Contemporary Lyrical Abstraction at Seager Gray Gallery

Contemporary Lyrical Abstraction

Contemporary Lyrical Abstraction Paintings by: Leslie Allen . Tim Craighead . Christine Hayman . Claudia Marseille . Frances McCormack Sculpture by: Emily Payne . Ann Weber June 6 - June 28, 2015 Reception for the Artists: Saturday, June 13, 5:30 - 7:30 Front Cover: Frances McCormack, Above and Below, 2015, oil on canvas, 55 x 51 in (detail) Back Cover: Claudia Marseille, Bygone Era, 2014, encaustic and mixed media on panel, 30 x 26 in (detail) Photo Credits Leslie Allen: Craig Kolb Tim Craighead Frances McCormack: Joe McDonald Direct inquiries to: Seager Gray Gallery 108 Throckmorton Avenue Mill Valley, CA 94941 415-384-8288 seagergray.com All rights reserved.

Contemporary Lyrical Abstraction Leslie Allen . Tim Craighead . Christine Hayman . Claudia Marseille . Frances McCormack Sculpture by: Emily Payne . Ann Weber

The term “lyrical abstraction” has been used to describe two separate post-war modernist art periods.

One was related to Abstract Expressionism and occurred primarily in France after 1945. Artists such as Jules Olitski, Joan Mitchell and Sam Francis expressed themselves in the language of abstraction, but in a less gutteral, more descriptive form, using movement of brushstroke and generous applications of paint to create paintings of uncommon complexity and beauty. Later, in the 60’s the term “American lyrical abstraction” emerged referring to artists such as Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Natkin who were moving away from geometric, hard-edge, and minimal styles, toward more sensuous, fluid abstractions worked in a loose gestural style. It is with a nod to those moments in history that we present Contemporary Lyrical Abstraction featuring painters Leslie Allen, Tim Craighead, Frances McCormack, Claudia Marseille and Christine Hayman. In planning the exhibition, we became interested in how some shapes and markings in paintings show up in three-dimensional sculpture. We decided to include the wire sculptures of Emily Payne and cardboard shapes of Ann Weber, creating an interesting dialog between the paintings and 3-dimensional forms.

Leslie Allen Leslie Allen was born in the New Mexico desert and grew up along the Rio Grande in El Paso Texas where families and neighborhoods were tight-knit, honored traditions were passed down, and the most meaningful things were made by hand. Leslie moved to California in her late teens and soon after fell hard for the Bay area abstract expressionists, whose works she studied with great purpose. Today Allen is described as a painter’s painter who approaches each canvas without preconceptions and allows the process to guide her through to rich, sophisticated surfaces of color, gesture and space divisions. Clearly influenced by California painters Richard Diebenkorn and Frank Lobdell, Allen’s lyrical sense and gestural marks also relate her work to the abstractionists, especially the paintings of Joan Mitchell.

Allen credits her family for her early arts education and California painter and long-time mentor Chester Arnold for pointing her heart to oil paints. Leslie Allen studied painting in San Diego, San Francisco, New Mexico and Paris, and over recent summers she has been studying aquatint etching techniques and traditions at Crown Point Press in San Francisco. Her watercolor and oil paintings are held in many public and private collections.

Leslie Allen

Jury of Three, 2015

oil on canvas on panel 48 x 60 in

Leslie Allen

For Pink, 2013

oil on canvas on panel 35.5 x 36 in

Tim Craighead Tim Craighead was born in Los Angeles. He received his B.A. in Printmaking and Sculpture from the University of California at Santa Cruz, CA and his MA in painting from Columbia University, New York. He was a postgraduate fellow at Columbia from 1991 to 1993. His extensive teaching experience includes lecturer in painting at Columbia, NY, visiting professor at Stanford University, CA, lecturer of art at UC, Santa Cruz and instructor of drawing at Cabrillo College. He has exhibited continuously in both group and one person shows in Santa Fe, Dallas and southern California.

Although Craighead’s work can be categorized as abstract, he himself sees it as inhabiting a space between objective and nonobjective painting. The combination of these two worlds, serve as a matrix for what are essentially autobiographical works. He is interested in the symbolic potential of the objective world and the possibilities abstraction presents in suggesting the unknown. His influences range from second-generation abstract expressionism to forms found in nature to structural drawings by Frei Otto and Buckminster Fuller.

Tim Craighead Vector, 2011

oil, alkyd and casein on linen 90 x 72 in

Tim Craighead

Trace Series #113, 2008

monotype with chine-collĂŠ image: 18 x 14 in paper: 30 x 22 in framed: 31 5/8 x 24 in

Christine Hayman Christine Hayman was born in New York City. She attended the University of Maryland while pursuing her Bachelors degree in Art History. She would later attend the University of Nevada where she was awarded a degree in art education. Hayman has had a continuous exhibition history, showing in galleries thoughout the country, most notably in Washington DC, Charlotte, NC Dallas, TX, New Orleans LA, Park City, UT among others. Her work is in innumerable private and corporate collections.

Living in northern California on a farm with livestock and natural surroundings, Hayman’s newest work concerns itself with space. She is interested in how forms are energized by the space around them, especially when incorporated into paintings with vivid contrasting color and thick painterly textures. Inspired by the natural world, Hayman believes painting is a process of constant investigation. She credits Gustavo Rivera, Roland Peterson and Mike Henderson as having greatly influenced her aesthetic sensibilities.

Christine Hayman Red Circle, 2015

oil on canvas 60 x 60 in

Christine Hayman Daybreak, 2015

oil on canvas 60 x 72 in

Claudia Marseille Claudia Marseille was born in the San Francisco Bay Area. She holds two Master Degrees. She received her BA in Anthropology and Archaeology from the University of California, Berkeley, CA with an accompanying Masters in Pre-Columbian Archaeology from the Institute of Archaeology in London. She then attended the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, CA and completed her Masters in Painting at John F. Kennedy University in Orinda, CA. Marseille’s intelligent and richly layered paintings convey her deep respect for time and materials. They have an unmistakable presence, like an ancient wall, rich in history.

She will patiently apply as many as 20 layers of glazes or encaustics to give the painting history and depth and then begin excavating and building. Her concerns as an artist center around color and texture. The viewer is able to experience both the complexity and the enjoyment of the process. The daughter of a psychoanalyst and therapist, Marseille is interested in the inner workings of the human psyche as well as the layers of time and circumstance that make up our physical world.

Claudia Marseille Chelsea, NY, 2013

encaustic and mixed media on panel 30 x 40 in

Claudia Marseille Bygone Era, 2014

encaustic on panel 30 x 26 in

Frances McCormack Frances McCormack was born in Boston and received her MFA from the University of California at Berkeley.

She is Associate Professor in the Painting Department at the San Francisco Art Institute. McCormack was the recipient of the first SFAI faculty residency at the American Academy in Rome, three Buck Foundation individual artist grants and a Djerassi Residency.

Frances McCormack’s canvases are lush, with references to natural places - gardens, forests and woods. The paintings combine stark architectural elements and loosely interpreted botanical forms. She incorporates landscape design drawings into her loose passages and biological shapes. In Above and Below, (right) the botanical forms are held between bars of an improbable rose/pink color, beautifully resolved. The bars resonate with the small floating spheres of rose and pink present in the foreground of the painting. These elements underscore the artist’s virtuosity in being able to “play” with the picture plane, replicating the surprising elements of nature with its infinite variety and astonishing color while using the vernacular of abstraction.

Frances McCormack

Above and Below, 2015

oil on canvas 55 x 51 in

Frances McCormack Red Loop, 2015

oil on canvas 55 x 51 in

Emily Payne Emily Payne grew up in Mill Valley, CA and Amherst, MA. She received her B.A. from Oberlin College in Ohio and her M.F.A. in Book Arts and Printmaking from San Francisco State University.

Among her other works, Emily Payne creates drawings out of wire. She is concerned with how the work will occupy space or appear to contain it and how angles of light might create shadows that can be incorporated into the experience.

Drawing is at the heart of Emily Payne’s work.

Whether drawing three dimensionally with wire, pencil or the edges of paper, she is interested in distilled and simplified information and the innumerable ways that objects, even simple objects interact with their environment.

In Payne’s Shadow Series, often shown in sitespecific installations, she begins with circles made of wire. She loops the circles to other similar circles to create orbs of various sizes. The orbs hang from seemingly invisible threads and are hung at varying heights in site specific areas. The space is defined and energized by the suspended shapes. They are simple in construction but elegant in presence.

Ann Weber Ann Weber was born in Jackson, MI . She received her BA in Art History from Purdue University and her MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts.

Weber’s initial work was in clay, and she had spent some time as a production potter. At a crossroads in her life, she realized that “It was on the West Coast where everybody was throwing all that (traditional craft) stuff out the window and creating new things, like Peter Voulkos with those big huge sculptures,” Weber said. She ultimately decided to move to the Bay Area and study with Viola Frey at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland.

She had moved to a new studio and had all these boxes flattened on the floor from the move. She began constructing forms from the boxes and creating the sculpture for which she has become known. Her work is in collections thoughout the country and she has won numerous fellowships and awards. She is represented by Dolby Chadwick Gallery in San Francisco.