Jean Arnold . . . from page 1
Not that Arnold is out to trip us up. Far from it. These paintings don’t have a hint of the passive-aggression, or contempt for the viewer or whatever it is, that so palpably lurks just under the paint in some Gerhard Richters and darker Chuck Closes, for example. And I don’t believe she’s indulging in the hide-and-seek games common in abstraction. Nor is there any lingering allegiance to ideas of flatness. My sense is that she is taking a third path through the thickets of abstraction: she seems to be abstracting because of the limits that her process imposes on her perception. In other words, abstraction isn’t something she has set out to do. It is not an agenda. It is what happens when she sketches modern American streetscapes through the window of a moving city bus. Billboards are bright and big because they are meant to be seen in glimpses, in a state of distraction, from moving vehicles. Just as naturally, the bright colors and as-though-glimpsedness of Arnold’s paintings are the result of seeing a broken, quickly-unfolding landscape from a moving vantage. As I understand them, these are paintings of what gets filtered out of our streetscapes by speed: if you don’t have time to focus as you speed by, you catch momentary glimpses of whatever is biggest and brightest and most riveting. Arnold often talks about Renaissance one-point perspective as a system of seeing and as the encapsulation of a cosmogony. There is a stretch of time implied in a Titian: he didn’t just catch a glimpse of blue crinoline on a passing beauty. He made a study of it. And later, at the height of the French Academy, representation became so idealized and suavely-rendered that one is cajoled into believing that art must be produced and received with infinite patience. The ideal is static. Arnold is as concerned with point of view as any neo-classical academic, but she is not seated in one unmoving place facing a stage-set of inert allegorical objects. She is almost flying by, seeing only what speed allows. The real, and our perceptions of it, are dynamic and fluid.
Sometimes, as in “Skytown,” |0| amidst the flashing and blurring of roadside buildings, signs, and cars, between the sunny reflections off glass and mirrors, we see little, plain objects that caught her eye, such as what appear to be newspaper boxes and advertisements at center left. But most of what she sees is what newborns supposedly see: big, bright, flashy objects. I have come to see these paintings as being about speed per se: the ones that contain more of the little, pedestrian objects feel slower to me than the ones that show a preponderance of what I’m supposing are billboards and buildings and trucks and lights. Maybe the small objects in “Skytown” were sketched waiting for a light to change. I imagine “NightStreet,” |1| the most pictorial [and, I think, weakest] image in the Philips show, was painted from a photograph [significantly not a sketch] taken while cruising a quiet residential neighborhood at 25 mph. On the other hand, “Sequestered” |2| feels almost vertiginous, as though barely caught somewhere north of the speed limit. If I’m right, I think I have a case for abstraction being the natural result, in Arnold’s work, of going by in a hurry.
Years ago I got to spend an hour with a Frank Stella sketchbook. It was full of very loose, fast aperçus of common scenes: restaurants, subway stations, sidewalks. The sketches appeared to be attempts to capture the movements of people against a more or less fixed background. The result was a kind of disjointedness, like a more spontaneous cubism. Limbs stretch unnaturally, eyes appear twice on the same face, hands dash like a pianist’s across dinner plates, waiters appear to melt around diners in their hurry from kitchen to table. Most of the images were hard to interpret at all, I think because events were unfolding too fast to be recorded without also recording the speed itself, in the form of blur and distortion. Arnold is doing something similar, but crucially different: she sketches mostly stationary objects from a moving point of view. In her sketches, and in the paintings they later become, nothing is reliable, nothing is steady. Everything is dynamic. But perspective still holds. The human eye measures speed partly by gauging the movement of an object in front of a relatively static background. The farther something is from the viewer, the more static it appears. This sense of spatial depth is crucial to Jean’s paintings. Abstract though they are, they are emphatically, vertiginously spatial, eloquent rebuttals to the old Greenberg orthodoxies of flatness. The Italian Futurists painted speed more or less symbolically: their strong diagonals, leaning forms, and veering compositions meant speed, looked fast, but ultimately depended on a cartoonish sense of imbalance to represent speed. I believe Arnold has accomplished something far more sophisticated: she has mobilized color, spatial depth and tension, a cinematic simultaneity of layered objects, geometric torsion of almost-recognized objects, and a through-a-window-like all-overness to document speed. If the paintings had been mere snapshots showing the blur of passage, as has been attempted so many times in recent years by photographers-cum-painters, they would be attempting something easier and less interesting. Arnold has managed to capture speed as a painter.
But I should get back to what I like most about these paintings: they just keep giving. They reward repeated scrutiny, thus passing that old art-critical test established by John Ruskin back when speed first started altering art. Ever since I first saw one of Jean’s Umbrian hillside paintings [ripe with slowness!] about eight years ago I have been excited by her paintings’ ability to reward at a startling range of viewing distances. From the street through the gallery windows they are as riveting as an action movie, from ten paces they are gorgeous in their color and composition and weightiness/lightness. From three feet they have a tendency to capture my entire cone of vision -even the smaller paintings do this- as though I’d stuck my head out a window. The frame disappears. And from minimum focal length they show a lovely layering of reworked surfaces, calligraphic strokes, and translucent colors, all without fussiness. Most of them do this, and do it well. Some, [especially, I think, the larger paintings], accomplish this rare feat with a kind of open-eyed perceptiveness and intelligent clarity that makes them among the most rewarding paintings I’ve seen in years.
Francesc Burgos & Jean Arnold continues at Phillips Gallery through June 9th.
additional images: "Fool's Errand" |3|, "Arlington/Moana" |4|, "Holladay: Roundabout" |5|
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Gallery Spotlight: Salt Lake
Emerging Art at the Main
by Sue Martin
Drum roll please. A new art gallery recently opened at the Salt Lake City Main Library. Art at the Main is a non-profit artist co-op exclusively for emerging Utah artists. The small space among the atrium shops inside the library building features the work of 17 artists working in “any medium that can hang on a wall.” All work sold in the gallery is original.
The new gallery held an Open House on Friday and Saturday, June 2-3 to mark the opening of their venture. If you didn’t have a chance to attend, make sure to stop in during the upcoming Utah Arts Festival, June 22 –25, which is held at Library Square.
Joy Nunn, one of the founding members of Art at the Main, says the inspiration for the artists’ co-op came to her the first day she worked at a temporary co-op in the Library sponsored by the Utah Watercolor Society in the fall of 2005. “It was such a wonderful venue in a public place where there’s lots of traffic, including out-of-state visitors,” she says. Immediately after her experience with the Watercolor Society co-op, Nunn approached Library management about the idea of a permanent art gallery.
Nunn’s group, including co-founders Janet Bondi and Julie Morriss, was not the only applicant for the space and they were frankly surprised when the Library accepted their bid. But the group’s business plan was clearly designed to appeal to Library decision makers. First of all, they established their business as a non-profit dedicated to supporting emerging Utah artists who do not have other places (i.e., galleries) to show their work. Secondly, they proposed to introduce their love of art to the public by offering demonstrations, classes, lectures, and occasionally hosting special art shows in conjunction with public high school art classes. And thirdly, the co-op will collaborate with the Library to amplify some of the special Library programs and themes.
“When the Library has its program on ‘literary luminaries’ for children,” Nunn mentions as an example, “we will challenge our artists to create work connected with what the library is showing. We may feature books and the paintings they inspired in our window.” Another opportunity for collaboration will be the Library theme, “Salt Lake City in your own back yard,” for which the co-op artists may paint and display scenes from the Salt Lake area.
The 17 artists who are the initial members of the co-op will support and run the gallery. They contribute to the operating expenses, work a certain number of days each month, and give up 15% of each sale to support marketing and other expenses. In addition, they help decide what the gallery will display and what kinds of special programs they will offer. Each artist commits to participation for a year, at the end of which they may decide whether to stay or not.
“Our goal is to help prepare artists for other opportunities,” says Nunn. Art at the Main will give them a chance to interact with the public, get a feel for what is marketable, and help them discover their niche.
While Art at the Main is registered as a “non-profit” business, it has not yet received approval on its IRS application for tax-exempt status. If and when it does become tax- exempt, the group may apply for grants to support its programs and reduce the financial burden on its artists.
Art at the Main is still accepting applications from artists. They believe they can accommodate up to 25 participants, depending on the size of their work. They will also consider artists who work in glass, sculpture, or fiber.
While the gallery space is limited, “eventually we want to have a web site on which the artists can show even more of their work than we can display at the Library,” says Nunn.
Art at the Main is open during library hours: 10 a.m. – 7 p.m. (Monday -Thursday), closing at 6 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. During the Utah Arts Festival, the gallery hours will expand to coincide with other Arts Festival activities.
Art at the Main members include Gayle Allen, Dana Ballard, Terrece Beesley, Janet Bondi, Janet Brohm, Louise Earl, Sandy Fullmer, Cary Griffiths, Kristine Groll, Betta Inman, Cara Koolmees, Julie Morriss, Maura Naughton, Joy Nunn, Elena Sepulveda, Nancy Swanson, Joan Zone.
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