The Self and Its Symbols

Against the background of a renewed interest in figurative painting, the author examines the work of who came of artistic age in the 1970 Joan Brown and Gregory Gillespie, each the control of a recent survey show

Consciously or not, many of the best contemporary artists strike one as being to be taking their catchword from the art of the 1970 The rife profusion of off-kilter portraiture and material substance art, for example, strongly resonates with the work of sum of two units artists who came of age in the 1970 Joan Brown and Gregory Gillespie. As it happens, one as well as the other artists have been the bring under rule of recent museum shows. Brown's paintings and plastic arts were exhibited last year in a vast dual-venue exhibition, curated through Karen Tsujimoto and Jacquelynn Baas, at the Oakland Museum of California and the Berkeley Art Museum. Gillespie's more concise traveling museum overlook was organized by Donald Keye for the Georgia Museum of Art and freshly ended its tour at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio.

Brown and Gillespie admittedly make an uneven couple. Brown's quick, cartoony drawing phraseology and use of radically thick--and later radically thin--paint look mismatched with Gillespie's finely large casked hyperrealism and classical draftsmanship. The sensibilities of the sum of two units independent-thinking artists, however, are surprisingly complementary. the couple of course, are best known for self-portraits. They were born within sum of two units years of one other--each into troubl Catholic families. In their 40 one as well as the other became devotees of Eastern religions.

greatest in quantity significantly, they both attended the San Francisco Art Institute in the wake of its Abstract-Expressionist explosion (Brown 1955-59; Gillespie, 1961-63) This background in Ab Ex with its emphasis upon subjectivity and interior investigation, underlies the approaches of the couple artists to figuration. Their quirky self-examinations furthermore render free of accessed provocative terrains unknown to the previous generation of Bay Area figurative artists that included Elmer Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn and David Park.

Having toyed with traditions of self-portraiture as they mined their personal lives for make submissive matter, Brown and Gillespie provide a crucial link between Ab Ex and the 1970 performance work of artists of that kind as Eleanor Antin, Vito Acconci, Linda Montano, Hannah Wilke and Carolee Schneemann. The ways in which Brown's and Gillespie's confessional work probes social and psychological assumptions about sex and identity also presages ideas in generally received figurative work by such artists as Amy Adler, Monica Majoli, Kurt Kauper, Alison Saar, Cindy Sherman, Susanna Coffey Lyle Ashton Harris and Susan Hauptmann.

Joan Brown's irreverent explorations of the conflicted characters associated with femininity make her look as well a kind of godmother to contemporary Bad Girl artists like as Karen Kilimnik and Nicole Eisenman. Gillespie's unabashed examinations of masculine vanity, emotional repression and the aging male material part seem to resonate in the work of artists like as Mark Greenwold, Tom Knechtel F Scott Hess, John Sonsini and Matthew Barney. The reemergence of figurative art into the mainstream in turn round facilitates a fresh examination of these sum of two units stubbornly iconoclastic individuals.

Joan Brown's life, fascinatingly detailed in Tsujimoto's biographical catalogue essay, can be tracked not sole in her self-portraits but also in her repeated depictions of her four husbands, her son her fondlings and her friends. Her career was marked, and loaded by the immediate success of her early, thickly impastoed paintings of domestic life. Her striking shift in 1968 to a flatter, more linear turn of expression cost her much critical and commercial support. Undaunted, Brown continued her experiments in self-portraiture and symbolic figuration until her activity came to an abrupt, tragic extreme point in 1990 with a fatal accident during the installation of an obelisk designed for Sathya Sai Baba's museum at his ashram in Puttaparthi, India. Brown's death looks particularly unfortunate for the assessment of her work, since it occurr in a stylistic transition period when the artist had retreated from painting to search for a more direct means of symbol-making in public sculpture

Brown's fearless independence and vigorous will were fostered by the fact that, unlike greatest in quantity young women artists of her generation, she experienced little difficulty in being recognized for her work. Discovering while in art institute a visceral facility with paint, Brown presently was keeping pace with her stellar collection of teachers at the San Francisco Art Institute (then called the California place of education of Fine Arts), showing with novel York's Staempfli Gallery at age 22 Early works were purchased by the agency of the Albright-Knox and MOMA. From the first, Brown worked upon a large scale with wild brushwork, flaunting a fearless gutsiness that rivals that of any of the older generation of Bay Area paint-slingers. In Fussing Around by means of the Light of the satellite (1959), an early abstract painting, for example, heavy forms clearly inspired through teacher Frank Lobdell are transformed into upbeat orbs by the agency of Brown's bold use of virid blue and red.