JOHNNIE WINONA ROSS: SAN SOLOMON SEEPS
Stephen Haller Gallery
542 West 26 Street
New York NY 10001
212 741 7777
May 20 – June 27, 2006
By SANDRA
SIDER
Johnnie Winona Ross San Solomon Seeps (SSS-02) 2006
acrylic, oil on linen, 24 x 23 inches
Courtesy Stephen Haller Gallery
As an artist living in New Mexico who produces pastel-toned paintings with a linear, horizontal emphasis, Johnnie Winona Ross is inevitably compared with Agnes Martin. His canvases, however, with their post-Minimalist intricacy and affinity with desert landscapes, seem driven by an aesthetic much closer to that of Georgia O’Keeffe. Ross’s imagery, like O’Keeffe’s, is grounded in his experience of the environment.
Ross’s paintings are similar to weavings, both for their visual structure and the painstakingly slow process by which they are made. He begins by pouring thin rivulets of bright paint down tilted canvases, with the streams of paint branching out as they flow towards the bottom to create organic forms. These narrow, vertical shapes echo that of water seeping down the face of a cliff, branching out as it encounters roots, depressions, and other irregularities. Ross then scrapes away most of the pigment, leaving faint traces of color.
This background imagery is veiled by luminous, rhythmic, horizontal bands of white, ranging from opaque to translucent. Because these bands are white and much wider than the “seepage,” they appear to hover in front of the rivulets. Like streaks of light, they both obscure and reveal the faint color behind them in the obsessively smooth surface. After each painting is completely dry, Ross spends days burnishing it with the sort of smooth stone used to polish ceramics. The muted tones and flat texture in his canvases result from many hours of scraping and burnishing, a sort of “weathering” process.
Viewed from the street in front of the gallery, Ross’s paintings might be easily (and erroneously) dismissed as a series of horizontal white bands on backgrounds of various solid hues. The paintings evolve as one approaches them, and the gallery has generously given each painting plenty of space for the magic to work. First, one notices that the white bands do not extend to the edges, but are slightly rounded off on each side. Then, this curvature directs the viewer’s eye back to the spaces between the bands, in which the rivulets gradually materialize, emphasizing the verticality of the background. There is no tension here, but rather the serenity of a calm, soothing desert landscape, and a subtle beauty.
The titles of all Ross’s paintings in the Stephen Haller Gallery exhibition refer to two geographic locations in Texas: San Bend Draw (with “draw’ meaning a gully) and San Solomon Seeps. Each painting has its own temperature, recalling different times of day and the varying quality of hazy light often experienced in the desert heat. The wavering thin lines in the backgrounds enhance this effect, and Ross uses this “seepage” to play with scale. The rivulets in his smaller paintings (e.g. 18 x 17 ¼ inches) are exactly the same size as those in the larger ones (e.g. 48 x 45 ½ inches). But he varies the width of the white bands, from one inch wide in the smaller pieces to three inches wide. The idea seems to be that, no matter how small the rock face, the water is a constant.
