George Abend
Untitled, 1962, oil on canvas.
Lent by Carlson Gallery, Carmel, CA
Some artists specialize in making things which are beautiful or aesthetically satisfying in themselves, apart from any utility they may have. Abend is an artist whose life was devoted to making painting a source of pure visual delight. His works employ immense sensuous appeal and decorative ingenuity. The mastery of shapes and analogous colors, contiguous on the color wheel, so that the families of color do not end distinctly at any point but seem to "intermarry" with their neighbors. They are harmonious next to each other, they mix with each other, if that is true of relatives, without becoming gray or oppositional.
Thomas Albright
The chief goal of Art Criticism is understanding. Albright had a way of looking at objects which, for him, revealed a great deal about their meanings and merits. But his was a search for meaning or pleasure albeit systematically. Some will argue systematic scrutiny of art kills the satisfaction that art can yield. They assume careful study is aimed only at gaining information. Albright sought information mainly about the sources of his satisfaction or the bearing of the work on his world and his existence in it. Mostly art criticism is talk about art, a sport he enjoyed that he was good at. Albright had a wide acquaintance with art, especially the type he chose to judge; more than a mere recognition of the monuments of art history. If nothing else, such experiences gave him some understanding of the gaps between artistic intent and achievement.
Bernice Bing
Cosmic Gap #2, 1992
Paul Beattie
Roger H. Bolomey
Untitled, 1957, oil on masonite.
Lent by the Oakland Museum of California, gift of Alfred A. Bolomey
One cannot escape the impression that the feature in Bolomey's work represents a shift of focus from the object to the symbolic meaning of the act of creating it. In this work we see the crossing of the line from plastic art to dramatic art: the object reminds the viewer of an earlier dramatic enactment. The second implication of this work lies in the tendency of the picture to merge with the wall and to become an architectural element rather than a work attached to a wall. Now the image rests on the surface; it makes no claim to occupy deep space.
Michael Bowen
Cafe Life, oil on canvas. Lent by Phil Johnson
In Baroque painting the use of shadows suggests the substance of how the soul made itself felt. In Bowen's work there is the suggestion of contemporary mysticism: color becomes a spiritual opportunity --not merely the balance of dark and light. Balance by contrast is a conscious effort by the artist. This almost completely symmetrical composition employs balancing of the figures on either ends of the picture plane, at both ends to symbolize the opposed notions of joy and sorrow, vitality and death.
Bob Branaman
Evening Garden, oil on canvas.
Lent by the Oakland Museum of California, gift of Dr. Joseph A. Baird, Jr.
William Theophilus Brown
Brown is one of the painters who was able to pit areas of color against itself, deriving the form of his painting from that interaction. His work involves pulling receding areas up to the surface and pushing back areas that protruded, in order to flatten the picture plane. These paintings are always in motion and rich with paint. This is an example of direct painting and the painter has fun because he relies heavily on spontaneous improvisation, the sense of push and pull which turns the picture into a dynamic filed of forces.
Jack Carrigg
Firehouse Series-Purple, 1962, oil on canvas.
Lent by Triangle Gallery
These painting bare a strong link to the great innovating generation of Pollock, Rothko and, of course, Morris Louis. There is a great deal of emphasis on optical dynamics which release new energies or confirm them. The pigment is thick on prepared canvas to form overlapped color constellations reminiscent of Louis and Action Painting. But in Carrig's work, the heavy consistency of paint layers and the transparency of his color stripes, their slowed velocities and uncertain flow is influenced, not by natural process, but by the expressive inflection of the hand. The individual color notes detach themselves with extraordinary distinctness from a swarming melee of color shapes despite their intermingling and accidentalism.
Ronald Chase
Ancient Wisdom, 1971, mixed media.
Lent by David & Jeanne Carlson
Jay Defoe
Untitled, 1959, oil on canvas.
Lent by the Oakland Museum of California, gift of Jay Defoe
A potent kind of quandary is found in Defeo's early work. This piece shows a typical gusto paint surface with pigment layered onto the canvas and troweled around creating a seemingly infinite cascade of movements. Seeing the work as a whole, one is aware of an overall gray scale, somewhat unstructured white splashes of knots and colors. The painting refers the viewer back to the artist's act of executing it. Its imagery is of paths of motion, dancelike and trancelike.
Ralph Ducasse
The Pure One, acrylic on unsized canvas.
Lent by the Oakland Museum of California, gift of Mr. and Mrs. C. George Ross
Deanna Forbes
John Freeman
Some artists enjoy working with objects that have an affinity for one another. There is something in the nature of what they represent that decides the particular arrangement in which we see them performing. What Freeman does through slight variations of shapes, color, value, and size, is to bring similar shapes into relation to each other by a barely visible line, or path. The entire arrangement comes to life in the same way that an instrument in a symphony takes a solo, a clear and elaborate path, at times fantastic and incomprehensible as the uncharted course of an underwater landscape.
Dimitri Grachis
For a certain painter, the miraculous emerges in the discovery that the act of painting can evoke a natural world nature does not know. Even the most rational of painters working at the time employed some kind of intuition, some reliance on sources of imagery hidden mysteriously in the self. In this work, Grachis epitomizes the world in two symbolic images, a pair of mysterious disks that float above an implied plane while uncouth pictographs hover in vaguely dismal forms of uncertain significance.