pegan brooke: ten years of water

PEGAN BROOKE: TEN YEARS OF WATER

“These pictures will captivate you, if you let them. But as with other equally subtle work, you need to empty your mind of daily distractions for their whispery eloquence to reach you. “

– Robert L. Pincus, San Diego Union Tribune

Gallery Bergelli presents “Ten Years of Water” a solo exhibition

of paintings by Bay Area artist Pegan Brooke. Opening June 6,

with the Gallery Reception on June 8th from 4-6pm, and Artist

Talk at 5pm, the exhibition continues through July 10, 2013.

Pegan Brooke creates ethereal abstract works that take their

cues from the natural environment. Marked by rising and re-

ceding color fields, structured by natural patterns and rhythms,

“Brooke’s canvases communicate a sense of awe of the world around her, enveloping the viewer in meditative depictions of beauty that alternately soothe and stimulate. Her imagery is both familiar and otherworldly, in-viting reflection and suggesting the possibility of transcendence by con-templation.”

– Ann C. Ray, Marin Magazine

30 paintings created in the last ten years will be presented in

this survey exhibition. “Ten Years of Water” will consist of col-

orful river paintings inspired by observation of the river in Pont

Aven, France, together with a collection of subtle sea paintings

inspired by the Bolinas coast as well as the gorgeous shimmery

canvases from the most recent body of work inspired by the

high snow-covered mountains in Sun Valley.

“Nature challenges us to contemplate a deeper understanding of what our lives are and leads us to recognition of the interconnectedness of all things...”

– Pegan Brooke

Pegan Brooke’s paintings have been exhibited for many years,

including exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum, SFMOMA,

Oakland Museum, San Diego Museum of Art, Des Moines Art

Center and Museum, Sao Paulo Biennale and the Monterey

Museum of Art. Brooke is a recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany

Foundation Artist Grant, two Marin Arts Council Grants, and an

alternate award for the Prix de Rome. She was also awarded

Artist in Residency fellowships at the Millay Colony for the Arts

in New York and five residencies at the Pont Aven School of

Contemporary Art in France. Brooke’s paintings have been re-

viewed in numerous publications, including The LA Times, The

SF Examiner, The New York Times and Art in America. Pegan

Brooke’s work is held in numerous public and private collec-

tions, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The San

Francisco Museum of Modern Art, U.S. Embassies in Sri Lanka

and Bolivia, Mills College, University of Nebraska Art Museum,

State of Iowa Capitol Building, Bank of America International

Headquarters, Standard Oil Corporation, Prudential Insurance

Company, Security Pacific Bank, Oracle Headquarters, Mer-

edith Corporation, McDonald Corporation, The Principal Finan-

cial Group, Unocal Corporation, Mr. and Mrs. Harry Anderson

Collection, Roselyn Swig Collection, Charles R. Schwab, and

Steven Chase Collection.

The Dragon’s Whisper: A Note on Pegan Brooke’s Recent Paintings

The ancient sages of China believed in dragons. These

were not the leather-winged fire-breathers of medieval Euro-

pean legend: instead, they were dragons of a more ethereal

breed. They were animistic personifications of the invisible

spirit energies that infuse every aspect of the natural world,

and they were crucial to any understanding of how those sages

understood that world. Sometimes the spirit dragons of Asia

were pictured as giant grimacing serpents whose muscular

coils were exaggerated mimics of the unseen undulations of

land, river and sky. More often however, they were not pic-

tured at all, and could only be understood by the discerning

eye as evocative hints of the invisible forces that exert a pull

on the visible components revealed in the sublime vistas of riv-

er, mountain and sky that were so characteristic of landscape

paintings of the T’ang and Sung dynasties. Through those im-

ages, and more importantly, through the way that they were

painted, viewers were and still are led to the recognition that

the whole of the natural world is alive and intertwined at the

deepest level of being. And this lesson extends to all of the

great traditions of Asian painting, whether or not they were

based on the shapeliness of the calligraphic gesture or on visu-

alizing the soft grandeur of the Yangtse river gorge.

Invisible dragons also haunt and animate Pegan

Brooke’s recent series of landscape-inspired abstract paintings.

The cursory glance tells us that these predominantly tonalist

works are elegant gradations of oil paint infiltrated with sub-

tle inflections of unpredictable chromatic additions that make

them shimmer in the light of a closer scrutiny. Their scale is

neither seductively small nor declaratively large, meaning that

their guileless invitation to intimate gazing is perfectly bal-

anced by their confident intrusion into the social spaces that

they might inhabit, never brash, noisy or pretentious, and cer-

tainly never willing to lapse into the visual gimmickry that is all-

too-often seen in recent exhibitions of contemporary art. With

that much said, it is also important to note the countervailing

fact that Brooke’s paintings never lapse into any ingratiating

coyness for the sake of giving the viewer too much easy com-

fort. Certainly the work is nothing if not generous in its spirit of

luxuriant visual pleasure, but is makes a few demands on the

viewer’s knowledge of the history of painting along the way,

simply because they know that the position that they take in

relation to that history is part of how they function in the world.

The paint in the most recent body of work is slightly

thicker than was the case in years past, and their color is signif-

icantly subdued, emphasizing a more austere tonality tinctured

with hints of color that look like fleeting refractions of light. In

previous bodies of work, vibrant color played a more crucial role

in Brooke’s paintings. Those earlier efforts featured gradations

of two or three closely related richly hued colors, and it was

never hard to see how any individual painting would shift from

presenting graphic variations of those colors to emphasizing

how they could be seen as invitations to see their rich pools of

color as a vast spatial vista. It is worth noting that those earlier

paintings were painted in a studio in Bolinas, California that

was but a short walk from a tall cliff that looked down and out

and upon the vast ocean reaching out to a distant horizon. As

stunning and brilliant as the color of those paintings are, their

real inspirations had to be play of light and atmosphere bred by

the breathtaking magenta sunsets of that place’s fall and spring

seasons. The more recent paintings were executed in studio in

the high mountain environs of Sun Valley, Idaho, where thinner

air and frosty light are the central themes of everyday seeing.

.

As has always been the case, Brooke’s paintings have followed

the suit of how nature is immediately experienced, meaning

that the new works can be seen to reflect the rugged rawness

of rockface and snowscape. But the work is still haunted by the

ebb and flow of the energies of nature, even as their attention

has moved further from the chop and crest of the ocean’s sur-

face, and much closer to the energies that underlie the sheer

drama of high mountain geology.

Brooke’s paintings force the viewer to decelerate from

the condition of high velocity image consumption that is so

characteristic of various forms of electronic media. In this em-

phasis on deceleration, they are very much of a piece with the

work of Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), that Bolognese master of

meditative tonality. Like Morandi’s work, Brooke’s decelerated

paintings bring the viewer back to a condition of experience

where the inner clock of being can better coordinate with the

outer clock of social requirement, and in so doing, align that

work with the way that the body absorbs and grows into and

through actual experience rather than mere sensation. Indeed,

their layering of pigment bears an uncanny resemblance to the

ways that geographical topographies layer themselves over the

course of geological time. In grounding the viewer’s experience

in this kind of decelerated time, they also celebrate the gains

of wisdom that come from the accretion of worldly experience,

this in subtle opposition to the empty timelessness of perpet-

ual sensation that goes everywhere and nowhere at the same

time.

-Mark Van Proyen

Oakland, California April 29, 2013.

Mark Van Proyen is a Bay Area-based art critic, cor-

responding editor for Art in America, and has also published

in Art News, Art Criticism, Artweek, ArtNet, Bad Subjects and

Square Cylinder. He is Associate Professor at the San Francisco

Art Institute.

S-102oil on canvas, metallic and mica pigments, 62”x52”

S-84

oil on canvas, metallic and mica pigments, 22”x18”


S-62, S-63, S-66oil on canvas, 18”x18”, each

S-72oil on canvas, 28”x28”

S-89


“ ...these predominantly tonalist works are elegant gradations of oil paint infiltrated with subtle inflections of unpredictable chromatic additions that make them shimmer in the light...”

S-88


S-93


R-5oil on canvas, 38”x48”

S-104, S-103oil on canvas, metallic and mica pigments, 36”x28”, each

(front and back cover)

© 2013 Gallery Bergelli. All rights reserved.

483 Magnolia Avenue, Larkspur, CA 94939

www.bergelli.com, 415-945-9454

Back Cover: S-103, oil on canvas, metallic and mica pigments, 36”x28”

Front Cover: S-104, oil on canvas, metallic and mica pigments, 36”x28”

Photo Credits: Josh Wells and Jay Daniel

pegan brooke: ten years of water

Documents

guggenheim museum

san diego museum of

pegan brookes recent

pegan brookes work

oakland museum

monterey museum of

solo exhibition of paintings

bay area artist pegan