August 8-21 - Pauline Ziegen
Artist reception:    Friday August 8, 2008   5-7 pm

PAULINE ZIEGEN
Bridging Horizons

The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon.
We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

SANTA FE, NM.  Pauline Ziegen’s earliest landscape paintings were done outdoors in Kansas where vast stretches of prairie lead to distant horizons. Representing the unique dichotomy of where the earth seems to meet the sky or the apparent boundary between earth and sky, the horizon is, she says, “an ever-shifting location that you can never reach, yet it is always compelling.”

At the time, Ziegen’s landscapes were representational; however, the plein-air process of capturing elusive light effects was one of the keys to what she does today. “When painting outdoors, the goal is to edit all that information into something that is meaningful—for me there is tremendous power in the restful yet aspiring horizon that both separates and unites.”

Ziegen has been “editing” ever since, creating suggestive abstractions inspired by the landscapes she views from a ridge-top home and studio on the outskirts of Santa Fe, New Mexico. “In a way, abstraction is all about editing and simplifying the visual world into formal elements that become metaphors of emotion,” she says.

A longtime fan of Eastern philosophies, Ziegen is drawn to the perceptual elements and materials of Chinese and Japanese art, including her use of gold leaf, which she combines with Old Master techniques of luminescent gessoed surfaces topped by glazes of gossamer oil pigments. “For this show, I’ve been studying the layered surfaces of woodblock prints, which are so delicate and sheer and yet substantive,” she says. 

Among the Oriental techniques that Ziegen has adapted is flattening space while suggesting depth. Using ephemeral darkened tones, such as those on the left and right sides of Sighing Sky (above),Ziegen explains that“the patina on the edges pushes the horizon into the distance. The tones glazed over the foreground reflect the sky as if the gold leaf were a mirror.” The result is spatial relationships that viewers create in their minds and hearts.

Ziegen’s innate sense of harmony and balance results in horizons that are soothing, calm, and orderly. To keep them from being too static, she introduces subtle yet energizing lines created with a pouncing tool that breaks her impeccable surfaces with small “dots.” Imperceptible in a reproduction, when experienced in person, the lines become provocateurs that grab the eye asking it to bridge opposites: the upper and lower registers, heaven and earth, the inner and outer worlds, being and nonbeing, and perhaps just as importantly, the landscape as perception and painted object.

September 12-25 - Kurt Meer
Artist reception:    Friday September 12, 2008   5-7 pm

KURT MEER
Afterimage

SANTA FE, NM.  “Let there be light” is a phrase so familiar that it need not be credited. Its meanings, however, range from the religious to metaphysical and metaphoric.

For nearly a decade, Kurt Meer has meditated on a mantra of four elements: sky, land, water, and light. While continuing to work in his tonalist style, for his third solo show at Karan Ruhlen Gallery, Meer creates passages of prescient light that linger in the soul like an afterimage.

The inspiration, he says, comes from studying the works of J.M.W. Turner during a recent exhibition. Known for his luminescent paintings of sunlight and moonlight reflected in water, Turner created a sensation in nineteenth-century Britain by conveying the illusion of light through gestural color juxtapositions.

“Turner’s paintings reflect his life story,” says Meer. “His abysmal light can be interpreted as either joy or horror. It has prompted me to look deeper into the energy flow of my own existence, translating it into subtleties of light suggested by the juxtaposition of disparate colors. Although the technique has been understood all along by painters, it was never so forcefully deconstructed than in the work of the Impressionists or given more corporeal presence than in the stained canvases of Mark Rothko.”

At age forty, Meer has become a master of values as well as color. Whether he is working in a warm earth-toned palette suffused with peach or in cooler combinations of blues and grays, his subtle ranges of dark to light are suggested with nary a visible brushstroke. Hovering amidst equally evanescent “horizons,” his minimalist value shifts prompt as many questions as answers. “There is power in conundrum,” he says of the elusive forms that mesmerize viewers into imagining clouds, shorelines, marshes, waterways, bluffs, or oxbows.

Recently returned to his home state of Texas, Meer says that he has been inspired by the Mississippi River, which pulses like a vein through the heartland of the nation, including Memphis, Tennessee, where he earned his BFA and did graduate work at the University of Memphis. “As an omniscient narrator of my own life, my art is referential, offering something another can relate to through its potential universality,” he says. “The process of finishing a painting is often frustrating, but therein is the beauty of the painting … the artist’s struggle to make something believable.”

Concludes Karan Ruhlen, “For collectors, Kurt’s paintings are meditations on the reality beyond appearances—that internal knowing which is unique to the psyche of each viewer.”

tentative schedule