High Color en plein-air
Dear friends,
I'm pleased to announce that an exhibition of my work opened last week in Shanghai, at the recently renamed and relocated CJ Gallery, after a hiatus of three long COVID years. Jennifer Zhou is showing a selection of my work from 2012 to 2018, alongside a Chinese artist, Lintian Wu.
Jennifer requested a video to introduce the paintings and make them more accessible in the gallery. Please note that if you click the little "Settings" gear in the video, you can select "Quality: 4K" for playback.
Working with clips of my studio process captured over the years, I created a six-minute video that shows several works in progress. Given the entirely non-verbal nature of painting, I found it surprisingly difficult to give an explanation for what I was doing, but viewers can simply watch drawing and painting as they happen. Painting’s incongruity with language has always been one of its sources of power.
The COVID series of drawings, which I wrote about in the last newsletter, began a process of working almost entirely from intuition and imagination, as opposed to beginning with a specific motif or set of source materials. In the day-to-day, this new mode always feels like a leap into the unknown, an unsettling separation from long-cultivated skills and habits of seeing and marking. It's reassuring, however, to look back in retrospect and see that there is a clear pattern, a development, some kind of drive that inheres and connects the works.
In some of my most recent drawings, I’m working with familiar materials such as powdered charcoal and oil paint, but making works on paper of significantly larger scale than previously, typically 187 x 132 cm (73.6 x 52 in). I’m in new and unfamiliar territory here: the structures are more liquid, the tonal distributions more emphatic, the forms stronger and less restrained. I have long wanted to make paintings with a heightened contrast between surface and depth, and now they seem to be appearing. I will be interested this summer to see whether the “high color,” large-scale plein-air abstractions I do on the lake in Minnesota integrate with this new mode, or whether the separation widens.
In February, Nancy and I traveled to Paris to see the beautiful “Monet/Mitchell” exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton. Joan Mitchell used to speak of the days before Giverny became a cultural landmark, when she and her artist friends would climb over a fence to look at the huge Nymphéas canvases still languishing in Monet’s studio. The glass window wall was broken and birds were flying freely over the paintings, whose enormous scale and loosened structure constitute an essential part of the DNA of post-war American painting. I took many photographs of Joan while studying painting with her in Vétheuil in the early 1990s, including this portrait I contributed to the exhibition.
As always, find my full portfolio on my website (cbcampbell.com), and follow me on Instagram @studiocampbell for recent works and studio process.
If any of this speaks to you, I would be delighted to hear from you. Please feel free to forward this email to anyone who might be interested.
Thanks,
Christopher Campbell
