|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
During a drive from the East Bay into San Francisco, novelist John Steinbeck observed, "this gold and white acropolis rising wave on wave against the blue of the Pacific sky was a stunning thing." Decades later, San Francisco (and its environs) is still a breathtakingly beautiful place, as the paintings of Tony Huynh remind us. "Bay Vistas," Huynh's first solo show at Bryant Street Gallery, features the artist's personal reflections on landmarks as varied as Angel Island, the Presidio and the Great Highway. It is a colorful and upbeat tribute to the unique and varied geography of the Bay Area, at the time of year when the notion of "home" is celebrated and cherished.
Huynh was born and raised in San Francisco and claims that he was destined to become an artist. "I was a distracted individual growing up and was not interested in many things other than art," he said. He studied illustration at the California College of Fine Arts, graduating in 2009, but made the decision to become a painter a few years ago.
Bryant Street Gallery owner Karen Imperial saw his work online and invited him to join her roster of artists. She explained, "We all travel around the Bay Area and see so many images around us. Tony captures these images and depicts them in a very fanciful, colorful way."
It must be noted at the outset that Huynh does not work in a literal, realistic manner. His landscapes are pared down, almost primitive, representations that rely heavily on the use of basic geometric shapes. "Presidio Row" is a good example of this simplistic approach with its three white houses, exactly the same and lined up like toys. Their cubist uniformity is offset by the sketchy outline of trees, sky and city in the background. Even lacking in details, we know exactly where this is.
Huynh takes a similar approach to "Fort Mason Center," a landmark site that has spectacular Bay views. As he often does, Huynh has chosen to take an atypical perspective, that of the rooftops. Using broad planes of contrasting colors, he has focused his efforts on the rectangles, squares and triangle shapes that make up a part of the building that most of us would never look at or notice.
When asked how he selects his subjects, Huynh said that he does not have any one favorite place to paint but explained his choice of Angel Island. "It gave me a chance to play with rhythm in nature, the shadows on the house, the sea, the sky, the land on the horizon and a boat."
He further explained that he does not work in plein air, preferring to take photographs which he then refers to in the studio. "I embrace a painting as it unfolds and accept it and work with it," he said, adding "sort of like a wabi sabi in terms of approach."
This aesthetic, which accepts transience and imperfection, can be seen in "Angel Island" in the rough, almost childlike, manner that Huynh has portrayed an old house in the foreground, the Bay in the center of the painting and the very rudimentary line of trees that serve as the horizon line. Like folk artist Grandma Moses (who Huynh cites as an inspiration) everything has been distilled to its simplest level, yet it is still recognizable and pleasing.
Another example of how the artist gets right to the essence of things can be seen in "Point Bonita" in which perspective is achieved through broad, horizontal bands. We peer through a white picket fence and the eye is carried beyond a small field to two low-rising houses.A small strip of ivory denotes a beach, which leads to the ocean and sky. From a strictly technical approach, it should not work, but our mind fills in the gaps and it becomes an enchanting scene.
"I think internalization is important," Huynh said. "It's not so much what the place looks like exactly, but what it represents to me or what I am trying to get across. I think paintings should be personal and being too literal might take some of that juice or magic away."
Huynh's depiction of the Great Highway, a dramatic merging of land and sea along San Francisco's western edge, is certainly based on his own unique experiences, rather than a stereotypical picture postcard. Here, swaths of blue, green and tan create the water/land border, but this is not the focal point of the painting. Huynh has included the houses that line this important byway, rendering them in contrasting primary colors and compact alignment. The matte colors in this painting are reminiscent of Japanese wood-block prints, which happens to be another inspiration for the artist.
There are also examples of how Huynh has had fun with working abstractly. One painting, at first glance, looks like a study of variously painted squares and rectangles. But look closely and read the label and it becomes obvious that Huynh has painted an homage to another one of his inspirations, Richard Diebenkorn. In "View of Diebenkorn," the artist has taken the position of standing in a museum, looking from one gallery into another, where a rectangular abstract painting by the famed California artist is hanging. Separating the blocks of color, we now discern a wall, then another, then the gallery where the painting is hung. The visual puzzle becomes complete when we realize the red, blue and green blocks in the foreground are actually the reflection of the Diebenkorn painting on the shiny gallery floor.
Texture is also a hallmark of Huynh's work, with broad brush strokes visible and, quite often, a layering of colors. In "Sea Cliff to the Headlands," the rough, stucco-like surface really adds to the solidity of the architectural structure from which we gaze out at the iconic Golden Gate Bridge.
In an email interview, Huynh expressed the hope that people would come to see the show in person in order to really appreciate this aspect of his work.
"I know we spend most of our lives behind a screen, the entrance into a digital world, and have access to what seems like the library of Alexandria in our pocket, but the images online will never do justice to a physical work like a painting."
Bay Vistas is on view through Jan. 27 at Bryant Street Gallery, 532 Bryant St., Palo Alto. The gallery will be closed Dec. 24 to Jan. 1.bryantstreet.com.
