Blandine Saint-Oyant Surges With Color

Posted on by Diversions LA

Awash in color and geometric patterns, Blandine Saint-Oyant’s This Is It, now at Gallery 825 in West Hollywood, combines a mix of spray painted lines, riveting colors, and varied gemoetric shapes both cut out and drawn. Her vibrant geometry sings, just as her pallette resonates with chromatic intensity.

Saint-Oyant says she uses a painting process that she’s developed over a period of the last 15-20 years to create this visually galvanizing work. “I pour liquid oil paint on a painted background on canvas or paper. When I pour different batches of colored paint and rotate the canvas back and forth, the pigments intermingle into visually striking patterns and shapes.”

It’s an alchemic process that allows for a fusion of the planned and the experimental..”Things happen when the colors mix and shapes form,” she relates, calling her work often improvisational. “I like the fluid and organic result.”

However, her work in This is It is a progression from her past work and processes. She considers it to be a transitional show that includes her large titular painting, which stands at an impressive 58″ by 70″, a series of paintings that are 38″ x 38″ called “Ecclectics,” and two smaller framed collages that she titles “Misfits.”

All of this work is an outgrowth of what she terms a “gloomy two year period” during the pandemic. “This is It” was set to be her last painting ever, she explaints. “This painting was a first for me in all aspects, technically and conceptually. It was the first time that I included painted letters and used so many straight lines and gradations of colors. It was a difficult piece that took me several months to complete. But this long process gave me with the time to think about the next phase.”

Despite her decision to be done with painting, after completing the ambitious “This is It,” she found she had a strong urgency to create new work. “I began working on a series of collages. My intention was not to restrict myself to one single technique or range of colors but to explore and juxtapose them as freely and unconventionally as possible, in a completely eclectic manner,” she says.

With this in mind, she combined “geometric and organic shapes, cut out and drawn lines, gradations of colors, and the use of spray paint to provide a strong new element. I call the collage series ‘The Misfits,’ and two are in this show. ”

These images, shown above,  are precise and fluid, the textures popping out of their vivid backgrounds, creating an astonishingly tactile and meaningful 3-D effect. There is a liquidity to both works, as if a splash or drops of water were caught in time and added to the layered collage.

Her work with collage led her to create her newest body of work,  her series “The Ecclectics,” below, which she developed using planned geometric shapes that she juxtaposes to one another.  This pre-planning differentiates her work in this exhibition from previous projects. “What makes these paintings different from my other work is the addition of free-floating spray-painted lines, patterned geometric shapes, and an adventurous color range that I have not used before,” she attests.

Each of these works once again exhibits a rich texturality that captures movement both in line and through color gradations. The paintings are like watching the shifting contours and colors of a sunset sky,  but instad of those colors changing due to the passage of time, they shift from engaging in deeper contemplation of the works, which manifest light and shadow in varied strands to create a sense of luminosity and depth.

Saint-Oyant continues to work with oils, drawn to the range of color and the infinite subtleties of color that oil offers her. She describes the medium as providing her with a “greater range” of color and texture than acrylic or other mediums.

Despite having once considered putting painted work aside, she finds that painting today is “still an exciting and innovative medium that has a lot to offer. I want my work to make people curious and inquisitive,” she says. “Painting is an adventurous endeavor that I will always pursue. For me it is a way to answer existential questions, to fully express myself in a completely personal and independent way. I am currently working on a series that I call ‘Les Sauvages’, which is more gestural and expressionist. “

The exhibition is on view at LAAA’s Gallery 825, located at 825 N. La Cienega in West Hollywood, through October 18th.

Along with Saint-Oyant’s lush work, also on view are three other solo exhibitions: Lousine Hogtanian’s Inside Out; Lori Markman’s Magical Landscapes; and Laura Van Duren’s Revelers.

  • Genie Davis; images provided by the artist

 

 

Kerrie Smith Provides Fabulous Fecund Beauty with Flora Ficciones and More At Gallery 825

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The immersive experience of Kerrie Smith’s work in Portals and Pathways, at LAAA’s 825 Gallery through December 1st, is one that is both delicately beautiful and intimate.

The exhibition takes viewers on a journey inspired by Smith’s own daily walks along More Mesa in Santa Barbara. It’s a literal and emotional garden of delights that stretches from floor to ceiling with gauzily floating banners forming a kind of forest, printed with images of Smith’s paintings and sheer fabric with the lovely words of the artist’s own poetry.

The poetry was imprinted using hand-stamped wooden blocks that Smith carved. Both hanging, and positioned like small pools of nature on the floor, circular photographic images of the More Mesa’s wildlife and plants offer a joyous glimpse into Smith’s inspiration. Adding to the immersive quality of the viewing experience is an audio component recorded by the artist, providing the sounds of chittering animals and birds, wind, and ocean waves.

The artist says she’s inspired by “California light and the interaction of color,” and that she has a “passion for patterns in nature.” In her exhibited poetry she describes the nature around her – birds, butterflies, flowers, as containing a “quiet joy” that brings them “contentment and peace within their worlds.” These words could also describe the sensation of viewing her paintings.

Entering the gallery, it’s immediately striking how beautifully Smith captures the natural light she loves. The banners, interspersed with small, circular hanging discs that depict her photographs of nature, as well as the artist’s portal-like circular photographs on the floor of mandala-like stones, sand, and grasses, all contribute to a sense of the ethereal. Texturally, of course, the banners are “floating” from the ceiling; sunlight spills in the gallery windows. But like a fine cut-glass prism or natural gemstone, the light is refracted in and reflected through, Smith’s art.

“More Mesa,” she writes on one banner, “There is so much happening it could be called a field of dreams. It always surpasses our imagination.”

As beautiful as this experience is, it’s only the start. Smith’s artworks, a mix of circular and more conventional shapes, offers viewers a vivid palette and a details delicate brush, as she literally pulls the eye and heart into plants and flowers. The work is both sensual and magical, a lush combination that evokes the Eden that Smith has found near her home of 28 years through the prism of her brush.

In short, her paintings bring the mesa she loves so much to vibrant life, as she records and experiences them on her walks in nature.

Smith’s 24-inch circular wood panel, “Bellum Natura,” deftly blends acrylic and mixed media with gold leaf, the latter heightening the sense of the preciousness of the flora. Here, a vivid purple flower is the centerpiece of a swirl of greens and golds, with lines and shadows that evoke the sea-close location.

From the same series, her Flora Ficciones, comes the acrylic painting “Deena Dallancia Desconsita,” a dazzling pink and yellow sea plant surrounded by dark yet radiant blue water and nearly translucent pale green fronds of sea lettuce.

A combination of acrylic with mixed media, “Clytie Girasol Galaxis” is a glorious rust orange flower with a purple and gold center, surrounded by yellow/green blossoms, and what resembles floating orbs of yellow light, or a magnified seed pod, carried by air. A similar flower, but this image a startlingly deep pink, is aswirl on circular wood panel in “Carpos Medea.”

The titles of each piece are derived from the ancient Greek – for example, Clytie means glorious. They also recall Greek myths. Clytie was a water nymph who fell in love with Apollo, keeping her eyes always upon him as he moved through the sky. She was transformed and became a sunflower, always turning toward the glowing sun.

Each of these works are special, both for their color and depth, and for their luminous beauty. These paintings are Smith’s true poems and tributes to the nature she loves, a reverent tribute, to the earth we so often fail to appreciate – but which Smith cares about and for quite deeply.

If you can’t see this special show in person, visit many of her images online . Smith will also have one of her Flora Ficciones “Calendula Asterales,”  as part of the Sullivan Gross Gallery’s annual holiday exhibition starting December 4th, with a reception on the 7th. Sullivan Gross is located in Santa Barbara.

  • Genie Davis; images provided by gallery, artist, and by Genie Davis

 

Soar Through a Cloud Renewal with Karen Hochman Brown

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Karen Hochman Brown’s solo exhibition Cloud Renewal, now at Gallery 825 in Los Angeles is a transcendent exhibition created while the artist was sheltering in place during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using her photographic images of flowers,  waves and clouds that she alters and merges, she presents three distinct and beautiful series.

The first presents larger scale works titled by where sky and clouds were photographed and the name of flowers she merges with these views, selected from her own garden. Each is a mounted, shiny acrylic print with a protective layer.

“Dusk on Honolua Bay With Roses” is one such work, vibrating with pink and gold shades against sections of blue sky, and darker cloud arising like streams of smoky incense at the center top of the work.

Her “Twilight in Ojai with Magnolia” is equally evocative, but here, there is less of the recognizable burnished gold sunset, which has instead become like glowing orbs, or a mysterious lamp suspended within a mauve-toned, gentle, near-evening sky. “Sunset in Tel Aviv With Orchid” transforms the flowers depicted to white shadowy filaments of the blossoms, making them dance together like faeries or angels.

Making a deeper dive into a world she could not then visit physically, she created the mixed media series “In the Bubble,” once again focusing on clouds viewed on her travels in the past. These smaller works allowed Hochman Brown to experiment in medium, using resin to create smaller works that are as experimental and experiential in technique as they are in image. At 10 x 10 x 2, these works are like small jewels, or their own permanent bubbles of light and magic cloud. There is the silvery blue of “In the Bubble Maui,” the seashell-like shape of “In the Bubble Galapagos, the lively orange, blue, and white mixed with gold of “In the Bubble Mexican Riviera.” She captures a vivid sense of place within each work, in her shapes, colors, and patterns. For example, her “In the Bubble Home” provides a richly recognizable orange, pink and blue sky – the color of fall sunsets over Los Angeles.

Later in her year in relative confinement, Hochman Brown and her husband wintered in Kauai, Hawaii. There she says that she brought her cloud panoramas essentially down to earth, “where the sky meets the ocean and earth…anchoring them to the horizon line.”

These works are presented on wood panels and on fabric tapestries. Where her other two exhibited series offer a focus that is sky/clouds/floral images or sky and clouds alone, here she creates full realized worlds, magical places veiwers can feel connected to. Along with the lush dark green palms and island shrubbery in “Bananas,”  there are radiant pink, white and gold flowers with banana-like curves emanating  from the vivid golden yellows of their stamens, a fully realized flower resting within a green globe sitting on the heart of the island which reflects downward into a glassy sea.

“Parting” provides the viewer with three golden orbs, a dark gold and inky colored seat which wraps around these balls, clearly the last of a glorious sunset what has set fire to the clouds and charred the ocean with its light. “Loopy” is a meditative, transfixing image in which swirls of blue sea form ribbons and arcs around a luminous pink, mandala-like center. “Welcome” shapes a vivid near-chartreuse green and deep rose watery portal – with hints of orange flaming wave – around a rocky shore line and a cloud dotted, still glowing sky. In the middle of this portal rises a full moon. “Breathe” offers a shape within a rectangular shape, reminiscent of a pillow. On this restful place foamy ocean spray rises; the sky and clouds have a lighter pink cast than Hochman Brown’s fiery sunsets.

Also a part of the gallery exhibition are two looping videos, each exuding magic and mysticism. Both were inspired by her residency in Kauai as well. “Meditation” gives us a stunning seascape with soothing ocean waves crashing to shore, and the only sound is that of the sea itself.  In “Respiration,” the ocean is contained with a portal shape, rising and falling white and blue and darker midnight colored waves flow like a perfect breath, while behind it, a sensuous, sinuous colorful background unfolds. The soundtrack is both delicately musical and the sound of waves.

The gracefully exhibited gallery room is well-curated, creating a highly sensorial world of intense visual beauty that connects the color and sense of motion in all the artist’s work from video images to her luminous clouds “In the Bubble.” The artist never disappoints. Breathe in the beauty.

Cloud Renewal is ready to renew you through October 28th, reward yourself with a visit – by appointment – at 825 N La Cienega Blvd. There will be an artists’ talk on the 21st at 11 a.m.

Also at the gallery: Peter Hiers new exhibition Burning Question features a body of work made from tire fragments he finds along highways; Ted Rigoni‘s Bygone Patterns represents a contemporary artistic presentation of the Mojave’s remains; and Sean Young offers profound mixed media work in TOUCHING THE TRUESELF WITHIN deals with The Four Noble Truths. 

  • Genie Davis; images provided by the artist