Art seen is art scene

Alex Coolman

Bradford Salamon had it good.

He was producing art that sold almost as fast as he could make it:

charcoal portraits of celebrities from the music world.

He did Joplin, Hendrix, Marley--skillful renditions of faces that

anybody could recognize. And in the Balboa gallery where he sold the

portraits, business was humming.

“We had a niche,” said Salamon, 36.

As time went on, though, that niche stopped seeming like a cozy corner

of the art world. Rather, it started to feel more like a room with no

windows, a space in which his creativity was choked and dying.

So Salamon decided to try something new--something risky.

He moved from the Balboa gallery to a space on Old Newport Boulevard.

And he started pushing his art to some different places as well.

He stuck with portraits, but he stopped doing celebrities. He painted

a series of images of anonymous, somewhat hostile women--works that, in

his words, “reject the viewer on some level.”

The result was somewhat more complicated than he hoped it would be.

“The better my work’s gotten, the worse it sells,” Salamon said.

What was once a sure thing, financially speaking, has now become a

gamble. And as the certainty of making money from his paintings has

evaporated, Salamon has had to deal with some difficult questions.

Why get involved with art? Is it therapy, or commerce, or some

combination of the two?

Salamon, even as he runs a successful gallery representing a number of

artists, is still trying to figure it out.

His situation is not unique.

Take a look at some of the more interesting galleries around town and

one thing stands out: the art hanging on the walls isn’t especially easy

to digest. And the people who deal with the stuff, the people whose lives

are dedicated to creating and displaying it, can’t always explain what

the viewer is supposed to take away from the gallery-going experience.

That’s because it’s art.

It’s not supposed to be easy.

In an austere gallery along Pacific Coast Highway, Jayne Murrel is

looking at the color yellow.

Specifically, she’s looking at a painting called “Yellow Over Red,” a

2-foot square canvas by the Santa Fe artist William Metcalf.

The painting, as the title suggests, is a shade of yellow acrylic that

is brightened and intensified by an underpainting of red.

And that’s all it is.

There is no “subject” to the work, and there aren’t even any marks on

the canvas that might refer, however obliquely, to something in the real

world.

“Yellow Over Red,” priced at $3,000, delivers nothing more and nothing

less than what it promises: a compact, vibrant square of yellow over red.

Other works in the Metcalf show have similar titles -- “Orange Over

Yellow,” “Blue over Blue” and so on -- and they too showcase nothing but

color, nothing but the paint on the canvas.

Murrel, who runs the Mariners Mile Marine Center in which the gallery

-- the Charlotte Jackson Fine Art gallery -- is located, looks at “Yellow

Over Red” and smiles.

“I think,” she says, “Orange County is ready for this type of art.”

“Monochromatic” painting, as Metcalf’s work is called, is nothing new.

Kasmir Malevich and Alexander Rodchenko were making works called “White

on White” and “Pure Yellow” in the early decades of this century.

But the experience of looking at a totally nonreferential canvas is

still baffling for many viewers, said Charlotte Jackson, speaking from

the other gallery she runs, which is in Santa Fe.

Whereas the wild styles associated with Abstract Expressionists like

Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning used to provoke a standard response

from many viewers -- “My kid could do that!” -- Jackson said

monochromatic work tends to be met with an odd silence.

“People are a little bit afraid to ask what they’re supposed to see in

this,” she said.

And the point, as far as Jackson is concerned, is that there isn’t any

“thing” to see. There’s only the color of the pigment and the distinctive

style of the artist’s brush strokes.

“There’s nothing,” she said. “It’s what you experience” when you stand

in front of yellow over red.

Or orange over yellow.

Or blue over blue.

Whatever that feeling may be -- whether it’s awe or confusion or some

mixture of the two -- it’s a very different sensation than one is likely

to experience when staring at one of Neil Parker’s works in the AAA

Electra 99 Co-op Museum and Gallery, across the street from the John

Wayne Airport.

Parker’s assemblages are possibly the polar opposite of the serene

canvases in Jackson’s gallery. They aim to unsettle the viewer, with

grotesquely mangled heads of dolls and shellacked bits of things the cat

dragged in.

Richard Johnson, the man who curates some of the shows at the gallery,

talks about Parker’s work, and that of the other artists whose drawings

and photographs cram the walls of the small, claustrophobic space, as if

it were the only game in town.

The Orange County art scene?

“There isn’t one,” Johnson said. “The rest of it’s all just a bunch of

pretentious stuff.”

Johnson is aware, of course, that there are many other artists

producing work in the area, but he isn’t interested in the larger scene.

For him, the chaotic world inside the gallery is just as absorbing and

self-sufficient as the portraits of the women are for Salamon or the

study of pure color is for Metcalf.

It’s a world that most people aren’t going to understand, and Johnson

knows that.

But it’s OK. It’s art. And if it’s a little strange, it also seems to

feel just right to him.

Johnson stops in front of a display by one of the photographers

featured in the gallery.

“This guy holds a karaoke night here,” he says. “He’s totally happy

here.”