A colorist finds his dynamic voice

What constitutes a distinctive artistic style? At what point in an

artist’s career can you recognize the painter’s work, even if you’ve

never seen a particular painting before?

All artists worth the name struggle with the issue of style, of

the original creation that is at once recognizable and impossible to

copy, familiar and yet totally novel. “Make it new,” the poet Ezra

Pound said, and the phrase became the anthem for everything modern.

It’s rare to be able to see this great struggle in progress, much

less completion, but the work of Larry Christy (Larry Christy Studio

Gallery, 1476 S. Coast Highway) will show you just that. Hanging on

the walls of his small gallery is a pictorial story of how art can

totally take over the artist, how method becomes style.

Begin with color. Christy is a colorist in the tradition of

Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, a figure who has cast a long shadow

into our time. You might think this simply means he paints large

color fields, but really it’s a way of painting, using “automatic”

methods: working spontaneously, without plan, allowing inner voices

to guide the composition.

You can see this kind of thing in Christy’s “A Lazy Afternoon”

(50x38). But he has already separated himself from his predecessors

with the suggestion of representation in the title. It’s a fairly

simple canvas, the familiar bars of color -- bands of florescent

yellows, oranges, pinks blended gently into each other. It evokes

light in August, and its title delivers what it promises.

But more interesting is “At the Circus.” Your eyes dance around a

large-scale (60x60) vibrant orange canvas. They dance because

floating around in the orange are amorphous, vaguely organic shapes

(“elements” Christy calls them). They range in clarity of shape. The

upper left element is cadmium yellow, roughly formed. The lower

elements are clearly defined against the orange in olive and Kelly

green. But sharpest is a small turquoise blue dab of paint --

turquoise against orange, shocking to the eye.

Something is happening here. “Elements” have emerged from plain

color fields. Both “A Lazy Afternoon” and “At the Circus” are

matte-finish paintings, with the only brushwork visible in the under

paint. The flatness of this finish makes the canvas almost static.

But the addition of form invites movement.

By contrast, “Breathe Color, Touching Air” (36x60) is an ethereal

blue-green study full of these floating elements done in a high

gloss. There are many layers of paint here; while true of the other

earlier paintings, these layers create depth rather than density.

Christy is struggling with something. The composition is full of

movement. Similar canvases demonstrate a dynamic change in his ideas

about color. Christy even drew lines into the first layers of paint,

wrestling with the texture, something he says was an “attempt to

compensate for not enough control.”

The next step in Christy’s stylistic evolution seems totally

unexpected to me. Such forward leaps of intuition and skill usually

are. He began painting sharply defined, architectural forms. He calls

this series, “Reflecting Windows,” a provocative name.

They are passionate pursuits of the pure expression of color.

It is the final emergence of a truly original style, the

resolution of the tensions and limits of working in color fields.

“Reflecting Windows #29” (60x36) is a lean, pared down, and

tightly controlled work of art. It is as if Christy is saying that

shape and color can never be perfectly expressed at the same time,

but this canvas is his answer to that tension. The colors are muted,

but each color is a pure exploration of the way colors operate on

each other, on perceptions of depth and space, on our notions of

harmony. Like other paintings in the series, there is a combination

of bars and curves that sit easily on the canvas. The colors

encounter each other harmoniously. Christy worked with each shape and

color individually, sometimes in many layers, sometimes few, working

with it until it was finished.

How does he know? What brought on this sudden change of direction?

People flock to “retrospectives” when they come to museums seeking

answers to these questions. There’s something about being able to

trace the line of thought back through the work that makes it seem

easier to understand. But you can study the early street scenes of

Rothko (yes, he painted street scenes, even portraits),

intellectualize them all you want, and you will never really know

what led him to “Untitled, 1953.” Only the artist knows this.

Sometimes, not even the artist knows. It’s intangible, illusive.

Talking with Christy, you get that impression. He knows only that

this is the way he must paint, because this is the way his art tells

him he must. He can vividly describe the problems he has answered in

the “Reflecting Windows” series, but its meaning to him is

self-explanatory: It means itself.