11th Jul 2010
George Lawson Gallery, 49 Geary, 2nd Floor, San Francisco
07.15.10 – 09.04.10
Reception: Thursday, July 15th, 5:30-7:30
Lorene Anderson, Chris Ashley & Ann McConville, Angela Baker, Judith Belzer, Nan Grand-Jean
Roger Herman, David Maxim, Ward Schumaker, Marie Thiebault, Jennah Ward, Nina Zurier
Posted by Chris Ashley under 
05. Exhibitions, 07. Artists 
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17th Dec 2009
Evergreen: Green Paintings, 12.17.09 – 01.14.10
George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco
Chris Ashley, Judith Belzer, Gina Borg
Clem Crosby, Michael David, Alan Ebnother
Lynn Glaser, Nan Grand-jean, Marie Thibeault
Alan Treister, Tad Wiley, John Zurier
Reception 12.17.09, 5:30 – 7:30pm
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31st Jul 2009
GEORGE LAWSON GALLERY
room for painting room for paper
GALLERY ARTISTSAugust 17 – September 25, 2009
Shasta College Art Gallery
Redding, CA
LORENE ANDERSON, CHRIS ASHLEY, ANGELA BAKER, STEPHEN BAMBURY, JUDITH BELZER, RICHMOND BURTON, CHARLOTTE CAIN, CLEM CROSBY, MICHAEL DAVID, ALAN EBNOTHER, SUSAN FELTER, JUDITH FOOSANER, NAN GRAND-JEAN, ROGER HERMAN, TAMA HOCHBAUM, RACHAEL JABLO, SCOTT MACLEOD, SUSAN MIKULA, QUENTIN MORRIS, NATALIE OBERMAIER, JUDE RAE, WARD SCHUMAKER, NIICOLE SCHMOELZER, JESSICA ANNE SCHWARTZ, KIM SMITH, AMY SUDARSKY, MARIE THIBEAULT, STEPHEN WESTFALL,TAD WILEY, NINA ZURIER
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17th Mar 2008
JOHN ZURIER: NIGHT PAINTINGS
March 1- April 19, 2008
Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia
Although I haven’t seen, and unfortunately won’t see, John Zurier’s show of Night Paintings at Larry Becker in Philadelphia , I was fortunate to see all of the paintings at Zurier’s Oakland studio during a Sunday afternoon studio viewing before all of the work was packed and shipped, a unique and generous event.
Distemper is pigment in warm glue. It is easy to spread across broad surfaces, quick-drying, and changes color and is matte when dry. Matisse used distemper a few times around 1911-13, and Vuillard used it more frequently, having learned the technique when making theater backdrops. I remember Zurier first talking about using distemper as early as May 2006, and I saw the first three or four of these in his studio in December 2006. At the time he didn’t know that this motif and approach would develop into the large body of work it has become.
In this beautiful and rigorous current work Zurier applies distemper on raw linen with brushes and spatulas. Brushed and scraped, worked into the linen in layers, the paint is actually quite flat and dry looking, but the end result is enormously rich and vibrant, with surprising depth. His touch is direct yet sensitive, fast yet considered, plainly apparent and exposed, yet sensitive, daring, and more than a little mysterious.
Much more than simply a series of dark paintings, each work has its own intention and focus, its own palette, marks, and space, and its own mood and quality of light. The paint is often patchy or splotchy, exposing the linen and allowing it to function as another color and also as a background, which creates both an airy deep space to enter and an open, flat, factual material space to confront. Many of the Night paintings seem to begin with a narrow turquoise or blue stripe anchoring the left side. The stripe provides the viewer with a structural element, a stable, knowable thing we can hold onto like a handle, as we find our way into the darkness of the painting.
These two qualities, the airy darkness and the blue handle, are analogous to two characteristics of looking or walking without light. Think of what it is like to be in the dark: you wake up and open your eyes, but you don’t see just darkness; instead, your eye is trying to use all the light it can access to see something, and you often see things that aren’t there.
When walking in the lightless dark, when the power is out or it’s the middle of the night, what do you do? You put your hands out in front of you to make sure you don’t bump into something, or try to find something to hold onto to find your way. These paintings provide that experience. They aren’t really abstractions but realism, much as Turner presents the viewer with the experience of a storm, and– let’s push this a bit– how Velasquez explores the complexity of mirrors, Edvard Munch shows the way a burst blood vessel effects his vision, George Innes evokes a season and Albert Bierstadt invokes vastness, Giacometti gravitates towards compression, and Twombly spreads out a panorama.
Obvious precedents for these paintings might be the big three, Rothko, Newman, and Still, whose paintings use simple form and shallow, open, almost barren space to lead the viewer from confrontation with vast and broadly painted surfaces towards the observation and contemplation of emptiness that moves into emotion, from thought to idea, and back to the painted surface. The viewer’s primary experience and self-consciousness is a central subject, a kind of looping narrative: look; internalize; recognize; explain; validate.
Of these three precedents, the Night paintings are closest to Rothko’s more classical touch, surface, and space, as opposed to Newman’s and Still’s blunt, on-the-surface marks. But Zurier’s scale is unlike the more commonly known grand, encompassing environments of these three artists; like Newman’s landmark painting, Onement I, these paintings, in the vicinity of thirty by twenty inches are close, mirror-sized, immediate— intimate, reflective, personal.
What do these paintings do that other paintings haven’t? What value is there in a painting that prompts a personal, visual, and physical experience of darkness? Is darkness the same as emptiness: barren, hollow, unfilled, uninhabited, unoccupied, abandoned, deserted, exhausted? Returning to the idea of being in darkness, of walking through a dark house at 3am, driving on an unlit road alone, or walking in the woods on a moonless night, we know that these are situations in which we strain to see; we see things we aren’t sure are there, and we struggle to find something familiar and recognizable. In this kind of tense situation we are left to our senses, unaided, trying to find our way. It is quiet and we are with our own thoughts. Stub your toe on the leg of a chair and you know that darkness is not emptiness. Even in the company of others we are alone, unstable, trying to keenly use our senses to navigate the space we are in and our relationship to it. In Zurier’s Night paintings, the left blue stripe is an anchor, something to hold onto, let go of, and return to as we see into and enter each painting’s unique main body of layered, rich darkness. This is not a conceptual, language-centered experience, but one that is visual and phenomenological, about consciousness and being.
The exposed linen and varying densities of paint made by the layered, scraped, patchy paint make for an intensely visual experience. Looking into these varying densities is similar to how we try to see in the dark; our eyes use every bit of light available, and when there is little or no image to fix on we can see how our own eyes can project onto the dark screen before us images of the vitreous, the clear jelly-like substance which fills the space in the eye. At the same time the exposed linen contrasts with darker pigment, making possible a situation other than the night, as if one sees through and past darkness towards a light source, like being in a darkened room looking through heavy curtains or blinds out onto a sun-filled day, or how bits of light fade into a new day, or fade out at day’s end. In this there is quiet, something internal, solitude.
This final idea— seeing past darkness towards light— may not be Zurier’s intention, but it’s important to acknowledge that these paintings can stand up to multiple associations. His Night paintings are interesting because they reference human experience, but also because they enable a profoundly visual experience. These beautiful yet tough paintings show us and trigger a contemporary and timeless existential experience.
Chris Ashley
March 2008
See Zurier’s statement about working with distemper at Larry Becker Contemporary Art.
The exhibition of JOHN ZURIER NIGHT PAINTINGS has been selected by Director Okwui Enwezor to travel in its entirety to the 7th Gwangju Biennale in Korea in September 2008.
This essay is also published at Bay Area ArtQuake!
Posted by Chris Ashley under 06. Writing, 07. Artists No Comments »
01st Nov 2007
Chris Ashley <ca+AT+chrisashley+DOT+net> is an artist, writer, and educator living in Oakland, California
Look, See is a blog where HTML drawings are posted daily. See website for paintings & drawings. Current writing is on Look,See, past writing is at an older blog. Some Walls is a curatorial and writing art project.
Inquiries
Exhibits and Presentations
Bibliography
I have been making HTML drawings since 2000. The first blog where I did this (March 2000 – October 2003) may be dead; Look, See is the second incarnation (October 2003- December 2007); now it’s here.
The HTML drawings exist within a specific context- anyone who has followed the work for awhile will have a sense that
It’s all quite a bit more involved- intuitive, hand made, felt- than it might initially sound, which will be borne out by looking and seeing.
Photo Pete Baldes 
, 2006
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Painting on Water
Chris Ashley uses the original and rudimentary instructional set of the internet to make art, and delivers the results to his audience via the web. His studio/gallery is an online journal he maintains on a daily basis, a digital version of Malraux’s Museum Without Walls. Still, for all his accomplishments as a critical writer and community blogger, as a digital artist and rigorous conceptualist, Chris Ashley remains fundamentally a painter. This is so not just because he does also paint paintings in traditional media, but because the color work he creates without paint, the HTML images he is becoming known for, promote sensibilities historically associated with painting. Ashley’s roots are classical. The substantive value of his imagery will outlive any novelty of his working in HTML. He never forgets that his true medium is color and light, and he wields these basics with a deftness any painter would envy.
Ashley creates his art through coded instruction, simple commands that give his rectangles hue, width and breadth, and determine their location relative to one another. His method is constructivist but his manner is decidedly expressionist. He discovers his grid-based images intuitively, almost in spite of the grid, through a series of choices that accumulate and graft onto one another. The resulting cluster is organic, like rectangular grapes on a rectilinear stem. He feels his way into the color, and into the broader implications of his task.
Considered as a form of painting, Ashley’s HTML, virtual and non-physical as it is, prompts musings such as, “What direction is the light coming from?” or, “How big are they?” The works don’t conform to painting’s standard vocabulary, deriving their color as they do neither from mass tone (the light reflecting off an opaque surface), nor undertone (the light filtering through a translucent skin). Distinct from painting in this corporeal aspect, what seems most salient to the experience of viewing them is their transparency, how readily accessed they are. Ashley’s HTML images are to canvases as emails are to handwritten letters, ephemeral but profoundly convenient. What digital correspondence lacks as perfumed, autograph, keepsake, it makes up for in its immediacy, and the same holds true for Ashley’s art.
Ideas and images flow unfettered out of Ashley’s agile familiarity with his chosen medium and with art history, every day calling forth a new piece. The serial offerings often unfold around a conceptual theme cued in by the title. A week’s worth gives one the chance to see the development of Ashley’s running exploration and to consider the relationship between his formally constrained abstraction and the narrative references he is prone to attach to each piece by association. It is in this chronological accumulation, with images so easily archived and cross-referenced, that Ashley finds the real strength of his medium, creating an art which is as rewarding to ponder as it is to view. He is basically publishing, and his issued output accrues its own built-in currency. A visit to Ashley’s blog always feels like late breaking news.
Traditional painting, by its static nature, has a way of arresting and stretching time. Painted images reveal themselves according to inner clocks. By working in an iterative medium that is so responsive to the moment, so readily updated and refined, Ashley has found a fresh grasp on this plasticity, painting’s inherent ability to manipulate the perception of time. He enjoys both the suspended release of static painting and the serial accumulation of the web, a kind of painted journalism.
Artists have described the challenges of making online art as tantamount to designing on water. Ashley seems perfectly at home with the flux of this medium, with colors that shift from monitor to monitor and an oeuvre that consists at its core of nothing but electronically stored chains of zeroes and ones. Nonetheless, the basic language he chooses keeps him much more closely aligned to the painter’s vocabulary than to the dizzying technology of computer generated imagery. He uses the inherent constraints of HTML to create new freedoms, extending in a realm that is anything but solid the vernacular and experiential impact of concrete art.
Oakland 2004/ revised 2007
Chris Ashley: Statement
Written for the CD “Christopher Ashley: HTML
Drawings,” September 2004, ISBN (3-901102-22-1), edition S.p.N.LAUB
All of the approximately 782 drawings presented here date from 2002-04, and are made entirely with HyperText Markup Language (HTML)[1] to compose tables with columns and rows colored cells. They are not made using a graphics program, or other coding or markup such layers, style sheets, or scripting. I use Macromedia Dreamweaver to make the drawings, and they are made “by hand.” These drawings represent probably 60-70% of the drawings that I have made over the last three years in this medium.
One drawing (and occasionally two) is made every day and posted on my weblog (link)[2] except on days when, for some reason, I may not have network access. This public, journal-like practice is an important aspect of how the work is made, and is a context that provides another layer of meaning to the body of work having to do with audience, habit, deadline, accumulation, aggregation, cross-referencing, and reflection. These drawings began in the context of a community of authors of weblogs who were reading and linking to each other regularly, which influenced my practice, habits, and need to explain what I’m doing and why.
The drawings typically occur in small series of, say, twelve to fifteen or more drawings. They are ususally based on a particular subject, approach, or problem: travel or place; a memory; an idea or concept; a feeling, inspiration, or aspiration; responses to other art and texts; as well as the usual painterly issues of line, color, plane, space, edge, and scale.
I call these images drawings because drawing seems to me to be a medium more open to varieties of approach and material, whereas paintings seem to me to be physical object and require paint! However, it’s fine with me if other people look at and refer to them as painting. Clearly, as can be seen in some of the gallery views I’ve concocted (ex. 1, 2), I’ve imagined many of these as paintings, too. It doesn’t matter that much; what does matter is that I draw everyday.
I started using HTML because I wanted to make images for the web, and the idea of an image made with code embedded in a web page struck me as elegant, novel, and efficient. The weblog as a writing environment encouraged me to avoid graphic images. I didn’t want to have to use a graphics program, and save, upload, and organize jpegs and gifs. I
s liked the idea that the browser would read the code on a web page which would contain all of the information the browser needed to display the drawing.
HTML is an extremely limiting medium for making images. Edges of shapes are always hard, colors are always solid, and there is no texture. Every image uses the grid, and verticals, horizontals, and right angles are the rule. While the grid is a given, I work hard to make images that don’t make the viewer fixate on the grid, that don’t lock the eye down.
Regarding color, a broad range is possible using hexadecimal code[3], a web-safe palette of 216 colors can be relied on, and no transitions of blending or fading is possible.
At the same time that this medium is very limiting, these very limitations can be immensely freeing. It’s clear what I can’t do, and so I have to explore small twists and innovations to find new ways of working.
I also recognize the need to push against the medium only modestly because of my wish to be considerate of the user’s browser, bandwidth, and monitor. This is very much in-line with the painter Thomas Nozkowski’s commitment to small formats and canvas boards as a form of anti-elitism, as a kind of political and social awareness and engagement. I would like to note that two series of 2003 drawings are represented here by graphic representations- screen shots- rather than with the original HTML source code; the drawings in the Hippie Dreams and Mojave series each are very dense, with tables inside of tables resulting in several hundred and even thousands of lines of code each. These graphic representations were meant to solve bandwidth issues; the only graphic alteration of these drawings is resizing.
I’m very pleased to have this opportunity to compile these drawings in one location, to organize them in different ways, and to have others write about and validate my art. I’ll continue drawing.
September 2004
====
[1] Web browsers read a markup language called HTML in order to properly
display formatted text, images, and links on web pages. For example,
<a href=http://chrisashley.net/weblog.>Weblog</a> = Weblog
[2] Chris Ashley’s weblog: http://www.chrisashley.net/weblog/
[3] Hexadecimal code is a system for designating color using six characters:
#ffffff=white; #000000=black; #003399=darkblue, etc.
Photo Ann McConville
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