Casper Brindle Video by EMS
/Thank you to EMS for this short exhibition video. To view the exhibition catalog clink the link below.
Thank you to EMS for this short exhibition video. To view the exhibition catalog clink the link below.
Photograph courtesy Brent Broza Photography
Casper Brindle is convinced that he’s putting out some of his best work yet in his latest exhibition at William Turner Gallery in Santa Monica.
The artist, who began painting in the 1980s and is a disciple of the Light and Space art movement in Los Angeles, has woven a Southern California influence through all his work, whether the hot rod and surf culture found in his earlier work or the pure light in his latest exhibition.
“I think the light in LA is different than anywhere else in the world,” Brindle said. “This will be my best show yet. I’m really proud of this show.”
The show is called “Light | Glyphs” and will be on display through November 5. The series contains 25 pieces of which 15 will be shown at William Turner Gallery.
“Light is a huge part of my work in general and especially this body of work,” Brindle said. “I would say it is as important as the materials that I use, even more so. These works came to fruition just playing with light and seeing what happens with other materials. I started with light itself and manipulated the materials to do different things and bring different energies.”
Brindle, who was born in Toronto, moved to LA when he was 6 years old in the mid-1970s and he has lived there ever since. He was an apprentice to the Light and Space pioneer Eric Orr. He has exhibited on a regular basis at William Turner Gallery for more than 10 years and this is his 7th solo exhibition with the gallery.
A surfer, Brindle is constantly observing the play of light on water and how it expresses itself with color. Many of the works were done during the COVID lockdowns, something that Brindle said worked out to be a great thing for a lot of artists.
“Everything went on the backburner,” Brindle said. “You didn’t have to follow deadlines. You were kind of like, now it is time to really play with ideas and research and do the things that you can’t do when you have commitments and things like that.”
To create the works in this exhibit, Brindle used automotive paints, pigmented acrylic and metal leaf. The final works are 3 feet by 3 feet by 4 inches. He used translucent sculptural boxes which he air painted with diffused colors through the frosted surfaces.
The light in the colored background reflects in a quietly dramatic manner. In the center of each piece is a glyph, inspired by hieroglyphs that were ancient modes of communication, where symbols or marks were carved in relief to convey ideas.
Brindle’s glyph is a three-dimensional rectangle that intersects the center of the translucent box. The glyphs have been described as a beacon cutting through fog – quietly dramatic.
“I’m fascinated with hieroglyphs and how they used them to communicate,” Brindle said. “I use that as kind of a vehicle to do this newer work with glyphs. They go back awhile in the paintings.
There is just something that a spirit bigger than us is speaking to us. When I look at just a single glyph, it is speaking to that bigger power. I found that fascinating to use in the work.”
With Brindle’s use of gold and silver leaf to create the glyphs, he feels they really lend themselves to telling a story and he wanted to further the investigation into glyphs with these paintings.
Casper Brindle, Light-Glyph II, 2021, pigmented acrylic, 74” x 44” x 12”
Two different processes went into creating the works in this exhibit. With the glyphs, he did a lot of preparation, research and models. The decision-making process was very conscious as from the start he had an idea of where he wanted to go with them.
The paintings, on the other hand, had a more Zen approach. Brindle would find himself in a meditative state, a state of calmness where he let the work take over.
“It is a meditative state where all of a sudden at the end of the day, you’re like, ‘What just happened?’” Brindle said. “It’s that kind of thing when you’re driving and then all of a sudden, you’re at your destination and you don’t remember how you got there. That’s the same feeling I get when I make the works. The day starts and then it is 8 p.m. and I’ve got to go home.”
Brindle said he doesn’t typically have a preconceived idea of what he is going to do with the paintings. He lets them paint themselves.
“It’s a constant trance-like state of making right and wrong decisions along the way,” Brindle said. “I don’t say I’m going to do a blue painting. I just start and make a number of decisions along the way and just kind of paint these paintings.”
Throughout the years and with individual paintings, his choice of materials has always changed and shifted, evolving until he gets to where he is now.
“That’s part of the process,” Brindle said. “The best part about making art is the process. Things are changing all the time until you get to a place where you are like, now I have it. I know what this is about.”
The trance-like state is one that he shares with those that experience his work. Brindle said he’s had a lot of reactions to his art, but the most common one is a sense of lightness and calm — a sense of their bodies decompressing and entering a meditative state.
He stressed the importance of seeing his three-dimensional work in person. It’s the only way to experience its depth and the way the light shimmers and moves. The large paintings shift as a person walks by them, inviting viewers to pause, to explore perception.
This is Brindle’s first major show since the pandemic delayed an earlier showing at the William Turner Gallery in 2020. He invites patrons to come and lose themselves in his meditative works, to let art minister to their hungry souls.”
We encourage you to view the digital catalog of LIGHT | GLYPHS. We will be printing a hard copy of this catalog. If you would like to receive a hard copy of the catalog please contact the gallery.
CASPER BRINDLE ARTIST PAGE
EXHIBITION PAGE FOR LIGHT | GLYPHS
With Light | Glyphs, Casper Brindle presents two new bodies of work, each involving dramatic investigations into light, color, and perspective.
A contemporary disciple of the 1960s & 70s Light and Space generation, Brindle is intrigued by the phenomenological possibilities stimulated by color and light. Employing a variety of materials and styles, Brindle’s work engages the viewer in experiences that inspire both reflection and interaction, as one begins to explore the enigmatic spaces of perception.
Utilizing tools and techniques adopted from Southern California’s distinctive car culture, Brindle applies fine layers of airbrushed sprays to create atmospheric gradations of subtle depth. Brindle's treatment of color and light as a material modality, draws the viewer deeper into the illusory depths of the canvas, anchoring our attention against the constant pull of time and distraction, so that we might pause and reflect.
While his work has clear ties to the materiality of the Finish Fetish and Light and Space movements, he synthesizes these sensibilities to create something entirely his own, captivating the viewer in expansive fields that have the power to elicit deeper emotional responses.
Born in Toronto in 1968, Brindle’s family relocated to Los Angeles in 1974, and he has called the city home ever since. Growing up surfing the beaches of LA’s coast undoubtedly made a profound impact on the artist. Brindle started painting as a teen and in his early twenties, he apprenticed for the pioneering Light and Space artist Eric Orr.
Casper Brindle’s work has been exhibited across the United States and internationally. This exhibition is the artist’s seventh solo exhibition with the gallery. His work is held in a number of prominent private and museum collections including the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation and the Morningside College Collection in Sioux City, IA.
Be sure to catch the feature in LA WEEKLY highlighting the work of Kim DeJesus. Read the article on the LA WEEKLY web site by clicking the button below.
Kim’s work is featured in the current exhibition CONFLUENCE. View the catalog for the exhibition below.
CONFLUENCE Exhibition Catalog is now available. Click on the button below to to take a look at the latest publication from William Turner Gallery.
With increased vaccinations and decreased threat of the pandemic, it has been enormously gratifying to hear the exclamations of joy and excitement as people begin to return to the gallery to experience art again in person. Our response to this pent up desire has been to celebrate as many of the gallery’s artists as possible as we get back to some semblance of normal. Our previous exhibition, CrossCurrents, showcased a cross-section of the gallery’s artists and work produced during the pandemic.
Confluence expands on this notion by introducing an exciting sampling of work by new and familiar artists on the gallery’s roster - their unique and disparate voices finding surprising harmonies through shared passions for art-making and expressing the human spirit in visual form. Many of the artists in this exhibition continue to experiment and probe the expressive possibilities of the materials with which they are working, creating works that in some instances inspire meditative reflection, and in others utilize materials to inspire movement and interactivity.
Natalie Arnoldi
Arnoldi states that, “These paintings represent a literal and figurative interface: between air and water, humans and the ocean, viewer and painting”. Growing up in Malibu, Natalie Arnoldi has spent much of her life in and near the ocean which became the inspiration for both her academic and artistic pursuits. The artist’s paintings of lightening exemplify her fascination with the vastness of the seas and mysterious forces of nature. Working in a limited palette that evokes the deep ocean depths, dark, inky pools of blue provide the moody backdrop for charged flashes of light. Arnoldi’s love of the ocean has found expression not only through in her powerful artwork, but has been complimented by a deep love of science, evidenced by her simultaneous pursuit of a Phd in Marine Biology from Stanford. The result has given us exquisite body of paintings, informed by scientific knowledge & creative passion.
Kim DeJesus
We are excited to introduce the work of Kim DeJesus to the gallery. Her improvisational abstractions tap into her interest in memory - how it works, and what it reveals about us and the world. In this new body of work, DeJesus explores how marks, colors, layers, erasures, and patches, evoke remembrance and forgetfulness and suggest the discoveries we make and the absences in our lives. Her work is informed by a concern with natural processes, particularly as they symbolize the relationship between ourselves and nature and the dichotomy we face in being simultaneously "a part of” and "apart from” the natural world. As the artist states: "This tension is echoed in the way I work. The material is not entirely controlled in my studio, allowing for accidents, discoveries, and an ongoing conversation between myself, the material, and what’s appearing on the canvas or paper. Frequently, I introduce marks and collage elements whose intentionality disrupts the happenstance of their fluid elements. The completed painting is a record of that process and the corrections and alterations that months of work bring about. Ultimately, I’m looking for artworks that depend for their transcendence in the tension between beauty and flaw, between grand ambition and simple means."
Eric Johnson
Inspired by both art and science, Eric Johnson creates composite works of pigment, wood and resin that reference a kinship with other artists: to the sensuality of Brancusi, the architectural vigor of Bontecou, and the works of DeLap. The handcrafted abstract works are often sheathed in resin skins, often revealing glimpses of skeletal armatures and hidden architectures. In reflection, Johnson’s structural forms are influenced by a severe neck injury and dealing with intense spinal pain. Other influences have been the aerospace industry and ancestral boat builder heritage. Initially the constructs hid their “bones” under a “skin”, time capsule artifacts within. Over the past twelve years, the structures have become organic and revealing to their formation. The current work merges the passion for depth and structure with an obsession for color and surface. Johnson has spent decades working with polyester resin. Like many artists of his generation, Johnson embraced the hot-rod culture of Southern California. As often was the case for many artists working in the 1970s, industrial products found their way into Johnson’s early studio practice and have remained there ever since. “I’ve translated all that automotive knowledge into making my artwork”,” he says. “I use the full array of auto tools and pigments.”
Javier Paláez
Based in Mexico City, Javier Peláez creates work that considers the myriad possibilities involved with the construction and perception of reality. Depicting enigmatic imagery that can be construed as simultaneously materializing and deconstructing, Peláez’s pictorial language is set in an incessant swing between opposing states of being. Fascinated by polarities, Peláez’s subjects walk the line between figuration and abstraction, disintegration and formation, certainty and uncertainty, inviting the viewer engage their imaginations as they enter to these beautiful spaces of ambiguity.
Curtis Ripley
Taking cues from the aesthetic of American Abstract Expressionists, Curtis Ripley’s process is one of spontaneity and gesture. Color is applied in broad strokes atop murky, moody surfaces. Ripley uses brushes and rags to wipe out and repaint the surface, obscuring previous layers while gradually building up others to create even deeper space and movement. As Ripley says of his work - “My hope is to create paintings that are timeless, poetic and full of life.” Music plays an important role in Ripley’s creative process. His rhythmic brushstrokes dance across the canvases and these flickering flashes of color result in bursts of sparkling light. Ripley’s paintings are lyrical - he cites poetry as a key influence, stating, “It is the economy of means, the resistance to strict interpretation and the intimate relationship with the viewer which I find essential. These paintings are not puzzles. They are meant to be experienced.”
Gustavo Ramos Rivera
Over the past four decades, Gustavo Ramos Rivera has developed a unique visual language that manifests throughout his paintings, monotypes and collages. His playful and powerful abstract compositions can be read like a visual diary, the expression of which works on both intellectual and emotional levels. Ramos Rivera’s fields of rich color and glyph-like mark making recall both the work of Joan Miro, Paul Klee and Cy Twombly and the iconography of the indigenous cultural heritage of his native Mexico. The marriage of spontaneous linework with technicolor fields create a highly personal symbology that speaks to memory, experience and shared history. Ramos Rivera says of his practice, “Painting is a delightful devotion, a mirror of truth; it’s an invention of anything you want.”
Michel Tabori
Michel Tabori’s work depicts symmetric transformations of the natural world, from fast moving action, landscapes and intimate portraits, as experienced both directly and through reflections of the subject’s surroundings. With a 30-year background as an award winning cinematographer, Tabori brings his highly attuned eye and technical proficiency to an ever-evolving repertoire in manifesting his poetic depictions of nature. Utilizing photography, digital imagery, airbrush, while painting on canvas and most recently, aluminum, Tabori has created works of captivating beauty. The result is not a static painting, but rather a work of continually shifting optics achieved through the use of materials that interact with the reflections of light and movement.
Alex Couwenberg, Troubadour, acrylic & spray on canvas, 72”x66”
Digital Catalog for the 2021 exhibition CrossCurrents at William Turner Gallery is now available.
Read MoreWilliam Turner speaks with William S. Burroughs for Venice Magazine in 1992.
Read More
William Turner Gallery is pleased to announce that we will be extending access to Andy Moses: Recent Works until February 27 due to overwhelming demand. The gallery will be offering increased appointment availability through February 27, 2021.
Appointments will still be booked on the William Turner Gallery web site and appointments will be available from 1-5PM, Tuesday through Saturday.
Andy Moses: RECENT WORKS 74-page Fully Illustrated Catalog Now Available at the gallery.
TODAY 1-5 PM @ William Turner Gallery - Please visit the web site for appointments
Gallery artist Andy Moses will be at the William Turner Gallery this Saturday, February 6, from 1-5pm to talk about the work, sign copies of the exhibition catalog and meet with guests visiting the exhibition.
Social distancing guidlines will be strictly adhered to and masks are required. You can make appointments for a viewing on the gallery web site or by clicking the button labeled appointments below.
SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Four years ago, artist Andy Moses was celebrated in a 30-year survey of his life’s work not far from where he grew up.
Mid-career, his work showed a consistent palette inspired by his time spent in the water while surfing off the beaches of Southern California.
“You never saw the same thing twice,” said Moses. “The line was always moving. The colors were always shifting.”
Looking at his most recent artwork today, you still see the same influence.
“Then when you rode a wave, you saw the texture on the wave, you saw the changing light, the shifting shades of color, and those were gigantic influences on me as a painter,” he said.
Interested in the physical properties of paint, Moses developed a method of painting through chemical reactions and by playing with viscosity and gravity to create compositions that simulate nature. Even the shape of his canvas looks like a wave.
“I’m interested in how they suggest landscape or this kind of Earthscape, capturing a view of somewhere of the Earth,” said Moses. “It could be oceanic, it could be desert, but you’re looking through this flat space into the infinite and you’re capturing all the subtle change of light that actually happens when you’re looking at this kind of phenomenon.”
Growing up as the son of Ed Moses, one of the most celebrated artists in Los Angeles' history, Moses had a lot to live up to once he decided to become an artist himself. While studying film at CalArts, Moses discovered he preferred having sole control of a canvas over a camera. He now paints out of his father’s old studio, where his spirit can be found everywhere.
“It was great growing up with a father for a painter,” said Moses. “There was always something to look at. He was always pushing the boundaries. He was always evolving. He was always moving forward.”
Now, it’s his turn to move forward to his newest show called "Recent Works" at the William Turner Gallery in Santa Monica's Bergamot Station.
Opening during a pandemic does limit visitors, but Moses' work gets their full attention.
“For 35 years now, I’ve been interested in exploring this line between abstraction and the galactic and microscopic phenomenon on a human scale, and how we relate to it,” he said.
Art is human, and human is nature.
Short video celebrating highlights from Andy Moses: Recent Works currently on view at William Turner
Andy Moses’ father, Ed Moses, was an artist with the Ferus Gallery, now enshrined as LA’s Cool School, and Andy grew up in the Santa Monica Canyon, looking out onto the ocean. He went to the California Institute of Arts, where the Death of Painting was a given and Concept art and Minimalism ruled, so for two years he worked with film and video. But an urge to pick up a brush seized him in his third year and he describes his instant conversion to pigment as a chemical rush. Upon leaving Cal Arts in 1982 he headed straightaway for New York where the break-out of the Neo-Exes had brought painting back to robust life.
Moses’ earliest work in New York were black-and-white abstractions and these were in his first exhibition at Annina Nosei. There was a distinctive edge to his project from the get-go. “I almost went into the scientific world when I was young,” Moses says. “I was very good at math and science. It’s always in the back of my mind and the way I make paintings is kind of scientific. Basically I experiment and try to figure out how paint flows.”
Such thinking entered the content too. “I was taking stories out of the New York Timesand silkscreening them on the sides of images to create complex narratives that were very much about language,” he says. “Things disintegrating, things forming. So I was kind of telling the audience what I was interested in.” The opening of a show in which he had work brought him back to Southern California in January 2000. “I fell in love with LA all over again,” he says. His New York period was done.
Moses settled first in Malibu. “It was right on the water. I used to commute to my Venice studio,” he says. “In New York I would go to Montauk. But you didn’t get the sense of infinite horizon that you get out here. There’s a point where the horizon connects with the sky. And sometimes it’s very well defined, but sometimes there’s a haze, a blur, and one thing begins to turn into another. I’m interested in that mirroring effect, of looking out into space, seeing one thing mirror another. You see it a lot in the desert, you see it a lot in the ocean.”
This got into his art. “The work shifted pretty quickly.” Moses says. “The very first ones I started doing were long and horizontal, mostly pearlescent white, and quite simple images.” He began keeping precise color notes. “I have an assistant who reads these charts and follows these tabulations,” he says. “We have thousands of pages going back years and years.”
He will begin a painting by figuring out the colors. Basing his choices on what?
“Things I’ve seen. Like things I’ve seen out in the natural world.” he says. The commutes on the Pacific Coast Highway have been a slipstream of visual event. “They are engrained on my memory. Then I focus on certain colors that might work together. What I’ll do is experiment on small paintings to see how much of these colors I should put in. It’s very interesting. Because reds and greens seem to expand, the blues seem to contract. So I have an idea what I’m going to do. But either they follow what I’m trying to get at or they don’t. And what’s cool is there is a certain amount of control but I also have to react to a situation in the moment.”
Accident being crucial.
“It’s a brand-new experience every single time,” Moses says “And that’s what makes it exciting. I don’t know what the end is going to be. I have to discover it as the paint is flowing. And react. And the paint reacts to what I do. And I react to what it does.”
He uses a dozen buckets, holding a couple of quarts of paint apiece, on each canvas. “I’ll walk around and pour in from one side and pour in from another side,” Moses says. “Everything is moving towards the center. And if I lift the painting up as it’s moving, everything will run the other way. So it is this juggling act of trying to get the sensation of everything moving towards the center. But at the same time there is a lot of circular movement that is happening.
“And other lines will be pushed by other buckets of paint. They will start to recede and come forward, which creates a three dimensional aspect. So I really never know what a painting is going to look like until it’s finished. Each one begins and ends in its own way. And there’s a million possibilities every time. And at a certain point I have to let go. And say that’s it!
“Once the color is down and the surface is all wet I can work on it for a couple of hours. It’s an intensely focused period of time. And the painting has to be done in one sitting every single time. It’s always done in a day. And it’s a long day.”
The sheer size of today’s’ art world, including the number of working artists, means that a walk-through of galleries in any art capital will reveal an acreage of beautifully-made work, sometimes described as “zombie formalism” or “crapstraction”, so that it’s almost jarring to confront the real thing. Andy Moses is not alone there – Hello, Sean Scully – but there he is, a figure in what has been described as a new Pictorialism.
“I do think it’s that,” Moses says. “Pictorialism is very much about
how things come into being. It is about energy and light turning into
matter”
Abstraction can be just that, I observed. Abstract. But abstraction
can also depict life, if not in forms with which we are familiar.
“I think so,” Moses said. “Somehow we are familiar with it and
Somehow we’re not. And I’m really trying to focus on that, the
essential force that’s all around us. I think it’s the emergence of how
we perceive images and how images come into being. And how
energy creates things – light and motion and movement. I really
want the energy of these to be the energy of the earth, the world.
Everything is dynamic, everything is changing, everything is
moving, everything is shifting ... and everything has that dynamic
aspect. You can see the world. And that it’s alive.” WM
William Turner Gallery is pleased to present the digital catalog for Recent Works, an expansive new series of paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Andy Moses. This extensive presentation marks the artist’s first solo exhibition since his highly acclaimed 30 Year Survey exhibition in 2017 at the Santa Monica College Pete and Susan Barrett Art Gallery.
Andy Moses: Recent Works presents an artist fully engaged and at the height of his creative process, showcasing perhaps his most ambitious and diverse body of work to date. Implementing techniques that utilize the artist’s almost obsessive study of the alchemical properties of paint, Moses’s work blurs the line between abstraction and a new kind of pictorialism…
A hard copy of the catalog will be available at the gallery. To receive a copy of the catalog by mail please email at turnergallery@gmail.com.
Andy Moses & Geomorphology 1707, photograph courtesy Alan Shaffer
AMANDA QUINN OLIVAR: I remember going to one of your earliest LA exhibits, with the rock paintings. When were you first inspired by nature? Has your art continued to revolve around it?
ANDY MOSES: Nature continues to be my first and main source for inspiration in my painting. I have always been interested in trying to capture that feeling of being alive. When you immerse yourself in nature you feel alive. The rock paintings you mention are from a show I had in 1988 at Asher Faure Gallery. Brian Butler, who now owns gallery 1301PE, was actually their director at that time, at Betty and Patty’s space on Almont Street. Your mother and father, Joan and Jack, actually bought two rock paintings before that exhibition in either 1986 or 1987.
AQO: Have other themes resonated throughout your career? Talk about the importance of form, energy and structure…
AM: Those are all great questions. Form, energy, and structure are what my work is very much about. I feel that form is essential to all painting. You create form in some sense within the picture field, but I’m also interested in the overall form or structure of what a painting of mine is and how that relates to form in general. In this recent exhibition at William Turner Gallery, each painting is one of three geometric forms: circular (which I refer to as tondos), hexagonal, or concave rectangles. In the tondos and hexagons, the form is emerging out of the center and the exterior form is defined by that emergence from the center. The panoramas are different. The overall composition is a little more conventional in that it is describing a pictorial landscape, or as I like to think of them, earthscapes. The earthscape being a little less like traditional landscape forms and a little more like an imagined form of some part of the earth. I am interested in this dance between pure abstraction and the suggestion of forms from the natural world. These concave curved rectangles come out of gestural abstraction but they do become pictorial, but of something that is in motion...
Andy Moses: RECENT WORKS - A short video about the exhibition from EMS - Photograph courtesy Alan Shaffer Photography
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