The hardest thing about starting an art career is finding your own voice. Strategies differ but often come down to navigating the fine distinction between novelty and originality. Thoughts like this come to mind at the interesting and enjoyable show "Variable Presence" at Aucocisco, featuring the paintings of Shirah Neumann and Jonathan Blatchford. Both artists are young and just getting started in their showing careers.
The good news about today's art world is that for most part the stylistic and thematic imperatives that once dominated the atmosphere have largely evaporated, at least outside academic circles. Since there is no mainstream, what once might have seemed to be tributaries now can be worthy locations to stake a claim. Of course they always were, but you used to take heat for it.
At first glance Shirah Neumann's paintings seen wholly abstract, with internal structure that provides room for dominant shapes, loose patterns, and areas of sophisticated color relationships with freely rendered borders. "Diamond Sky (Night Fire)," for example, has a jagged blue mass that rises from the bottom to form three points just above the middle, suggesting three overlapped triangles, or perhaps pyramids. They are surmounted by a red diamond shape with a blue spotted center that occupies a larger rectangular field of little yellow shapes, all on a darker and less concrete background.
A horizontal color change about midway up the painting gives it a sense of horizon, and turns it from a pure abstraction to something a little mystical, as if this were an impression of the effects of a ritual. And indeed, one of the other paintings refers to Johannes Itten, the Swiss artist whose book on color, written in the 1920s, remains one of the basic texts on the matter. Itten was a member of a fire cult based on Zoroastrianism.
It would be a mistake, I think, to ascribe too much of Neumann's purposes to a directly spiritual intention, but it seems clear with this painting and others like "Temple of the Sun" that she is working towards a numinous quality in all of them. The combined sense of pure abstraction and pictorial reference has, by now, a long history, and has plenty of room left in it.
Jonathan Blatchford is after something a little different. His seven paintings in this show all depict an orchard in seasons where there are no leaves, with the exception of one whose leaves are just starting. There is no specific intention to abstraction in this group; they are landscapes, pure and simple. There is, though, a directed focus on their artifice that has been part of the modernist idea for decades.
For example, "Orchard #14" has the classic landscape areas of illusionary space — a foreground with trees in it, a middle ground with a grassy field, and a background with a hill and horizon. The sky goes from lighter toward the horizon and darker toward the overhead, and is dotted with puffy clouds. All standard.
Blatchford does two things that wrench the illusion back to the abstract idea of "painting." One is that edges of the picture are blank — he brings the paint to within an inch or so of its border and leaves it there. The unpainted area near the edge reveals both the support and the underpainting.
The other is the tree color, which is the core issue. Blatchford cranks the color saturation of out of all relation to a realistic depiction. The lightest twigs are red, blue, or pink marks; the trunk is deep blue on the shadowed side and orange and, on the upper end, bright yellow on the lit side. These colors are outside all chromatic proportion to the range of the rest of the painting. To emphasize their artificiality, there's another tree a short distance behind this one that is mostly dark with a touch of white highlights. He is being clear about he wants to say, and not at all shy about saying it.
The son of a Houston sandwich-shop owner, the hard-charging Mr. Allbritton dealt in real estate, banks and mortuaries until he was drawn to the District by a new challenge: reviving an ailing afternoon newspaper in the nation’s power center.
Mr. Allbritton bought the Washington Star in 1974. He won entry into the District’s elite political circles not only as a media magnate but also as a friend of other Texans who had made their fortunes in the capital, including lobbyist Jack Valenti and Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworksi.
Federal regulations over media ownership forced him to sell the Star just four years after he bought it. But he retained valuable broadcast properties, including the ABC affiliate that soon took his initials (WJLA, Channel 7), and he forged ahead with other enterprises that included NewsChannel 8, one of the country’s first 24-hour local news channels.
In recent years, the company Mr. Allbritton started — now run by his son, Robert — has reshaped the city’s media landscape with the launch of Politico and the short-lived Internet news venture TBD.
The elder Mr. Allbritton was perhaps best known for overseeing Riggs National Bank, marketed as “the most important bank in the most important city in the world,” during its scandal-plagued decline. The bank was eventually forced to pay millions of dollars in fines for hiding assets of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Riggs was Washington’s largest independent bank and its most gilded. Since its founding in 1836, the bank had served 21 presidents and their families and had financed the Mexican-American War and the purchase of Alaska. The bank’s flagship branch sat across Pennsylvania Avenue from the Treasury Department, a geographical metaphor for its proximity to power.
Mr. Allbritton, too, cultivated connections to influence. He entertained presidents at his home in Northwest Washington and hosted an annual brunch (often featuring Texas chili) for boldfaced names from the intersecting worlds of business, finance and media. He collected impressionist paintings and bought a farm in Fauquier County where he indulged his passion for raising thoroughbreds. His horse Hansel won the Preakness and Belmont stakes in 1991.
In 1982, he spent $70 million to acquire a controlling interest in Riggs National Bank. He became chairman and chief executive, and his strategy for the next two decades relied on the bank’s air of exclusivity to woo wealthy clients, particularly foreign governments and their diplomats in Washington.
He traveled the world in the bank’s Gulfstream jet, courting heads of state and wealthy businessmen abroad. He continued to conduct business in lavish style even after shareholders raised questions about the bank’s high overhead costs and tried to force him to sell the jet.
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