“Above the Grid”, 2005/6, Oil on canvas, 42" x 60"
About the Show
The sublime, almost hallucinatory qualities inherent in Petley's new works are paralleled and further extended in the spectacular new series of paintings by Utah artist Jean Arnold. One of the strongest abstract artists to emerge nationally in recent years, Arnold's promotes a signature style based on tradition, spontaneity, memory, and technique. The paintings in "Urban Organica" are full of depth, skill and a connection to the environment that is thoroughly engaging.
Raised in the American West, Arnold's work reveals an obsession with the land and the environmental concerns that are tied into it. According to Arnold, "While the founding mythology of the American West is that of endless space, we now find that 'remote' is within our reach, traffic and/or jetliners are always within earshot, and empty is filling up rapidly. " Moving quickly through the landscape as a passenger in anonymous settings, Arnold documents in sketchbooks the immediacy of her surroundings in one long-continued take. The artist takes her line drawings to the studio, where she fills in the colors and establishes borders in order to 'find' her paintings. As she brings the images to life, her palate shifts again, finding itself with colors and strokes that take on new life through the scale of her brushes. "Landscape on acid" is the first thought that these vibrant, pulsating images conjure in the mind, though it's through the long-term study and dedication to her work that Arnold is able to achieve her distinct vision.
As thoughtful about her work and career as any artist the gallery has discovered, Arnold revels in the process. "My artwork is extracted from the experience of travel -- not of a particular place, but from the velocity of travel itself, its visual bombardment, and its alteration of spatial perceptions. While traversing the urban landscape via car, bus, or train, this hyper-fluid viewpoint engages me. My obsession with my environs compels me to notationally sketch architecture, cars, trees, and urban clutter flowing by. In my drawings and paintings, I 'collage' and invent a new scene and space -- accumulating and compressing miles of space and time into one image."
Arnold further reflects "This process creates a dense layering of geography, reflecting the current condition of complexity, simultaneity and disjuncture in our lives and society. The resulting work contains ambiguous space and presence, as elements are captured in a state of flux and removed from their original context – dismantled and reassembled. As we break down traditional time/space barriers, the distance between ourselves and our natural origins ever-accelerates. As we reconfigure the land in ways to suit our ambitions, the environmental quandaries facing us are ever-accumulating."
Though her context is the present, Arnold derives her thought process from the 19th century traditions of the urban ambler, the “flaneur,” aimlessly strolling the streets of major cities such as Paris. Figures such as Walt Whitman, James Joyce, Charles Baudelaire, and Walter Benjamin are her influence as the notable observers of the urban scene who translated their experiences into writing. Arnold connects with this tradition, though she takes on modern means to carry it forth and eschews writing for the greater realm of the imagination that painting may conjure. The result is pure and exhilarating, reaching a level of abstraction that is solidly rooted in experience and the understanding of her medium. As Arnold has hones her painterly skills over the last ten years, so too has she grown into a visionary artist who is currently coming into her own.
Born in Lewiston, Idaho, Jean Arnold developed her artistic career over the last ten years as a resident of Salt Lake City, Utah. Not content with her limited surroundings and market for contemporary artwork, Arnold has continually made forays into a national market, having achieved much success as a result. She has been included in group exhibitions in New York, Texas, Missouri, New Mexico, Nevada and Ohio, including many invitationals and competitions. Most recently, she has been featured in progressive national exhibitions such as "Landscape Revisited," at the Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, NY (2005), and "Moving Perceptions at the Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, AR (2003). She has had a ten-year survey at the Hutchinson Art Center in Kansas (2005) and looks towards inclusion in multiple group and solo exhibitions in 2006and beyond.
Also of significant note, in 2005 Arnold set aside time to promote the almost lost works of her Uncle Adam Worden, a collage artist with a phenomenal level of output whose work was never seen by anyone until after his death. Worden carried a pure, artistic soul that was lost to locale and his position in life. In discovering his output after his death, Jean's own artistic talent was refined enough to recognize the level and impact that his work may have had in a better situation. Only time will tell if his work lives on; fortunately, through her own progressive career and dedication Jean Arnold is guaranteed her own place in the annals of art. + Gallery is thrilled to exhibit her most recent body of work "Urban Organica" in Denver.
