ASTRID PRESTON
NEW PAINTINGS & DRAWINGS
SOLO EXHIBITION
ASTRID PRESTON: NEW PAINTINGS & DRAWINGS
May 17 - July 12 , 2008
Opening Reception
May 17, 2008, 4 - 6 pm
Craig Krull Gallery
2525 Michigan Avenue, B-3, Santa Monica, CA 90404
On May 17th, Craig Krull Gallery will open its sixth exhibition of paintings by Astrid Preston. Over the years, her work has addressed our dual relationship with nature, both the wild, which has been in our evolutionary blood for thousands of years, and the cultivated, which represents our desire for order and control. Recognizing this, Robert L. Pincus wrote that, for Preston, “the depicted scene is a territory of ideas.” In fact, her almost surreal interpretations of hedges and mazes epitomize the concept that all landscapes are mental constructs.
In her recent paintings however, Preston takes a sharp look at her very real, immediate surroundings. The new works reflect an almost obsessive observation of the eugenia, ficus, and oleander that not only surround her home, but are the ubiquitous, and literally “unseen,” elements in the hedges and property borders all across Southern California. Preston fills her canvases from edge to edge with a seemingly endless wall of shrubs. Her detailed depiction of thousands of small leaves is a result of her contemplation of and meditation upon the natural repetitions in nature. The resulting visual complexity is quieting in its rhythms. She employs what may be termed a photo-realist approach, but to abstract ends. In fact, in her new paintings, plant forms in the brightest of light go completely white as they would if they were exposed on film. In some cases, she creates silhouettes of entire patches of leaves, allowing them to remain in their earth-toned wash of underpaint. The most recent work in the exhibition is a six-canvas grid titled, “Eugenia’s Dance.” In this painting, Preston combines the naturalistic depiction of leaves, the “blown-out” photographic white leaves, and the raw unpainted leaves in an intricate patchwork of abstraction.
Essay by
Peter Clothier
[ Excerpt ]
Preston’s paintings of the past two years have pursued the avenue these earlier paintings opened up, but they have zoomed in still closer on the natural subject matter. Instead of trees and forests, we now encounter greatly enlarged, over-all visual fields of leaves and blossoms whose framing, though surely a reflection of the artist’s selective eye, seems almost arbitrary. More and more, Preston says, she finds the representational quality of the image to be superfluous to her painterly objective. “My recent paintings of plants,” she has written, “come from observing how sunlight reflecting off leaves creates abstract patterns. I find that the more attention I pay to the reality of the image, the more abstract the image becomes.”
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Absence, 2007, oil on canvas, 32 x 32 inches
Absence, 2007, made at another moment of personal anguish, at the time of Preston’s mother’s death, provides an excellent example of the phenomenon she describes. The large central “diamond” effect suggested by the diagonal thrust of supportive stems creates a strong, quasi-geometric structure within the larger square of the 32” x 32” painting. Meticulously observed and painted in this structural context, the natural-world reality of the leaves and blossoms evanesces through the artist’s hand—and under the viewer’s gaze—into the alternate, “abstract” reality of the painting: given an attentive eye, we can catch this act of prestidigitation in the act of its happening: stand back, and we enjoy the illusion of observing nature. Come close, and all we see is a rendering in paint of the effects of light and shade. Preston has brought us in so close in these new paintings that the first option recedes even as our eye is occupied with the second.
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Moment Into Moment, 2007, oil on 4 canvases, 32 x 128 inches
Abstraction, though, also betokens something deeper than its common aesthetic association, and Absence, in its very title, brings this other significance to our attention. At one level, surely, it is emotional: a sense of loss, the grief we experience at the sudden absence of a loved one from the world we have shared with them. That absence is suggested in the painting by the way in which the foliage parts, at the center, to lead us into a dark inner core, where definition disappears and the unknown, unknowable, indescribable awaits, refusing to reveal itself to the eye or mind, a sink hole that acts as a vortex for the eye, inviting it on a journey, as I suggested at the outset, into what lies beyond the seductive surface.
Eugenia's Dance, 2008, oil on 6 canvas, 96 x 64 inches
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Near the Edge of Light, 2007, oil on canvas, 64 x 32 inches
What, then, is this “beyond”? In part, it is what lies literally behind the foliage – the decaying undergrowth and the adjacent area of unoccupied space, rendered as pure abstraction – that is given more and more of the picture plane in works like Near the Edge of Light, 2007, (p.23) and Moment into Moment (p.31-32) a large four-part painting also from last year. At a deeper level, however, it is the joyful experience of that groundlessness I mentioned earlier, the loss of all explanatory context, whether temporal or physical, and an absorption into the experience of pure, unattached presence.
In the Company of Spring, 2007, oil on canvas, 16 x16 inches
It is the point at which Preston’s newest work – in paintings like Pink Hawthorne, (p.29-30) for example, or the gorgeous In the Company of Spring, both from 2007 – serves to pluck us out of our small selves with all their expectations, all their attendant ego needs and attachments, and leave us finally unmoored, adrift in the immediacy of the moment and the act of contemplation. It’s the point at which, for me, the perennial mystery of The Heart Sutra begins to offer up just a brief glimmer of its ineffable meaning: Form is emptiness, Emptiness is form… Before it evanesces once again as the mind attempts to grasp it, with its imperious need to understand.
