Author: Sarah Sargent

One’s first impression of Anne Chesnut’s exhibition “Art.i.facts” at Les Yeux du Monde gallery (through April 7) is of rich colors, bold images, and dramatic compositions. On closer inspection, one sees interesting juxtapositions of images and it becomes clear something deeper is happening here than just fetching artwork. Information is being conveyed on a particularly cerebral plane.

Chesnut, who received her MFA from Yale has supported her artistic career through her work as a highly-esteemed graphic designer and her images have a polished quality that owes much to design. While drawing “remains at the core of what guides and informs my art,” she loves letters and numbers and switching back and forth between fonts, which confirms a lively cross-pollination between avocation and vocation.

Some of Chesnut’s prints are stand-alone works; she also produces series that range in number from three to 63. These vary from the elegiac “What Remains: Bolivar,” focusing on the destruction of Hurricane Ike to the Bolivar Peninsula in Texas, to the constellations (where her dogs, both living and dead, are immortalized), samplers, quilts and the “Summer Dressed” series. Within each print Chesnut combines disparate images taken from the wealth of drawings, photographs, and graphic elements she has produced over time. She uses animals and birds, constellations, seashells, flowers, and typography (with often autobiographical connotations) to create visually rich and enigmatic works that run the gamut from the microscopic to the astronomical.

“The sources of imagery and meaning for these prints are drawn from personal experience. My surroundings supply imagery, and my graphic work analyzing word and image, has introduced additional forms, symbols, and references.” She also draws on a rich science-based iconography featuring botany, ornithology, entomology, genetics, and astronomy and adds dashes of whimsy and political commentaries into the mix.

Using both familiar and exotic, even arcane images, Chesnut connects them much like a poet connects words, playing with the symbolic and visual links between them, achieving a kind of symmetry that expresses an awareness of simultaneous dimensions. The images and their interplay have an immediate visual appeal while referencing other more intangible concepts. Chesnut starts with something simple like a number, or letter, and runs with it. For example, the number four leads to heart chambers, blood groups, the four points of the compass and ink colors. A rose is a photograph of a rose picked from her garden, but also an amusing Chesnut-designed emoticon and a Gothic rose window. Like Chinese boxes, her works keep opening up to reveal more and more. Gallery director Lyn Warren said, “It’s very easy to enter Anne’s prints from different points. You can come at them from the standpoint of subject, concept, or visually. The more you look, the more you see.”

Chesnut uses both actual and faux stitching to divide up the surface. The hand-sewn approach has a practical side, enabling her to produce larger compositions, not possible given the limitations of printer size. But on a more symbolic level, she is stitching together not only the physical pieces, but also metaphorically she’s stitching the different concepts together. In some works she achieves a quilt-like effect and she has a whole series of “Samplers” (a modern version of “women’s work” according to Chesnut), which gives her ample opportunity to play with letters and numbers—key elements in traditional samplers.

The digital process allows Chesnut to merge traditional techniques with new artistic approaches. Working in the graphic design field Chesnut was conversant with emerging digital technology early on, and became interested in using it “to explore and exploit properties not previously available.” From the beginning, she saw digital printing as a means to make new discoveries rather than as an expediter of tasks. Once archival liquid inks and paper could be used in digital printing, Chesnut embraced the medium wholeheartedly.

It’s an equalizer of sorts giving the same visual weight, sense of texture and depth to, say a photograph as a drawing. Here, the end result is sleek and smooth. Chesnut says she’s interested in creating works “that push at the edges of what is possible with new media and seek to redefine old processes. Each individual print is a digitally manipulated composite that mixes traditional media, my drawings, prints, and photos, with images and symbols I have rendered digitally to make something entirely new from the images, patterns, colors, and textures.”

I must confess I was a little leery when I read “digital prints” while researching this show, but Chesnut won me over with her imaginative and innovative use of the medium. Her expertise with print technology enabled her to see its potential early on, and her strong artistic background means she uses it in a most creative manner, producing work that is visually satisfying and laden with significance. “It is my hope that the final images composed of many elements—whether old or new, detailed or abstract, anecdotal or scientific—will engage the viewer to find their own narrative or reaction to the shared images and experiences, whether true or fictitious.”

Through April 7/“Art.i.facts”/Les Yeux du Monde

The butterfly of “Becoming the Butterfly,” The Fralin Museum’s current exhibition of etchings and lithographs by James Abbott McNeill Whistler refers to the stylized butterfly that Whistler used to sign his work and the exhibition. Curated by Emilie Johnson, the show provides a succinct yet effective window into Whistler’s evolution as an artist. This is the first of two shows at the museum focusing on the American 19th century master’s prints (through April 28). The second (opening April 30), will feature portraits.

Born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1834, Whistler began studying art when he was 9 in St. Petersburg, Russia, where his father, an eminent civil engineer, was employed by the Moscow-St. Petersburg Railway. Following the death of his father when Whistler was 15, the family returned to America.

While attending his father’s alma mater, West Point, Whistler was an indifferent student in all but drawing and did so badly in chemistry, that he was eventually dismissed. Thereafter, he worked for the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey in the drawing department, where he learned etching.

In 1855, Whistler went to Paris to study with Charles-Gabriel Gleyre. He became friends with Gustave Courbet, Manet, and Degas, and was exposed to Japanese art as it was just coming onto the radar screens of Western artists. This particular aesthetic, with its conservative palette, flattened space, and overall restraint, would prove to have a profound influence on his later work. In 1859, Whistler moved to England where he remained, for the most part, until his death in 1903.

Eight Whistler etchings are exhibited at The Fralin, together with three by artists who influenced him: Rembrandt, Charles Meryon, and Seymour Haden. His prints from 1858-59 are models of precise, unsentimental reportage.

The woman seated in the field, a parasol half shading her face from “En Plein Soleil” (1858), reveals the influence of his realist friend, Courbet. It also provides a wonderful example of Whistler’s dexterity of line: the tightly controlled hatches that describe the woman give way to free strokes rendering her surroundings.

In his pastoral “Landscape with Horses” of 1859, one can spot on the image’s edge a worker installing telegraph cable—a potent aside referencing the birth of modern technology. It’s easy to imagine Oliver Twist or Gaffer Hexam wandering around the landscape featured in “Thames Police” (1859), a detailed view of London’s riverbank before Victorian urban renewal transformed it.

Over time, Whistler became interested in conveying mood rather than direct narrative, using variations of tone to accomplish this. The title of his most famous painting, colloquially known as “Whistler’s Mother,” is actually “Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1” (1871). This new direction is apparent in his painterly lithotints from the 1870s. Here, the use of tusche (an oily black liquid) washes applied directly onto the lithographic stone enabled him to modulate tonal effects with sumptuous results as in the quintessentially Whistler “Nocturne” of 1878, an evocative scene of boatmen in punt-like craft, shimmering river and far shore with reflections, steam, light, shadow, and haze adding atmosphere and tranquil beauty to the composition. Whistler cleverly used blue paper, markedly enhancing the work’s crepuscular effect.

A brilliant artist, Whistler was also a larger than life figure, variously described as arrogant and abrasive. The famous 1885 William Merritt Chase portrait of him seems to capture his confrontational insouciance perfectly with his provocative pose, wild hair and imperious gaze. As his monocle and cane attest, he was flamboyant in both dress and personality. His relationships with critics were notoriously acrimonious.

In 1877, John Ruskin’s essay “Truth to Nature” famously attacked Whistler’s “Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket,” saying he had flung “a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Whistler, whose personal credo was “art for art’s sake,” would have none of that and so sued Ruskin for libel. Though Whistler triumphed, it was a Pyrrhic victory: awarded a farthing’s damages, he was financially ruined by court costs and the scandal-related decline in sales. He spent the following year in Venice, working on a commission for the Fine Arts Society. The resulting 12 etchings helped repair his image and he eventually regained his financial footing and reputation.

Though he may come across as difficult, Whistler’s only real fault was he knew his own worth and would brook no criticism from detractors who didn’t understand him. While Whistler was building the very foundation of the modern movement, the critics who bedeviled him were bogged down in the Victorian miasma of their own narrow view.

It’s the age-old story of the genius way ahead of his time. Whistler was a vanguard out there on the frontier of art with an approach so revolutionary as to be incomprehensible to most contemporaries. In his words: “Art should be independent of all claptrap—should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye and ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it, and that is why I insist on calling my works ‘arrangements’ and ‘harmonies.’”

An enthusiastic crowd attended Bradley Stevens’s talk “In Search of Perfect Proportions: the Golden Section and Geometry in Art” at the Warm Springs Gallery on Sunday afternoon. Stevens’s show there features his series of paintings focusing on museum galleries. In these works, rooms open up to other rooms giving the sense of receding space and affording glimpses of works of art in the distance. Stevens straddles two worlds with these works: the static one of the artwork he reproduces and the more active one of the contemporary museum visitors who populate his exhibition spaces. His rendering of them reveals a finely tuned eye for those details that breathe life into a figure.

Stevens works in oil because of its slow drying time, which allows him to manipulate it, softening it and blending it. He uses color, in concert with the arrangement of shapes, to balance the composition. His scenes are not exact; he will reposition paintings or change the color of the walls because, in the end, it’s about the integrity of the finished work, not the reality of the subject.

With their photographic realism, the paintings showcase Stevens’s technical skill and his adulation for art history. His biography states that he “spent five years copying over three hundred Old Master paintings at the National Gallery of Art.” He’s very good at reproducing famous artworks and this museum series affords him ample opportunity to do so. Like a Rap artist sampling music, Stevens plays with perspective and size presenting an entirely new version of the initial artwork. This not only produces a renewed appreciation for the piece, but it also allows the buyer of the Stevens work to, in a way, possess the masterpiece depicted. It’s an acceptable copy of the original because it’s been transformed by another artist and is now an entirely new artwork.

As might be expected from the title of his talk, Stevens is very keen on the golden section and geometry, they’re the guiding principle for organizing his compositions. “Literally it’s how you divide a distance or a space into the most asymmetrical balance or the most dynamic symmetry, the most perfect proportion.”

Working at an easel and using string as a compass, Stevens demonstrated how to determine a golden section through basic geometry. The golden section is used to describe perfect proportioning within an artwork (the ratio of small elements to larger elements is the same as the ratio of larger elements to the whole, basically). This corresponds to the Fibonacci Sequence and the mathematical pattern that is endlessly occurring in nature from bacteria to spiral galaxies. It’s so ubiquitous and fundamental it stands to reason that we are hardwired to intuitively respond to the pattern.

But I wonder… while I’m certainly impressed with Stevens’s skill, if not his lackluster and somewhat dumbed-down presentation, I find his paintings’ perfection cloying. Beyond a clever idea, which I’m sure has many admirers, there’s nothing here that captures my fancy.