“Ember,” 2024, oil on canvas over wood, 22 1/2 x 13 1/2 in. (detail) Photos courtesy of Matthew Miller, Paul Thiebaud Gallery
Cornelia Schulz Synthesis at Paul Thiebaud Gallery
by Barbara Morris
San Francisco’s Paul Thiebaud Gallery presents Synthesis, a show of recent work by virtuoso painter Cornelia Schulz. While modest in scale, these works are expansive in energy, massing and bubbling under thick swaths of troweled-on paint. Schulz, with a BFA in painting and an MFA in welded steel sculpture—both from SFAI—has had an illustrious career as artist and educator. She has shown in major venues, received the prestigious SECA award, as well as pursuing a lengthy teaching career at UC Davis, among other institutions, from 1973 to 2002. Schulz chaired the Art Department at Davis from 1973 to 92, and again in 1995.
Schulz’s work has transcended boundaries to create objects one might view as painterly sculptures, or sculptural paintings. Here, Schulz works on unusual supports, compact, assertive forms which she constructs herself, this grouping of eleven works all using the shape of a rectangle as a point of departure. These are potent small paintings, ones in which the lengthy history of the bravura gesture is conveyed by sheer force of will. Formal elements combine and contrast, we witness an internal dialogue with Schulz displaying the blissful and/or excruciating interplay of gesture and decision making that is the working process of a painter.
“No Laughing Matter,” 2023, oil on canvas over wood, 22 x 13 in.
Schulz’s remarkable show is presented in two upstairs galleries, the first room holding five small, irregularly-shaped works hung at eye level. No Laughing Matter (2023) features a base color of dark hues, black and violet, tinged with bright flecks and splotches of red, orange, and green. Some areas are scraped down close to the support, as others roil and coagulate, like flows of lava stopped in mid-stream. A wide, cream-colored band oozes from the upper-right corner, acquiring a corrugated appearance where the motion of a wide trowel/scraper was repeatedly disrupted. The lower half is punctuated by an incised band, glowing and juicy, as hair-like tendrils of paint twist and writhe under our gaze. Despite the intimate scale, there is nothing subdued about this work, which crackles with intensity, reflecting decades of experience handling paint, and a muscularity born of comfort in the creation and destruction of energies, a synthesis of opposing forces.
“InterFray,” 2024, oil on canvas over wood, 20 1/4 x 13 1/2 in.
InterFray (2024) is a bit more subdued, almost demure, a wavy shape echoed in undulating paint, once again scraped with a wide tool into a colorful band with delicate stripes in warm, understated hues. Thick and sludgy encrustations in green and violet at the top disappear beneath this coating, the lower half emerging as a black surface disrupted here and there with bits of red and green, and trailing residue of the creamy surface above.
“Ember,” 2024, oil on canvas over wood, 22 1/2 x 13 1/2 in.
A back room features six more works by Schulz, along with an assortment of works by associates and colleagues from including her former husband, the late sculptor Robert Hudson, with whom she raised her family. The thickly-encrusted Ember (2024) continues in the palette of cream, green, red, and egg yolk yellow. It’s remarkable how powerful these small works are, with Schulz’s extensive experience as both painter and sculptor coming into play—the irregular shape of the supports sets us a bit off-kilter from the get go, and the wildly contrasting textures and energies, smooth, layered passages, cool geometric undergirding sharply incised lines, meet thrashed up messes of gooey and clotted shapes, their physicality reflecting the materials and processes that informed their construction. These works also have a seductive glimmer, a shiny, viscous appearance evoking an assortment of industrial materials (tar, grout) as well as biological fluids, such as the moist surface of a wet pink tongue suggested in the salmon color of Red Skirt (2022).
“Red Skirt,” 2022, oil on canvas over wood, 19 x 12 in.
Red Ralley (2023), with its emphasis on verticality, also evokes a tradition of the sublime at odds with the intimate scale of the work. We may reflect on predecessors in this vein, with a lengthy trajectory ranging from Albert Bierstadt’s paintings of Yosemite through Clyfford Still’s abstract interpretations of man confronting the majesty of nature. Once again, we are presented with a seeming conundrum, with an expansive feeling of majestic scope, compressed into a tiny package. Another merging of opposites.
“Red Ralley,” 2023, oil on canvas over wood, 23 x 14 in.
As art evolves, often away from the materials and processes that had defined it for centuries, we are often confronted with objects so anxious we may need a Paxil to enter the gallery. In this case, that expectation may be left at the door. These substantial pieces convey the best of 20th century painting practice, yet are very much of the moment. Here, like magic, the weighty history of painting is brought down to size, as Schulz posits that perhaps better doesn’t always have to mean bigger, the whole macho tradition of Abstract Expressionism defied by this intimate scale. For those who love paint, the mark of the brush, and the energy of the gesture, a visit to Paul Thiebaud will be richly rewarding.
Cornelia Schulz Synthesis on view at Paul Thiebaud Gallery through January 11, 2025.
Foad Satterfield, Jewel Lake Diptych, Acrylic on Canvas, 60″ x 100″, 2016
Foad Satterfield Then is Now at Sanchez Art Center
Painter Foad Satterfield’s connection to nature, and to water in particular, runs deep. Growing up on the Gulf Coast, the artist reflected, “we were never more than two steps from being wet…” In addition to a visual art practice spanning over 50 years, Satterfield has had a distinguished career in academia, serving as a professor of fine art at San Rafael’s Dominican University for over three decades, as well as directing the university’s San Marco Gallery from 1980 to 2013.
In recent years, Satterfield’s accomplished work has begun to appear on a broader stage, with shows on both coasts garnering increasing critical attention. Present By Past at SF’s Maybaum Gallery in 2022 was followed by Space Before Us, Unrestrained at Malin Gallery in New York in 2022, along with a show at their Colorado branch Elemental Variations in Aspen in 2023. Other exhibitions of note include a memorable show, Things Known, at St. Mary’s College in 2019, as well as numerous exhibitions at Burlingame’s Studio Shop Gallery.
Satterfield grew up in a country whose soil was deeply permeated with injustice. Those whose skin color afforded them access at birth to a life of relative privilege took this situation for granted, while those in the opposite position were made painfully aware on a continual basis just how their aspirations might be constrained by their complexion. The artist’s rise to prominence in his field, despite the deck being stacked against him, is a testament to his boundless talent, persistence, and infinite grace. Satterfield is himself overflowing with gratitude: for his gifts, his success, his family, indeed for life itself.
Recently, the Sanchez Art Center in Pacifica presented an exhibition of Satterfield’s work, Then is Now, and as well hosted an artist’s talk on a chilly Superbowl Sunday. A vibrant performance by the Bernini Baroque Trio accompanied the event. Gallery Director Jerry Barrish, who curated the exhibition, also moderated the talk. Barrish noted that he has known Satterfield for 28 years, bemoaning the delay in presenting his work at Sanchez.
After his introduction, the artist took over the discussion. Foad Satterfield was born in Orange, Texas, moving at the age of eight to Lake Charles, Louisiana, where he would spend the rest of his childhood. “I’d already been held back, I flunked the first grade,” he shared, explaining, “My English skills were not strong. At home we spoke a mixture of English and French.” It was certainly understandable that a small, sensitive child with language issues would have difficulties assimilating into a culture, the Jim Crow south of the 1950s, already predisposed to exclude him.
The level of pain and discomfort this caused him is never dwelt upon, certainly not here, and to my knowledge this is not something he cares to discuss at length. We learn of a compassionate 3rd grade teacher who took the unmoored child aside and taught him how to cut stencils from notebook covers using a razor blade, and then to paint these on cloth “with a flat brush and color. Red, green, and yellow. That was my first experience making things…” he shares, adding that “making things” has been essential to him ever since.
Then is Now offered a lovely glimpse into the artist’s oeuvre with an “intimate retrospective” consisting of seven works spanning seventeen years. Early in his talk, Satterfield alludes to additional, earlier work painted with a vastly different technique, “no sign or indication of the artist’s hand. All the edges smooth and clean.” Feeling unsatisfied with this approach, he began to explore other forms more connected to gesture, materials, and process. Drawn to the power and beauty of African art, but lacking the funds to acquire quite the pieces he desired, the artist began a more modest collection with terra cotta vessels, often chipped or broken. These forms, evocative of the human figure, inspired the “Broken Vessel” series, of which the painting Red (2006) is a part. The stencil technique, we learn, was employed in this earliest of the canvases on view, here the artist using plaster, rather than paint, to create a dimensional effect.
Foad Satterfield, Red, Acrylic On Canvas, Plaster, 50″ x 60″, 2006
Indeed, Red is all about texture. The vessel form, obsessively duplicated across the massive canvas, sets up an initial rhythm and gesture for the eye to follow, almost like musical notation on a staff. Or braille, as the crusty forms progress across the surface seemingly inviting us to touch, to run our hands across their surface to better comprehend the message they contain. As one might expect, this work explores the warm range of the color spectrum, yellow to violet, punctuated by brilliant reds, dramatic blacks, and shot through with a ray or two of golden light—like an epiphany.
Underlying the entire body of recent work is the artist’s desire to express something about his relationship to the world around him, to the landscape, and to nature. He describes this more eloquently as “the outside world, the inner world, materials, and the compositional elements of making my paintings simply serve to give my narratives a place to dwell.”
He reflects on the tradition of landscape painting, and the attraction of iconic vistas like Yosemite’s El Capitan. When first visiting Yosemite, while awed by the majesty of El Cap, it was instead a small pond behind the cabin where he was staying that captured his imagination, wanting to “bring to that scrubby little pond the same level of attention, to find it of the same significance, as El Capitan.” He wanted “to bring to it the quality of what moves us when we are in the company of something bigger than ourselves.” This is, of course, an artist’s secret hiding in plain sight—it’s not the scenery that makes for great art, but what you do with it. Certainly photographs of Monet’s Giverny gardens, while charming, pale in comparison to that earlier artist’s revolutionary Nymphéas.
Foad Satterfield, Big Fish Camp Series, Poem, Acrylic On Canvas, 71.5″ x 84″, 2014
Satterfield’s canvases range in scale from large to monumental, Big Fish Camp, Poem (2014), the “scrubby pond,” spanning around six by seven feet. He does not care to work on small paintings, finding them far too easy to overwork. Like AbEx painters, such as Jackson Pollock, the artist activates every square inch of the canvas with dynamic, gestural energy—where one flings dripped paint, the other employs a dizzying array of vigorous brushstrokes. This image is moody, dramatic, fecund. The upper half is shot through with with dusky light, while a middle ground, perhaps patches of sky, shimmers with vibrant rosy hues—pink, violet, gold. A network of dark lines soaring upward suggests trees, then refutes the suggestion, breaking into their own quirky dance of rhythm, repetition, and sheer joy of mark-making. It feels like autumn, desolate, chilly, maybe in a sense bereft—but simultaneously breathtaking, transcendent, sublime.
When the scale of a work is so large that it’s hard to take the whole thing in, we respond in a variety of ways. We may move further away, to grasp the entire composition, or move our gaze, or our body, back and forth, up and down, to appreciate the work in full. With the massive GreatEpic #1 (2018), one is drawn to employ these tactics, and as well to move closer still, for the dizzying satisfaction of losing oneself to total immersion in the paint.
Foad Satterfield, Great Epic #1, Acrylic on Canvas, 84″ x 96″, 2008
While traditional landscapes may employ horizon lines or perspective devices, Satterfield often takes a different tack, with a soft-focus, gestural marking technique inviting the viewer to experience the work from various vantage points. We absorb waves of color and energy, the paint refusing to comply with a desire that it settle down, come into focus, or indeed suggest any single vista. Presenting a watery view, the layered field of marks could represent reflected sky, blossoms or plants, or perhaps fish swimming beneath. A darker triangular section in deep green and violet, flecked with pink, holds down the upper left corner, with the lower edge rimmed by an irregular band of dark hues tending to blue-black. This vibrant work glows from within, bright patches of yellow and pastel violet shot through with flickers of coral. Our eye, drawn initially to marks in the upper left, soon darts back and forth, spiraling towards the center for a while, then branching out in all directions. Individual passages, jaw-dropping colors, swirls of pattern and energy, engage us in an indescribable manner, akin to the transcendent experience of being in nature itself.
From the earliest work on view, Red, (2006), to the most recent Trilogy #5, (2023), the work generates power from reservoirs of energy—clearly pent up and grateful to flow, indeed burst at times onto the canvas. Beauty is at its best when there’s an ache to it, an awareness of the flip side, the pain and the ugliness never far away, just a trick, perhaps, of the light can make the shift. But we can focus, or attempt to, on the bright side. Satterfield, who has without question seen both sides of life, has chosen to create, live, and to share, visions of positivity. Has chosen to focus on the light, the energies that sustain and connect us to each other. It bears noting that the artist has for decades sustained an ongoing meditation practice, one integral to the work, and views this as “accomplishing a great deal by doing nothing.”
When asked about his brushstrokes, if he felt indebted in some way to Van Gogh, his deft answer was kind of a “Yes, but…” which he employed in response to numerous inquiries about his process and influences. Van Gogh’s work, he suggests, is one significant part of the history of Western art which he, like most thoughtful contemporary painters, has drawn upon. The viewer’s perception is really perhaps not so much about line quality, but the energy, the sense of urgency and a conviction that would not bear disbelief. It simply is what it is. Finally one must note, while the canvases on view are massive, a tour de force of energy and scale in themselves, this is barely the tip of the iceberg… A prolific artist for half a century, Foad Satterfield’s beautiful, peaceful, challenging, and throughout thought-provoking work demands even broader attention, with future retrospectives on an expansive scale.
Barbara Morris
Foad Satterfield Then is Now closed at Sanchez Art Center, Pacifica, on February 11, 2024.
Grace Munakata, Curious Cloud, 2022, Acrylic, wax pastel on panel, 37 1/2 x 48 in.
Grace Munakata “Biology of Flight” at Anglim/Trimble
How does one define “abstract art?” Some feel that an abstract painting should not include any recognizable objects, while others suggest that it is the conceptual underpinning of a work, the way in which the artist approaches the canvas, that makes it abstract, rather than the eventual presence, or absence, of objects. The late John Baldessari, an influential multi-disciplinary artist and art professor, presented an interesting exercise to his students at UC San Diego. Each was given an abstract image, one completely devoid of any discernible objects, with the assignment to go find and photograph this image in the real world. Almost without exception, the students were successful.
Falling squarely into the realm of abstract work grounded in reality is that of painter Grace Munakata, whose current exhibition “Biology of Flight” at Anglim/Trimble presents a range of small and medium-scaled paintings, collages, and works on paper and panel. Munakata studied at UC Davis under Wayne Thiebaud, who became a mentor and friend. In a 2001 interview with Manneti Shrem Museum’s Associate Curator Susie Kantor in conjunction with the exhibition Wayne Thiebaud Influencer a New Generation, Munakata recalled Thiebaud’s belief that “painting is an intellectual inquiry, finding out about as many aspects of human experience as possible,” and his description of the studio as “a shared laboratory for experience.” Munakata went on to a her own distinguished career as a professor, teaching at Cal State East Bay (formerly Cal State Hayward) as well as sustaining a remarkable visual art practice.
Munakata grew up in the Central Valley, into a Nisei Japanese family which had endured internment during World War II. Her family’s experience undoubtedly colored her perceptions of the world, suggesting it as a place of mixed signals and shifting planes. Her mother was a seamstress, and the influence of her love of fabric, the feeling of swatches of different material and patterns, is clearly felt, as well as the influence of different cultures coming together. Descriptions of her family home include images of her father creating sumi-e works on the kitchen table, her mother spreading fabric and patterns on the floor, and décor ranging from gestural senryu poetry panels and elaborate Japanese dolls in lacquered boxes, to an Asian version of Santa Claus, all mixed in with a painting of the Golden Gate Bridge. With an eclectic mix of aesthetics, one senses in the work her openness to inspiration and source material of all kinds.
Curious Cloud (2022) hinges on an amorphous violet shape, the cloud, just left of center. Other forms may or may not suggest additional clouds, mountains, trees, or other natural forms. A rough oval is bisected into a rust orange on one side, the other broken into a floral pattern in blue-violet, cream, and yellow. An underlying checkerboard makes a subtle allusion to the Minimalist grid, and the Hofmannesque push and pull of the forms on the picture plane draw our eye in and out. What draws one into the work initially, in addition to it’s glorious color, are the dazzling visual pyrotechnics of her many overlapping compositional devices. We may think of the work of Julie Mehretu, using more hard-edged, architecturally-inspired images to construct a visual field of similar complexity and depth. Mt. Govardan and Wilson’s Snipe (2023) uses a similar strategy, balancing objects with the non-objective, careful rendering here and there, particularly of the bird, and washy patches of color. Contrasts of light and dark, blurry and focused, keep us engaged and create a satisfying sense of mystery.
Grace Munakata, Mt. Govardan and Wilson’s Snipe, 2023, Acrylic, wax pastels on panel 36 x 47 in.
Harbuz, 7 X Down, 8 X Up (2023), inhabited by insistent bumblebees, smiling pumpkins, and frowning gnomes, immerses us in the realms of fairy tale and fantasy, with a specific reference to Sankaku “Triangle” Daruma, Japanese dolls symbolizing resilience. Munikata displays an enduring playful spirit and willingness to, as Thiebaud advised, embrace the ridiculous, even to “risk artistic suicide.” Among her diverse practices and strategies, she also cites the importance of randomness and the gestural impulse.
Grace Munakata, Harbuz, 7 x Down, 8 x Up, 2023, Acrylic, wax pastels on panel 41 x 48 in.
Munakata also presents many smaller paintings and collages without distinct objects, “pure abstractions,” which are intensely satisfying. Deep in the Ground (2021) presents rich yet muted colors and quirky shapes overlaid with careful tracings of pattern dancing across the panel. The joyous collage Susan’s Circus (2019) offers deep purple and brilliant yellow bands anchoring an irregular rectangle; playful dots suggest balls and juggling, as well as the yin-yang symbol.
With art a highly subjective realm, ultimately abstraction, like beauty, may lie in the eye of the beholder. As with many attempts to define or quantify aesthetic qualities, words fall short of experience. In the work of Munakata, a mixture of influences and techniques, layers of imagery and gestural marks, combine in satisfying compositions highly abstract—yet suggesting a diaristic record of a life of intellectual inquiry.
Barbara Morris
Grace Munakata “Biology of Flight” will close Saturday, December 23 at Anglim/Trimble, SF.
