Something fresh at Sandstone Gallery

AT THE GALLERIES

One of the things that I most admire about what we now call modern

art is its innovation, its drive to constantly make things new (to

paraphrase poet Ezra Pound, who was in turn translating Confucius).

Never settling in one place, it is constantly remaking itself to

challenge the viewer, drawing on new media, and then abandoning it

for something else when this becomes tired or hackneyed.

Abstract art was its earliest innovations, generally beginning at

the turn of the 20th century when artists began to see the role of

art as more complex than a “mirror held up to nature.” Often objects

from nature were “abstracted” -- or you could say, broken down to

their most general geometric elements. Strangely, innovations in film

and photography contributed to these ideas, as artist like Pablo

Picasso and Georges Braque attempted to capture an object’s many

different perspectives -- like a woman’s face from the front, from

profile and the movement from one to the other -- simultaneously on

the canvas’s flat surface. It was highly ambitious.

This led some artists to abandon even the vaguest concrete

subject, focusing instead on a concept, mood or theme. Artists like

Mark Rothko or Wassily Kandinsky began to take their subjects from

aspects of experience that had never been represented in art before

or had only been represented by personification -- a god or goddess

figure -- like music. This move changed painting radically, from

allegory to a more complex and illusory pursuit of an idea.

Judith Anton, who exhibits at the Sandstone Gallery here in Laguna

(384-A N. Coast Highway), is clearly an inheritor of both experiments

with material and with subject, showing strong influence from

Kandinsky. Rather than oil, watercolor or acrylic, Anton uses special

fabric dyes on raw canvas. This gives her work both saturation and

transparency, a combination that has a distinctive feel.

A work titled “Copernicus” is a swirling set of impressions

suggesting the movement of the planets and astronomical calculations

simultaneously. Round balls of vivid primary colors swing through a

washed green ground, connected by strings of black. When spheres

collide, their forms and colors intersect and change, suggesting both

movement and physics. Triangles and pound signs dance rhythmically

together.

Like Kandinsky, Anton takes subjects from music. “Cool Jazz”

combines flesh and sage tones with four black spirals that suggest

variations on a theme (Kandinsky had a number of canvases titled

“Improvisation”). Here, the black lines that connect the shapes vary

in width, change in intensity, suggesting beats and measures, the

variations on a theme that comprise a jazz performance. This is even

more emphasized in two smaller canvases called “Soundbytes,”

utilizing golds, pinks and oranges, opening the idea up with more

space between figures.

Sometimes the material is the message in these works. Sandstone

Gallery founder Marge Chapman, uses collage. Both Picasso and Braque

began working pieces of newspaper into their paintings. This is now

famously called “mixed media,” artists often using too many different

kinds of materials to be named. Chapman’s “It Figures” is mixed media

on paper. Its basis is an abstract line drawing of a sitting woman,

surrounded with bits of textured red and black paper, tiny metallic

threads, and washes of turquoise and yellow paint, with touches of

gold leaf. It is a pleasing composition, where the eye wanders from

the texture in the foreground to the figure in the background.

Chapman’s work with female figures shows and eclectic set of

influences, including even Marcel Duchamp. His famous “Nude

Descending a Staircase, No. 2” attempted to capture motion on a

static canvas. Two monotypes by Chapman, both titled “African Dance,”

feature a simplified female dancer in the various stages of a dance,

sometimes jumping lightly in the air. The monotype format, slightly

grainy and rough, gives the set the impression of fabric. The paint

was pushed around the plate in vertical streaks, adding to the sense

of movement. Simple black and white (with some sepia brown tones)

makes it seem like a set of time-lapsed photographs. Another collage

work, “Homage to Oliveiras” layers jewel-toned fragments of textured

paper over the dream-like form of a human figure. That figure, seen

slightly from the side, seems warm and burnished, a harmonious center

to the surrounding fragments of red, blue, violet and green.

Many artists work exclusively in collage. Those artists are an

interesting hybrid of painting and sculpture, constantly on the

lookout for items they can manipulate in their art. In the 20th

century, anything from a delicate feather to a piece of sheet metal

can be found on the wall in museums. Mia Moore, another Sandstone

artist, uses collage in its “purist” form, collecting antique Asian

papers and using the fragments in her three-dimensional compositions.

“Asian Banner” combines three collage-on-paper panels under a split

bamboo beam. The splashes of red, torn pieces of old calligraphy in

Asian script, and a small image of Mount Fuji give the composition a

sense of nobility, violence and grace.

Collage artists see art as a kind of harmony that can be achieved

by taking parts of experience and reassembling them into a new whole.

Moore’s “Asian Chime” invites us to hear that harmony, fashioning two

fan-like strips of collaged paper with gold wire, bits of gold

bamboo, jade pendants, brass calligraphy, bone carvings and glass or

gemstone beads. Junk, even trash, comes together to create something

of beauty. That is the surprise of contemporary art, the freshness of

a new perspective.

* BOBBIE ALLEN is a poet and writer who has taught art theory and

criticism. She currently teaches at Saddleback College.