Tom Wudl at LA Louver

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Last Thursday around seven in the evening, I found myself lying on my back deep in the Venice Beach sand. It was dark and I was alone, no soul in sight, a rare experience for an LA resident. Overhead were luminous clouds, lots of them, and if I lifted my head a bit, I could see the whitish waves rolling in against a darkened ocean.  I lay there either snapping photo shots or just soaking it all in while listening to the rhythmic beats of the tides: I did this for at least an hour, disturbed only by an occasional moving star that, outside of my imagination, were planes taking off from LAX.

An hour before my Venice Beach lie-down, I had been a few blocks away at LA Louver to look in on Tom Wudl’s latest exhibit. I had watched him for the better part of a year working on the paintings and drawings for this show, so I hadn’t expected any surprises. Yet he surprised me. I always considered these new pieces strong but now, with his studio clutter gone and only an empty room, they exuded even more power and energy than before. To add to my surprise, Wudl had selected and mounted many of the works on well-considered frames that seamed an integral part of his works.

So I had to revisit the Gallery one more time and started walking back. On my first visit there were only a handful of guests but now I found a mob inside and bumper-to-bumper traffic outside. I was lucky to have visited his art when nothing came between it and myself or I would have missed seeing just how much energy his work can exude.

All of the paintings and drawings were generously priced for today’s troubled pocket books and apparently many clever collectors had taken note because half of the works were already sold. Every piece was meticulously executed with precise attention to detail, a hallmark of Wudl’s work. Hundreds if not thousands of extremely small club motifs or floating eyes provided a sum total compositional effect but also signified a world of iconographic meaning for the artist. Another attribute of his work is that it’s sometimes challenging to decipher his symbols. As Wudl recently commented, it’s “one’s own hermetic iconography and visual searching that may or may not be communicated to an audience.” Perhaps not knowing adds a sort of mystery, like a mass in Latin or an opera in Italian; as soon as you hear it in English, it falls flat.

Like the artist Charles Garabedian (also represented by LA Louver), Wudl’s visual work more often than not stems from a book or text that has moved or enlightened him. For this set of paintings his inspiration came from Buddhism, specifically the “Avatamsaka Sutra” (Flower Ornament Sutra). This is one of the longest Mahayan (Sanskrit for great or higher vehicle) sutras and for those into Pure Land or Zen, it is considered the epitome of Buddhist thought.  It all gets rather convoluted, especially the Sanskrit terms, but suffice it to say that the Mahayana movement started in India and then spread throughout East Asia.

This sutra along with his meditation practice is part and parcel of Wudl’s search for clarification and meaning to his existence; his representing it in visual form is part of that search. The main theme of a flower floating mid-canvas without a stem, along with club motif and eyes, are not simply meant as mere representational renditions but act as visual transcendental images to what he would consider a higher reality, at least as I understand him.

At the entrance hang four small, nearly identical ink-on-paper drawings titled, “The Fragrances of Enlightenment Practice,” part of a set of twelve states. These particular drawings show “generosity,” “kindness,” “understanding,” and “forgiveness.” Then there’s a graphite on rag paper drawing titled, “The Will for Omniscience” which demonstrates a brilliant balance between his flower motif on the bottom portion and the rest of his iconographical menagerie on the top, resulting in the sort of tension one might see in a Gottleib.

Two other works also caught my fancy. One was another graphite on rag paper titled “Waking” that displayed a lot of whimsy by sticking the images of Laurel and Hardy into everything else going on. This is not happenstance, Wudl had previously made an entire series of these two iconic figures, and his inclusion of them in this work seems to be the artist’s way of creating a continuity link. After all, you see a lot of the club motif in his former works of the two comedians.  The other was the largest work in the exhibit, a 38” x 26” gouache, graphite, and oil painting on rice paper titled, “Portrait of the Artist’s Son.” To me this work seemed the most complex and perhaps the most gratifying. There are many visual levels to it, and it looked to me like an esoteric Chuck Close on steroids.

But the show stunner was also one of the smallest paintings, an approximately 4” x 4” oil on linen of his flower icon viewed from above titled “Now.” The precision craftsmanship is only outdone by the phenomenal play of the bluish/purplish and white colors. The final result has a remarkable degree of clarity and force that can easily dominate a large space; your eye is automatically drawn to it like a jewel in the crown.

Tom Wudl’s work shows an artist who never compromises his artistic integrity or his visual search. If I come away with nothing more than having learned to emulate this quality in him, then I will consider my association with him to have been a complete success.

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