DAVID SEPULVEDA PHOTO
From bold brushwork to no brush work, five painters’ different paths have converged at Silk Road Gallery on New Haven’s arts-centric Audubon Street.
“New Acquaintances,” an exhibit that runs into February, brings together the work of artists Shen Dawei, David S. Chorney, Joan Cho, Julia A. Coash, and Luyi Xu in one of New Haven’s most beautiful and intimate galleries. The artists talked about their work at a recent opening reception, revealing their approaches to art-making and the inspirations that have informed their contributions to the exhibit.
Approaching the gallery from Whitney Avenue, large plate glass windows bring into view the spotlighted figure paintings of artist Luyi Xu, a graduate of the Yale School of Art (MFA/painting and printmaking). The paintings are notable in form and content: nude male figures against stark white grounds that up-end the historic canons and taboos of painting the nude male figure, especially by women.
The 19th and early 20th-century American realist painter Thomas Eakins was dismissed from his teaching position at the Pennsylvania Academy after removing the loin cloth of a male model before a class of women art students. This proved to be the last straw for the Academy after other incidents of questionable teaching methodology by Eakins, an instructor clearly ahead of his time. John Singer Sargent, a leading 20th-century American portrait painter, kept his passion for painting the male figure out of the public eye. It was not until after his death that his trove of male nudes was released to museums for safekeeping to be shown in a more accepting era.
Xu talks about her work at the artists’ reception. Dan Li photo.
Historically, women have assumed the role of muse and model for male artists, their roles as artists themselves constricted by societal frameworks that have long denied them parity at the upper echelons of artistic greatness. In this series, Xu challenges those conventions. She removes the proverbial fig leaf from the male body, laying bare prevailing gender dynamics and the privilege of males that have dominated the arts since antiquity.
In her focus on power relationships, Xu asserts a feminist message through the power of her brush and her drive to level the playing field. Xu’s austere compositions and figure manipulation are vehicles unconcerned with exacting realism as much as they serve to explore and unpack the social psychology of the way things are. Xu’s brushstrokes construct the physicality of her models as surely as she builds her consciousness-raising case against persisting chauvinistic paradigms.
A series of small watercolors by painter Joan Cho are realized without the conventional use of brushes. Cho said she found the inspiration for her Silk Road series while remodeling her kitchen. A trip to a local granite warehouse for a new countertop revealed a landscape of giant stone slabs, each with unique, lustrous, and organic patterns that have informed her exhibit images.
Though painting is not a full time vocation for Cho, it is hard to imagine otherwise. She is the winner of numerous awards for her representational plein air watercolor paintings. While most of her images in the show are completely abstract, representational imagery is strongly suggested is some works; a sunset landscape, undersea formations of coral and small creatures. Viewed in the abstract, the sprays of gold dust, flow of colors, texture, and irregular-edged patters are highly satisfying. A departure from her superlative representational painting, Cho’s interest in nature reveals itself in this body of work, inviting viewers to enjoy her spontaneous explorations without having to visit a granite warehouse, though that is highly recommended.
David S. Chorney’s high-contrast black and white paintings are tempered with whispers of charcoal that provide dimension and form in strategic areas of his of his large dropped methodology paintings. During the painting process, “nothing touches the canvas except the paint,” said Chorney.
Detail, Chorney.
While positive and negative shape combine to create the large emotive portraits, it would be a mistake to only consider the representational imagery, or to dismiss these as simply “face paintings.” It is in the layered drips and directional flow of acrylic paint that movement and texture conspire to form tension and chaos in the body of painted areas. Jagged and looping drips display lava-like intensity in their interface with white space, where contrast is greatest.
When viewed up close, the topography of paint layers and frozen drips provide a rich, tactile dimension, and an aspect of the paintings Chorney said he is continuing to investigate.
Julia A. Coash is a professor of studio art and art history at Albertus Magnus College. Her painting and brushwork are catalyzed by observations of nature and qualities of light that play on weathered surface textures. The elegance of natural vines have long been a subject of interest for the artist. Coash also has been highly influenced by her Southeast Asia sabbatical studies in calligraphy, Asian brush painting, and textile art, and by a background in ethnographic photography and cultural anthropology.
In this exhibit, Coash shows a series of small abstract paintings that present much larger than their physical boundaries. Each work embodies sweeping calligraphic lines and gestural movements that seem to extend beyond format edges. A painterly buffet of techniques and art elements includes varying thicknesses of paint — from the textural to the transparent, contrasting values and tonalities that overlap, with scumbling and pentimento techniques that result in a crafted build-up of layers and sense of depth. Every area of these paintings packs visual interest, contributing to the overall unity and energy of the works.
Artist Shen Dawei, who was present for the Gallery’s inaugural ribbon cutting last year, is showing a series of traditional ink wash landscapes rooted in his research of Chinese cultural history, calligraphy and idioms of China’s Song dynasty.
Dawei presents his landscape paintings in a circle format within a square frame, a highly symbolic shapes combination long recognized in Chinese culture. The circle’s significance is of oneness, perfection, and unity, while the square is said to relate to laws and regulations. Together, they are said to represent the “cornerstones of Chinese language and mindset.”
Adding occasional accents of color in a departure from traditional black and white painting, Dawei’s graceful and tranquil compositions are an homage to the “beauty of and grandeur of nature only lightly touched by human hands.”
“New Acquaintances” runs at Silk Road Gallery, 83 Audubon St., until Friday, February 12, 2016. Visit the gallery’s website for more information.
