"Many Rivers"

This post duplicates the presentation of my work in my online exhibition with Galerie Cerulean, which ran on the website gallery until April 20, 2015 (and remains in the Archive section).

In other news, I have 12 pieces on view currently at Drawing Rooms, 180 Grand Street, in Jersey City, NJ. The show is entitled "Little Hand," curated by Anne Trauben, and includes 8 artists, some of my favorite contemporaries working in abstraction. Please follow this link for information about the artists, hours, directions, and public transportation options: Drawing Rooms website. The show will close June 28, and it's my first opportunity to show this much work this near a metropolitan area in quite some time. I hope you'll visit!

I have also completely revamped my own website, where you can see a few installation shots of that show, and selected works from the last ten years or so: www.ravennataylor.com. 
I plan to rotate works in and out of the website, so there will be fresh things to see periodically, but not too much all at once.

Gambit 2014   22.5" x 26" oil on paper

Retort 2015 22.5" x 30" oil on paper

Geologic 2015 22.5" x 27" oil on paper

Springhead 2015 30" x 22.5" oil on paper

The paintings were executed in oil paint, mostly on the paper called Arches Huiles, which is formulated for oil paints and solvents without the need for priming. I enjoy this immediacy, and the sensations of paper, the mix of drawing, fluid wash, stain and brushwork, the ability to change the shape and format in the process of working -- the imperatives of my materials.

The reference to rivers grounds my intentions in the dominant feature of the place where I live, as well as my ongoing preoccupation with time, its passage, and the evidences of what changes and what endures. Rivers also refer to the spiritual song by Jimmy Cliff, Many Rivers to Cross, which I was listening to somewhat obsessively in the studio last summer.

Many Rivers 2014 24" x 22.5" oil on paper

Untold 2015 22.5" x 30" oil on paper

Teeter-Totter 2015 22.5" 24" oil on paper

Broken Chord 2014 22.5" x 27" oil on paper

Sotto Voce 30" x 30" oil on wood panel

 

Natural History 2014 30" x 22.5" oil on paper

Ravel 2015 30" x 22.5" oil on paper

Glimmer 2014 22.5" x 26" oil on paper with fabric collage 

Thank you for your eyes and your support!

Plot Twist

©2013 Ravenna Taylor, "Holding Sway," watercolor, gouache on paper, 19 x 20 inches

This watercolor/gouache didn't go into my last online exhibition, the show titled "Plot Twist." It's about 18 inches square. The pale green is the color of this beautiful handmade Italian paper. I like to mix gouache and watercolor together, which makes a less predictable granulation and opacity than either one on its own.

This is the final weekend before my new show will be mounted in Joe Walentini's online Galerie Cerulean. I call the new show "Many Rivers," after one of the paintings you'll see, and also the song by Jimmy Cliff. If you'd like, have a look at the twelve images in my Plot Twist exhibition, at this LINK.

I'm looking forward to sharing the Many Rivers works with you soon.

Salon: Plot Twist

After my last post here, I became very busy with finishing up new work for my annual online-only exhibition, hosted by Joe Walentini at his Galerie Cerulean. In addition to completing the work I wanted to exhibit, I also learned how to photograph it digitally with a new camera I bought for the purpose, and how to process the images in my computer. It involved a lot of hair-tearing! But I'm happy to have crossed that threshold at last, something I'd meant to take on for the last few years, while I had continued to hire out my photography.

For my project, I prepared eighteen images, although I would only need twelve for the show. So today I am presenting here the six works that I did not select for my online show, titled Plot Twist, which is on view now in the "Archive" section of the gallery; the show ran in the "Main Gallery" through April 13, 2014.

The very small painting below, oil on wood, with an attachment for hanging that was cut from an antique kid glove, is a pared-down image that has fed many of the ideas I have worked with in the last year. The undulating line has two references for me: my love of rivers and streams, and all they represent to me; and the action of sand falling in an hourglass, which is an iconic image I have been preoccupied with for the last five years.

©2013 Ravenna Taylor, "Limbo," oil on wood, (with leather and pins), 7 x 5 inches

This next piece, a watercolor on toned paper, also makes those references, while employing the game-board grid that I have enjoyed for some years; it makes oblique allusions to my preoccupation with time, and the matter of choice vs. chance.

©2013 Ravenna Taylor, "Holding Sway," watercolor, gouache on paper, 19 x 20 inches

The following piece is an oil painting on paper, using the Arches "huile," a new material for me which I have been enjoying very much. This image brings together the game board, the central flow idea, along with my pleasurable preoccupation with road signage, in particular the diamonds that give graphic indications of curves with arrows and side roads breaking off.

©2014 Ravenna Taylor, "Retort," oil on Arches "huile" paper, 22.5 x 26 inches

The next is a small oil painting on linen over wood, and was also derived from road signage.

©2013 Ravenna Taylor, "Either Way," oil on linen on wood, 5 x 7 inches

It has been observed that my new work, especially what I selected for the online exhibition, has become very involved with holding the center, which is a departure from recent years where the eye was being led around the edges. I am even reminded a bit of work I was doing in the 1990s, where my focus was very much on the meetings of edges, and particularly in grids or even one horizontal line in reference to sea and sky. (Please check out work pre-2003 on my website: click HERE.)

In this following image, my sadness after losing many trees in my area to the winds of Hurricane Sandy allowed a gestural line to be the conduit of expression. From this work, other more linear ideas developed, and I think there will be more ways of bringing linearity back into my work in the coming year.

©2013 Ravenna Taylor, "Apostrophe," oil on Arches huile paper, 22.5 x 26.5 inches

Here is the last work I finished before turning to the photography project. This is also oil on paper, and it conflates the gestural work above with the central undulating line I began with in this post. 

©2014 Ravenna Taylor, "Broken Chords," oil on Arches "huile" paper, 22.5 x 27 inches

I pared down my "statement" for the show this year. Over the years, I have grown impatient with artistic statements generally, and I would almost eliminate the whole idea of writing one at all! But to sum up this post, which invites you to visit my exhibition online, I will offer you these 85 words:



In oil paint, watercolor, or collaged torn materials, I compose pictorial abstractions. Colors and geometrical forms are derived from nature, and from my fascination with systems, as can be found in measures, time pieces, gameboards and maps.

I delight in color, harmony, patterns, and ambiguities. In haptic terms, I am more a visual composer than a gestural one, working through layering processes with material and color; but always in the end I mean to reveal the trace of my own hand, a single human existence.
©2014, Ravenna Taylor

Chromatic Scale

Some new work is developing, in a slow way; incubating quietly and playing close to the chest. I see it fleetingly, in a dream sometimes. Or it occupies my thoughts in the way I find my cat occupying a place on the rug at my feet, silently, although I hadn't even noticed she'd entered the room.

I was driving to an appointment this morning. I drove over the Delaware River and it seemed as though many impressions suddenly felt the force of the current below, and they ran together in my mind.

I had written last week about my work of the 1990s and currently, in the context of my show online; I alluded to the influence of Mughal painting, which I'd seen so much of around 1997, with many exhibitions displaying the work as part of a global commemoration of the anniversary of India's independence from Great Britain. At that time, my painting palette had been most influenced by the life I'd had living among woods and fields, then transplanted to the Pacific coast and the concrete, treeless streets of San Francisco. The Indian paintings I was seeing opened up another language of color for me. I was painting abstractly, always (as now) concerned about how to invest the work with intention. I  saw then how color could bring all my feelings together - it was revealed to me not in the narrative content of those works, but the ways in which the close harmonies and varying intensities seemed, to me, to speak of the range of human emotion and drives.

As I was listening to the news on the radio, driving over the Delaware River this morning, I was thinking how odd it is that the most basic, and even base, of human drives are now expressed in the world through the most technological of means, and then the outcome is broadcast all over the world through the internet, radio and television. But nothing really changes enough, when it comes to destructiveness, greed, and violence.

At the same time, the prior week I'd been into New York and had seen a few really wonderful painting shows: Thomas Nozkowski at Pace Gallery; a brilliant group show called "Painting Advanced" at Edward Thorp Gallery; Al Held at Cheim & Read; and Andrew Masullo at Mary Boone.

Well, I'm starting new work and thinking about color, and my use of it, and about how color is being used by my contemporaries in painting. There is a lot of very saturated color in contemporary abstract painting, brilliant and bold. For the kind of nuanced and sensitive calibrations of color I most enjoy, I was excited by the group show at Thorp and the Nozkowski at Pace - although the inventiveness of the imagery keeps me interested in Andrew Masullo's work too - the "Alphabet Paintings" by Al Held are in a class by themselves.

So, driving over the Delaware River and listening to the news, and ruminating on all the many currents flowing into my awareness, I was visualizing new work, in particular a few drawings I've made recently, without much color. I came back to the realization I had in the 90s, about how the stories didn't really matter to me in the Mughal paintings; it's the colors, the expression of nature and design, and the way that emotional range and the coexistence of noise and song, dissonance and harmony, rage and joy, make that kind of chromatic composition very meaningful to me. As much as I love, even prefer black and white photography, I think I can't, for now, express what I need to in painting through the use of black, white and grey alone. 

Still, maybe because when I am composing I am using value as my scaffold, I remain a big fan of black and white photography. Here are a few books I recently found at a favorite bookstore, Panoply in Lambertville, New Jersey. You can find just about anything you want there, and things you didn't even know you'd love to see.

Resonances

There are still a couple more weeks to view my online-only exhibition in the AbArtOnline Galerie Cerulean (click here).

I was thrilled when the artist and writer Philip Hartigan chose to focus on my work for one of his blog posts (click here). I loved what he wrote, a sensitive reading of one painting in the online exhibition, the recently-completed "Decay of Sound," with extrapolations to the twelve works in the online show. Please visit Philip's blog, Praeterita, to see the post.

As I've said elsewhere, Joe Walentini's concept for his artists in this season was to provide new work alongside work from past years, to draw parallels or contrasts. Here is a photo of my studio wall, with some of the new work and some I brought out of storage alongside it, as I was contemplating my selections last February. I was very happy to give some works in storage another chance to be seen and put in some new context.

  

As you can see in the foreground center, the recently-completed "All The Time" has definite corollaries in the painting to the right of it, "Sotto Voce," from 1998. As "Sotto Voce" didn't end up in the final selection of just six works to complement the six recent works, I thought I would provide today a view of that and a few other works which I'd wanted to use, but in the end did not. (Some of these older works were documented in slides and then the slides were scanned, so if the photos are not as crisp as what we've become accustomed to, that's the reason.)

Ravenna Taylor, "Sotto Voce," 1998, oil on wood panel, 30 x 30 inches

Ravenna Taylor, "What Matters," 1997, watercolor on paper, 22 x 30 inches

Ravenna Taylor, "Efflorescence 3," 1997, oil on two canvases, 40 x 60 inches

I titled my show after a recent painting: Echo-location. These and other works from before 2002 were the most resonant with some of my latest work, because in my work of more recent years, I have been involved with patterns and systems. These earlier works, however, had evolved in the early part of the 90's, as I was emerging from a more naturalistic (though still loosely-rendered) study of landscape, and especially horizons. 

Ravenna Taylor, "Avowal," 1995, oil on canvas, 60 x 48 inches

I was then using a palette very much inspired by my walks outdoors, especially on the western fringe of San Francisco, at Ocean Beach. Around 1997, I began to see a lot of museum exhibits celebrating India's anniversary of independence from Great Britain, and my palette was strongly influenced as I was thrilled by the wider possibilities of emotional expression through color. Here is an example of a work in oils that used the same compositional approach, but with new developments in my chromatic expression, (as can also be seen in the watercolor above, "What Matters"):

Ravenna Taylor, "Cadence 2," 1998, oil on two canvases, 36 x 60 inches

These are just a few of many works I still own, which I had wanted to exhibit in the current online show, and which would have resonated with my latest work; my work has always been very involved with edges and meetings, the harmony or dissonance of one visual field meeting another, and the metaphysical or metaphorical possibilities I could explore in that edge. A number of other possible inclusions can be viewed in my website (which I must confess has not been updated since about 2004!) -- That is to be found here.

There was a leap in my imagery from the years 2002, and the one painting I included from that period in the online show is this one, "No Words."

Ravenna Taylor, "No Words," 2002, oil on canvas, 30 x 32 inches

More than a few others from the years between 2000 and 2003 are represented in the website; during that period, I was taking part in a figure drawing group every week, and the impact of that activity is reflected in the changed imagery with which I worked.

In a future post, I will put up some photos of work completed since my move to New Jersey in 2003, works I considered for this year's online exhibit, but which, like paintings pictured above, were not finally included.

Exoskeleton

Today I drove to Manhattan to deliver two pieces that will be exhibited with the Hullaballoo Collective (follow link to see my two works), at the Fountain Art Fair, located in the historical Armory on Lexington Avenue . We are excited that it is the 100th anniversary of the first Armory Fair! After long years of feeling isolated in my work, and having mostly an audience that exists only behind a computer screen, I am frankly thrilled to think that living breathing human beings will be respiring and perspiring in the same space that my collage and painting will occupy. People will be overstimulated and fatigued, but I look forward to seeing how my work holds up in that crush. I am very grateful to the Hullaballoo Collective for including my work and for all the work that various members have taken on to make it possible.

The lighting was fixed on the part of the wall where my two pieces are hanging, (above the chair in this shot), and before the show actually opened to the public. Thank you, Hullaballoos and Fountain.

 While awaiting the drop-off hour, I went to the Whitney to see the Jay de Feo survey. It was very moving to me in a number of ways. There are her ambitious oil paintings, but also many more personal and private works: drawings in mixed media, photos and photocollages, photograms, and objects. Here is a photo of a piece that was labeled "gelatin silver chemgram."

It touched me to learn that Jay de Feo had stopped painting for 4 years after disruptions in her personal life and her health, and then had returned to the Bay Area to teach; in a new and more secure phase of her life, she resumed her work, paintings informed by all the pursuits she had kept up in the intervening years, although she never did anything again as ambitious and strange as her "Rose."

After dropping off my work at the Armory, (near-missing a parking ticket), I went to Chelsea and managed to hear a good part of a panel about the work on exhibit at Cheim & Read currently, the "Alphabet Paintings" of Al Held. The paintings are monumental, stunningly so; but in their touch, they have a human trace. They are magnificent.

My online exhibition is underway, where I have twelve works on display now, with Galerie Cerulean at AbArtOnline. I can't help reflecting upon all that has unfolded in my life in the years that the exhibition covers, from 1999 to the present. Tonight, to have been among works, and also among artists, who tower over me, in a week that is a beehive of activity for the artworld, taking place in NY -- I moved to put myself in this proximity, and find myself feeling, sometimes, almost further away than when I lived in San Francisco.

For many months now - maybe nearing a year - I have been feeling a little like Rip Van Winkle, waking to find myself in a world different from what I knew when I went under the spell. But it's not just the surrounding world that feels changed; my inner world too, and the "container" through which I experience it, so that no aspect of life is untouched, and where I thought my feet were falling, suddenly the ground is different in quality, and the imprint of my presence too.

I have things on my mind I don't know how to say tonight. Maybe what I'm feeling is Spring, the lengthening days; or maybe it's the return of my embodiment. One feels a bit as in a dream sometimes, walking in the world insufficiently clothed. Just maybe what I'm feeling is an artistic breakthrough chipping at my fragile shell.

Pretexts

Recently, a Facebook friend, upon seeing some images of my work online, asked me about a shape that I use quite often in my compositions. It is a shape that I've been working with for the last few years, since 2009, having developed it through drawings of hourglasses. I was deeply preoccupied with time I was losing to recovery from an injury, the days passing, the years, and I chose the hourglass as a beautiful form and as a way to visually focus my preoccupation with time.

© 2009 Ravenna Taylor, ink, gouache, on found gameboard, 14 x 14 inches

Simultaneously, I also began using game boards as another way of visualizing time's passage, along with chance and choice, enjoying the historical evolution of gameboards alongside that of mapmaking. I recall that it all came together one day in the studio, when I picked up a gameboard I'd found at the flea market, and I started to paint in gouache within its format. Since then, I've continued to employ the quasi-triangular shape as an intrinsically interesting "character," and the grid as a way to explore the edges and tangent points of my feelings and thoughts; these are the main themes I have used as the structure for my work in recent years.

"Sorry," 2010, watercolor, gouache, 14.5 x 11.25 inches
© 2010 Ravenna Taylor

"Cross Roads," 2010, watercolor, 11 x 11 inches  © 2010 Ravenna Taylor

"Mount Of Knowledge," 2010, watercolor, gouache, 15 x 17.5 inches
© 2010 Ravenna Taylor

In my enjoyment of art of past centuries, I have at times almost envied the painters of the past, their commissions to paint the Annunciation, Saint Sebastian, Nativity, etc (not that I'd want to do that) -- I've seen so many such representations that I really don't see them at all anymore; what I see are the abstract qualities of the artists' interpretations: color choices, paint handling. In later centuries, dominant modes might be landscape, still life, or portraiture. In contemporary painting, we have an open field of possibilities for the generation of ideas.

"Coda," 2012, oil, linen, wood, 9 x 12 inches  © 2012 Ravenna Taylor

"Sound of Mind," 2011, oil on canvas, 21 x 23 inches © 2012 Ravenna Taylor

"Latitude," 2012, oil, linen, wood, 12 x 12 inches © 2012 Ravenna Taylor

In my own work, I honor the history of art. I compose my "pictures" to feel as though they might be representing something, without it being anything one might need to name or know. The shapes and forms of my compositions are necessary to me, but I don't need to tell that story or explain it. I just like to arrange and rearrange, juxtapose and recompose.

"Time Signatures," 2012, painted collage, 39 1/2 x 30 inches © 2012 Ravenna Taylor

In my next online-only exhibition, I will be showing some new work which continues to exploit the possibilities in these themes and subjects, alongside six works completed at intervals since 1999. The show is currently online, until April 14, at www.abartonline.com; there are twelve more images to be seen in the gallery archive, of work from 2011-12.


Photo credits, this post: Greg Benson Photo