Memories So Fair and Bright →

John Yau March 28, 2023 for Hyperallergic

Kimetha Vanderveen’s paintings are about the interaction of materiality and light, the bond between the palpable and ephemeral world in which we live.

SAN FRANCISCO — The email announcement for Kimetha Vanderveen at Peter Mendenhall Gallery (February 11–April 1, 2023) reminded me of the afternoon I spent in her sunlit studio in San Francisco’s Hunter’s Point Shipyard at the end of October 2022. Until then I had seen her work only digitally, not in person. After an email introduction from a mutual friend, we met in a coffee shop in early February 2022 in New York’s Koreatown. Even though I had no idea when, or even if, I would travel again at that point, I told Kimetha that I would visit her studio the next time I was in San Francisco. Something about the work’s modest scale and evocation of light through materiality piqued my curiosity. This is how, six months later, I ended up in her studio.

As Vanderveen began to show me her works, many of them nuanced monochromatic oil paintings on panels that were less than eight by eight inches, I returned to a question asked by Joe Brainard and Thomas Nozkowski: how big does a work of art have to be? Though certainly many abstract artists working monochromatically have made larger pieces, I did not feel that Vanderveen’s works needed to be bigger. What was it about them that demanded they be small?

We often think of monochromatic paintings as a solid field of a single color. Vanderveen does something different. She paints one pale color over another so that traces of the previous layer peek through faintly. In one work, I found myself focusing on a brushstroke that moves across the surface, gently and precisely, causing the color on each side of it to change slightly. Vanderveen is a tonalist. Her paintings are about the interaction of materiality and light, the bond between the palpable and ephemeral world in which we live.

Vanderveen wants the viewer to scrutinize her paintings, to become aware of the tonal shifts and gradations, as well as the interaction between the paint and the light emanating from its material surface. They are meditations on time passing, which I think is the essential subject of her work. 

As soon as I saw the watercolors that Vanderveen had placed on the table before me in her studio, I wanted to write about them. The 15 watercolors, each measuring five by seven inches, were all made near a lake in Camden, Maine, over the course of a few hours in the summer of 2022; she started in the early morning and stopped in the mid-afternoon. They are a quietly joyous diary of light changing and time’s passage. At the same time, the sense of time passing and the aloofness of the material world introduce notes of loss and mourning into each view.

Vanderveen divides the horizontal format into three areas: lake, hills, and sky. The middle band is generally the darkest in color and the most defined in shape. The perspective shifts throughout, as the artist changes her position slightly or gazes in a different direction. She seems to have used only four pale colors in all the works: gray, blue, green, and yellow. The paper’s surface always peeks through. While she used a brush, the dried puddles or stains show no sign of her hand. Some of the works approach representation, while others only cohered as landscapes after I reminded myself of what I was looking at — and even then I was not always sure of what I was seeing. That slippage seems to me to be crucial to the paintings. Vanderveen is not trying to name something so much as depict — in these works at least — change and impermanence, the passing moment. If the watercolors are meant to be memory aids, a record of a day spent by a lake in Camden, they are also about a world disappearing from sight and the faultiness of memory. The modestly scaled watercolors hover between form and dissipation. I remembered the first stanza of Henry Vaughn’s poem “They Are All Gone into the World of Light”:

They are all gone into the world of light!
And I alone sit ling’ring here;
Their very memory is fair and bright,
And my sad thoughts doth clear.

This is why I kept looking at Vanderveen’s paintings and watercolors, and why they have stayed in my mind.

Kimetha Vanderveen continues at Peter Mendenhall Gallery (180 South Lake Avenue, Suite 110, Pasadena, California) through April 1. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.

Light Touches at Peter Mendenhall Gallery

by Kenneth Baker from the exhibition catalogue

American culture today has little use for contemplation. Unlike such dispositions as restless­ness, impatience, disappointment, competitiveness and envy, it scarcely lends itself to exploitation by the profit system that rules our lives.

As a pursuit, or even as a last psychological resort, contemplation can feel as isolating as private grievance or a guilt-inducing secret vice. It runs counter to contemporary culture's manic extroversion, which seems to have deafened nearly everyone to the oxymoron in the phrase "social media."

The art world no longer stands apart, if it ever really did, from the wider society's cravings for notoriety and economic loopholes. Yet the art nexus still makes space now and then for new artworks, such as Kimetha Vanderveen's paintings, that explicitly invite quiet, sustained attention, with no overt promise of a payoff.

Even after a century of abstract art production, the voids that a painter fills -- blank can­vases, panels or pages -- continue to vibrate with echoes of the long tradition of European pictorial art. Experienced viewers may sense those subliminal echoes almost as vividly as painters who try to reach an accommodation with them.

In small oil paintings on panels, and occasionally on pieces of found wood, Vanderveen stages ambiguities of perception, or draws them forth, with a subtlety that may effectively make her works invisible to some who approach them in haste. Some pieces may evoke memories of landscape or of nuances of weather and natural light. A few might even bring to mind the sparest watercolors of J. M. W. Turner.

But Vanderveens's paintings tend to be sparing of allusions and generous with minute de­tails, such as the faint lapping of under-painted color at a picture's edges or corners or fluctuations of surface finish so subtle that only the right slant of light will reveal them.

Some works in this exhibition may bring color field painting to mind, but they are closer to color chips in scale than color fields. They become fields only if and as their dimensions billow subjectively under the pressure of a viewer's attention. They owe what depth they appear to have largely to the energy of our attention to them. If we withdraw it, or never bring it, they can seem as weightless and empty as unwritten postcards.

But Vanderveen seeks a kind of fullness that we seldom encounter in material culture be­yond the margins of art.

If we linger with the paintings, we can feel their whispering insistence that we ask ourselves repeatedly what we are seeing. And they frequently deliver, rather than answer, re-tunings of the question: slowing, shifting or dissolving and retracing distinctions we presume to exist between an object and our perception of it. Do we even have names for those distinctions? If we do not doubt it already, Vanderveen's paintings can make us do so.

Perceptual uncertainty may set in around the question of color names. Some pieces we can imagine pegging with a color name - one that I would describe as Naples yellow comes to mind. Others seem to have no dominant, stable or nameable hue. Their color complexion seems to defy memory and even eyes-on certainty. To know them, they insist with a tacitly ethical pressure, we must be in their company.

In many cases the longer we look at a Vanderveen painting, the harder it feels to plot with words the sequence of ambiguous sensations we experience. Our confidence in the linkages be­tween words and things begins to slacken. Some people will experience this sensation as liberat­ing. Others will find in it a foretaste of potentially paralyzing skepticism.

Contemplation fulfills itself in a changed experience of time.

To those overcommitted to the life of action, a slowing of time may seem the necessary prerequisite to contemplation, but that gets things backwards.

Set aside calendar and clock time, or imagine that you could, and time-as-experienced be­comes all the time we know. Time's slowing - or rather a true, focal sense of its elasticity - arises only in contemplation, and Vanderveen's work makes that invitation.

Her paintings are devices for modulating our experience of time, but their ostensible sim­plicity communicates the fact that we have to affect ourselves by means of them. Like the con­templation that they invite, they will not change us. Their inertia denies us escape, but it shows us something of our powers as perceivers capable of reflection that we may have forgotten, or not discovered before.

The beauty of Vanderveen's paintings seems like an inevitable by-product of her process of lavishing countless hours of fabrication, revision and observation upon objects that look pocket­size in the contemporary art context. Their refinement, vulnerability and soft luminosity account for their surprising aesthetic force, but so does their capacity, by their very modesty, to make us feel the latent power of our attention magnified, yet not exaggerated. Too few contemporary artworks show their viewers such respect.

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Three at Meridian Gallery

by Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle

Kimetha Vanderveen's work, on the third floor, embodies the paradox of aesthetic power achieved with apparently minimal effort.

Paintings on panel such as "Winter" (2011) or "Lifting" (2011) look breathed into being. Their gray on gray surfaces appear so nuanced as to court dismissal - even disposal - by anyone who values observation too little.

The defenseless quality of Vanderveen's work shows differently in her drawings, where ink strokes accumulate with apparent confidence, yet refuse us the obvious satisfactions of imagery.

Vanderveen makes a theme of trust in our interest in seeing as an expression of our interest in ”

Vanderveen makes a theme of trust in our interest in seeing as an expression of our interest in living. The bravery of this posture will too easily go unnoticed.

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New Works by Kimetha Vanderveen

by Elizabeth Johnson, Art Practical

Taking in Kimetha Vanderveen’s show at Mina Dresden Gallery in the Mission, I notice that the gallery’s giant, textured walls offer the perfect contrast to her diminutive, smoothly applied oil paintings. The show features wooden surfaces prepared with gesso: small squares and rectangles and two groups of white sculptures.

At first glance, I understand that this work has been sanded, buffed, or burnished on multiple occasions. The artist carefully applies layers of paint as controlled but lively brushstrokes, subdued colors and calligraphic lines.

Just as selectively, she removes wet paint with a rag or dry paint with a sander. In a conversation, she tells me that “sanding most often is a short touch or swipe to take off a dried layer or small area of paint, a way to get back down to the gesso.” She goes on to say that “the process of adding paint and removing can be akin to the effects of weather, elements and geologic time…. I like the effects of the little bits of paint that are left.”

Looking at Seta (2010), I see how Vanderveen broke back into layers of red and yellow, keying the bright color to a white and grey background. Little etched hints of red wink through the white ground: preserved whispers of paint, nearly erased but saved by a deft hand.

The tough, taut surface unifies the painting. Smooth as polished stone, it is a reminder of all the physical work that went into making it. Paint addition competes with paint removal, opening a field for chance events that snag the

artist’s eye: a burr in the wood, a trace of a dried brushstroke, a persistent mite of color―something to build on or risk losing altogether.

Sanding and rubbing, glazing the entire surface, building up shapes that approach but stop short of an image, the artist seeks to “finish” a good start or a collection of good elements. The surfaces she creates range from hard as glass to powdery and toothsome, like paper or wood. In her most successful paintings, Vanderveen chooses a subtle and economical resolution.

One of the standout pieces, Untitled # 5 (2010), gels because the lightest fleck of white paint on the bottom edge of the surface pulls a hazy fingerprint or reworked wet paint smudge out of visual center. I smile for how easy and how hard that must have been. On the whole, the work showcases paint's particular anomalies, blips and bruises—singularities worth our notice—with humor, balance and restraint.

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S.F. shows by Vanderveen, Wilson, Saunders

by Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle

Small, subtle paintings, especially abstract ones, can easily lack presence. Bay Area painter Kimetha Vanderveen has understood this liability and overcome it.

No painting in her first solo show at Mina Dresden measures even 1 foot square, yet nearly everything here makes us want to intensify our attention to it, so that we imbue her work with the presence it might otherwise appear to lack.

Abstraction may have had roots in the attitude of "art for art's sake," but Vanderveen takes it in the direction of scrutiny for scrutiny's sake, and for pleasure's sake, as if she believes that painting ought to counterpoise the wide culture's trend toward perceptual and conceptual blur.

With their burnished surfaces, low contrast and light touch, her paintings make us reach for a clear view of their details, some of which may show plainly only from certain angles or at specific times of day. To visitors not inclined to ask themselves what they are seeing, the work may simply look vacant.

Vanderveen lavishes effort on little stretches of panel, layering colors and sanding away passages to let underpainting breathe through.

In the intimate theater of her picture's surfaces and atmospheres, a single brush mark may declare itself with inordinate force, despite its subtlety. Without imagery, "Seta" (2010) quavers with reminiscences of change in weather or temperature, or perhaps of waking to morning fog.

Like Richard Tuttle and like the watercolors of Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), Vanderveen can enliven a large interior with just a few well-judged, unforced moves. She commands Dresden's cavernous gallery space with almost uncanny economy.

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Bonzai/Godzilla: Then and Now

www.artpractical.com

The show Bonzai/Godzilla at the Artists Gallery of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art showcases the work of some 17 American and Japanese artists. In this ambitious show Curator Bob Hanamura compares pre-war Japan art with its postwar counterpart. Bob Hanamura's interests range from jazz, architecture, design, art, and dance. A ubiquitous figure with his trademark cap and grey ponytail, he belongs to the beat generation and has been following the cultural scene in San Francisco for a long time.

Hanamura applies his wide ranging curiosity to Japanese art, which is unique in its ability to absorb old and new, east and west, Shinto, Zen, and Buddhist philosophies, American culture, high and low art, and the media. In addition, he looks to the current wave of Japanese culture hitting American shores in the form of Anime and Manga and traces the effect of this culture on both Japanese and American artists. "Bonzai" can be viewed as a pre World War II greeting to the emperor and Hanamura uses the term to refer to traditional Japanese art's concern with nature, as expressed in the notion of color, volume, and depth. The "Godzilla" section of the show refers to the post World War II Japan that created the comic books called Manga, and the animated films called Anime. Of course, Godzilla was the gigantic irradiated dinosaur, transformed from the fallout of an H-Bomb test and the most widely recognized symbol of Japanese pop art.

Contemporary Japanese Artist Murakami Takashi compares the current cultural trends in Japanese art to that of Japan's Edo period (1600s-1800s) where flatness and multiple perspectives share equal value. In the spirit of Bonzai, the show begins with traditional Zen and Shinto motifs depicting the fragility and transitory nature of existence. For example, Kimetha Vanderveen's prints are structures of delicate marks, while Tom Marioni, a conceptual artist uses a sweeping brush stroke for his enzo, or Zen circle, painted directly on the wall (which will be painted over when the show ends next month). In the same vein, Theordora Varnay Jones's meditative piece consists of a series of grids on separate wood panels covered with paper, which appear to be delicately burned. In contrast, artists Seiko Tachibaba, Kim Anno, Laura Dufort, and Peggy Gyulai explore the idea of volume and color. Fortunately for his followers, Osamu Tezuka, one of the leading exponents of manga, currently has a show at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Though trained as a doctor, Tezuka became an artist and hoped to reach the younger generation of Japanese through comics. Influenced by Walt Disney after World War II, Tezuka is the creator of the atomic powered. Astro Boy--known as "Tetsuwan Atom," or "Iron-Arm Atom" in Japan. Astro Boy is ultimately not human and like so much in postwar Japan, an import from the West. Tezuka widely influenced the following generation of Japanese artists including Yoshitomo Nara, and Murakami Takashi, which in turn have greatly influenced the next wave of Japanese and American artists.

Artist Scott Tsuchitani uses Dorthea Lang's photos of Japanese internment camps and mixes them with pop images of Astro Boy, Hello Kitty, and the Milky boy whose innocent face appears on boxes of Japanese rice candy. Tsuchitani even provides a fluffy Hello Kitty purse filled with candy for the viewer's delectation. Combining pop and historical images decontextualizes them both, and the viewer's mind bounces back and forth between the historical accuracy of the photos and the call to innocence and pleasure of the pop images.

Artist Kathy Aoki, influenced by Manga and Anime, extends this metaphor in her work. She uses cutout wood images of "cute" sheep, deploying the Japanese concept of Kawai or cute to treat serious subjects. John Casey's scary masks refer both to the demons typical of the spirit world of the Shinto religion and Manga.

In conclusion, while many of the "Godzilla" artists' work expresses a sense of isolation and dissociation with their own bodies and existence, they have found a visual language, alternately hopeful and pessimistic, that allows them to comment on the post-apocalyptic world that they live in. The "Bonzai" artists find refuge in beauty, tradition, nature, and the sublime. These are very different impulses to be sure, but in Bonzai/Godzilla: Then and Now Hannamura magically makes it all come together. 

Bonzai/Godzilla: Japanese Influences in American Culture Then and Now 
Curated by Bob Hanamura
Building A, Fort Mason Center San Francisco, CA
June 27-July 27, 2007

Featuring works by: Kim Anno, Kathy Aoki, Lucy Arai, John Casey, Ishan Clemenco, Laura Dufort, Yukako Ezoe, Peggy Gyulai, Theodora Varnay Jones, Tom Marioni, Howard Munson, Tomoko Nakazato, Seiko Tachibana, Kazuaki Tanahashi, Ayu Tomikawa, Scott Tsuchitani, and Kimetha Vanderveen.

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Fostering Emerging Artists: GenArt’s Annual Exhibition

by Lena Vazifdar

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Gen Art’s ”Emerge” 2006

by Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle

One artist among the 20 in Gen Art's 2006 "Emerge" show, Kimetha Vanderveen, happens to have taken a clue from Morandi.

She makes tiny monotypes in oil, in shades of gray, on gray paper. The resulting patterns hold their own as abstractions, but they also wink with suggestions of landscape, still life or slightly spooky interiors. We can no more hurry the discovery of their ambiguities than we can those in Morandi. Like his work, and unlike nearly everything else in "Emerge 2006," Vanderveen's work invites us to slow down and breathe.

Perhaps ambition explains the held-breath temper of so much work in "Emerge," or perhaps political frustration or foreboding does. In any case, I left the show gasping for air, despite enjoying and admiring several things in it.

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”Working Proof” Review

by Faye Hirsch, Art on Paper

These moody little prints are subtle and modest abstractions: intersecting brushes of modulated black and white and earth tones that intersect monumentally, á la Franz Kline; or, closer to Vanderveen’s home, like Bay Area Abstraction—but on a very tiny scale.

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Kimetha Vanderveen, Untitled (2000) (fig. 6), a series of 17 monotypes in etching ink and oil paint. Each measures 6-3/8 x 9-7/8 in. or 5 x 8 in. (paper) and 2-3/4 x 1-3/4 in. or 1-3/4 x 1-3/4 in. (image), and was printed on Rives BFK or Somerset Satin paper by the artist at her studio in San Francisco.

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