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inner logic – a pictorial logic, to be sure, but also a geo-logic, a feeling of land masses and tectonic plates moving coherently, however violently, in response to gravity. Their inferred motion is as ponderous as it is massive, and they seem to be shaping one another with their mutual inexorability. If Lobdell’s colors breathe organic vitality into his marks, Jefferson’s endow his with optical, and by inference, physical depth. Most of all, Jefferson’s entire aesthetic proposes a sense of a fluid earth, a globe – and by extension cosmos – that evolves according to its own natural principles. If anything, this is a kind of Abstract Naturalism. Charles Strong’s style relates closely to that of his friend Jefferson, and also displays earmarks of Still’s. (Still was Jefferson’s teacher; he had a more fleeting acquaintance with, if still significant impact on, Strong.) Strong captures a very different, much more rapid sense of time and flow. If Jefferson’s elements grind into one another, Strong’s claw at and consume each other, their flux far more vivid and pressing, more chemical than solid. In effect, while Jefferson seems to slow down Still’s crackling patterns, Strong seems to hasten them, investing them with an organic animation – a bio-logic, as opposed to Jefferson’s geo-logic (or, if you would, Still’s eco-logic), time. There is a bio-logic time operating in Lobdell’s work as well, but his formal vocabulary maintains a complexity and intricacy that, you
could say, puts it on a higher biological order than Strong’s. If Lobdell formulates creatures, Strong conjures the amino soup from which they emerge – and Jefferson the earthbound processes that forge amino molecules out of carbon in the first place. What all three painters shared – and shared at least to a certain extent with Still (not to mention their colleagues represented in the pendant show) – was a devotion to a vision that required them to work out beyond themselves. Unlike the New York School (and, for that matter, the European informel painters), the social and artistic attitudes prevailing among San Francisco School painters never emphasized individual career achievement, much less fetishize the superficial distinctions of style. They stressed instead a painter’s discovery of fundamental conditions, existential or (as evidenced by these three painters) elemental. Gerald Nordland has noted that the painters gathered at the California School of Fine Arts sought “an unpretentious, painterly, ‘American’ look.” Intellectually unpretentious, this look was anything but unprepossessing. It was, however, extremely painterly – and profoundly American. Los Angeles November 2011