Legacy in Continuum: Bay Area Figuration at Bakersfield Museum of Art March 22, 2012 - May 27, 2012

 

Mitchell Johnson "Torrenieri," 2011 22x26 inches, oil/canvas

     World War II shocked our global sense of reality. After 1945, artists of significance could no longer create recognizable images that had sustained the creative world for centuries. Figuration, which represented the world of the past, was obliterated; blocking, what seemed to be, all artistic roads. How were passionate artists to create? 

     Rather than working, as they had, with color, shape, line, and space to create traditional, recognizable subjects, in a known and conventional process, artists began to "deconstruct" art. They ripped aesthetic concepts apart, flattened the picture plane searching for a new painterly essence in unexplored territories. As their view of process became transformed, unexpected possibilities were revealed. They achieved immediacy with the newly invented acrylic paint, layering it in painting, drawing, collage and assemblage, and increasingly. in non-obiective images. They discovered unconventional methods and tools to build their art. In these radical processes, where aesthetic content was profoundly altered, artists discovered that color, shape, line, space, materials, and process could become their subject. They realized that when individual artistic components relate to each other in unaccustomed ways, they yield fresh abstract possibilities. Consequently, Abstract  Expressionism, as the orginal movement had been labeled, became the most expressive mode of the day. It was a complete reformation of the known artistic process and purpose. 

     In the San Francisco area, The Bay Area Figurative Artists expanded and integrated the thinking of the Abstract Expressions by seeing a profound connection between abstraction and figuration. Artists realized that their heritage need not be discarded: that it was possible to work in both modes simultaneously. Moreover, melding two forms of expression could be a metamorphosis yielding a perceptibly new aesthetic form. Certainly, this was no easy task. It requires that each artist develop an individual process while working in at least two modes of expression. Inevitably, when creating in two modes, the shadow of a third could possibly appear, giving increased richness to what might transpire, endowing art with greater sources of visual possibilities. 

     Courageously, the original Bay Area Figurative artists worked non-figuratively, often in an indeterminate space that emerged from vibrant strokes of their brush. Within this atmosphere, they brought back the figure, a subject, at that time, which was considered passé. David Park, an original Bay Area Figurative master, speaking for himself, but representing the vision of his colleagues "saw no distinction between nonobjective and figurative painting." Because it was a mode of expression that was an amalgam of non-traditional approaches, the first generation of Bay Area Figurative painters set a standard that could freely bring past and present together on the same canvas. 

     Today, more than 60 years later, there are approximately three generations of Bay Area Figurative artists and growing. They no longer come only from the Bay Area, but  from many places in the USA and the world. These contemporary artists have carved out paths that evolved in different and individual ways, based on the uniqueness of each artist, his or her life's influences, and the social milieu. With each generation, tied in part to the original artistic philosophy, the movement changes and the art broadens, becoming more global in scope and direction. Evident in this exhibition is a continuum. Contemporary artists reference and personalize powerful aspect of the original philosophy. They prove, in this art exhibition, that contemporary Bay Area Figurative art, founded originally by the most insightful of artists, continues to be even more expansive and vibrant with the increase of artists drawn to it and with each new work of art they create. Roberta Carasso, Ph.D. Elected member of the International Art Critics Association. Student of original Abstract Expressionist artists - Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and Hans Hofmann. Selected as a private painting student of Willem de Kooning. 

-Roberta Carasso, Ph.D. 

Legacy in Continuum: Bay Area Figuration at the Bakersfield Museum of Art March 22, 2012-May 27, 2012 was curated by Vikki L. Cruz featured paintings by Nathan Oliveira, Dennis Hare, Paul Wonner, Suhas Bhujbal, Elmer Bischoff, Kim Frohsin, Richard Diebenkorn, Joan Brown, Mitchell Johnson, John Goodman, Siddharth Parasnis, and Theophilus Brown.