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Figure Studies in the 21st Century

A Solo Exhibition by Jerrold Ballaine

January 16—February 29, 2004

Jerrold Ballaine, a resident of Sonoma County for the past 17 years, retired in 1995 as professor of art after teaching figure drawing and painting for about 30 years at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition, he had served as chair of his department and as a director of the Berkeley Art Museum. Some of his early noteworthy works were of women done in the Bay Area figurative style, and he later became well known for inventive vacuum formed plastics and lush landscape

Thomas Albright's classic book Art in the San Francisco Bay Area: 1945-1980 also notes that Ballaine concentrated on photography during the late 1970s. On exhibit here are paintings from a new series begun about two years ago. They are based on classical figuration and art historical tradition, but are created with the intention of visualizing the human figure in a unique contemporary manner. These paintings do not follow the major styles of the past several decades such as super realism (Lucien Freud and Philip Pearlstein), color-field painting (Alex Katz), and op art (Chuck Close).

Among their apparent influences are the works of Francis Bacon and Richard Diebenkorn in particular, as well as the California and New York schools of abstract expressionism. The solitary, meditative figures in Diebenkorn’s paintings of the 1950s and 60s were imprinted on Ballaine’s mind beginning when he was a student at the San Francisco Art Institute and Diebenkorn was one of his instructors.

A few of the English lessons learned from Bacon's art are the technique of painting on the back side of primed linen canvas, and composing with careful reflections and transmissions of light and shadow that distort the images without depriving them of their emotional impact.

The paintings are all done with acrylics. Ballaine begins with no preliminary sketches, but photographs often suggest compositions and provide gestural ideas. Each picture shows a single figure in a closed interior, with no implicit narrative, no social commentary, no drama, and no sentimentality. The figure is always close to life-size. This one-on-one psychological aspect explains the dimensions of the pieces. The largest ones (44 x 36 in.) place the subject against a developed background, and the smallest works (14 x 11 in.) are of heads only.

In contrast to this reduction of the figural image to maintain one type of consistency, the individualization of the subject disappears as the works grow large. The small head pieces are all obvious portraits (indeed, self-portraits), while the full figures are depersonalized by their somewhat neutered sexuality as well as the brusque treatment of the facial features.

Looking back in time this series can be seen to have developed along paths from stasis to movement, and from more traditional representation to looser abstract formats emphasizing delight in pure painting. Every new canvas was done with at least one finished piece on view so that each picture grew out of the previous ones. The problems Ballaine resolved while working within this venturesome process of growth have been the prize for the artist.

For the viewer, each piece initially presents its particular formal and conceptual challenges. However, those who take the trouble to study them will soon enjoy their play of light and shadow and line and color and design and composition, and will experience their profound sensuality.

A few examples will serve to indicate Ballaine's masterly treatment of artistic elements. Rhythmic patterning is the basic design form of "Seated Male Nude, 2002". The rich background of reflections and shadowing includes the slatted diagonals in the center of the floor.

Another major set of diagonals appears as shadows from the back of the chair that were formed on the wall and floor at the left side of the picture, as though the wooden slats had been disembodied by the power of light, leaving only a lavender memory in the chair frame. No realistic analysis can explain these happenings. They suggest a magical choreography of light and mass that has been recorded in paint as part of the larger patterning of stripes, curves and ovals that stabilizes and animates the picture’s structure.

Spatial composition is a principal aspect of "Nude with Shirt, 2003" (cover photo). Here, Ballaine aggressively emphasized the two-dimensional surface and abstracted the imagery by pressing the seated subject right up against a background of large diffuse rectangles. The flattened human figure has been spread out beyond the edges of the canvas, and in the shock of compression the legs became unhinged from the body.

Many of the features of human flesh, bone and muscularity have been diminished also by the use of thinned paint. The long diagonals of the parallel limbs are offset by two large ovals, one in the loop of the arms above and the other in the form that encloses the leg below.<br>Two limb ends have banged into the wall on the left, forcing the green paint lines to curl around them. If not for the thin armrest that anchors them the subject would slide off the smashed chair bottom. And blood seems to trickle down the lower leg from the knee where it bumped into the gray oval mass that might have been a pant leg before its artistic transformation.

This same painting also shows off Ballaine’s beautiful use of color. The dominant blue, magenta, yellow, orange and green pigments provide a complementary balance that harmonizes the sections of the picture. Magenta specks reflect off the rectangular right edge and onto the androgynous figure’s face and shirt, giving them a pale violet glow. Greenish yellow covers the vertical space on the left in a thinned mist, and pale blue washes over the beige lower section and drips to the bottom. A rough rectangular wave of black on white expands from the right side and spatters onto the lower leg as the artist asserts his own gender in a parting shot.

Jerrold Ballaine has used the special creative determination that sometimes comes to older artists to produce new works of singular originality and eloquence.

—Robert Berg, Curator
Sebastopol, California
November, 2003

 

 

click on images for larger views

"Self Portrait, 2003&"
"Self Portrait"
30" x 20" 2003
Acrylic on linen
"Female Study with Studio Light, 2003"
"Female Study
with Studio Light"
40" x 30", 2003
Acrylic on linen
"Losing Balance, 2003"
"Losing Balance"
44" x 36", 2003
Acrylic on linen
"Man with Arm in Motion, 2003"
"Man with Arm in Motion"
44" x 30", 2003
Acrylic on linen