Chris Ashley
Blue & Green Paintings
Chris Ashley has gained respect from art world insiders over the last few years for a unique series of HTML-generated drawings he posts daily on his blog. A year’s worth of prints from this series was recently exhibited in a beautiful show at David Cunningham Projects in San Francisco. Parallel to this effort, Ashley maintains a disciplined studio practice as an accomplished painter in oil.
It seems surprisingly easy to emphasize the similarities in Ashley’s hands between painting and coding. In each case his method is constructivist but his manner is decidedly expressionist. He builds his grid-bound images intuitively, in spite of the grid, through a series of choices that accumulate and graft onto one another. The result is organic, a kind of cluster, like rectangular grapes on a rectilinear stem. Ideas and images flow unfettered out of Ashley’s agile, leaping sensibility. By trading seamlessly between his two chosen media, Ashley serves to point out how unproductive the nagging pronouncement of painting’s demise is in the current critical debate.
Over the last three years he has been working on a formally related group of small canvases using oil and industrial metalic paint on linen which he refers to simply as the Blue & Green Paintings. We are pleased to to present a selection from this series for our third installation in the room for painting.
George Lawson, Director
room for painting room for paper
SHAPESHIFTERS
Chris Ashley’s Blue & Green Paintings
Forget the naturally obvious and construct an artificial obvious . . .
For days now, looking at, listening to, and conversing with Chris Ashley’s Blue & Green Paintings, these words from Annie Dillard have vexed and soothed; in fact, she’s quoting from Stewart White’s book The Mountains. Quotation, compression, tension, shapeshifting, and harmony—to make a short list—are the DNA of these paintings which present, Ashley reminds, a contrast between “the natural and the artificial.”
“The artificial obvious is hard to see,” Dillard warns immediately after quoting White. In Chris Ashley’s paintings—with a circumscribed palette, a simplicity, and a nod to gesture—how and what is there to see?
Showing his first Blue & Green Paintings in 2006, Ashley pointed to the influence of Qinglü, a Chinese blue and green landscape style that originated just before the Tang Dynasty. While a shared color palette is self- evident, and early paintings in Ashley’s series reference places in the Berkeley landscape, the chief correspondence between his project and Qinglü is their creative spirit: Qinglü painters, and Ashley, do not attempt presentation of an image seen in Nature. They paint time from nuanced comprehension; they present for reflection a fleeting, less defined dimension of a world whose elements are force and matter.
The Blue & Green Paintings are oil brushed onto linen rectangles of similar, but varied, dimensions. The colors are ultramarine, burnt umber, cobalt blue, permanent green and aluminum. The paint is thinned with turpentine and applied quickly, using a chip brush, as Ashley explains, “in dots, gestures, drips, strokes, line, and filled-in shape. The black outlines are calligraphic and have different qualities: smooth; thin; barbed; abrupt; flowing.”
Paint is applied to exposed linen; dark, brush-stroked lines quickly demarcate empty space; blue and green oil goes on inside the demarcations; applied aluminum shines smooth, ethereal, while linen unpainted remains textured, earthy—the quiet earth/sky horizons ground fenced colors; thinnest paint trickles down, crossing painted boundaries, staining slubbed, porous linen with minute capillaries; fresh paint goes on over dry; the picture begins to breathe tension.
Compression and Tension:
Ashley’s dark lines carry the logos—time expressed—of material discourse through each image; in lines, tension of life enters the work. Actors, these lines cohere and compress; they speak first facts to embodied space; they enable a the, imply a truth.
In early paintings from the series color is obedient, blue and green do not blend, they remain distinct and clean; in later paintings this demarcation begins to blur, new liberties are taken, boundaries bleed. Throughout the whole series, adjacent blue and green patches are the spirit of Ashley’s paintings—brushed, daubed, dripped or layered into whimsical, stolid, expressive or evocative shapes. The character of each painting’s blue/green coexistence holds each painting’s emotive fate.
Depth is not mimicked by receding shapes, nor by gradation of color saturation. As Ashley extends the series, energies born of tense reciprocity in color coexistence—forces that cue our trust of visual depth—morph, meander and discover. Thicker fields of color cover thinner fields that have dripped and dried beneath. Curling waves of blue and green coil, braid, embrace and bulge, teasing a viewer. Blunt, squibbed blots hover over dark, flexed lines, aping their energy and direction, jockeying for position. A flock of ovoids kites above a simple surface, drip-tails weighing them down. Or do they rise and sway, a top-heavy Birnam Wood?
Shapeshifting:
Today I walked familiar trails in Tilden Park. The light, landscape, weather and spirit of Bay Area open space is the cognitive and spatial palette of Ashley’s work. Walking today, personae of the Blue & Green Paintings were, like magical beliefs, a haunting ubiquity—in mind, in world; in sun, in shadow. Everywhere, natural obvious and artificial obvious in congress. Everywhere, arcing or jagged, oak-limb & laurel-limb & buckeye- limb, brush strokes grown crooked, broken, gnarled—honed to prevailing weather. A jumbled wobbling push-pull of earth-tanbark-blue-sky-leaf-green-metallic-sun-frieze-fuzzed-through-forest-canopy – ceaseless; ceaseless as Ashley’s Panoramic, Cragmont, Moonlight, Hanging Mountain, Schattenberg; as Mann’s Der Zauberberg.
Harmony:
Moonlight flirts up this hillside, soul’s an isolationist;
Complete thought dries out in a reasonable light.
James Harris