Cleve Gray in "Color/ Line/ Form" at Rosenbaum Contemporary

Cleve Gray, Curatorial Essay

Exhibition: Color/ Line / Form at Rosenbaum Contemporary

Written by: Gabriel Diego Delgado

Abstract gestures that fit within neither the Abstract Expressionists, nor the Color Field painters, Cleve Gray’s paintings cannot be pigeonholed.

His age, fundamentals, upbringing, life-experiences, humbled privileges, mannerisms, and character steered Gray’s straight and narrow path through the art world. He was guided by his own terms –building lasting friendships with more writers than artists, being a wallflower more than an extrovert, and cultivating a love for sports, animal husbandry and fitness.

Gray’s paintings have been critiqued as being heavily influences by his love of Chinese landscape painting, a subject he wrote his thesis on at Princeton. His artwork would seamlessly develop from his early aesthetic to a more mature and energetic later work; continuing a personal life-long investigation of gesture. These categorical evaluations illustrate an artist exploring theory and fundamentals more than the sometimes-uncompromising rubric of modern art.

Known for his large scale sweeps of eloquently mastered and calligraphy-inspired marks, Gray’s predominately acrylic on canvas paintings reflects a renouncement of figurations. His interest in color and emotional resonance ring true through his painterly subtleties and ambiguities. Defined physicality of foreground and background were null to these metaphysical ideas of application. His aesthetic was focused on the creation of art that showcased his intuitive preciseness of line, color and form. These mark-makings was generated by an artist of true scholarly apt whose intelligence, wittiness, and scholar drew the beloved company, and garnered the life-long friendships, of artist, Barnett Newman; Founder and editor of Art News and former Curator of American Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas Hess; and British art critic Bryan Robertson.

As Gray grew older, he was subject to bouts of intense arthritis that affected his ability to hold his brushes. In 2000, he was graciously gifted some oil sticks. This new material opened up another world to the artist. The oil sticks alleviated the need to mix any paints, limiting the artist’s discomforts. However, it limited Gray’s ability to continue his techniques of various thicknesses of line, texture, and even rhythm. He had to reevaluate all the gestural applications of paint to transverse over to the seemingly demanding and extremely limiting functions of a colored oil stick.

Not to be pinned down, Gray saw this as an opportunity, a positive change on his quest of emotional gesture. He became excited, thrilled and enthusiastic about exploring the new possibilities with this new seemingly restrictive media.

As he delves into creating new bodies of art with the oil sticks, disaster strikes. Even more debilitating than the start of arthritis was the onset of severe eyesight degeneration.

In 2002, Gray suffered a stroke of the optic nerve, which eliminated his peripheral vision. 

From 2002- 2004, battling near blindness at the ages of 84 to 86 years old, Gray painted images using a host of mixed media, but mostly oil stick and acrylic paint on canvas. These later works, born out of a challenging downslope of health, portrays an artist who does not slow down…even in the direst of circumstances. In the last two years of his life, the energy and raw emotion of the artist’s work was essentially drawn from his subconscious; primordial associations of a human being facing the inevitable.

Gray said, “By being half blind, you only see the essentials…and that’s all that matters.”

Gray was coming face to face with the end of his eyesight, and as an artist, this was a virtual death sentence. Now in his 80’s, his social circle was also growing smaller and smaller.  Good friends like Dick Avedon, Barnett Newman, Bryan Robertson, and Bill Maxwell were already gone, each devastating the artist again and again with their passing.

It is then, on December 7, 2004, almost three months after his 86th birthday, Cleve Gray fell and slipped on some ice while walking to his studio in Connecticut. A few days later, at the Hartford Hospital, Gray died as a result of a severe subdural hematoma.

The six paintings in the exhibition “Line / Color / Form” are prime examples of Cleve Gray’s artwork during the last 4 years of his life. With inevitable vision deterioration, and painful arthritis in his hands, Gray’s health was suffering. His aesthetic had to be redefined due to these declines in wellbeing. With the oil sticks, we see a reduction in a number of stylistic characteristics. Thin and thickness of line are irrelevant now, huge sweeps of pigment across larger than life canvases cannot be created, and calligraphy-esque wisps no longer grace the canvas. What exists is an artist re-definition of how to achieve a personally desired effect of gesture.

“Letting Go #14”, 2003 is a 60 x 45 inch mixed media painting on canvas that showcases Gray’s explosion of emotion through the exploration of a new media. Rhythm, gesture, and line show the artists movement– marks by the artist culling from a divine intervention.

Visually, the cerulean background allows the black, yellow, orange, gray, and black lines to float within the abyss. Conceptually, you can almost visualize the intuitive movement of Gray’s hand as he moves across the canvas.  The wiggling and wonting, subject to his sweeps and glides. He seems almost like an orchestra conductor, guiding the fine tuned rhythm in his mind to a visual epiphany.

“Letting Go”, the title of the painting is severely coded language for Gray at this point in his life. It is a letting go of his eyesight…of life…of old techniques…of old aesthetic…

In analyzing the visual evidence, we see two main entities, one large and one small.

Is there a connection to the two-–a progression or digression? A vertical mass of black wiggly lines dominant the left side of the canvas. And the cool blue background compliments the collective warm color tones in the line.

However, there is great depth created by these lines. The yellow palette dominates all the others, floating above these receding colors; as they each push and pull for distance and intensity.

“Letting Go” was painted one year before the artist’s death, and three years after receiving the oil sticks as a new medium.

What we have to understand is, at this time, Gray’s peripheral vision was nonexistent. He relies on automatic mark-making to capture the gesture. Is “Letting Go” an artist’s intuitive response to the changing world around him?

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