Upand COMING
My first museum job was at the Albright-knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. It was there that I gained a grounding in contemporary art and all the isms of the 20th century— hyperrealism to minimalism. One of my favorite paintings was Georgia O’keeffe’s Green Patio Door,
1955—a horizontal band of mottled blue for the sky, a horizontal band of brown for the adobe wall, a horizontal band of lighter brown for the desert and a vertical rectangle of turquoise for the door. It could have been painted by Josef Albers.
The painting often comes to mind now that
I live among those simple adobe buildings with turquoise doors and the sometimes unbelievable reality of northern New Mexico skies.
David Grossmann is attracted to the simplicity of the West and when it is complex he reduces it to its essence in his Zen-like paintings. He says, “The Asian aesthetic tends to be a twodimensional way of designing images. I like flattening planes and have fun experimenting with more flattened types of images while still maintaining a sense of three dimensions.”
Clouded Sunset, Taos is reminiscent of the planes in O’keeffe’s painting. Grossmann’s brushy application of paint suggests the organic nature of the adobe walls, their shape softened by remudding over the years.
Grossmann spends hours outdoors, observing while running or making multiple sketches of the landscapes. He arranges and rearranges the sketches into simple compositions that belie the process behind them.
The soft adobe shapes of the wall in Brett Allen Johnson’s Gateway are echoed in the peeling slats of the gate, the mountains and the sky. Johnson’s gallery observes, “…he can be found wandering the vacant corners of the state in search of the particular sense of place seen in his paintings.” Immersion in the landscape inspires him but he says, “I am not often a painter of literal places. I regularly invent entire works, or paint them from memory. I like to invite observers into a world which is merely similar to the one they know, an adjacent world.”