A Regional Roundup, July 8 – August 15, 2010
Oil on Canvas, 2010
Jack Ogden’s paintings for Flatlanders 3 are somewhat of a departure for Ogden from the lighthearted, cartoon-based, post-gusten style with which he is most often associated. These new works are not somber by a long shot, but are truly serious, the product of a mature master at the height of his powers.
They are based on 19th and 20th century historical photographs found by the artist. The subject matter – artists, cowboys, 1930s labor strife – constitute a summary portrait of Ogden’s aesthetic, cultural, and geographical inheritance as someone who has lived most of his life in Northern California. In Ogden’s youth, before World War II, this area was still rural, recently frontier and decidedly rough-hewn. It’s a gone world, which Ogden is reconstituting through paint.
The Picasso portrait, By the Bye, and the double figurative portrait, Blacks and Browns, are also attempts to come to terms with modernism by an artist who has been publicly cogitating about this theme for most of his career. In these small works, he employs strokes cumulatively full of suggestion but always tacit, sub rosa. They’re little Bay Area figurative abstraction paintings that hone in on the figures and cut away most but not all the abstract surroundings.
Eight cowboys stare out at us from the picture plane; five are seated. They wear western wear and one, legs crossed, shows us his Gustonesque shoe sole. His face could in face be Guston’s, surrounded by other gun slinging painters admired by Ogden. The three standing menace touching the shoulders of the seated men, suggesting connection. Two have six-shooters in their hands. All are wearing hats. All have clothing of the most seductive colors. It appears to be the late 19th century.
Jumping ahead a half-century, the other large painting in the show is of six men in the 1930s. Factories are visible in the distance; the two groups of men appear to be on the verge of violence. Three are touching. One may be in handcuffs. They’re all in suits, half with hats, but they’re not suit suits like 21st century “suits.” They’re tough guys on both sides trying to look respectable. They’re the sons or grandsons of the cowboys in the other painting, and they’re acting out a myth of the west: barely sublimated violence just beneath the surface of the everyday, manhood at issue, like the outcome of a game of five card draw.