Publications
Page 230 from "abstract art", published by Fresco Fine Art Publications, LLC, Albuquerque, NM
Stuart Ashman, Curator
Suzanne Deats, Artists Profile |
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| The voluptuous elegance of the New Mexico landscape mirrors the hills and valleys of the recumbent human figure, a fact that has long been noticed and exploited by all manner of representational painters. The shops are full of semi-erotic, dreamy, impressionistic references to this phenomenon. |
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It takes a particular kind of artist, however, to vault over the obvious, to embrace the sun-ripped mineral brilliance of the desert, to fuse the sensuous texture of cloud and canyon with the austere poetry of the body. Abstraction affords an emotional connec-tion that is not inconsistent with intellectual distance.
Stan Berning's art fuses the physical with the terrestrial by means of line and color. His affinity for line informed even his earliest work. Color became a catalyst after he became interested in fine print media. He participated in several workshops in Santa Fe, and also became an assistant printer at Graphics Workshop, one of the top printmaking ateliers of its time. |
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Pastorale #19
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Power Study Part Two #1
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Berning was especially drawn to the monotype process, which produces a print that has an edition of one. Dampened paper is placed over a flat inked plate with nothing etched into it, and both are run through a printing press. "In the monotype," he says, "I rediscovered the flexibility of the sketchbook, while the medium yielded finished pieces of art."
He also rediscovered his abstract roots, and his work became progressively purer. However, he retains his appreciation for realism, finding it to be a rejuvenating influence even in his most rigorous abstract pieces. |
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During those generative early years of printing, Berning began to study color in earnest by devising various experiments. One weekend, he decided to lay various colors alongside each other in varied hues and proportions, just to see what might happen. "After three twelve hour days," he says, "when I had pulled dozens upon dozens of these quick experimental prints, I remember locking the studio door behind me and turning to find a world transformed. It was late night and a yellow fire hydrant down the street leaped out at me. The deepest shadows radiated a purple glow. Some huge yet subtle shift had occurred in my brain. For the first time in my life I was seeing color as it is rather than as I had been taught to see it. 'This will be gone in the morning.' I thought. But it never left me." |
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Power Study Part Two #2
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A Natural History Part Two #10
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Within the past year Stan Berning has begun a new series of paintings and prints which opens up an entirely new range of possibilities. These graphically sophisticated images function as wholly abstract meditations on form. They may also allude to anything the viewer wants to read into them. Life moves in ecstatic moments and geological epochs. Landscape becomes figure becomes landscape. Nature shows itself to be a single organic reality. |
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Overture #13
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Catalog Introduction by Richard Tobin, 1997
THE SERIAL IMAGE in modern art can be traced from Monet's haystacks to Warhol's soup cans, and into minimalist abstraction. The repetitive use of an image is not new to art or to music where, as visual motif or musical theme, that image offers structure, movement, and continuity to inchoate idea or feeling. But what makes the serial image more than a motif is its explicit recourse to repetition itself, a device born of inquiry and bent toward incantation. Here is the risk and the promise: the serial image describes the arc between mantra and monotony.
In Stan Berning's series, entitled Planet Studies, each monoprint bears the visual stamp of a powerful generative composition: a massive polygonal shape is centrally placed on a thick horizontal band, set amidst translucent planes etched by lines that interlock space in dense, encasing atmosphere. But the structure's interplay of plane and solid is achieved by fields of intense chromatic contrast and subtle or dramatic change in texture. The effect is an image that constantly glides in and out of focus, shifting imperceptibly from illusive mass or diaphanous volume into thin, layered bands of ambient, gaseous light, and finally into subtle variations on a single geometric substrate. This underlying image in the series recalls the quiet but insistent grid of Reinhardt's black paintings. Here, the grid and its central geodesic shape work like some pivotal theorem in Euclidean plane geometry, at once anchor and catalyst for each subsequent idea in the sequence of line, surface, and solid.
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Berning's Planet Study series builds on earlier monoprint essays that exploit the ambivalence of plane and solid, and in doing so create a tension of illusive space and flat ground. What is new here is the overarching role of color and texture as they explore the endless variations in saturation and surface implicit in the monoprint process. And the triumph of chromatic structure is achieved in the very course of serial inquiry.
Berning's progression of monoprints from the First Planet group to work of the Third Planet series leads to an increase in scale. The smaller scale is marked by cubic density and massive gravity, as if to pull in the decorative propensity of intense lyric hues within a more sustained and pensive tectonic harmony. The move to the larger scale in the Third Planet studies frees color to produce monumental patterns that evoke Pompeian wall paintings. Rectangles etch the glyptic surface with brilliant bands of incrustation and satin planes of marblelike facets, all taut within a flat, abstract unifying grid.
Berning's largest works are the most recent. Fourth Planet features compositions in egg tempera on panel that look to the earlier series for their geometric structuring. The direct source of the images are small panel studies in egg tempera whose precision and finish give them an iconic quality. These small egg temperas point up the effect of scale in the Fourth Planet series, where expansive linearity and illusive space of the intimate study give way in the large works to insistent surface, deliberate pattern and physicality. The result in each instance is a self-contained, painted panel that is as much wall as wall painting, giving an immediacy and directness to the entire Fourth Planet series.
Yet for all the visual appeal of each monoprint and panel study, it is the series' sum that informs each of the parts. With the artist's continual return to an underlying serial image, the art affirms the fundamental notion of change as reciprocal balance of fixed and moving elements. His approach is a heuristic act that yields motion and stability.
Stan Berning's planet series is a mantra of inquiry. Its imagery is a celebration of discovery.
Richard Tobin 1997
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Excerpt from Altoon Sultan's "The Luminous Brush"
Published by Watson-Guptill Publishing 1999
An abstract painter who has worked with many different media, Stan Berning discovered egg tempera three years ago. His paintings make use of an emotive geometry and rich layers of color and contain a conversation between form and process. Berning has found that the glazes painted with egg tempera are finer and more luminous than those of acrylic paint. The medium's crispness works well for his rendering of form. Although he has ground his own pigments in the past, he now uses tube egg-oil emulsions.
They dry a bit more slowly than pure egg tempera because of the oil but their slower set-up time allows the paint to be workable for a longer period. He paints on Masonite, or on hollow wood doors for large works, and uses Fredrix dry gesso mix. Here are Berning's notes on his use of tempera painting:
There are no new, earth shaking techniques which I apply to egg tempera that are different from those that traditionalists apply to their images. It is a matter of attitude. My goal is not to reproduce a vision already imagined but rather to discover the image through the process. Tempera's capacity for a broad range of opacity and transparency, its quick-drying qualities, natural vibrancy, and sensitivity to fine and broad hue adjustment allows me the latitude to "think out loud" on the paint surface. I am aware from the beginning that the crisp delicate nature of the medium, particularly in its final stages, will lead to some precise and controlled areas, so I attempt to keep the process as loose as possible for as long as possible. Not only does this result in some surprisingly energetic surfaces, but also prompts a dialogue that reveals itself in layer upon layer and informs the finished painting.
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Day 1: I lay down yellow orange mixed wet and heavy for Fourth Planet #22. Day 2: Blue, green, orange, red, violet mixed to black. I put the paint on heavily and etch into it to create drawing. I use anything that works, from a dull nail and Q-tips to a plastic pencil tip. Often I'm working the paint very wet using a straight edge or some other tool which picks up paint and marks the surface while I'm using it. Day 3: The lights begin to emerge as I continue to etch and draw.
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STEP 2
Day 4: I begin to develop hue adjustments. I am finding areas that I like. Transparent washes come into play. (Because the image is abrupt, primary, and extreme in contrast, I now begin to look for holistic resolves which might unify the image.)
Day 5: I lay greens over whites, reds over greens and do lots of work with reds and oranges. Blacks are thin and cold and emphasize the fractured and broken delineation of the composition. (Awkward, lurching, and primary to the extreme, the painting is like a bad cartoon. At this point I am tempted to destroy the image with washes and by aggressively pulling away paint. I have reached a turning point: Go forward or turn in a totally different direction.)
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STEP 3
Day 7: I decide to stay with what I have. I soften linear work in the reds by using washes. I warm blacks and give them depth by using washes of violet mixes which achieve an opalescent glow. I extend lights to the lower left but these areas still need a lot of work.
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STEP 4
Day 14: Finished. I resolve jarring angles through compositional changes to the areas where reds and blacks meet and by tighter adjustments of hue in the reds. I rework the lower left to lower center over and over again. I find it necessary to bring strong green complements into play and then subdue them with the use of earth tones and more blacks. I adjust the blacks further. The painting's natural vibration has gone from high to medium-low frequency and settled into an attitude of calm elegance --- all within a vibrant and muscular image.
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Review from
Intuitive processes, color and form give abstracts character and identity
9/14/01
Like certain high-fashion models, Stan Berning's beautiful, geometric abstractions are completely self-centered. They are not about anything other than themselves.
This is the first solo show at Butters Gallery for Berning, a Santa Fe artist. Stylistically a sort of reconstructed Constructivist, he gives us pictures composed of circles and squares. An emotive minimalist (an oxymoronical beast if ever there was one), Berning seeks to overcome the inherent austerity of the rectilinear form with color. He fills his precisely fractured planes with marbled orange, gold, red and yellow. The effect is to produce humane pictures that exude an almost geologic sense of solidity -- pictures that are visceral rather than ideological statements.
Berning has focused his attention on egg-tempera the past few years. He has found it ideally suited to his needs. Tempera's qualities -- its crispness, its range of opacity, its luminosity, its sensitivity to hue, its ability to dry quickly -- allow him, as he puts it, to "think out loud on the paint surface."
The success of this thinking can be seen in pictures such as "A Natural History Part One #42," in which we are captured first by the glowing, slabby rightness of the thing -- its gestalt -- and then by the intricacy of the relationships established among and between the formal and chromatic elements.
In discussing technique, Berning describes drawing into a picture with whatever is at hand -- a nail, a plastic pencil-tip -- to let light enter. He uses a variety of washes to "soften the linear work" and to adjust a piece. Conceptually he prefers to fly by the seat of his pants, to rely on intuitive processes. As he describes it, he allows a picture to emerge, to "discover its own character and identity."
Using the basic building blocks of art-making, Berning's work provokes responses that are themselves the basic building blocks of art appreciation. In both his prints and paintings he shows us, again and again, the primitive power of form and color to communicate.
Butters Gallery, 502 N.W. Davis St., 503-248-9378. 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturdays through Sept.29.
--Kenneth Dixon Special to The Oregonian
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Artisans of Santa Fe 'ArtisTalk' Artists Profile / November 2004
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