Artist and
gallery owner Susan Christian worried that it might not be kosher to exhibit
her own paintings at her own gallery, Salon Refu, but many friends coaxed her
into it so she set up a show of her own paintings — not her most recent work
but some odd little flower paintings she did about 20 years ago. As with many
of Christian’s paintings, these take some getting used to.
In order to
explain why her work takes some getting used to I have to look back to about
1989 or 1990. She was doing paintings that I thought were too sparse and
inelegant. Minimalist painting is hard enough to like because there’s not much
there; so what is there has to be outstanding, striking in form and color. But
her paintings were not so striking. What stands out most in my memory was a
series of mountains — nothing so grand or exciting as, say, Cezanne’s faceted
views of Mount St. Victoire, but rather just a lump of a mountain with ground and sky, all painted
with very little variation in form and rather dull in color. But the more I
looked at them the more I began to realize that there was something strong,
unpretentious, yet audacious about those paintings.
These flower
paintings have much the same quality about them. They grew out of a series of
batiks she attempted after a trip to Thailand in about 1994. They are paintings
in acrylic on plain brown wrapping paper. Most of the pictures are of no more
than two little clumps of flowers with one or two blooms on sinewy tendrils
that either snake out from the edges of paintings or float on a flat, monotone
background. There is no way to describe them without them sounding clunky and
unappealing; yet I like them very much, and the longer I look at them the more
I like them.
They also
have cool titles like “Chastity,” “Remember My Name,” “Warning the Tourist” and
“White Music.”
There are a
couple with small clumps of flowers floating on acid yellow backgrounds that
are particularly pleasing, and a group of four small paintings on the south
wall on black backgrounds that seem to defy logic. Flowers at night visible
without light or displayed on black velvet like specimens? These are some of my
favorites.
“Warning the
Tourist,” an acrylic painting with collage is the largest work in the show and
the one that is totally different from all the rest. There are mountains and
sea and smack-dab in the center a collaged image of flowers that look like they
came out of a catalog. Something about this one reminds me of paintings by Fay
Jones, although it’s not nearly as strange. I’m not crazy about this one, and
it does not fit with the rest of the show.
Another one
that I like a lot is called “Snake.” I like it because of the intense pink on
the edge of a white flower and because of the strangeness of the circular form on
the bottom left edge of the painting. I guess it is an unopened flower bud.
It may seem
ironic, but one of the reasons these paintings are good is that the flowers are
not particularly lovely. This is an admittedly personal bias: I have an
aversion to paintings of beautiful subject matter like flowers and sunsets and
pretty but coyly posed nudes. The ART should be beautiful, not the subject
matter. If you just want pictures of pretty subjects, photographs are just
fine. Christian’s flowers are not beautifully arranged and are on the verge of
being wilted, so what you see is not the beauty of the flowers but the
aesthetic quality of the colors, shapes and placement on the paper, and the
visual interaction between the subject and the background. The placement and
stark simplicity of the flowers — the slap-dash quality of the painting — makes
the nuanced backgrounds come alive. Furthermore, these paintings do not look
contrived; they looked like they just happened. I strongly suspect that
Christian did not give much thought to what she was doing but approached the
pictures in the manner of an athlete or a dancer, without much conscious
thought but trusting that years of practice and study are ingrained in their
bodies, eyes and hands, which react almost independent of thought.
This is a
good show to see and maybe go back and see again.
Salon Refu, Thursday-Sunday, 2-6 p.m. through July
27, 114 N. Capitol Way, Olympia.
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