And a Project Aimed at Raising Up the San Pedro Arts Scene
The Palos Verdes Art Center presents a very special exhibition by pioneering San Pedro artist, abstract painter, and curator, Ron Linden titled The Look of Disquiet, on view through Nov. 16. PVAC is also showing another San Pedro artist; Ann Weber, with her exhibition, Let the Sunshine In.
The Look of Disquiet takes its title from the 1935 novel The Book of Disquiet by Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa. This episodic and fragmented piece is one of many literary works from which Linden draws inspiration.
Linden takes a literary approach to his abstract works, which create an opportunity for implied narrative within a study of shapes. This year has been particularly productive for the retired associate professor of art. It was spent mostly in the studio. When discussing his new exhibition, Linden said several things inspired him this year, like introducing himself to a couple of poets, in particular, John Berryman.
Linden was invited to show an exhibition at PVAC by the art center’s community engagement director, Gail Phinney, whom he had known since his days at TransVagrant@WarschawGallery, which closed in 2016. Linden’s TransVagrant@WarschawGallery, considered the crowning achievement in the San Pedro art scene, set the bar for exhibitions in San Pedro, and featured highly acclaimed artists from greater Los Angeles.
Even though he had no prior dealings with the Palos Verdes Art Center, Linden said he was quite glad he accepted the invite. He noted everything was handled so professionally that they made it a pleasure and “they made it also kind of seamless.”
One of the highlights in the show is an assorted ephemera from the artist’s studio on display in two vitrines, which illuminate the mechanics of his process, referencing when drafting tools, triangles, straight edges, and French curves became the subject of his work. Linden said Phinney had the smart idea to present the vitrines. Indeed, as you enter the main gallery, the centrally located glass cases garnered considerable attention from visitors during the opening reception. Also inside are a handful of books that have inspired Linden over the years, aside from Pessoa’s, The Book Of Disquiet are: Minds Meet by Walter Abish, The Journal of Albion Moonlight by Kenneth Patchen, and 77 Dream Songs by John Berryman.
“I did a play on it and called [the exhibit] The Look Of Disquiet,” said Linden. “This guy, Fernando Pessoa, was so radical and so strange that he would scribble notes on anything, and then he would throw them into this trunk. And he just kept filling the trunk with these scraps. Then this editor who was such a fan and admirer of Pessoa put them together and they totally make sense.”
Linden added, in the vitrine are two of the very first books that got him as interested in literature as he was in painting. Abish’s Minds Meet was the first work of meta-fiction that he ever read.
“The narrative will be going along and suddenly, you realize that something else is happening with the language that is no longer coherent in the sense that a narrative would be,” Linden said. “It’s wordplay. It’s so abstract that I could make that correlation between the images that were created in my head from what I was reading, to images that might make it into a painting. The other one like that is the only novel ever written by the Northern California poet, Kenneth Patchen, who wrote The Journal of Albion Moonlight, which is psychedelic. Some people thought that it was conceived and executed while he was high on LSD. That may or may not be, but strange and wonderful things happened in that novel too. It’s prescient, like the protagonist Jack, midway through becomes Jaquine and then changes his gender back again. I never read anything like that, this was in the 1970s, you know?”
In his case, Linden said, meta-fiction was interesting and inspiring; he believes there are direct correlations between Pessoa’s book and, not some, but all of the paintings in this exhibit.
“If you look at them, they fall into the category of abstract painting,” he said. “But there are hints at figuration. There are hints at real objects whether they’re writing tools like the masks that I use, or whether they’re trying to humanize abstraction like in Clown Time, that funny black, white, gray painting that looks like it’s got a tongue sticking out [and] weird eyes that are spying on some event. I was just having fun, trying to poke fun at formalist art, which I guess is easy to do.”
Also displayed in the vitrine is one of the artist’s notebooks, which features pennings from re•dux, his 2023 exhibition at Gallery 478, organized by Arnée Carofano, possible titles for artist Anne Daub’s spring show, Multi-Faceted, at PVAC, and a blend of colors Linden smudged together from his paint palette, that pleasantly surprised him. And, on a more personal note, Linden wrote the names of artists, his friends, who have passed away in recent years; Slobodan Dimitrov, Craig Antrim, and Scott Brown.
Not only is Linden still painting and curating, but he also brought forth coloration not often seen in his repertoire.
“I was working my way from ochre and raw sienna and started to add cadmium yellow and found that glow,” Linden said. “Basically, I’m monochrome, mostly black, white, gray, trying to get it done with the most minimal of tools and moves and colors. I’m stuck on that modernist edict, that less is more, so I try to be as straightforward and workman-like as I can be. And I’m interested obviously in diagrams and structures that lead nowhere, or somewhere.”
Linden recalled paintings he composed that echoed interiors in the 1980s, sometimes with stylized minimal furniture like chairs or tables and nothing else in them, just vacant interiors. He said he became attached to that idea because it conveyed a kind of emotion that he had been interested in for a long time. Those paintings were directly inspired by French writer and filmmaker, Alain Robbe-Grillet.
“[He] did novels where there was nobody and there were just descriptions of rooms, environments and as the descriptions change,” Linden articulated questions that arise with the reader: “What was in there? What’s now missing? Why is that like it is? Why is that door open? And I found that that was very challenging to think about as a painter.”
The emotion elicited in Linden by these paintings was mostly one of anticipation.
He explained, “You anticipated all the time that something may happen, and it didn’t. But the evidence (or challenge) was there that something had happened, so you put that together and that formed a narrative in the most blank way.”
Photo courtesy of Melina Paris
A few of the beautiful paintings exemplifying this glow Linden recalled are Forecast, Coda Below Red and MOI. The warm, golden MOI (2020) really does glow in its textured and varied gold tones. Its large “M” at first seems like conjoined line structures, suggesting upward and downward motion, moving across an indented, horizontal line until the letter reveals itself, as your eye then reads the rest of the expression of being, “Moi,” following to “O” a serious, perfect, black ring in the lower left corner. Finally, your gaze discovers “I,” a firm umber tree trunk standing far across to the lower right corner atop a 90-degree plane. MOI’s perpendicular lines and frisky ellipses are subtle, yet, they play with the viewer’s gaze, revealing interesting and surprising results.
San Pedro’s Ranch
Linden discussed important work he is still doing in support of local artists, in partnership with San Pedro artist/sculptor Eric Johnson. The premise of this series of exhibitions, which Linden is curating, is to highlight artists who live and work in San Pedro.
“This effort is overdue because there have been and there remain quite a few really serious practicing artists in San Pedro,” Linden said. “ … It’s been a long time coming, but now San Pedro artists are somehow getting their due.”
Find out about The Ranch at …https://www.randomlengthsnews.com/archives/2024/10/09/san-pedros-ranch/58747
Art scenes will ebb and flow, but Linden, always focused, continues on and San Pedro’s art district remains extremely fortunate and better off for it.
PVAC hours are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturdays 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Time: Meet the artist reception, 1 to 3 p.m., Oct. 12
Cost: Free
Details: 310-541-2479; pvartcenter.org
Venue: Palos Verdes Art Center, 5504 Crestridge Road, Rancho Palos Verdes