For the artist, making art is a perpetual dance of visual decision-making; call it the “art” of art. Quite naturally not all dances look alike. Any way an artist decides to explore art is as valid as any other– exploration and innovation can exist in the strangest of corners. But you must admit that artists willing to fold a possible winning hand for a completely new shuffle trump all; they stand to discover artistic terra incognita in abundance.
Call this courage, call it artistic guts, it’s what came to mind as soon as I walked into the Left Coast Galleries on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City to see Moline Kramer’s latest show entitled “All That Remains.” I last saw her works at the Paul Kopeikin gallery a few years ago, at that time displaying her hyper-realistic portraits of people. This time around, I realized things had drastically changed from her former work. Now I saw an artist who had jettisoned her parachute to plunge out of her routine comfort zone.
For Kramer, a graduate of Art Center and a former medical illustrator, her techniques had been honed to the point of “automaticity” for both drawing and painting which now represented a well-honed skill set but little else. That occurred four years ago when she realized that the effort to continually refine her technique became a compulsive goal that no longer offered her a challenge; She now wanted more creativity and less boredom in her art making. So Kramer turned to a more gestural, emotionally based type of art, purposely allowing her unconscious and spontaneous side to mingle with her now automatic technical abilities.
Her major shift was now right in front of me, hanging on the exhibit walls and for the most part arranged chronologically. First were two small, exquisite paintings on wood (my favorites because they reminded me of one of my favorite artist, Manny Farber), the details realistically rendered but the forms creatively arranged. The artist prefers painting on wood or hard surfaces than canvas.
On the next wall Kramer has two highly rendered graphite drawings. The first depicts a part of a crashing wave entitled “90265.” When she noticed my perplexed look she said, “That’s the zip code for Malibu.” The other, done after the wave, depicted a side view of a stag skeleton with a hyper-realistically drawn fly at the lower right corner. These two drawings are pivotal ones for her. She became so bored drawing the wave that she grabbed watercolors and moderately splashed them over her drawing. The result doesn’t look draconian to the viewer but to Kramer it represented that cinematic moment when Dr. Strangelove stands up from his wheelchair and shouts, “…I can walk! I can walk!” The stag drawing, still tightly rendered, gave her the notion to continue examining animal skeletons and by placing the fly in the corner, proclaimed her manifesto; I, myself, make the visual rules.
The following wall shows a scattering of eleven 10” x 10” tinted wooden squares, most of them displaying one or more birds or a collaged figure sitting or hanging from tree branches. It represents her own hermetic symbolism; it’s her family tree, the individuals translated to birds. The interesting thing going on here is that the birds and figures are not each at the same level of refinement, Kramer is experimenting, playing with the in-and-out, back-and-forth between realism and abstraction. Some viewers will notice that all the squares can be joined together to make one seamless painting. This sort of strategy is not new to Kramer. Paintings that have not sold are cut up into small squares and auctioned off for charity.
Moving around to the next wall, one sees four pedestals, each holding a small box. Inside each box is a bird skeleton in some sort of association; for example, one of them shows a little cloth outfit made for the bird. It’s whimsical, but continues to represent a loosening up technique for the artist.
Finally on the last wall is Kramer’s metamorphosis, a series of decomposing bird portraits done by applying multiple back-and-forth coats of oil sticks and gesso on paper. For all intents and purposes, they look like Zen brush strokes. Kramer asked her art students to bring her any deceased birds they ran across so she could then hang them, head up, from a line for use as models for these works as they decomposed, Such intense observation and recording of the natural world is in the old tradition of Leonardo Da Vinci.
For Kramer, these paintings represent a new platform to continue in her future visual exploration. But at this point in her career, it marks a huge liberating breakthrough moment for her. It’s no longer just a toe in the pool to test the waters, like her “90265” drawing, she has now thrown her whole body into the ocean. And there’s no turning back.