J.B. Bryans installation of large
abstract paintings at the Harwood Art Center is an exquisite sensory
experience. Although rooted in the landscape genre, these lyrical
garden paintings depict active verbs of experience rather than landscape
as scenery. His marks are tendrils reaching, in constant
motion, twirling, twisting, tying, unraveling, connecting, and overlapping.
Bryan calls their visual syntax more about flowering than any
particular flowers.
An untraditional landscape painter, Bryan occupies the surface like
an abstract expressionist to explore haphazard aspects of botanical
growth. His tendrils are talismans; his paintings, illuminated manuscripts
of poetic revelations. Bryan says, wisteria astounds me.
In What a Bee Knows, the viewer becomes the bee who is attracted to
the colors of flowers. The electric red and orange emit an alluring
glow, drawing the viewer into the pollen of the painting, the fruit
of light and earth producing an intoxicating buzz.
These paintings offer tastes, smells, music, dance, and the feeling
of entering the pulsating surfaces of color and animated marks. A
fresh salad of intense colors pop against a sandy desert surface with
no horizon or literal reference to the landscape. Yet, these deconstructed
garden scenes convey all the nuances of plant life, new growth, and
regeneration. Like gardens, they reveal the totality of the cycle
of life, offering a harmony of opposites entanglement
and release, inward and outward. In, a lavender tendril unravels,
while burgundy is bound into a chunky knot. In, minty green arches
emit a fresh scent that bounces off juxtapositions of rhythmic color.
Bryan pursues a personal idiosyncratic style that echoes back to Post-Impressionists
and Oriental calligraphers without ever being derivative. He invents
his own improvised recipe of visual jazz composed of polyrhythms and
new structures to create unique and unabashedly beautiful work. Bryans
exuberant paintings depict what Matisse called sublimated voluptuousness.
Although the work could be considered eye candy to some, it rides
a chaotic edge that gives it an unnerving quality.
Like the layering of color, marks, and light in these paintings, the
artist is a many layered creator and a Renaissance man. Poet, painter,
designer, and publisher, Bryan brings his own brand of heartfelt quirkiness
to all of his work. His paintings are a celebration of beauty and
nature that make me glad to be alive.
J.B. Bryan is represented by Richard Levy
Gallery in Albuquerque.
Artist's Statement
I follow a lineage that includes the Western tradition
of oil painting as well as the ink painting of Asia. Both have equally
complex and inspiring histories, though different, and sometimes opposing,
intentions. What I have pursued is a synthesis between the two in
their shared concern for the natural world. Or at least I have found
my own interest in ecological systems to meet at a juncture in the
late 19th century with Paul Cezannes discoveries and the concurrent
revitalization of Chinese brushwork by Wu Changshuo. From there I've
developed a more abstract approach to landscape painting where forms
are invented out of observation and reworked in the brushwork and
continual adjustments of process. The visual syntax appears more about
flowering than any particular flowers. Where some painters might think
in terms of grid, I work within a field.
Landscape is a lousy term that implies a romantic devotion
only to scenery and too often has become a genre ghetto of clichés.
I feel the real subject matter is how to evoke our relationship
to the World we live in and at the same time make a picture.
In China, the two divisions of landscape painting were mountains
& rivers and flowers & birds which acknowledged
those who painted vastness or the intimate. We can look at Claude
Monet and see someone who cultivated gardens in order to have a motif
right at hand. I practice this myself by maintaining a studio surrounded
by fruit trees, a garden, and the native wildness. From gardening,
Im inspired by the nuances of transformation which arrive out
of botanical happenstance and new growth, then in painting this becomes
spirit of the brush as well as myriad possibilities in the rhythmic
resonance of composition.
My own practice includes a backpack French easel, field sketches,
ink painting, as well as large studio works. These are not necessarily
abstract but lyrical in their exploration of color and pictorial process.
One of the great joys of painting is to lose oneself in the act as
attention is focused in the mystery of the work. I like what Philip
Guston called baffling means whereby at some point a painter
steps back and is amazed at how the work came to be. I sometimes stare
for an hour at whats in progress before making, hopefully, a
significant stroke. Sometimes it is perfect and sometimes other marks
are necessary to redeem the gesture. Wrong notes often
lead to an unknown outside of ones palette of movesthe
poetry of surprise.
Henri Matisse said that exactitude is not truth and Qi
Baishi (who lived concurrently) spoke of the simultaneous likeness
& unlikeness in painting. Probably many painters would have
their own pithy motto along similar lines. My own poetic statement
says not realism, but a mutually interactive, interdependent
plant jazz which reflects an interest in polyrhythms and improvisation
while inventing fresh structures. Jazz musicians often find themselves
in the dilemma of wanting to be in the tradition and on
the cutting edge all at the same time. Painting also incorporates
a love of whats gone before while pursuing a personal, idiosyncratic
style.
I err on the side of appreciationto take what is and be part
of what happens. I also cant help but believe in beauty, that
uncanny quality which occurs in the middle of our chest
as we perceive what surrounds us. I try to make work whose beauty
signifies a relationship to the miraculous world we call nature.
The hope is that someone looking at my paintings would be able to
sense a connection to the remarkable array of biological forms and
have those entities enter their own sense of self. The manifestations
we call beauty, whether in nature or in works of art,
are phenomenon of intensity. They call our attention to the kind of
presence specific to whatever we are focusing on. We need beauty,
to turn our attention to what we most fear losing: the raw actuality
of existence. (Kenneth Baker, A Use for Beauty,
Artforum)
No matter that our leaders are either thugs, criminals, idiots, insane,
or paid off and despite the fact that corporate culture is the true
weapon of mass destruction, there still exists an enduring ecology
of beauty. Whats real keeps trying towards well-being and nurture.
Most people on this planet simply want to sit down safely with family,
friends, or tribe around a meal of good food and be grateful. Beauty
lives in this coexistence.
O to see clearly and be advocates of continuation!
PEACE