Time Out New York recommends “CAGE NAM JUNE: A Multimedia Friendship”

 

Time Out New York, October 19-25, 2006 Issue 577, p. 104

……………………………………………………………………………

ZONE: Chelsea Center for the Arts

……………………………………………………………………………

601 W 26thSt between Eleventh and Twelfth Aves (212-255-2177). Tue-Sat 11am-6pm.

*Cage Nam June: A Multimedia Friendship”

An exhibition of videos, installations, music, photographs and more celebrating the 35-year association between Nam June Paik and John Cage.

Through Nov 3.

 

 

*Recommended

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The Village Voice reviews ” Molly Davies”

The Village Voice

 

Molly Davies

By R.C. Baker

 

Since the ’60s, filmmaker Davies has been collaborating with such luminaries of sound and movement as John Cage and Merce Cunningham. As in the novels of Virginia Woolf, her multichannel videos coalesce a larger narrative from the closely examined particles of moments in time. Additionally, sculptures that enclose rings of fluorescent light within apple baskets and vegetable crates add earthy grit to these illuminating installations.

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The Villager interviews Molly Davies

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"Redefining the ordinary", January 18 -24, 2006, Vol. 75 No. 35

Molly Davies

Villager photo by Jefferson Siegel

Film and video artist Molly Davies

 

The Villager

Redefining the ordinary

By Nicole Davis

 

At first glance, the group of crates, piled haphazardly in a corner of this Chelsea gallery, looks nothing like the rest of the work on view at Molly Davies’ first New York retrospective of her forty-year career. She is, after all, a film and video artist, so stumbling upon these Chinese produce crates, which house illuminated scenes from parks in Paris and Berlin, and emit, from some speaker somewhere, a chorus of tree frogs, seems like a curatorial mistake. In fact, the installation, titled “Dislocation,” may be the most symbolic of Davies’s signature style — changing the meaning of the most ordinary things through some savvy repackaging.

 

Five video installations over three decades show the many sides of this meditative video artist, who says she often films first, and decides on the structure later. One of the least visually arresting works in the show, “David Tudor’s Ocean,” has perhaps the best back-story. Its inspiration sprang from a conversation with Nam Jun Paik, commonly called the godfather of video art. He told Davies she should make a documentary of David Tudor, a friend and avant garde musician for whom John Cage created piano and electronic compositions.

 

“But I don’t do documentaries,” Davies explained.

 

“Just shoot his hands,” Paik told her.

So she did. She filmed hours and hours of footage of Tudor setting up and creating the music for a Merce Cunningham dance performance that Tudor, then the company’s music director, scored with a half-finished composition by Cage called “Ocean.”

 

“I shot it in 1984 — and as always, it took three years for me to figure out what to do with it,” says Davies. She ultimately decided to split the footage between the slow, methodical act of preparation and the seamless, seemingly effortless process of performance. Three of the six screens in the installation show Tudor setting up for the 90-minute show — one for each day of set up. Every so often one of these screens flashes, which signals where the film was cut. On the other three screens — one for each day of the performance — there are no edits, and hence no flashes, only a continuous loop of Tudor as he plays (or programs) the electronic music from the pit while the dancers move on stage.

 

“It’s a portrait of the working process through detail and accumulation,” says Davies, a statement that applies just as well to her collected body of video art. In “Sea Tails,” for instance, we see her collaborative style at work. “I almost always work with friends and family,” says Davies, who fortunately knows some very talented people. Filmed over a week in the Bahamas, it brings together the underwater kites created by friend and artist Jackie Matisse and the music of David Tudor, who stayed on board and recorded the marine sounds while Davies filmed the billowy, colorful movement underwater. There is a method at work in the finished product: At all times, a pair of screens — there are three pairs, or six screens, altogether — displays the kite’s movement in unison as three different speakers play a different Tudor composition simultaneously. That may be much to grasp on paper, but in person it gels beautifully as the kites flow like seaweed to the sound of the snaps and cracks beneath the aquamarine water.

 

This multi-layered approach is echoed in “Dressing,” where we see her partner of 16 years, dancer Polly Motley, performing the simple act we repeat each morning, on three different screens. “It’s basically just putting appendages through holes,” says Davies, but through her multi-monitor-lens, as we watch Motley slowly button her shirt and zip her slacks, this quotidian chore becomes sensual, even erotic.

 

Davies, who has lived in her loft at Broadway and Great Jones for the past 20 years, began making films in the late 60s to document her friends and family.

 

“I was hanging out with the great documentary makers” — the ones responsible for bringing cinéma vérité to the New World — “DA Pennebaker and Richard Leacock, and I was so struck by their ability to get those everyday moments.” She continued making films and teaching when she moved to St. Paul with then-husband, conductor Dennis Russell Davies. There, she met dancer Sage Cowles, and began what would become a ten-year collaboration on performance pieces that featured multiple screen projections of Cowles while she performed on stage. (Last spring, for Cowles’s 80th birthday, they reconstructed their seven-piece oeuvre at Dance Theater Workshop and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.) Davies says she ultimately embraced video installations because it freed her from the constraints of live performance. “I wanted the time to construct something in the way I wanted to construct it,” she says.

 

When Davies returned to New York in 1984, she also took time to raise her life’s other important work: her children, three from her marriage, along with two of Polly’s. It is one reason she did not stay in the forefront of video art like a contemporary of hers, Bill Viola, who is actually a few years her junior. “It’s a crucial time — between 40 and 50, if you’re not out there in New York, you kind of drift off the map. I’m probably better known with the dancers,” says Davies, who, despite her 62 years and two grandkids, sports a spiky haircut and stylish threads that make her one very hip grandmother, with plenty of fire left.

 

It shows in the other work on view, like “Desire,” in which a playful conversation among friends takes on sexual undertones, and in “Pastime,” a multi-layered work that turns a simple summer afternoon of play with mother and son into something downright Oedipal.

 

“I shot it because of the absolutely riveting beauty of the afternoon light,” she said, unaware of how provocative the scene was at first. But somewhere deep down she picks up on these intimate undercurrents that run through the most innocent of scenes.

 

“You don’t always see the significance of these moments initially. But then you go home, and go into the studio, and it reveals itself to you.”

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The New York Times selects “Molly Davies”

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Molly Davies The New York Times Ken Johnson
The New York Times
February 10, 2006

By Ken Johnson

Feb. 10, 2006

 

This expansive show features major works from three decades by a veteran
avant-gardist film and video maker. Ranging from near-abstraction to
dreamlike allegory, the video installations of Ms. Davies call to mind
artists as various as Gary Hill and Bill Viola. Some involve collaboration
with musicians and dancers, and the esteemed poet Anne Carson stars in a
sensuous and stately three-screen production from 2002 called “Desire.”

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The New York Times includes “Molly Davies” in The Week Ahead

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Molly Davies The New York Times Sulcas
The New York Times
January 22, 2006
The Week Ahead: Jan 22 - Jan 28

By Roslyn Sulcas

The film and video maker MOLLY DAVIES is one of a slowly fading breed of downtown artists who came of creative age in the graffiti-covered, unfashionable SoHo of the late 1960’s, and she has worked with the best of that generation. Ms. Davies has always been interested in dance, and her current exhibition features a fascinating six-screen piece, “DAVID TUDOR’S OCEAN,” which documents three performances of the same work by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. The focus is more on the composers – Mr. Tudor and Takehisa Kosugi – than the dancers, but it’s a compelling and extensive look at the fabric of an artwork. Also on show is the premiere of “Desire,” with text by the poet Anne Carson. Through Feb. 18, Zone: Chelsea Center for the Arts, 601 West 26th Street, (212) 255-2177.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/arts/the-week-ahead-jan-22-jan-28.html

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The Village Voice reviews “Jackie Matisse: New Art Volant”

The Village Voice

June 15th - 21st, 2005

Air Born

Jackie Matisse

by R.C. Baker

 

 

Jackie Matisse

Zone Chelsea

601 West 26th Street

Through June 24

 

Henri was Jackie Matisse’s granddad; she helped her stepfather, Marcel Duchamp, with the construction of his “portable museums.” Some might have wilted under such a legacy. Instead, this septuagenarian artist has combined the bold compositions and formal revolutions of her heritage, leavened them with Arte Povera, and blazed her own trail on gallery walls and video screens, underwater, and across the sky.

 

A selection of Matisse’s kite art—vibrant cloth sails and rainbow-saturated crepe paper tails—anchors a body of work that has a strong physical presence and a radiant spirit. Using rigid piano wire, Matisse has constructed skeletal boxes containing street flotsam—bits of foil, wood, plastic toys, newsprint, feathers—suspended by strands of human hair from “many different people.” (The framework for Magic Hair No. 1, 1968, is meant to evoke a Paris cobblestone, and the artist confides, “the hair is a very small one,” implying that some were making love, not war, during the May revolts.) Elsewhere, tiny streamers swirl in bottles of water (magnets propel their weightless, chromatic dance), and virtual-reality kites vie for prominence in a pixel sky. Sweet yet determined, this work exhibits no fear of flying.

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Heads and Tails by Jackie Matisse

JACKIE MATISSE

Heads and Tails: Hommage to Merce
September 24 - November 20, 2009
Jackie Matisse, "New Art Volant", Installation view

JACKIE MATISSE: New Art Volant

May 26 - June 24, 2005
Sculpture Magazine on Jackie Matisse

SCULPTURE MAGAZINE review on Jackie Matisse

"Jackie Matisse: Collaborations in Art and Science", November 2006

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SCULPTURE MAGAZINE review on Jackie Matisse

Novbember 2006, Vol.25, P34 - 39, by Howard Risatti

Jackie Matisse: Collaborations in Art and Science

 

New York and Paris based artist Jackie Matisse has been making and flying long-tailed, Asian-style kites for several decades.  In 2002, through Ray Kass of the Mountain Lake Workshop of the Virginia Tech Foundation, she became involved in a radically new and technologically ground-breaking project, a collaboration with super-computer scientists to create simulated kites to fly in virtual space.  The result, Kites Flying in and Out of Space, is the first virtual reality (VR) art piece ever created to use big broadband “grid” computing full immersion techniques.  When it was shown in Amsterdam at the iGRID 2002 Conference sponsored by science and technology center SARA (Stitchting Academisch Rekencentrum Amsterdam), Scott Bradner of Network World called it the “most emblematic demonstration of a real-time interactive, 3-D work of art” and “a beautiful personification of distributed computing.”1

            Among the features that made Kitesso compelling was the way it exploited the CAVE™ at SARA to set 3-dimensional form in motion.  A CAVE is a 10′ x 10′ structure in which computer-generated images are rear projected onto walls and floor so that a person standing in the CAVE is completely surrounded by (i.e, fully immersed in) stereoscopic computer graphics.2  To appear as three-dimensional forms in space, these graphics must correspond perspectivally to a viewer’s location in the CAVE.  This is done by having a computer track the viewer’s position and movements in real time.  With Kitesa participant wears special glasses and holds a wand with a virtual kite string attached to control kite movements and to inject wind into the scene. The glasses, tracked using magnetic sensors, feed data to a computer that continually recalculates the kite forms (∼30 frames/second) and projects them back into the CAVE.  This insures kite movements appear perspectively correct even when the viewer moves or turns his or her head.  In part because they are not stationary forms, each of the 12 kites in the piece is so complex to simulate (each utilizes up to 15 megabits/second) that a distributed computational model using processors on multiple machines is needed. At SARA servers distributed across the globe (Chicago, Canada, Japan, Singapore, and Virginia) were enlisted to calculate kite forms, each server streaming a single kite into the CAVE. In the international scope of its collaboration Kites Flying in and Out of Spacewas a wonderful example of network performance and a visual metaphor of the possibilities of global cooperation through art and technology.

            A version of Kitesshown in 2005 at Zone: Chelsea Center for the Arts in New York was a flat-screen, interactive stereoscopic installation.  Similar to 3-D movies, this technology uses polarized stereoscopy: two projectors with different polarizing filters display differing images (one for each eye); when viewers wear matching polarized glasses they see the separate images and experience a 3-D effect similar to that of 19th-century stereoscope photographs.  To simplify computer computations, in this version feed-back from a hand-held tracking mouse with a virtual string attached was fixed to a stationary point in front of the screen, not to a mobile viewer as in the CAVE.3  Rear-projection allowed viewers to stand close to the 8′ x 10′ screen without casting shadows so the screen completely filled their field of vision and any perspectival discrepancies became imperceptible.  Up to five participants with 3-D glasses and a hand-held mouse could each fly their own kite and interact with each others kites.  This multi-participant feature extended the collaboration metaphor from the invisible grid network used in the CAVE at SARA to the virtual space visible in front of the screen.  Through the international grid kite flyers also could have interacted from distant sites thereby giving a global dimension to the metaphor.

            To go from flying real-world kites to collaborating with scientist/engineers to fly virtual kites seems a radical transformation for Jackie Matisse of both means and ends.  I say radical because collaboration challenges the art world’s insistence on the singularity of artistic production and because computer imaging challenges the art world’s belief in “personal touch” as a sign of creative individuality.4  Collaboration also is a risky move for the artist as well because, when genuine, it means giving up a degree of artistic control and putting personal identity in jeopardy.  But, making and flying kites as art is already a departure from mainstream art practice, so much so that the artist risks not being taken seriously.  To most people flying kites seems akin to children’s play or simply an attempt to recapture innocence lost.  For Jackie Matisse, however, it moves beyond simple adult desires for innocence and purity.  Her kites, with their colorful tails as long as 35 to 45 feet, take Alexander Calder’s conception of sculpture as movement and change (rather than mass in place) and infuse it with an animating spirit.  That’s why in the early 1970s she and six other artists including Tal Streeter, Curt Asker, and Istevan Bodoczky signed the Art Volant Manifesto (Flying Art Manifesto) declaring that the kite is “a vehicle joining the spirit and the physical…, the kite’s flying line connects the human hand and mind with the elements.” 

            For Jackie Matisse, kites are a vehicle to play with color, to “draw” lines in the sky and to sculpt the air.  As she has said, “my kites play games with the light, hide and seek with the clouds.”5  The term “play,” however, should be understood more in the philosophical sense of an inventive interaction of creative possibilities through chance and a loosening of personal control.  This openness to chance as a genuinely collaborative force in her work has its roots in the1950s and 60s, especially in Gesture painting, Earth and Conceptual/Process art, and the ideas of John Cage. 

            In Gesture painting the mark left on the canvas is a physical manifestation of an action, a two-dimensional trace in paint declaring the artist’s presence in the world.  Such works were not pre-planned, but the result of “situations” organized to open the artist to the unexpected so painting would become a path to the new and to self-discovery.  Jackie Matisse shares with Gesture painters their openness to chance and the idea of art as a performative act.  However, her kite-drawings are 3-dimensional and made, literally, in the vastness of empty space.  They leave no physical trace because their lines are not material manifested on a ground, but lines only in the sense in which we would speak of a “bee” line, a direction or motion of an object–real or imagined–in and through space.  Thus, the sculptural forms her kites locate in space are unstable and transitory, continually coming into being and, at the same time, continually disappearing into nothingness.  If they are to be understood as betraying the artist’s existential presence, it is at best a fleeting, transitory presence existing only as long as the mind can embrace them as object and concept.

            In their conceptual and environmental aspects her works also parallel 1960s Earth and Conceptual /Process Art–here I am thinking of Michael Heizer’s motorcycle drawings in the Nevada desert, the airborne sculpture of Otto Piene and Group Zero in Düsseldorf, and the work of Hans Haacke, specifically his 1967 Sky LineSky Linewas a series of helium-filled balloons strung on a line like pearls; when it was released in Central Park it floated upwards creating an actual, physical line in the sky whose shape was determined by chance by the breeze, thus diminishing the role of the artist in the work’s final actualization.  In doing so Sky Line reflects the ideas of John Cage who, already in the 1950s, tried to free art from individual taste and ego by using chance methods derived from the I Chingto compose music; his solo piano composition 4’33”(sometimes referred to as Silence) has no notes so when David Tudor premiered it in 1954, only the ambient sounds of nature were heard in the open-air concert hall.  Cage went on to use chance to make visual art beginning in 1978.6

            Jackie Matisse’s work, even more than Haacke’s Sky Line, is influenced by Cage with whom she developed a close friendship through her step-father Marcel Duchamp.  Nevertheless, her work remains independently her own because, unlike Haacke or Cage, she never tries to completely relinquish control.  Instead, she actively flies her kites and in doing so the sculptural forms drawn in space can be seen as extensions of her presence in the world and reflections of her “wishes and desires.”  On the other hand, the movements of her kites are only prompted by her actions, not completely controlled by them–air currents, air resistance, gravity, aerodynamics all play their part in flying her kites with her. In a kind of mutual action and inter-action, the slightest of hand gestures are magnified, but also altered by the forces of nature acting upon the kite.  What results is a “give and take” between her hand and the forces of nature. As she has said,

my kites push and pull on the wind….My hand grows longer and longer until I feel I am somehow in contact with that immensity into and out of which all things come and go.

 

This is clearly a post-Cagean sensibility because, in giving oneself over to the process of flying, one is neither the sole agent nor a passive witness, but a genuine collaborator with and in nature. This makes the sky an arena in which to both act and to be acted upon, not only to allow, but to prompt the un-expected into being.

            On a philosophical level Jackie Matisse’s art is a reminder that we are not alone in the world, but a part of it, that our actions reverberate beyond ourselves.  This gives her work a certain resonance with the environmental movement and the existential belief in personal responsibility.  It also challenges recent Post Structuralist claims that signs lack presence, that they no longer directly connect to lived experience, only to other signs.  Encountering nature through the kite is a direct, lived experience, one that helps situate man in that larger world extending beyond the self–after all, when the artist tugs on the kite line, it is nature, in its fullness, that tugs back. This situating of man in the world through direct experience, it seems to me, is the intellectual underpinning of flying kites as an artistic endeavor.

            In 1979 when one of her kites accidently fell into the sea, Jackie Matisse got the idea of “flying” kites underwater.  This led to collaborations with composer David Tudor and filmmaker Molly Davies in the creation of Sea Tails(a six-monitor, six-channel video installation shown at the Pompidou Center in 1983) and Sound Totem, 9 Lines(a 1986 performance in the Whitney Museum Sculpture Court).  These collaborations, which were radically different because now she was not only sharing control with nature but with two other artistic personalities, eventually led to her Mountain Lake Workshop project.

            While focus of the Mountain Lake Workshop has always been collaboration, over the years these collaborations have increasingly involved art and science including John Cage and mycologist Orson Miller; Kyoto minimalist Jiro Okura and the Brooks Wood Research Center; and NYC Department of Sanitation “artist-in-residence” Mierle Laderman Ukeles in anaerobic microbiology.  When Workshop founder and director Ray Kass saw photographs of Jackie Matisse’s kites and Molly Davies’video of her underwater kites, he was immediately struck by their ethereal, other worldly forms.  To “fly” them in virtual space seemed appropriate to her own artistic experimentations and to the direction the Workshop had been going. 

            Thus began Jackie Matisse’s virtual reality collaboration, one which shifts the dialogue in her art from nature to science/technology, two of her long-standing interests.  From early on her kites have featured a black square on their heads as a homage to Malevich, the Russian Suprematist painter who related art to new technology and tried to express pure feelings unencumbered by physical material.  But Malevich never actually employed modern technology in his work so his example remained abstract and imaginary.  Her first-hand experience of artistic and technological collaboration began in the 1960s when, through Niki de Saint Phalle, she met Jean Tinguely and Billy Kluver.  Kluver, an engineer for Bell Laboratories and a founding member of E. A. T. (Experiments in Art and Technology), collaborated with Tinguely on his Homage to New York, that animated sculptural machine which self-destructed in the MoMA Sculpture Garden in 1960.  Kluver also assisted Rauschenberg with his 1963 sculpture Oracleand was instrumental in the 1966 collaboration9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering in which Rauschenberg and Tudor both participated.7 

            With this background plus her work with Tudor and Davies, a super-computing collaboration seems a logical extension of her ideas.  Flying virtual kites, in one sense, realized both her and Malevich’s ambitions towards creation of physically unencumbered form; they are, after all, pure gossamer veils of light, ghostly forms that can be wrapped around a person but cannot be touched.  Trying to hold them is, as she has said, “like trying to hold onto a rainbow.” But in another sense, her engagement with technology is more than a dematerialization of the art object as Malevich wished.  It is an attempt to extend art’s social dimension into the world of cutting-edge technology by collaborating with that technology so the creative spirit of art and science can come together.  This collaboration, at the level of code writing and performative interaction, transforms virtual space from a purely technological site, a locus of scientific innovation, into a metaphorical arena for art’s social engagement with the world of science and technology.  While many questions remain concerning technology’s role in the life-world, this collaboration is an attempt to work from inside science to integrate art and technology, to get artists and scientists to collaborate–without instrumental and economic imperatives driving their work–in order to carry forward the spirit of what in the Post Enlightenment period would have been called “the cultivation of the human.”

 

1Scott Bradner, Network World (14 October 2002).

2CAVE™ is a registered trademark of the University of Illinois where the concept and technology were developed at its Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) in Chicago. Technically and fiscally, this project would not have happened without Tom Coffin of the U of I’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Arlington, VA.  Coffin, an artist himself, endorsed the project, proposed it to EVL, and organized technical support.  Former graduate student Shalini Venkataraman, working under Dr. Jason Leigh at EVL, wrote the program.  Dr. Paul Weilinga, Director of SARA, also gave support. 

3Artist-programer David Pape, Department of Media Study, University of Buffalo, developed the mouse and adapted the VR CAVE program for other platforms so it could be used in a gallery situation.

4For more on these issues see Holland Carter, “The Collective Conscious,” The New York Times (5 March 2006), sec. 2, pp. 1 & 29.

5Unless otherwise specified, all quotes are from interviews the author conducted with the artist over the last three years.

6From 1978 until his death in 1992, Cage annually made prints with Kathan Brown at Crown Point Press using chance; in 1983, 88, 89, and 90 he used chance to paint watercolors with Ray Kass at the Mountain Lake Workshop.

7In December of 1966 Kluver helped found E. A. T. which later was engaged by Pepsi-Cola International to create the Pepsi Cola Pavilion at the 1970 Osaka World’s Fair, to date the most ambitious art and science/technology collaboration.

 

Heads and Tails by Jackie Matisse

JACKIE MATISSE

Heads and Tails: Hommage to Merce
September 24 - November 20, 2009
Jackie Matisse, "New Art Volant", Installation view

JACKIE MATISSE: New Art Volant

May 26 - June 24, 2005
Sculpture Magazine on Jackie Matisse

SCULPTURE MAGAZINE review on Jackie Matisse

"Jackie Matisse: Collaborations in Art and Science", November 2006

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“Airborne Abstraction”, ART IN AMERICA reviews Jackie Matisse’s exhibition

December 2005, by Jill Johnston

Heads and Tails by Jackie Matisse

JACKIE MATISSE

Heads and Tails: Hommage to Merce
September 24 - November 20, 2009
Jackie Matisse, "New Art Volant", Installation view

JACKIE MATISSE: New Art Volant

May 26 - June 24, 2005
Sculpture Magazine on Jackie Matisse

SCULPTURE MAGAZINE review on Jackie Matisse

"Jackie Matisse: Collaborations in Art and Science", November 2006

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American Arts Quarterly reviews “Monument” by Richard Mayhew

American Arts Quarterly

By Gail Leggio

Rhapsody by Richard Mayhew

Richard Mayhew
Rhapsody
2002
Oil on canvas
48 x 60 in.

Published on Summer 2009, Vol. 26, N. 3

 

For over half a century, Richard Mayhew has been painting vibrantly colored landscapes that gracefully negotiate the border region between representation and abstraction.  This summer, ZONE: CONTEMPORARY ART in New York City presented “Monuments,” a solo exhibition of highlights from his career.  In the fall, three San Francisco Bay Area institutions—the De Saisset Museum, the Museum of the African Diaspora and the Museum of Art and History in Santa Cruz—are running concurrent shows, each focusing on a different phase of the artist’s oeuvre. (October 9, 2009—January 10, 2010)

 

For Mayhew, nature is the portal to a “universal space with the illusion of time.”  Born in Amityville, New York, and descended from African-American, Cherokee and Shinnecock Indian stock, he has a strong sense of place, although he is not a close observer of specific topographical details.  He grew up drinking in the interplay of water, sky and earth around the Long Island Sound and watched the New York City painters who came for the summer to work.   He studied with Ruben Tam and Hans Hofmann at the Brooklyn Museum, went to Pratt and the Art Students League and earned an art history degree from Columbia University.  Mayhew feels a special affinity for two defining movements in American art history: the Hudson River School, with their celebration of nature’s spiritual illuminations, and the Abstract Expressionists, who approached painting as a shamanistic practice.  Primarily a colorist, Mayhew found his own lyrical, pantheistic aesthetic, distinct from the culturally freighted realism of Thomas Cole and his followers, on the one hand, and the muscular drama of Jackson Pollock and associates, on the other.  At his best, Mayhew combines ecstatic color fields with a convincing vestige of spatial recession.  In Fortissimo(2002), he positions a middle-distance cluster of trees between the varied greens of a field and a sky of hot pink and orchid.  The trees are blue and cast a complementary orange reflection in a foreground stream.  Colors are heightened, yet so well balanced that they do not seem arbitrary, and the composition holds together as a landscape.

 

Mayhew is a jazz musician as well as a painter, and the titles of his paintings are often taken from musical terminology. In Rhapsody(2002), the green foreground rears up, a foliage screen. The tree that rises above the screen is a violet silhouette, subtly shaded toward pink and plum.  The profile of the tree trunk against an intense blue sky is particularly effective.  Mayhew layers his oil paint in a way that approaches the stained-glass color glow of Redon’s pastels.  Shape is a unifying force in Fortissimoand Rhapsody.  Clouds and leafy boughs have similar curvy, organic forms; the living landscape seems to be organizing itself from some primordial vital matter. Mayhew’s pictures look nothing like van Gogh’s, but the Dutch artist does something similar when he carries his energy-spiral brushstrokes through clouds, fields of grain and cypresses. Pater’s famously enigmatic declaration that all art aspires to the condition of music has been associated with Whistler’s “Nocturns” and “Symphonies” and the synesthetic experiments of Kandinsky and Scriabin.  But, at a basic level, it is a way of emphasizing the importance of formal rhythm and harmonic color.  Mayhew, who works from memory, is particularly adept at improvisation, which requires both skill and instinct—the musician’s ear, the artist’s eye.

 

Many of Mayhew’s paintings are in the traditional horizontal landscape format, including some from an elevated point of view.  Montalvodepicts an open expanse of lime grass, shadowy blue-grey and maroon trees and a pale yellow sky; in Soquel Valley(2006), we seem to be skimming through ochre-gold and violet clouds over blue water.  Mayhew, who spent time in Europe and traveled across America, now lives in Soquel, California, between the Pacific Ocean and the mountains, and uses features of the nearby Soquel Valley in his continuing exploration of the genre.

 

Trees are often central for Mayhew’s compositions, and he sometimes selects a vertical canvas for what is essentially a portrait.  In Monument(2004), a strictly frontal, irregular-edged, dark green arborescent shape is pushed up against the picture plane; the backdrop is a throbbing orange-red.  While subtle tonal variations give the foliage convincing texture, the highly charged presentation suggests an emblem of transcendence.  Mayhew’s almost druidical reverence for trees is expressed more naturalistically in Cello Solo(2002).  An S-curve with dusky green foliage rises majestically from maroon-brown earth, silhouetted against a pale greenish sky, in a landscape softened by mist.  With its retinal punch, Monumentreflects Mayhew’s longtime fascination with color theory. Cello Solodemonstrates his skill with atmospheric perspective; the restrained, tonalist palette evokes a sense of crepuscular mystery, adding to the drama of the imposing asymmetrical tree’s presentation.

 

Mayhew’s long career stretches back to his first solo show at the Brooklyn Museum, in 1955, and encompasses his work as a co-founder, along with Romare Bearden and Norman Lewis, of the Spiral Group in the 1960’s and a distinguished teaching record.  He continues to paint daily, creating distinctive contemporary paintings that tap into American touchstones from the spiritual landscape to the music of Miles Davis.  

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