

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Emily Mason, An Emerald to be Told, 1998, oil on canvas, 56” x 54”

Bernard Chaet, The Orchard, 1961, oil on canvas, 48” x 40”

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Connie Connally, Citron Graphite, 2010, oil on canvas, 66” x 44”

Robert Natkin, The Red One, 2003, acrylic on canvas, 40” x 60”

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Dirk de Bruycker, Spring, 2014, asphalt, gesso, cobalt drier & oil on canvas, 30” x 24”

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Robert Natkin, Puerto Rico, 2004, acrylic on canvas, 40.5” x 60”

Tracy Rocca, Dive Stuy III, 2014, walnut oils & alkyd on polyester over panel, 20” x 20”

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Jimi Gleason, Shadow Flyer, 2006, acrylic on canvas, 53” x 48”

John Kiley, Divided Sphere, 2012, blown, carved & polished glass, 10” x 10.5” x 10”

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Emily Mason, Surpassing Ermine, 1985-86, oil on canvas, 60” x 52”

Connie Connnally, Octobre Folie, 2013, oil on canvas, 44” x 60”

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Tracy Rocca, Dive Study IV, 2014, walnut oils & alkyd on polyester over panel, 20” x 20”

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Emily Mason, Shore Line, 2013, oil on canvas, 20” x 26”

Dirk de Bruycker, Summer, 2014, asphalt, gesso, cobalt drier & oil on canvas, 30” x 24”

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John Fincher, Grand Bottanica, 2014, oil on linen, 48” x 24”

Scott Bennett, Silver Back, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 59” x 46”

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Tracy Rocca, Dive Study II, 2014, walnut oils & alkyd on polyester over panel, 20” x 20”

Ani Yellowhammer, Emanations, Series II, #7, oil on canvas on panel, 50” x 40”

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Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | info@lewallengalleries.com Š 2014 LewAllen Contemporary LLC