Visual Arts

Ari Post • September 17, 2015

“The Divine Comedy,” the National Museum of African Art’s current exhibition, on view through Nov. 1, toys with the gravity of religious symbolism and points an ambiguous, often irreverent eye toward the grandeur of shared mythologies. It is also a sincere and moving exploration of the notions of faith, belief and tradition, which gracefully entwines many conventionally rigid boundaries of religion. Further, it deals with troubling histories of colonialism in Africa and the assertion of Christianity and Western ideals over native spiritual systems.

However, to put it more plainly, it is also one of the most beautiful, visionary and elegantly composed shows in the city this summer.

Curated by the internationally acclaimed writer and art critic Simon Njami, “The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists,” reveals the ongoing relevance of Dante Alighieri’s 14th-century epic as part of a shared, globalized intellectual heritage. This dramatic multimedia exhibition includes original commissions and renowned works of art by roughly 40 contemporary artists from 19 African nations and the diaspora. An ambitiously expansive show that runs in pieces throughout three full floors, it is also the first exhibition to take advantage of the museum’s pavilion and stairwells, taking over the space like vines spread across a brick wall.

Celebrated artists like Kader Attia, Wangechi Mutu and Yinka Shonibare explore the themes of paradise, purgatory and hell with video, photography, printmaking, painting, sculpture, fiber arts and mixed-media installation. In so doing, they probe diverse issues of politics, heritage, history, identity, faith and the continued power of art to express the unspoken and intangible of this life and beyond.

Hell is in the basement. With a dark and cavernous open floor plan, the gallery is transformed into a harmonious chaos of navigable space, a cacophony of sounds and eerie spectacles where artworks and installations literally fall on top of one another. (This author chose to start at the bottom, preferring, if you will, the ascent to heaven to the descent into the netherworld.)

One of the most troubling if beautiful pieces in the gallery is a heavy boat made of burnt poplar by Jems Robert Koko Bi, “Convoi royal (Royal Convoy),” which is filled to the brim with roughly carved wooden heads. Reminiscent in spirit of paintings by American artist Kerry James Marshall, this is an incredibly redolent confrontation with the strange, spectral atrocities of the Atlantic slave trade and the subsequent loss of identity among countless native African cultures.

In a similar vein, it is impossible to ignore “Tyaphaka” by Nicholas Hlobo, a lumpy, python carcass-like sculpture made from rubber inner tubing and ribbon that sprawls across the gallery floor. It feels almost nauseating, like a sack of bodies devoured by a monster, or the snake leaving Eden and taking with it in its belly the now tainted souls of man.

At the entrance (or in my case, the exit) sits a monumental sculpture by Wim Botha, “Prism 10 (Dead Laocoön).” Blurring the lines of historical connection, this sculpture is a take on the Greek Hellenistic masterwork “Laocoön and His Sons,” as if it were set on fire to reveal that beneath the white polished marble of the original sculpture lies a framework of brittle, jagged and black coal. It is the veritable fruit of the underworld, the destructive but necessary commodity of industrial progress that is excavated under oppressive labor conditions and transformed to smoke in order to fuel our economic consumption.

Purgatory lines the stairwells and the pavilion, and here there is no work more transfixing than “The 99 Series” by Aida Muluneh. A series of manipulated photographs of a woman covered in chalky white paint and wrapped in striped cloth, the duplicity and fractured spirit of the individual is starkly and breathtakingly rendered, as the disorientation of space, dimension and human anatomy speaks for a sort of judgment and inquisition, either by one’s self or a higher power.
Walking into the galleries of Heaven is bewitching, for this is a paradise represented not in the image of angelic Hollywood depictions or in the Vatican gift shop, but as a sort of pagan, polytheistic cabinet of curiosities, where all are welcome — but not as it could ever be imagined.

The toxic, ethereal beach scenes of Youssef Nabil have a violently saturated exuberance. The photographs show a man wrapped in cloth by the ocean with the sun setting radiantly on the horizon, portraying an almost overwrought notion of heaven’s divine beauty as something that we can’t really see, perceive or understand through our earthly lenses.

Of course, the relentless, bizarre, Hieronymus Bosch-like sculptural installation by Jane Alexander is totally unignorable. Like a fairytale nightmare, a bizarre, incomprehensible drama unfolds on a field of granular red clay, with figures of mice on men’s bodies leading a cart being dragged by bird-headed slaves. The cart is wrapped in freight packaging, and on the top sits a leather chest with an inlaid postcard of the Madonna and Child, upon which a lamb presides over the entire scene. There are more birdmen guarding and directing traffic up a rickety wooden ladder that leads through forced perspective up into the presumed heavens. There is also a sort of voodoo colonialist ghost with scythes and machetes on his belt, black feathers for a head and giant foam hands the likes of which you typically only see at a Green Bay Packer’s game.

There is almost nothing more I can say — or, rather, I don’t want to infect the curiosity by trying to connect it to literary or literal metaphors — but this exists and it has to be seen. I have never in my life experienced a piece of work provoke so much discussion among museum attendants.

Every one of us has a unique understanding of life, love, death and the beyond. Whether or not we believe in heaven and hell, our moral compasses are invariably catalyzed by that eternal logic of good versus evil, decency versus vulgarity. Through “The Divine Comedy,” the Museum of African Art helps reveal that one person’s vision of heaven, purgatory or hell might not match another’s, yet we are all driven by our conflicts and trials with humanity.

Ari Post • August 17, 2015

One of the reasons that museum exhibitions of photography are so satisfying, I think, is because we connect with the way history looks and feels, even if the inexhaustible burden of its hard, underlying truths can be painful to confront. In a way, history is like Mel Gibson: it’s a beautiful face if you overlook the loathsome, backward ideology it conceals.

This pervasive but fairly unarticulated aesthetic fixation is responsible for a number of recent pop-culture fads, many of which exist among the urban hipster subspecies: the revival of fashion accessories like pinstriped fedoras and horn-rimmed glasses, the jaw-dropping surge in vinyl record sales, the general love for all things ‘vintage.’

Sometimes we want to look behind us to feel the past, but it’s tough to think about what we are actually looking back on. (For a good time, go watch Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris.”).

Take for example the unfolding national debate over the Confederate flag. My family is from North Carolina, and I have borne witness to the genuine affection that many Southerners feel toward the flag’s symbolism and the pride it elicits. This does not mean I agree with these sentiments (by all means, please take down those flags), but I understand what it means to be attracted to something that carries a burden.

Clearly, the Smithsonian Museum of American History is not hurting for attendance; it gets more visitor traffic on a given weekend than most of our art museums get throughout an entire summer season. But for those of us with cravings for a history, less moderated by textbook timelines and Hollywood endings, photography exhibitions at the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery and other art-focused museums around the city offer refreshing alternative visions.

Right now, at the Phillips Collection’s wonderful new photography exhibition, “American Moments,” I could not help but embrace this strange feeling of guilty nostalgia toward ideas and realities that are better off left in the past.

“American Moments” showcases a selection of mid-20th century images of American subjects from the Phillips Collection, including Modernist work and street photography, documentary expression and photojournalism. It shows us our country’s past as we crave to envision it, without omitting the harrowing struggles, isolation and oppressive environments that bore not only great thinkers, artists and innovators, but the nameless huddled masses, long and forever forgotten.

Like the advent of photography itself, the exhibition starts with the city, the towering industrial wonderlands whose skyscraping mysticism and sprawling shadows have mirrored the ambitions of generations of dusty dreamers. The city became one of our most potent symbols after World War I, and photographs by Berenice Abbott and Paul Strand, among others, capture the roiling speed of its physical and cultural development.

Abbott documented the transformation of New York City. In “Canyon: Broadway and Exchange Place” (1936), she points her lens upward toward the towering buildings that blot out the sky, and that dwarfing sense of scale in experiencing a new city will hit you in the gut.

The corresponding galleries explore more of the American landscape, areas of rural and industrial labor where cornfields and expanses of Standard Oil pipelines yield a menacing, inexhaustible geometry to the oppressive low-wage environments of the working class. Here the photographs of Esther Bubley prove to be an indomitable force, which threads throughout the entire show.

The next gallery, titled Scenes from the Road, are right from the grand tradition of American myth, from Lewis and Clark to Jack Kerouac, “Easy Rider” to “National Lampoon’s Vacation,” even my own father’s 1966 cross-country road trip at the age of 17 in a Volkswagen van. Traveling our country is like a rite of passage, a tradition of the singular individual, of the non-collective, which feeds the cultural ego-myth that Americanism so grandly fosters. These photos — notably Bubley’s photographs of Greyhound bus depots and Alfred Eisenstaedt’s stunning photograph of a crowded Union Station in 1934 — show the crumbling of the facade as well as the inner heroism of such journeys.

The exhibition then unfolds into a profound meditation on the conflicted humanity of a developing country, offering postwar portraits of punch-drunk (and flat drunk) soldiers in hazy bars with their spritely, well-tailored women, adjacent to suburban streets where young baby boomers run amuck. In some ways the show culminates with images from Bruce Davidson’s devastating “East 100th Street Series,” which documents desolated neighborhoods in New York City in the ’60s. These noble, sober-eyed portraits and street scenes lay out the generational resonance of our heritage and point to the dust-like impermanence of our lives, which are no less dignified and beautiful for it.

Yes, the photographs are enchanting, and they will make you yearn for something fleeting and implacable (if nothing else, an old-fashioned camera with black-and-white film). More important, and especially in light of a recent game-changing Supreme Court decision, they are an opportunity to reflect on how far we’ve come as a society and a reminder of the roads we ought not to go down again. We are fortunate to live in the present, but let’s not forget the grey areas, the tarnish and silvery moonlight of our past.
[gallery ids="102153,132970" nav="thumbs"]

Ari Post •

We are welcomed into the National Gallery of Art, just past its pantheonic atrium, by the paintings of Manet, Renoir, Pissarro, Monet, Cassatt, Degas, Morisot — those visionaries who built a bridge between the classical tradition and the modern era.
The early Impressionists created some of the first work within the Western canon that does not require a religious, historical or scholarly key to be fully appreciated. These are secular images of mundane humanity — a woman reading a newspaper, a man staring out the window — and scenes of fleeting naturalism, like a sunset over an open field or fruit scattered across a wooden table.

Strange to think that this could be considered an act of defiance, but in the age of the French Academy the subject matter of art floated on a lofty plane; the depiction of laborers, pedestrians, dirty urban street scenes and ordinary wheat fields was renounced as vulgar, even depraved.

Say what you will about the brushwork and color palettes of the Impressionists (which are indeed heart-stopping), the real enduring power of that brassy and quarrelsome gaggle of painters is their work’s ability to connect to a mass audience — now for well over a century.

For two reasons, then, one is stunned to encounter the work of Gustave Caillebotte in the National Gallery’s current retrospective, “Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter’s Eye,” on view through Oct. 4. First, his work is immediately iconic, with many pieces as bracing and unforgettable as established Impressionist masterpieces such as Monet’s “Woman with a Parasol,” which hangs nearby. Second, and in light of this, it is baffling that no one seems to have heard of him.

(It should be noted that Caillebotte is far from unknown among the many artists and curators with whom I have spoken. In fact, he is a frequent favorite, a sort of beloved secret.)

Poised to rectify Caillebotte’s status among the leaders of early Impressionism, the National Gallery exhibition tackles this conundrum head-on, revealing the odd circumstance that underscores Caillebotte’s relative anonymity: He came from money.
Caillebotte’s family owned a successful textile business. Being financially secure meant that he never needed to make money through his paintings. Because he did not sell his work, relatively few of his paintings have entered public collections. Furthermore, as a contemporary of Degas, Monet, Renoir and others, he was also an art collector. Upon his death much of his sizable collection was willed to the state, becoming the cornerstone of France’s national collection of Impressionism. Ironically, this bequest overshadowed his own reputation as an artist.

With his paintings shielded from public view, Caillebotte’s significant role in the development of Impressionism receded. He remained largely undetected until a series of exhibition late in the 20th century.

However, when finally confronted with his work, all this history suddenly seems like a trivial footnote. It is a feeling that takes hold the moment you enter the exhibition galleries, with the very first painting on the right, “Portrait of a Man.” The cool quality of the light as it breaks across the planes of the subject’s face and vest, with the delicate lace curtain and iron window guard so succinctly rendered, shows an artist in complete control of both medium and style.

There is also a tremendous sense of soul to the man in the painting. This chilling distinctness of inner life, of self and spirit, reverberates through of all of Caillebotte’s portraits. But to speak of the painter’s distinctive qualities is to say nothing of his noteworthy artistic evolution.

Caillebotte began his career exploring a Paris in transition, detailing the city as it was transformed by large-scale renovations, beginning in the 1850s, guided by Baron Haussmann. With immense street scenes and glimpses through parlor windows in his portraits, he examined the city’s new steel bridges, wide boulevards, ample sidewalks and uniform buildings. Through his still-life paintings of the Parisian markets — the butcher shops, patisseries and produce stands — we see the city’s lush offerings. Surprising and wonderful, these works are the missing link between the vanitas of near-nauseating banquet pieces from the Dutch Golden Age and Wayne Thiebaud’s window displays of cakes, pies and confections.

After showing with the Impressionists in 1882, Caillebotte stopped exhibiting regularly with them, and by the end of the decade he had moved from the city to the suburbs. There, he painted boating and garden scenes, and ultimately devoted himself to the pursuit of landscapes (likely influenced by his increasingly close friendship with Monet).

?As you proceed through the exhibition, you can actually watch as his brushwork loosens and his colors leave the pearly blue hues of the city behind, becoming far less restrained.

In the final gallery, there is a painting called “Linen Out to Dry, Petit Gennevilliers.” A small cottage sits on the edge of a river at what initially looks like the base of an unfinished mountain range. Then you realize that what you see are not mountaintops but white linens billowing in the wind. It is nearly a study rather than a finished painting — in many areas the raw canvas is visible between the loose brushwork — except that you can taste the air of the countryside.

As Impressionism goes, the conjuring of some Transcendental ether is quite a profound, if ridiculous-sounding, achievement. But it is one of the pleasures of this exhibition to get caught up and whisked away by the discovery of these new and eternal moments of painting.

Gary Tischler • June 22, 2015

People talk a lot about the Greatest Generation, that generation of Americans who lived through the Great Depression and World War II.  Every year, the World War II Memorial becomes a celebratory site of veneration and commemoration for dwindling numbers of veterans of the war, many wearing uniform jackets and medals from campaigns across world-wide theaters of combat.

Last weekend at the Kennedy Center’s Concert Hall, a different and still lively group of members of that generation—maybe they were all the same—helped fill the hall to capacity for town.  Some surely must have  been veterans,  but most of them came not to remember the war but the songs and music that accompanied them through the war and beyond—and the one man who sang those songs to perfection to the point of being unforgettable.

They came to hear the songs and music of Frank Sinatra in a two-night program, “Let’s Be Frank: The Songs of Frank Sinatra,” by the National Symphony Orchestra Pops and its director Steven Reineke.

This was their music, some of it sung by a remarkably skinny kid from Hoboken, who arguably became America’s first teen idol and vocalist as superstar. Later, that very same man transformed into a sophisticated, tipped-hat, cool guy, movie star and catnip for the ladies and crooned unforgettable and emotionally true songs from the Great American Songbook.  That later incarnation was Frank, the cool leader of the Rat Pack, the soulful male torch singer of rueful romance at three in the morning.

They knew and, more importantly, remembered their man and their own lives.  “I was 15 when I heard him for the first time,” an 87-year old lady told us.  Sitting in front of me, two women snapped their fingers through many of the songs, in tempo.  Some of them were frail, and some had walkers, but all of them made it to their feet when singer Storm Large sang “My Way” and did it her way.

Reineke, who is the epitome  of  pops conductor as pied piper, led the proceedings orchestrally through “New York, New York” and “Mack the Knife.” Then, he introduced, one by one, and bore the responsibility of carrying the program through the canon of Frank Sinatra.  Maybe not everybody appreciated over a long career and life the personality of Sinatra, but nobody had ever had the gall to disavow his singing the songs that were as clean as as a cold Scotch on the rocks.

Frankie Moreno, Tony DeSare and Ryan Silverman all carried themselves, each in their own way as youthful versions of Sinatra—a little snap of fingers, light feet, the stance, the pop of classic pop music and each had his own version of fizz.  Moreno nailed the accepting defiance not far from the surface of “That’s Life,” and DeSare had a real soulful touch for “Night and Day,” “My Funny Valentine” and “I Have Dreamed” from “The King and I.”  Silverman added sheen and silver to the longing “Moonlight Becomes You.”

Moreno, DeSare, Silverman, Broadway and lounge stars all, had a cross to bear, which is that they were singing in the shadow of the Chairman of the Board.  

Storm Large, a remarkably original singer with a pedigree that goes from rock to torch in a rueful heartbeat, had no such goal.  She could be entirely herself, which is a tall, almost regal, blonde woman with a rangy voice and do the songs justice.  She didn’t wrestle with them. She didn’t parse and spin. She just sang: “The Best Is yet To Come,” “Come Rain or Come Shine” and, of course, “My Way.”  Large sang those songs not with Sinatra stylings, but with Sinatra’s gift for getting to the heart of an emotion.

That was some generation, that generation. That was some music that generation lived, worked, fought and swayed to in a ballroom.              

Gary Tischler • May 21, 2015

There is a lot more to Steven Knapp, 16th president of the George Washington University, than meets the eye.
Standing up and speaking at the George Town Club recently, the last of the spring speakers in Georgetown Media Group’s Cultural Leadership Breakfast Series, is one sort of person, an affable, impressive man talking about a range of subjects, but focused on the university’s rise to its own cultural leadership role in Washington.

But this is the same man who – when he became president of the university in 2007 after a stint as provost at Johns Hopkins – focused on building the stature of the university as an “intellectual contributor to the solution of national and global problems,” presided over the building of a new Science and Engineering Hall and hired a neurobiologist as president of research.

Talking with him later in a corner of the George Town Club, and reading about the man on paper, you get a sense of how it all fits together.

“You can no longer focus on one thing in terms of leadership, in terms of the kind of university we are,” he said. This, to him, is about being an urban institution of learning in Washington, “the most unique city in the country.”

What’s happened is also a reflection of the man who wanted to be a percussionist and still plays, who thinks that Dostoevsky is relaxing reading and who bonded with students who were initially skeptical of him by participating (at some risk) in a snowball fight.

His memberships and leadership in any number of organizations reflect a drive toward cross-pollination, not only of disciplines but of institutions and of intellectual and artistic taste. He has seen the future – for quite a while now – and finds it rife with opportunities for collaboration.

“Our world,” he has said, “has reached a level of complexity at which problems can no longer be solved by relying on the contributions of any single discipline.”

You have to think a little about his specialty: Romanticism, literary theory and the relation of literature to philosophy and religion. A longtime teacher of English literature at the University of California, Berkeley, Knapp is used to dealing with intersections in thinking and creating; he knows how poetry can become infused – in the case of a Blake or a Coleridge – with matters near-holy.

The arts were a place rife with opportunity. GW was a major player, along with Arena Stage and, later, other universities and theater companies, in the National Civil War Project conceived by choreographer Liz Lerman, a GW alumna. “It was something important, and it was a chance to work with other institutions for me and for us. It was a great experience.”

“The arts are the source of innovation, a constant search for innovation, and we have to do everything in our power to become involved, to innovate and lead, in the arts,” he said.

His belief and focus on enhancing partnerships with neighboring institutions couldn’t be better illustrated than by the moves GW and Knapp have made over the last two years.

In 2014, GW joined with the National Gallery of Art to assume responsibility for the Corcoran, saving the venerable museum and its art school, which was merged into GW’s Columbian College of Arts and Science. According to Knapp, there will continue to be art on display in the landmark 17th Street building – the National Gallery, which has control of the collection, is planning to mount “Corcoran Contemporary” exhibitions and to show works representative of the Corcoran legacy – free of charge. The college is now called the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, the plural suggesting that studies in the non-visual arts will be added.

The university also took under its wing the Textile Museum, a small, almost unassuming institution of the kind often described as a hidden treasure. Hidden no longer, the Textile Museum moved from its former location on S Street to its current one on the GW campus at 21st Street. Its new building, connected to historic Woodhull House, now home to the Albert H. Small Washingtoniana Collection, is part of the complex called the George Washington University Museum and the Textile Museum.

In the May 6 issue of The Georgetowner, Ari Post called the Textile Museum’s “Unraveling Identity” exhibition “a well-earned retrospective of the museum’s historic collection of textiles, spanning centuries and almost every continent.”

In addition, the university has a high functioning, high profile performing arts center at the Lisner Auditorium, where Executive Director Maryann Lombardi oversees a program laden with global performers and artists.
It’s all of a piece for Knapp: science and pragmatics, the Economics Council as well as the NSO board, drums and snowballs, art singular and the arts plural, textiles and Washingtoniana, being part of the city and a citizen of the world. His wide embrace suits a university whose mission – from its namesake – was and is to “educate future leaders, not only for the nation, but for the world.”

Ari Post • May 11, 2015

In the decade following World War II, a 40-year-old Dutch immigrant named Willem de Kooning dominated New York City’s art scene. With a few fellow painters, he guided the evolution of Abstract Expressionism and defined an era of American art that would change the postwar world.

At this height of power and influence, de Kooning was – for fellow artists if not for the press, who favored in personality the cowboy brass of Jackson Pollock and the fierce erudition of Mark Rothko – a vortex, whose talent, sensibilities and ideas pulled almost any aspiring painter into its overwhelming influence.

This was when he married Elaine, an aspiring young painter who would become his first wife and, ultimately (despite periods of long separation), his lasting life partner.

While Elaine de Kooning (1918-1989) would have been the first to concede the great influence her husband had on her artistic development, she took her long and illustrious career down a road that almost no other painter successfully traveled, merging Abstract Expressionist aesthetics with portraiture.

Elaine de Kooning managed to navigate and manipulate the roiling tides of Abstract Expressionism, whose muddy, streaked and pock-marked canvases defied taming, to achieve nuanced faces and expressions, delicate gestures, postures and anatomy, without surrendering the style’s spontaneous energy and unpredictability.

At the National Portrait Gallery through January 2016, “Elaine de Kooning: Portraits,” takes us on a retrospective journey through de Kooning’s evolution as a portrait artist, covering the 1940s through the 1980s. A beautiful and refreshing exhibition, it shows that de Kooning is far too bright a talent to linger any longer in the shadow of her husband’s legacy.

The paintings from the 1950s, amidst the pull of her husband’s influence, have a sort of whirlpool effect: all lines and shapes are pulled as if by a black hole toward the center of the canvas – this epicenter sometimes being a pair of crossed hands, sometimes even just the button of a jacket.

Faces are often less defined, sometimes smudged out entirely. On the whole, these effects, while attractive (in fact, among my favorite in the exhibit), almost suggest that de Kooning was still struggling to reconcile an unwieldy abstract approach to fit the representational constraints of portraiture.

Her 1952 portrait of her husband is a good example of this, his entire face reduced to an aquiline nose and a tuft of hair on a muddy pink ring of paint – though it still manages to reveal the man clearly in caricature if you know what he looked like.

The second gallery devotes a great deal of space to de Kooning’s series of portraits of President John F Kennedy. While significant, these were ultimately library commissions and they feel a bit like that. The most interesting thing de Kooning achieves in these paintings is subconscious. She captures JFK, but the airy, almost hazy atmosphere surrounding him makes them portrayals of what it feels like to be in his presence: awe, reverence, reservation, timidity, even attraction.

In the galleries that cover the remainder of her life, we find hints of Matisse, Velázquez and Picasso, John Singer Sergeant, even Roman frescos and religious altarpieces, all intermingling in a subtle but profound painterly sophistication.

Her portrait of Aladar Marberger, from 1986, attributes the sitter with the ferocity and certitude of Pope Innocent X, but in an airy, Bonnard-like garden landscape. Marberger sits in a wicker chair on a pink cushion, purple socks covering his feet. Trellised vines and palm plants surround him, and the background dissolves into a pink and green tangle of thin branches and narrow tree trunks. This lovely and provocative interplay between severity and lightness of tone could easily collapse in on itself and fail utterly. But de Kooning turns it into something worth treasuring. [gallery ids="102057,134554" nav="thumbs"]

Ari Post •

When we walk through a crowd of people, we don’t see everything. We see little glimpses or slices of movement. We see light, shapes, shifting expressions in a sea of faces. And those little fractured pieces—a gesture, a movement, a reflection—create a reality.

The steady density of urban living surrounds us all with these moments, these fleeting torrents of life that wash endlessly by. “And that’s what I am aiming at,” says painter Kay Jackson, discussing the paintings in her new exhibit at Addison/Ripley Fine Art, on view through May 2. “There is no whole picture, just little bits and fragments of an endlessly renewable composition that create and reflect today’s world.”

Kay Jackson is a painter’s painter. Perhaps this is pulling a tired phrase, but in Jackson’s case there is simply no other way I can say it. The first time I saw her work in 2012, I was struck hard by her remarkable draftsmanship and singular style. She applies Old Master techniques to contemporary settings, using oil glazing, gold leaf and virtuosic tonal control to create works that feel unquestionably of our era. While some painters today capitalize on these techniques as an erudite gimmick, Jackson employs them in service to the larger work with elegant subtlety and naturalness.

When asked about this, her response is unassuming. “That’s just the artwork that I admire the most,” she says. “It’s hard to improve on traditional oil painting techniques.”

Exhibiting since the 1980s, Jackson’s work frequently focuses on environmental concerns, such as pollution and the loss of animal habitats. Her last exhibition at Addison/Ripley featured immaculate gilded icons of endangered species (which you must see up close to properly appreciate their beauty). The subjects that drive her work have striking correlations to the endangered old world techniques—largely forgotten by artists today—which she uses to create them. It is also hard to ignore the preservationist aspect of these practices in parallel to issues like wildlife conservation.

Her current exhibit focuses on a different environmental risk, and one that has engrossed her for over a quarter century. The exhibition title, ‘Malthusian Paintings,’ refers to the theory of overpopulation developed throughout the early 1800s by English scholar Thomas Malthus.

It began for Jackson in 1988, with a series of vivid dreams: throngs of people replaced cars on the streets and moved in an endless herd through the city. To deal with the anxiety the dreams caused her, she began taking her camera out during rush hour traffic and snapping photographs of the crowds. She then used these photos as references for her first Malthusian paintings.

The canvases are crowded with moving figures, often faceless or submerged by darkness, connected in kaleidoscopic patterns of light and shadow. The allusions of movement border on abstraction, as suggestions of human figures collide with architectural gestures and patches of gold and copper leaf, layered between veils of paint to create a luminescent surface.

And yet the anonymous human figures throughout these paintings, even in the hint of but a few simple brushstrokes, are fully realized, taking on the air of apparitions.

Jackson is such a good painter that it is dangerously easy to overlook how expertly these works are conceived and rendered. They seem to have no composition at all, as natural to look at as a crowded city street. Reminiscent of James McNeill Whistler’s atmospheric naturalism, these “all-over” compositions are like movie stills plucked from the ether. They are immediately accepted by our eyes as simply right, meshing seamlessly with our living memories of the surrounding world.

And what is perhaps most astonishing is the whisper-like nuance with which she pulls this off. There is plenty to admire at a glance, but in a way these works beg patience and attention. These are paintings that will slowly unfold and evolve over many years, paintings to which you will keep returning. These are paintings that carry secrets. Their inner-life seems in many ways equal to their time spent resonating in the artist’s mind. Such is the rich beauty with works like this, which an artist works on for as many years.

“A lot of these canvases are multilayered,” Jackson says, “in the sense that if I did not like what I saw, I just kept painting over it. And that’s when the really magical stuff happens—you get the echo of other images coming through the painting.”

Addison/Ripley is a gallery that makes great use of its relatively modest space, and the 27 pieces of varying sizes lend a sort of retrospective quality to the exhibit. And as a body of work spanning 27 years, it is hard to think of it any other way.

“I’ve always made these paintings because I just love them,” she says, simply. “I can try to talk about them, but it is hard to find words that explain the non-verbal world of painting.”

To experience the steady, mesmerizing rhythms of Jackson’s paintings is to give into that world. It is a beautiful encounter.

Kay Jackson’s ‘Malthusian Paintings: 25 Years and Counting,’ is on view through May 2 at Addison/Ripley Fine Art: 1670 Wisconsin Ave. NW. For more information visit www.AddisonRipleyFineArt.com [gallery ids="102066,134472" nav="thumbs"]

Richard Selden • May 7, 2015

Wrapping up Georgetown Media Group’s spring round of Cultural Leadership breakfasts, Dr. Steven Knapp, president of the George Washington University since 2007, will speak the morning of May 7 at the George Town Club about the university’s expanding activity in the arts, exemplified by the bringing of the Textile Museum and the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design into the GW fold. Until recently, the District’s largest institution of higher education had not positioned itself as a leader in the arts.

Dr. Knapp will speak at 8:30 a.m. and a light breakfast will be served. Admission costs $15. For more details and to RSVP, contact Richard Selden at richard@georgetowner.com.