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art china figurative art painting

Hung Liu: The Sun Also Rises at Rena Bransten

Pledge of Allegiance 1942 72″ x 72″ oil on canvas 2019

Hung Liu: The Sun Also Rises at Rena Bransten

Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) weaves a tale of romance and dissolution as expatriate American and British writers and intellectuals explore exotic diversions in the world of bullfighting in Spain. Like Hemingway’s protagonists, painter Hung Liu’s world was transformed by her move to a new country, one with vastly different customs and sights. Liu’s recent exhibition at Rena Bransten shares the title of the earlier novel, and focuses on the artist’s newer subject matter drawn from her adoptive land. For much of her career, her work was almost always thematically tied to her homeland, China. As a young woman growing up during the Cultural Revolution, Liu was eyewitness to the humiliation and suffering endured by intellectuals and anyone perceived as disloyal to Chairman Mao. She herself was sent for four years of “re-education” working in the fields of the countryside.

Early training in a social realist style of art which emphasized imagery favorable to the government, essentially propaganda, came to a halt when the artist moved to California to attend college at U.C. San Diego, where innovative professors like Alan Kaprow proceeded to blow her mind. She never turned back, making her home in California for 36 years, teaching at Mills College since 1990 and garnering critical acclaim for her work. Liu’s historical subject matter provides a framework on which to explore her love of the human face and figure—and the process of painting.

California 72″ x 72″ oil on canvas 2020

Liu’s work uses realistic drawing as an underpinning for layers of expressionistic oil paint, washy veils of color with luxurious fields of drips cascading down the canvas. Imagery taken from personal and historical photographs of China provided a context of human drama, along with a subtle element of political commentary. Something, her understated commentary perhaps—very much between the lines—resulted in Liu’s long-awaited 2019 retrospective in Beijing being sadly cancelled. This turn of events was a cruel blow to an artist hoping for acknowledgement of her significant accomplishments in her native country, revealing instead the Chinese government’s increasing censorship of artwork.

It was during her traveling retrospective “Summoning Ghosts: The Art and Life of Hung Liu” that Liu discovered that the Oakland Museum, which organized the exhibition, houses the archives of Dorothea Lange’s photographs. These iconic images document the Dustbowl Era, the Depression, and Japanese Internment. Figuring that she had now lived half her life in the US, it seemed a good time to approach new subject matter drawn from her adopted home. While new faces in Liu’s repertoire, they share many of the same qualities as her earlier subjects, individuals caught in a tide of history, introspective, a bit guarded.

Through the Window 72″ x 72″ oil on canvas 2020

California (2020) captures a young man playing guitar, his mouth pursed as though mid-song. Many symbols place the figure in context, the state bird, the quail, inscribed almost as though perched in one of Hung Liu’s signature circles—in Chinese philosophy the circle is a symbol of oneness, the unity of yin and yang. Poppies sprout on lower left and upper right. And a vintage license place puts the scene in CA in 1935, mid-Depression, in the throes of the Dust Bowl migration. This image may evoke music of the era, particularly Woody Guthrie’s iconic folk songs.

Some of Liu’s most powerful works have included images of children caught up in events beyond their scope of comprehension. This remains the case here, as in Pledge of Allegiance 1942 (2019) where a grouping of children with their hands over their hearts is focused on a young Asian girl front and center. Lange had been called to document Japanese internment camps during World War II, and this image of the child evokes our feelings of shame over this chapter of American history, as well as the broader questions of the systemic racism underpinning our society. Through the Window (2020) features a trio of blonde-haired boys gazing from a railroad car as though peering into the distance, wondering what lies ahead. With so much uncertainty in all our lives at this point in time, it is easy to relate to this image of internal questioning made manifest.

Homeless Puppies with Boy 70″ x 65″ x 2″ oil and UV acrylic on aluminum, wood, and canvas

In the larger gallery space, Liu presents a group of wall-mounted pieces that relate to her interest in installation. Large cutout figures portray children holding animals, such as Homeless Puppies with Boy (2020). A young boy with closely-cropped hair cradles puppies into his pale green shirt. Emotional relationships of the children to the animals are very close and touching. Images of adults, sharecroppers or others down on their luck, feel a trifle overwrought. Cloud images, also drawn from Lange’s body of work, and circular shapes of painted aluminum hover around and above the figures. These elements may be moved around in response to different spaces, adding a dynamic element to the composition.

By taking the small black and white photographs of Lange and transforming them into large-scale, brightly-colored images, Liu has reconfigured the playing field. Some might argue that her approach dilutes their emotional intensity, but instead one may find the faces and figures acquire a greater universality, a certain timelessness, representing anyone who may feel tired, vulnerable, down on their luck…or just introspective. While honoring the legacy of Lange, she has created a body of work very much her own, with an upbeat humanism born of one who has known great struggle in her life.

Some of the best painting is found in a smaller series of lean-tos, Duster Shacks hanging in the narrow corridor between galleries, the colors and textures of cloth and wood dwellings cobbled together haphazardly speak volumes about the nature of this living situation, much like the homeless tent encampments we now find springing up throughout the country. Subject matter and the painting mesh to create small vignettes of heartbreaking beauty.

Duster Shack 6 12″ x 12″ oil on canvas 2019

Barbara Morris

Hung Liu: The Sun Also Rises closed in November at Rena Bransten Gallery

Rena Bransten Gallery Artist Hung Liu

Categories
art folk art russia

Andrew Romanoff: Life Work at Gallery Route One

Morning Commute in Firenze acrylic on canvas 20″ x 20″ (2012)

Andrew Romanoff: Life Work at Gallery Route One

Andrew Romanoff would have been in line to be Russian tsar had circumstances been a bit different. Romanoff, who has had an amazing journey through his long and remarkable life, is the great-nephew of deposed Tsar Nicholas II. With the Bolshevik Revolution in 1918 and the execution of Nicholas and his family, King George V extended an invitation to his cousin Duchess Xenia, Andrew’s grandmother and sister of Nicholas the II, to live at Frogmore Cottage—the 23 room guesthouse on the grounds of Windsor Castle. Andrew Romanoff was born in Great Britain, and raised there as a Russian prince.

Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton Tail, and Andrew Shrinky Dink on wood panel c. late 1990s

After somewhat of a storybook childhood at Frogmore, rambling in the gardens and eating chocolate Easter eggs intended for the British royal princesses, Andrew was sent to attend a military academy and soon learned to navigate the world without privilege. Romanoff served in the Royal Navy during World War II, enlisting at the age of 18 and serving on the HMS Sheffield. After the war he worked in farming and other professions for a while in England before moving to the US at the invitation of family members, settling in California in 1949. His connection to nature led him to the bucolic coast of Marin County, where he met painter Inez Storer. The couple married in 1987, and Storer’s dedication to her craft inspired the artistic side of her new husband.

Andrew’s unusual medium of choice is the Shrinky Dink, a crafts technique more commonly associated with children. This medium consists of sheets of translucent plastic upon which one may paint, and then bake in the oven until they are greatly reduced in size. Romanoff likes to share that the manufacturer has presented him with a “lifetime supply” of the material, in honor of his art. Gallery Route One in Point Reyes Station recently presented an exhibition “Andrew Romanoff: Life Work” featuring many of the artist’s Shrinky Dink paintings, in addition to works on paper and canvas, photographs, and as well as some little-known sculptural works.

HMS Ganges Training Base Shrinky Dink on wood circa late 1990s

Romanoff has a playful, expressionistic style, favoring bright colors and a quirky, energetic line. Early works include scenes from his childhood. Growing up on the grounds of Windsor Castle provided fertile material for narrative works and a series of Shrinky Dinks illustrating a book about his early life, The Boy Who Would be Tsar (2006). Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Andrew portrays the young artist on a stroll down a wooded garden path with a trio of rabbits, the image of the castle hovering above the scene on the left. Other autobiographical scenes recount his time in the navy, such as HMS Ganges Training Base where the architecture and geometric design of the battleship, masts, and rigging form a solid compositional underpinning to this more serious work.

A video, Yours Truly Prince Andrew Romanoff (2016) directed by Sam Hayes, presents the artist reminiscing about his heritage and his then-daily ramblings through the beautiful scenery of West Marin, often searching for mushrooms…chanterelles and boletes; Storer confirms that his reliable knowledge of the species yielded delicious morsels to share with family and friends, and even to sell to some of the Bay Area’s most prominent restaurants. She as well shares that when would-be mushroom hunters brought their dubious-looking finds to the house for identification, Andrew would rather dryly comment “I don’t think I would eat those.”

Reflecting on the Russian Revolution, and his active service in World War II, among other major upheavals, Romanoff remarks that he has witnessed all these grand, significant events—and there is something poetic about shrinking these in the oven. He feels his work is both serious and funny at the same time which, he says, is “very Russian.”

Fly Over Shrinky Dink on wood c. 2014

Fly Over (c. 2014) presents a rotund female figure, clad in a blue dress, hovering over a landscape. While initially humorous, the image actually conveys the artist’s concerns about Russian aggression, worries heightened by the Russian invasion into Ukraine in the news at the time. Romanoff kept informed about world affairs, particularly those involving Russia, and these would often filter into the work. If there is much of the joyous and primitive in the work, like Raoul Dufy or perhaps Chagall, there is equally an incisive and darker satirical undercurrent, more like George Grosz.

Morning Commute in Firenze (2012) is the signature work in the exhibition, with an assortment of colorful characters zipping down the road on scooters. As with most of Romanoff’s work, concern with perspective is thrown to the winds, and the narrative of the work propels the viewer into a dynamic space where a long-haired character in polka-dot jumpsuit steers a lime-green scooter to some unknown destination, presumably the endpoint of the commute. Storer and Romanoff spent a lot of time in Italy, with frequent invitations to teach or create art extended to them. Inez recalls that while she was teaching in Florence, Andrew would go off with “the men” to have coffee and talk about politics and other issues. She also remarks that the main figure resembles the artist Sam Francis, who made his home in West Marin at the end of his life.

Exquisite corpse drawing, mixed-media on paper. collaboration with Cindy Davis, c. 2017-20

An accomplished gymnast, sports and physical fitness were always of utmost importance Romanoff, and the last series of Shrinky Dinks he created in 2018 portray an assortment of robust standing male figures, wearing seagoing or military attire and in some instances accompanied by balls and cricket bats. These figures are a bit mysterious, but certainly suggest an autobiographical aspect. While no longer able, at 97, to create his Shrinky Dinks, he was continuing to do collaborative “exquisite corpse” type drawings up until the COVID-19 shutdown made that impossible.

The World After the Destruction mixed-media wood sculpture c. 2012

The most unusual work in the exhibition is a table-mounted sculpture The World After the Destruction (c. late 1980s) in which he grapples with issues of extinction and conveys an apocalyptic feel. Menacing creatures with the bodies of snakes and the heads of birds, carved from wood, emerge from a barren landscape of spindly trees painted white at the base, red on top. The piece not only predicts climate change, but also is infused with Romanoff’s impression of our country as increasingly due for its own revolution of the oppressed.

Portrait of Andrew Romanoff by Todd Pickering

A wall-mounted collage of newspaper clippings highlighted his life and his work, his marriage to Storer, and provided a tribute to his rich activities and accomplishments. Photos from his youth, and throughout his later life, reveal his striking appearance and regal bearing, qualities that have endured late in life even as other abilities have faded. With his unique position in the history of Western Civilization, and his enduring relentless eye and good humor, the Bay Area has been fortunate to have Prince Andrew—and his delightful artwork—call our part of the world his home for so many years.

Andrew Romanoff: Life Work closed in October at Gallery Route One.

https://galleryrouteone.org/2020/09/andrew-romanoff-life-work/
Categories
art rock music

Marin’s Rock Art Scene at Marin MOCA

Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley Grateful Dead Skeleton and Rose 1966

Marin’s Rock Art Scene

If San Francisco, with Golden Gate Park and the Haight Ashbury district, epitomized the 1967 Summer of Love and the West Coast hippie scene, arguably that movement was in fact born a year earlier and farther north in Marin County. At least that is the premise of the current exhibition at the Marin MOCA in Novato. The exhibition was inspired by MOCA director Nancy Rehkopf’s photograph of Janis Joplin , a gift from photographer Herb Green. It captures Joplin in a playful mood wearing a top hat at a jaunty angle, dark jacket over paisley dress, a big grin on her face. This image seems the key to the whole exhibition, evoking the summer of 1966—a time when Janis was living in West Marin’s Lagunitas while writing songs for Big Brother and the Holding Company’s iconic “Cheap Thrills” album.

Herb Greene Janis Joplin 1965

In conjunction with the exhibition, and adding some important background color, a virtual panel discussion was held hosted by Marin IJ’s longtime rock columnist Paul Liberatore, including recollections and thoughts from Dave Getz, Jay Blakesberg, and Jonathan Korty. Getz, Big Brother’s drummer, also has a maintained a commitment to his visual art practice over the years. Before joining the band, he not only painted but taught art at the San Francisco Art Institute. Getz brings the summer of 1966 to life with intimate details of communal life with Janis and Big Brother, how she not only “had the nicest room” in the former hunting cottage in Lagunitas, but that her decorating revealed “a feminine side, she put up little quilts and things like that.” He also recalls that she had a brief but touching love affair with Dead member Pigpen, who like Janis kept his sweet and vulnerable nature camouflaged behind a tough exterior. Getz’s large-scale black and white collage Why Love is Like a Ball and Chain (1999) captures Joplin in a variety of dramatic poses many of which reveal her darker side.

While Big Brother was tucked away in Lagunitas, the Grateful Dead, originally a Palo Alto band called The Warlocks, had migrated north to Novato. They rented a summer villa called Rancho Olompali, on the site of a former Miwok village. The seeds of the band’s enthusiastic, large, and fanatical following of Deadheads can be seen in a riveting group of six intimate photographs shot by Herb Greene. The photographer primary covered fashion shoots at the time, and almost hadn’t thought to bring a camera when invited to the party. Jerry Garcia at Rancho Olompali (1966) reveals a beardless, somewhat bleary Garcia sporting shaggy Prince Valiant hair, arms crossed, a lanyard on his bare torso. Party Goers at Olompali (1966) portrays scantily-clad revelers, a telling glimpse into this outdoor concert that presages Woodstock in it’s revolutionary combination of music, drugs, and nudity. The Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick reveals long hair, blotchy skin, and an intense look behind dramatically arched sunglasses. These candid images convey the newness of the experience, an optimism and innocence when free love and psychedelic drugs fueled a time of unbridled ecstasy and adventure for the nation’s counterculture youth…at least until it all went south with too many victims of drugs and other abuse ending with broken dreams.

Herb Greene Party Goers at Rancho Olompali 1966

Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley, premier rock poster artists, also made their home in the county. A sweet image from 1965 features a sepia-toned Pooh and Piglet seen walking down a path to advertise an outdoor concert featuring Joan Baez, the Grateful Dead, and others. This image is found as you walk down the hall through a small section called “Women of Rock” paying homage to Joplin, Grace Slick, Bonnie Raitt, sisters Joan Baez and Mimi Farina, and others. Baez, who has given up touring and is now focusing her creative energy on painting, presents two images of her sister Farina, along with a spare and acerbic portrait of David Crosby.

Joan Baez Mimi Farina 2016

Jay Blakesberg presents eleven photos, he captures the Grateful Dead in two black and white concert photos from 1978 and 79. In one, Bobby Weir struts his stuff while strumming the guitar, eyes closed in a blissful rapture as Micky Rourke on drums scowls. Blakesberg recounted early years of his “misspending his days on sex, drugs, and rock and roll” while honing his craft as a consummate rock photographer.

Jay Blakesberg Bob Weir Phil Lesh Bill Kreutzmann Micky Hart (1979)

He also presents another of the most engaging images in the show, Sammy Hagar (1989). Marin’s Red Rocker, who was lead singer of Van Halen 1985-86. He captures the singer in mid-air, poised above a red mountain bike on a hillside overlooking Golden Gate Bridge, his prolific mane of hair flying straight up. Liberatore asked Blakesberg how he got Sammy to jump, he laughed and replied this was Sammy Hagar, you just had to say jump and he did it!” adding “nowadays you’d probably be arrested” for performing such a stunt on the fragile Marin Headlands.

Jay Blakesberg Sammy Hagar (1989)

Ashleigh Sumner’s I See No Changes (2018) mixed-media work featuring Tupac Shakur ties in to the current climate of social protest and the Black Lives Matter movement. Shakur, who attended Tam High, is seen bald and shirtless on a field of red rosebuds. Riot police menacing a protester, hooded klansmen, accompany text “NO ONE TAKING THE BLAME” Text runs vertically along Shakur’s body read “I just want you to know I can see through your masks.” Knowing the tragic end of Shakur’s life, a victim of gun violence, adds a very somber note to the work.

Ashleigh Sumner I See No Changes 2018

In the final room Poster Art of the 1960s captures a bit more of the colorful, hallucinatory flavor of Bay Area scene of that era. Visionary poster artists Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley, Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso, Wes Wilson, and Bonnie MacLean all called Marin home at one time or another. Wall text refers to a coded language in the psychedelic cryptic text—the interlocking text engages the viewer while breaking all the standard rules of good poster design, legibility from a distance being a key one.

Mouse and Kelley’s Skeleton and Rose (1966) print on vellum for a Grateful Dead concert poster is a highlight. The skeleton was inspired by illustration in 12th century Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. This image later appears on the 1971 album “Grateful Dead” also known as the skulls and roses album. It remains one of the most iconic in the rock poster history.

David Singer’s New Year’s Eve-Bill Graham Presents (1970) presents stylized font in crimson red on sky blue advertising two New Year’s Eve shows in 1970. One was held at Filmore West, the other at Winterland. Tickets for either show were $5.00. The last time I bought a ticket for a live performance, the ticket fee alone was several times that amount.

David Singer New Year’s Eve Bill Graham Presents (1970)

We may all look at the hippie era, and the so-called Summer of Love, through rose-colored glasses, viewing it as an idyllic time when peace and love prevailed, and getting high and grooving on the scene were the order of the day. For many who were the right age and demographic, that was in fact the way things were, for a while. If racial and gender discrimination still prevailed, at least cracks had been etched into the walls of systemic racism and sexism. Like the music of the time, the counterculture movement borrowed from many traditions and cultures, blues with folk, acid rock with country or bluegrass. As Jonathan Korty, the youngest of those on the panel reflected, “it all came out of blues music…then they all took acid, and it turned into something else entirely.” The influx of drugs was intrinsic to the scene and the era, enhancing the magic and the highs of the spectacle and the sound. But for many, this idyllic journey was sadly derailed. Ultimately, “Marin’s Rock Art Scene” is a tightly focused blast from a psychedelic past, several gems of photographs and the iconic posters from the era making it a trip worth taking.

Barbara Morris

Last weekend for “Marin’s Rock Art Scene”! Open Saturday and Sunday Nov 7 and 8 11 am – 5 pm.

marinmoca.org

Categories
art

Emily Payne: Burst at Seager/Gray

Emily Payne Flare mixed-media 26″ x 18″ 2020

When Emily Payne arrived for her 2019 artist residency at Vermont Studio Center, she had no preconceived ideas of the direction her work there would take, just some pencils and a few other basic art materials. A walk in the woods drew her eye to some dangling pine needles, and it was their shape and gesture that were to inform her work in Vermont as well as the series of work recently on view at Seager/Gray Gallery in Mill Valley, “Burst.”

Emily Payne Sap mixed-media 14″ x 18″ 2020

Payne first exhibited with Seager/Gray, then Donna Seager Gallery, in the gallery’s annual show “The Art of the Book.” All of the two-dimensional surfaces that she works on are, in fact, comprised of book covers and pages stripped from their bindings and adhered to panel. They perform the function of both the ground, and at times, figure, of the 2-dimensional work. Rather than employing paint or other pigments as one might expect, an unusual twist is that all of the color in the work is provided by these same book covers or end pages.

Emily Payne Plume steel wire 21″ x 12″ x 5″

Payne’s sculptural process uses steel wire which she unspools, bends and shapes to create splaying, suspended shapes evoking the form and energy of the sprays of needles. These structures are then wall or ceiling mounted on a variety of supports—some found objects, others custom fabricated for the work. In her translation of the sculptures to the two-dimensional objects, Payne bathes them in light in order to cast shadows onto the paper or canvas; she traces these out and the delicate skeletal forms, now enlarged, become the subject matter of the works on panel.

Emily Payne Limb mixed-media 24″ x 45″ 2020

There were an assortment of these on display, ranging from intimate in scale to a large-scale immersive works. Rich colors of the book covers evoke a sense of time and place. Scrawled names, marks, and other pentimenti further evoke the history of the objects. Limb (2020) combines cool hues, indigo blues and royal purples, juxtaposed with the subtle tonal variations of graphite applied on the adjoining panel. Payne creates the form of the traced shape in a variety of ways—most often the strips of book cover are applied on top, in some areas instead carved away. With the shadow’s shape now defined by the strips, the artist then performs a Zen-like and labor-intensive process of drawing in the negative space. Working on top of the surface with graphite pencils adds another layer of texture and line, evidence of the artist’s hand and the passage of time coming into play.

Emily Payne Awash steel wire 60″ x 5″ x 16″ 2020

While the two-dimensional works are fascinating in themselves, they provide a dramatic backdrop and foil to the sculptural installations. Awash (2020) challenges human scale with a veil of lengthy wires suspended from a curving armature mounted high on the wall, their delicate lines sweeping down to near one’s knees. The thicket of wire suggests lengthy tresses of stiff hair, perhaps human or animal, the gaps in spacing allowing the viewer to see through it, in some cases easily, where spacing is more generous, or with greater difficulty, as at the top, where overlapping skeins of wire create a denser field. A segment on the far right appears as though clipped shorter, lending an element of mystery and the unexpected. Delicately suspended, the pieces come to life when air currents in the room cause them to sway or flutter.

Emily Payne Big Flare mixed-media 48″ x 36″ 2020

A two-dimensional work, Big Flare (2020) more closely relates to the pine needle shape that inspired the work. In this large-scale piece, vibrant hues of tangerine and coral anchor the image to the top of the support. The pale book-plates, in hues of tan and gray, morph into a lighter-hued ground as we descend in the piece; the splaying wire shadows also lighten, turning white on the ground of end pages covered with intricate graphite marks, and crisscrossed with a geometric pattern of orange book cover striping. While we know the actual botanical source, the shape here can also evoke the human presence, perhaps suggesting an a-line dress with spindly straps. Payne’s fascination with the flowing line of wire and the ways that linear shapes may weave and interlock comes to her honestly, her mother Nina Payne was an accomplished textile artist, her crocheted nest-like objects at times suspended with dangling tails of waxed linen. Acclaimed Bay Area sculptor Ruth Asawa was also a family friend, having attended Black Mountain College with Payne’s uncle. Asawa’s elegant crocheted wire pieces provide inspiration and certainly have helped to inform the work.

Near the gallery entrance Payne mounted a large installation incorporating three sculptural elements suspended from above and a large, red-hued book cover piece which is floor-mounted beneath. Bough Installation (2020) was created in the gallery with the final touch, a pool of black sumi ink, applied on the spot.

Emily Payne Bough Installation mixed-media 2020

While grounded very much in the real world of nature and plants, as well as the tactile and solid materials of paper, fabric, and wire, the conceptual overlay and play between two and three dimensions, foreground and background, light and shadow, lend the works a deeper aspect of complexity. They transport us, much as reading a book might, into an inner realm of thought and reflection.

Barbara Morris