CALIFORNIA LANDSCAPE INTO ABSTRACTION

This show at the Orange County Museum of Art puts together some fine paintings and three-dimensional works from the museum's collection, from the earliest California Impressionists like Frank Cuprien (a personal favorite) and Edgar Payne to some of the most recent artists working with digital technology and other media.  It's something of a grab-bag, but a theme does emerge from the vast number of works on the walls: that representational painting and abstract painting are not as mutually exclusive as is normally, rather glibly assumed.  Simply put, all painting is an act of abstraction, in that it reduces a perceived three-dimensional reality, out-there, to a two-dimensional surface, and in a medium that bears little or no relation to that reality.  If that's not a process of abstraction, I don't know what is.

(In a related thought: It has long been my understanding that it's a short, straight road from the California Impressionists, attracted here in the early 20th century by the light and space their paintings celebrate, to the so-called Light/Space artists of the 60s and beyond, who used those perceived phenomena not merely as a subject, but as their medium.   Good artists help us to expand our experience of the world by showing us the infinite and unique ways in which it may be perceived.)

When confronted with an exhibit of such variety, we have a game in our family that helps us leave with some kind of a focal point amongst the multiplicity of objects: we ask, at the end, "Which one would you take home with you?"  In this case, Ellie and I each independently chose this great piece by the inimitable Tim Hawkinson, reliably thought-provoking, often plain funny, and always demanding of immediate, visceral response.

Titled: Concentric Circle: 705 Year-Old Tree Drawing, this particular example is a roundish work, approximating the cross-section of a tree trunk.  Working from the center out...

Hawkinson has hand-penciled concentric circles--we assume 705 of them, but I didn't count--following the date lines of the tree...

It's incredibly detailed, labor-intensive work, which draws our attention to the process of its making even as it delights the eye and provokes the mind with its double-edged simplicity and complexity.  If you're anything like me, you can't help putting yourself in the place of the artist, making those lines, one by one...

... and in a some strange sense participating in the making of the tree itself.  The work brings us as close to the creative processes of man and nature as we're likely to get.  And yes, it's an "abstraction."  Looking at it from a distance--and allowing the eye to compensate for the off-kilter quality of the circle and the irregularity of the lines--you'd likely take it for a painting in the minimalist, geometric tradition with which it plays with gentle and quietly pleasing irony.

A close rival to this delightful work, for both of us as it turned out, was this tiny landscape by John Lees...

The physicality of John Lees's paint is palpable.  He lays it on thick, overlays it, and conjures images out of great slabs of the stuff.  This artist had one of his first solo shows in Ellie's gallery (Ellie Blankfort Gallery) back in the early seventies, so it was a pleasure to see him again in the context of this show.  His picture of an armchair has long been admired--by ourselves and others--on our wall; and it appears on the cover of my book, Slow Looking.  Here's the image:

So having lived with this piece for more than forty years, we have a special fondness for it, as for more recent work by the artist.  We would happily have taken his little landscape home...