One does not make friends, one recognizes them, so the
saying goes, and it seems Joan Baldwin has taken it to heart. She has
intelligently curated and installed an exhibition that honors Cleve Gray, the
artist scholar, by bringing us into his work and studio through her selections
from the Cleve Gray Flat Files. The installation at the Hotchkiss School’sTremain Gallery covers six decades, from his work in high school to the Interplay series created just two years
before his death in 2004.
An opportunity to see the contemplative life of Cleve Gray,
the show feels half library and half studio. Work is pinned to slanted pedestal
shelves. Watercolors, prints and drawings are mounted with bull clips, loose
and unframed, so you can practically rub your nose on them. On thick
deckle-edged paper, the work feels like a remnant of an event with each gesture
of mark-making and color response that, either horizontal or vertical, contains
it and converses with the next piece. His ink figures and watercolor landscapes
all bear similar signatures with blocked tones, infused color transitions,
repeated fractures of light, and screens of geometric patterning created with
the long edge of his charcoal sticks.
His brushes are displayed under glass. Scumbled, frayed,
split, thickly coated and caked, their disintegrating handles are evidence of
Work. Large chunks of pastels, blocks of dried red and orange pigments and wax
crayons are presented as relics of a life of physical commitment. A large
photograph is displayed of his paint splattered studio sink. His materials look
impulsive and untidy. There is a physicality emphasized, with inclusions of
worn studio ephemera and text panels describing Gray’s physical breath work
that preceded the painted marks. He was a striving, curious, hardworking artist.
The installation is intentionally thematic rather than
chronological because of so many returns in his practice to investigations of
color, line, pattern, and the open and closed compositions. Included in the
show is an early portrait he drew as a teenager at Phillips Academy that
heralds his interest in cubism with angular form and emotive use of color. This
lens is returned to in his Paris years, his southwestern landscapes of the 50’s
and his vertical abstracts of the 60’s.
His college thesis was on Yuan Chinese landscape painting
and the theory and process became a lifelong influence. The Yuan Dynasty
Chinese painters responded with their spirit to the subject and then relished
the marks of the material as spontaneous and transcendent. Gray’s brushwork
shows in layers of transparency built up and in the combination of dry and wet
marks. In all the work you can see an interest in the calligraphic line and in
experimenting with media. A long scroll landscape of the Southwest has
multi-vanishing points and details lightened and darkened for emphasis, with field
notations woven through out.
After serving in WWII, young and curious, Cleve Gray stayed
in Paris making art and joined other artists working in Jacques Villon’s
studio. A pastel portrait of Claude McKay, a Harlem renaissance poet who was
both a friend and a model at the studio, is an example of this time.
A large wall-sized diagram connects Cleve Gray, “artist,
writer, farmer, friend”, to his influences in the educational, literary,
musical, and artistic worlds.
There is space for students and visitors to sit and peer
through monographs and books on painting, while listening in ear pods to the
music of the studio. Music is part of the experiential event and the gallery is
filled with the music from Shostakovich to Tchaikovsky that Cleve Gray listened
to as he worked.
At the entrance to the show, Joan Baldwin has chosen a quote about the vast array
of artistic concerns and the repetitive use of media that keep surfacing in the
works over the decades. Cleve Gray was about movement and practice and referred
to the pendulum as a way to find his own center, as reflected in Untitled, with it’s two mirroring
brushstrokes that are black and white, transparent and opaque.
When swinging on a pendulum
between black and white, one always returns to Gray.
Cleve Gray lived in Warren CT. This is his third exhibition
at Hotchkiss. He was a parent and grandparent to Hotchkiss students. The Cleve GrayFoundation has been generous in offering us access to this work.
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