A symbiotic relationship: filmmaking and painting
EL CAJON--An art exhibit to be shown through Thursday, Dec. 12, at Grossmont
College's Hyde Art Gallery explores how artists are influenced by their
mentors.
The works of five artists are examined,
including those of the late Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson, a husband-and-wife
team who inspired the works and careers of the three other artists represented
in the exhibit.
The three "mentees," who today are successful
artists in their own right, are Bill
Mosley, today an art instructor at Grossmont College; Leslie Nemour, who
likewise teaches art at Miracosta College, and Jim Randall, who is a practicing
artist in New York City.
All three took
classes from Farber and Patterson when they were on the faculty at UCSD. Farber and Patterson taught that paintings and
films could mutually influence each other, and
the works of Mosley, Nemour and Randall, help to demonstrate that
relationship.
Mentors Farber and Patterson
For this, the late Manny Farber is chiefly responsible as he
was both a painter and a movie critic, whose reviews were published regularly
in such prestigious magazines as New
Republic, The Nation, Artforum and Art in America. Farber's reviews rarely dealt with the plots of the
movies but rather focused on themes, movements, colors, and other aspects of
the cinematographer’s art. He looked at films
the way a painter would examine paintings and he studied paintings from the
perspective of a film maker, according to Mosley.
When Farber was 49 and already an established critic, he was introduced to Patterson,
about whom famed photographer Helen Leavitt wrote to him, "I met this
young girl and I think the two of you would like each other." Patterson was
25 at the time, but their age difference mattered little, so transported were the couple by each other's art and
outlooks on life. Very soon after
meeting, they became married collaborators--she, of Irish background, whose
paintings explored her ancestral country, and he the son of Jewish immigrants
who had set down roots in Douglas, Arizona.
Growing up in the small town of Douglas, her husband had seen every movie that
came to the two movie houses, Patterson said.
“He was born in 1917 so we are talking about very early film. He started
out with the silent movies.” Farber also
frequented the town’s library, “where he would study writing – how writing was
done. He was a very, very hard
worker.”
In the entry exhibit space of the Hyde Gallery are two large
paintings by these mentors -- a 26" by 40" still life by Farber
entitled "No Film" and a 4'2 x 65" scene by Patterson which she
titled "Patricia and Coidin" after a couple who had been her hosts in
Ireland. Patterson was an advocate of
artists painting what was familiar to them, rather than forcing themselves to
try to make some big statement.
As curated by Grossmont College's Prudence Horne, the balance of the exhibit
space in the gallery is devoted to the works of Mosley, Nemour and
Randall. Each of these artists spoke about
how film affects their painting. While
their subjects are quite different, there are some similarities in how Mosley,
Nemour and Randall go about their paintings.
All three of them begin either with the images they find in movies or on
still film. All three of them typically
will draw or paint a small, test version of the work that they ultimately will
create.
Grossmont College instructor Bill Moley stands by his freeway bridge series
William Mosley
Mosley likes to paint different kinds of landscapes. Instead
of those that view a scene from a horizontal perspective, as most people are
used to seeing, his studies look down from the air toward the ground. At the gallery, a sequence of three large
paintings gives us the sense of approaching, flying directly over, and
departing from the airspace above the Interstate 805 freeway bridge as it
crosses over Interstate 8 in Mission Valley.
Using the photos he took on a helicopter ride—along with
images from Google Satellite photos—Mosley paints and repaints the scene, varying
the perspective.
Leslie Nemour poses by one of her 'Fistfight' series
Leslie Nemour
Nemour had a dozen paintings on display in the gallery, all of them involving
fistfights, wrestling matches or other types of physical violence. The images
are intentionally blurred to give the sense that the depiction “is not forever,
it is moving, it is changing and it is a moment in time,” she explained.
The paintings are not a glorification of violence, but to the contrary are an
effort to come to terms with it, she said.
“I am kind of making it into something else; I am making it symbolic of
more contemporary kinds of fights, which are struggles for belief systems.” The
fight scenes are intriguingly titled as battles over Feminism (the only one in
which the subjects are women), Realism, Obama Care, Gay Marriage, Roe vs. Wade
(abortion), Futurism and Cubism. A
companion piece, “Fight Over Conceptual Art,” has a perplexed woman holding her
face in her hands.
Jim Randall is framed by two of his paintings of fire
Jim Randall
Randall’s images are far more abstract, but they too start
with photographs. He pointed to a large
canvas covered in hues of red and orange.
Initially, he said, he saw a newspaper photograph of a fire. He magnified a section of the photograph
until he had eliminated all that surrounded the flames, so that he could
concentrate on the interior of the fire itself.
And that, in abstract, was what he painted.
“Before, I was making things that were much more
recognizable – the same material, the same source material, but I wasn’t happy
with it,” he said. “So I decided to zoom in as if it were a movie and get more
atmosphere into the painting.” He also
gets more “physically active” in executing the painting, using a string dipped
in paint and then flogging the color onto the painting. He supplements this technique with brush
strokes. He said he utilizes some very
expensive materials, such as linen instead of canvas, rabbit skin glue/
resin, and a particular line of paints
from Germany.
Randall zooms in like a movie to find the desired image;
Nemour blurs movie images; and Mosley
sequences his paintings as you might see them on a strip of movie film. The influence of cinema—and the love for the medium taught by Farber--is
manifest.
-DHH-
