A Post Card With A Painting by Brian Chu On It.

Brian sent me this card announcing his show in the Oxbow Gallery in Northampton.  It arrived here about June 16th. It is his first show in a couple of years. He used to show at the Bowery Gallery. Now, he is living and teaching at UNH. Anyhow the painting shows a nude in sharp perspective on a couch. Although most of the forms are in shadow or in half light, there are some strong contrasting shapes, primarily on the nude, in full light.  The girl is a redhead and she is resting on a couch with a redwood frame, and possibly, light blue cushions. She has reached the last page in the book and on one side we see the cover which is very dark, but still, with what appears to be some paper attached to it. I am used to Brian's touch. He was one of the very best students Rosemary Beck ever had, and she did him a lot of good and no harm. But it has been years since the influence of Bonnard was deductible quickly when one looked at his work.  It is still there in his sensitivity to color. Every time he returns to a place the new look at it not only affects the drawing, but the color changes, too, at least in a small spot, although sometimes I think he makes larger changes. Looking at the image for about a month and a half, now, my impressions of the painting [which I have assumed is a modest size, say 36 inches in the long dimension] have changed radically. For one thing after a while I thought I noticed that he was making one of those shifts, best used by Cezanne, in which, because of the change in the speed of the movement of our eyes, or because of a tired hand, we come to the same place at a different point. This results in  a discontinuity between the forms, and tends to reach out and punch the canvas flat for a moment, after which it rises and shines with much more spunk, into space. I thought that was interesting. I had never seen him do that before. But I kept looking at it, and eventually I realized that the book his model had in her lap was actually wider than I had realized [the lightest lights in it were not so very different from the colors of the lights on her knees]. But in fact there was no real shift. He had just faked one, so we got that bump in the space, and then when we looked again, it wasn't really there. I things like that are happening many times in this painting, and that really is something new in his work.

Despite the fact that he is dealing with a figure in perspective, he does not concentrate on the drawing. Some edges of the figure's forms are a bit irregular because he is wandering around over them, changing the color, rethinking the space. Things can actually look badly drawn until you catch on. The drawing he is getting is the drawing he needs for his space, for his model's mood, for how she feels and how he feels about her. He will have as much "good drawing" as he needs, and otherwise he is painting and the touch, the stroke, the color is all. I think it is the best painting of his I have ever seen. And it breaks the rule that every one always puts their worst painting on the announcement.

I think that in some ways Brian is more like Stanley's students than some of my other New York friends. He does use a modernist as a model to get into painting. His modernist is Bonnard. Since Bonnard's major progenitor [sorry that was the only word I could get for it] was Renoir, maybe Brian should look at Remoir, too. Renoir, after all was one of the greatest figure painters, and himself spent his last years looking at and learning from Roman painting-I mean ancient Roman painting.

There are other issues in Brian's work, too. Not so much in this painting as in some others he has had up at UNH. Brian was never trained in any Chinese painting tradition.  He started out in art in the USA at Queens. His wife, though, was, and he has seen the flower and bird tradition [one of the major Chinese subject matter areas] a lot.  In some of his other work he has been trying to deal with that as a western style oil painter. Since I come from an imageless tradition, except in words [Judaism], I can't fully understand what it is to need to come to grips with a group of familial images.  But it seems a neccessity to me, especially when I see Brian doing it. 

It do spend a lot of time looking at some related artists and their work. The Shijo, Nanga, Maruyama and other classical school painters of Japan from the 18th and 19th century. Quite a few of the greatest are particularly liked for their Kacho [flower and bird] paintings. Ans the finer Shijo school painters like Bumpo, for example, or Keisai, can make a flower or a rabbit a tense, marvelous, structured image, and structured with a free brush, too..

You know, it would be very nice if Brian would put a JPEG of that painting up at UNH so some of you could see it   It really is a terrific, quiet painting with wonderful bumps which make a marvelous abstract shape in that painting which occurs because of the nude but has nothing really to do with a nude, and much more to do with this rectangle of paint based on those wonderful images that developed while he painted them. It really is a very geometric painting, too.  Bravo, Brian, I wish you many more.

Love,
Gabriel