Hadley Rampton . . . from page 1
Rampton’s travels are, she says, “a better way of understanding the rest of the world than through the headlines. I like to take the trains, I like to get past what is put on for the tourists, and to really get into what the real feel of the country is, what the real people are thinking there, and what their lives are.”
Her most recent travels have taken her to Hungary, Turkey, Georgia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Armenia. “These are parts of the world that were under communism and have strong senses of themselves. Then you look back over the centuries and their history of invasion, by the Byzantine Empire, and then it was the Ottoman Empire, and then the Russian and communism, they all still have their own pride in who they are.”
There is something very special about the human experience, that through wars, recessions, famine, natural and human-caused disasters, we can still, through it all, look to art and the messages it brings — and at these peak times of turbulence, most often that message is about what it means to be human: it is about truth. Equally special is the phenomenon of the artist who herself lives a life that is the search for truth. This is the undisclosed distinction of Rampton, whose art is her means to find, to express, and to learn “about what it means to be human.”
When she’s abroad, Rampton works in watercolor, a medium with a magnificent history associated with major artists and artist travelers who have enjoyed the practical as well as aesthetic benefits of the medium. Watercolor’s malleability of application is very desirable for those who can appreciate milder tones and enjoy the structural interplay and relationships the medium allows. These requisites define the work of Rampton, an avid colorist who uses pen and ink to define her structural edges, thus adding immense dimension and making the whole piece “pop!” Her colors do not get lost at a distance but in her method stay true and strong, no matter how far away the viewer may be standing.
Rampton’s past series of watercolors finds the penetrative artist looking closely at dusty streets, brightly colored buildings, sidewalk cafes, village bazaars with much interplay between the old world, that is lost in muted and faded tones and designated by the expressive pen usage of the artist to get into cracks and the crevices, and the bold world of the new. In Rampton’s “Adhan, At Dusk, Istanbul” (watercolor and ink 12” x 16”) one sees the 6th century Hagia Sophia presented in the distance under the late afternoon sun at the call for evening prayer. The artist’s view of the Turkish capital is lively and modern. Rampton sees the bright colors of the automobiles, the youth with vivid nylon backpacks on their backs, women walking about freely together with varying degrees of dress, a kiosk with a bright top serving refreshments for a hot late afternoon; this is a scene that could take place almost anywhere, the presence of Hagia Sophia being the only indication that this is old Istanbul. We see in these early works an artist not only painting, but also an artist questioning and searching for truth amidst what one thinks one knows and what actually is.
Rampton’s current work may give the initial impression that these are a series of romanticized compositions; that Rampton has given up her search for realism for a new perspective towards a more idealistic notion of reality. But upon closer inspection, the viewer will see they are wrong with such generalized inference. Rampton’s color palette has indeed changed — it is a less bold color systematization and more playful and lighter use of color conducive to the settings. A work like “Early Evening, Budavari Palota," is grandiose, with its historic monument and late-neo-Classical edifice: the painting almost resembles a history piece. But not too distant from the frontal plane, sitting on the rim of the plaza, are two young women who are unmistakably 21st century in hair and dress. Also, the exaggerated pen and ink that is Rampton’s signature method is applied very liberally, giving far greater depth to crevices and breaks in masonry in and around the plaza, emphasizing the historical dynamic between past and present tense. These subjects may be larger with historic and monumental facades, but historical realism is but one more aspect in an artist’s search for truth made more apparent in scenes that emphasize the notion of temporality and the reality of present, past and future.
As exquisite as Rampton is with watercolors, she is equally adept with oils. She says, “this kind of energy, this excitement that I feel when I am traveling, as much as when I work with oils, I feel the same. It’s exciting and I am energized and I want to do something with it.” Rampton’s subject when she returns to her home in Utah and works in oils is nature, primarily landscapes of aspen groves executed in her singular style.
The excitement felt for the vestigial remains of ancient civilizations in a contemporary setting…is the same as for a grove of aspens? How can this be? Says Rampton, “Whether I am traveling or up in the mountains and it is gorgeous, it is the same. I grew up here, our nature is a huge part of who we are.”
In the dusty streets of Georgia, Rampton shies away from the touristy, brightly lit bistros and experiences the most essential Georgia she can. What, then, is essential about Utah to Rampton? It is our wilderness. It affects all who live or visit here and the honest manner she employs in her brilliant work to depict it is true to the nature of Utah.
Rampton’s approach is not to paint the structure of a particular tree, one defined against the next, to form a grove. Far from it. Just as in her watercolors, in her oils Rampton is fascinated with color harmonies, contrasts, groupings, and looks to the light of day and the saturation upon the grove, to create a composition that, when looked at without the spindly delineated line of the tree, would be entirely abstract.
“I am very much drawn to the abstract expressionists and their way of thinking,” Rampton says. “For example, this is paint on canvas, so I am drawn, especially with the newer work, to heavier brush strokes, much more broad so you are really thinking about color relationships and how to create these strokes, not blending.” She continues: “A lot of it is that I really enjoy different ways of applying paint. I do love color so both in my oils and watercolors my color is enhanced, not in a fauvist kind of way, but I am always interested in color relationships.” These very real aspects of painting are very much the proto-Modernist way of thinking, about considering the reality of painting and the reality of paint, as opposed to trying to fool the eye with illusion, using the same formulas the academies have taught since just after the Renaissance.
The result is that Rampton’s oil paintings both have a universality about them, a sense of abstracted form and structure that points towards a common experience of the landscape, and a very real sense of the local: those who love Utah’s unique landscape will immediately recognize their surroundings when they find themselves immersed in one of Rampton’s landscapes.
As Rampton seeks reality in her travels, with every fragment of truth gained, she learns about the people she meets and their ways of life. Rampton does not stop being a seeker once she returns to her home. Her methodology to her painting of wilderness seamlessly grants her recourse to her unending search for truth and deeper understanding of the world she exists in. More importantly, and more fundamentally, she finds in her search, a greater manifestation of her personal, very private, very real, and honest reality.
An exhibit of new oil paintings and watercolors by Hadley Rampton opens at Salt Lake City's Phillips Gallery on October 18 with a reception 6-9 pm. The exhibit continues through November 8.
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Exhibition Spotlight: Salt Lake City
Man in a Suit
Andrew Rice at Saltgrass Printmakers
by Shawn Rossiter
This month, Saltgrass Printmakers features the work of Andrew Rice, a printmaker who explores the poetic possibilities of empty spaces and isolated figures.
In April, as part of our 35x35 exhibition, we interviewed Rice to discuss his work and chosen medium. We caught up with him again this month as he worked on a large-scale drawing in his Poor Yorick studio.
Enclosed, an exhibit of prints by Andrew Rice, is at Saltgrass Printmakers in Salt Lake City through October 12. You can view more of his work at andrewriceart.com.
Recording of this interview was made possible in part by a grant from Utah Arts & Museums.
Exhibition Review: Orem
Active Light
Experiments in Lighting and Chemistry
by Shawn Rossiter
Photography liberated painting says the traditional narrative of art history. Freed by the advent of photography from the burden of faithful reproduction, artists of the nineteenth century began experimenting with their mediums, stretching their descriptive possibilities while exploring new manners of seeing and understanding the world. Something similar seems to be happening to photography.
Now that digital cameras and post-production software have made it possible for just about anyone to take a great photograph, and economical enough to take photographs of just about everything, the chemical aspect of the technology is attracting new adherants and propelling a flurry of creative experimentation. Photographers are returning to chemical processes not simply because the images look better — the way music afficionados prefer vinyl over digital; they are also returning to chemicals for their experimental possibilities. Whether achieved through accident or systematic trial and error, chemical photography can create astonishingly fresh ways to see and understand the world.
Take Matthew Allred, the Utah photographer showing this month at Finch Lane Gallery. Allred leaves his pinhole cameras out for weeks and even months at a time, allowing the sensitive materials to interact with the available light as days and even seasons pass. The results are ghostly images in which a bright colored band marks the diurnal path of the sun over the allotted days. The extended exposures and dominant light source causes everything momentary to disappear and even any fixed structure to be reduced to a vague silhouette. Allreds' are visually compelling images reeling with poetic implications on the transitory nature of experience.
Chris McCaw, one of two artists exhibiting currently at the Woodbury Museum of Art in an exhibit titled Active Light, does something similar. His silver gelatin images track the sun's path over a shorter period of time, but in a very visceral way. McCaw stumbled on his technique during a camping trip that involved too much whisky: when McCaw forgot to wake up to close the shutter on an all night exposure, the rising sun burned the negative and ruined the image. McCaw embraced the inadvertant folly, and now purposely exposes his silver gelatin negatives to the effects of the sun over long exposures. The overall tonality of his black and white images becomes inverted in a process called solarization, while the sun literally burns the paper either in a single point, like a cigarette burn, or in an arc across the sky, making the final image resemble a cross between Ansel Adams and Lucio Fontana. In addition to the visual interest of their unique and inverted tones, McCaw's images radiate with both heat and movement so that the viewer feels the burning presence of the sun, can almost smell the cooking gelatin, and senses the spinning sphere beneath their feet.
McCaw's exhibition partner, Barry Underwood, approaches light in a dramatically different way, though he too is interested in chemicals and the land. Underwood investigates rural, suburban and urban sites, studying their various uses and in them creates light installations that he documents with his camera. Using LED lights, glowsticks, balloons and other apparatus (the magician is understandably hesitant to reveal his tricks), Underwood intervenes on a scene, providing otherworldly presence to natural and industrial scenes. In some instances Underwood's images resemble over-produced commercial photography, and the artist plays up the artificiality of his constructed images with Shakespearean titles like "Prospero" and "Oberon and Titiana." In other cases, though, where a mountainside is lit up by a field of pale yellow lights, or a school of fish is implied by green orbs floating in a lake, we are reminded of the variety and mystery of nature, like the field of lightning bugs that appears in one of Underwood's images.
In Active Light, both arists are using nature, chemical reactions and light to create compelling images. That McCaw's images feel more closely connected with the natural world, more raw or honest, may simply have to do with analog nostalgia — that impulse to enjoy the hiss in a vinyl record.
Active Light, featuring the work of Barry Underwood and Chris McCaw is at the Woodbury Art Museum in Orem through October 19.
Matthew Allred's Heliography opens at Finch Lane Gallery on October 4, 6-8pm, and continues through November 15.
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