The Weekly Curation: Pairs

Throughout our past curations, we’ve shared a lot about crafting artwork, style, and personal taste. We’ve learned how to take in visual information from a single work of art, from color palette to composition to size to scale to materials and beyond. But what happens when we pair two separate works together? How do we craft a collection with coupled pieces? How can they inform and enhance our visual landscape? How does a work change when it’s given a partner? Often when we see two different paintings, we focus on what they don’t share –– differences in color, shape, or subject matter. But, let’s reconsider –– let’s look at work in partnership.

This week, artist and curator Mel Reese brings together pairs of Art in Res pieces that she feels connect with one another in a compositional, subject matter, color palette, or even size/scale relationship. This exploration of artwork companionship is a fun way of thinking about how multiple artworks can relate to one another within your home and collection.

It’s a great time to revamp the living room, bathroom, or bedroom. As we all dream of designing our permanent homes, we can select stunning new artwork, lending our design tastes an extra dose of class and sophistication.

Now let’s scroll onward –– happy browsing!

Here we have our first two pieces, seemingly very different on the surface. Both are square formats, but different in size. One is a narrative portrait, while the other is abstract. However, both utilize similar techniques like mark-making and blurred lines to express a certain feeling of energy and movement. The fluffy dog softens the harsher lines in Dwan’s painting, with the gray abstract smudges giving the dog a darker glow. Paired together, we see new sides to each work, both using minimal style and expressive marks in their craft. Soft whites punctuated by dark browns and blacks populate each work, with a central color combination mirroring each piece’s compositions.

Jennifer Cannon is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She tells us that she doesn’t have a biography or even a biographer, but she does tell us a bit about her process of creating her wonderful dog portraits, “My work as an artist is very much the work of a medium and a conjurer. For each of my paintings, I begin with a name. I hear in the world the name of a dog, an untethered dog spirit floating in between existence and non-existence… I paint Seal, a portrait of his face, to capture the moment when he learns the news about his future. This moment, for me, is everything: the moment when he learns, when he feels, when Seal becomes himself, when Seal emerges into a new form within my painting.”

Rachel Dwan is a SF Bay Area native, who has been creating resonant paintings of natural patterns for almost 10 years. She is inspired by dance, and any other form of communicating ideas with the body. She tells us about her painting, “Burl is named for the circular budding patterns that form inside a tree burl. A burl is an arrested collection of the tree’s plans for growth, a bundle of potential branches. This idea of rippling potential undergirds this painting. In these paintings, I draw only a few lines, and then repeat those rhythmically across the space to create the feeling of a resonant field of sensation, both minimal and full at the same time.”

In this next pairing, we notice a very similar subject matter –– almost identical! They are also paired perfectly in size. With each window onto the scene, we see houses, water, boats, land, and docks –– nautical landscapes, familiar and bright. The similarities make it easy to feel the kinship of the two pieces, while also highlighting their interesting differences. Yang’s waterside-scape is soft and subtle while Halper’s dockside scene is rich and vivid, both thoughtful exaggerations of our own world. In Halper’s painting, we are very aware of the human figure. Paired with Yang’s almost lonely scene, we search the quiet scene for a face or figure. Are we alone? We begin to imagine the figure passing out of view, traveling through both worlds, hidden just out of view within Yang’s canvas.

Ella Yang is a first-generation Korean-American and native New Yorker. She is a mostly self-taught painter based in Brooklyn, New York. She takes great pleasure in traditional methods of oil painting, especially working "en plein air," i.e. on site with a portable easel.

Kathy Halper lives and works in Evanston, IL. Kathy became an artist after a shorter career writing ads. She has explored many different mediums, believing that the artist isn’t defined by the choice of medium or theme at all. The artist is defined simply by the need to make art.

There’s a certain whimsy to both Charity Baker and Mollie Douthit’s pieces. One is a traditional portrait, though warped in the details, while the other is a still-life study of a cookie, both childlike in their subject and both artful and silly. In still life studies, we often see an overlap with traditional portraiture. Both pieces are intimate studies of their subjects. Both are the same scale and ratio of size, despite being immensely different in physical size –– both elongated vertical orientations. Within each piece, we see the artist showing great care to capture the complexity of their subject, studying something often overlooked. We see the subjects interacting, a sullen subject given a bright cookie. We can build a narrative here, a frown morphing into a smile as the cookie comes into frame. It’s lovely and joyful and utterly quirky in combination –– and we love it.

Charity Baker grew up in Pittsburgh, to a family of actresses, dancers, and architects. Her paintings center around the direct observation of her immediate environment, travel, and experiences. Lush oil paintings, and drawings make up most of her work.

Mollie Douthit is an American representational painter. Her small scale oil paintings depict images of food, home, and memory. Mollie tells us about her work, “Growing up, my grandparents owned a restaurant; therefore, the kitchen was the physical center of our daily lives and I became an avid baker. When I started painting, I unsurprisingly gravitated towards still lifes, especially foods that conjure memories. I came to realize that a kitchen in many ways reflects a studio, and now it is a favorite place to paint.”

Now you may be thinking, Mel has lost her mind! What on Earth do these pieces have in common? But, if you take a second look, subconscious visual language starts to unfold. We imagine them in a bright living room or near a kitchen window and it just feels right. One may be vertically oriented graphic abstraction while the other is a bright architectural landscape, but they are a natural pair, I swear! Peachy pink squiggly lines float through Chinkan’s painting, pairing with the salmon pink of Burdett’s house like a fine wine. The triangular-like shapes often repeated throughout the painting also speak directly to the traditional peaks of the home’s roof line. Color seems to float through each canvas, blobs of blue and pink call upon the shapes and colors in Burdett’s landscape.

Fiona Chinkan is a New York City based artist. Fiona began her signature style of drawings in 2001, as a way to accompany graffiti lettering she was exploring at the time. Over the years, she has developed the lines and forms as a means to express herself and interpret the world around her. Fiona creates out of her Brooklyn-based studio.

Caroline Burdette is a visual artist living in Los Angeles, California. She began producing paintings in 1999 while living in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico. Caroline was a recording artist, songwriter, and band leader until 2010 when she decided to dedicate all her focus to graduate school. Caroline eventually earned her Master of Arts from the University of Chicago, where she focused on studying neuroscience research implications on psychodynamic theory. After years of working in the field of healthcare she has returned to her roots in fine art and is a full-time artist in Los Angeles.

On curating the collection:

Let’s learn how and why I brought these pieces together –– I want to walk you through what I’ve considered. Whether you’re an experienced collector or totally new to the art world, it’s always fun to thoughtfully discuss what makes a great collection.

This week we have examined what can happen when you pair two works of art together. What conversations are being had between the two? How does one possibly change our understanding of the other? Below, we highlight what compositional tools can come into play when coupling paintings.

Color:

This is generally the most easy to understand piece of visual language. When we get dressed everyday, we all know in our gut what colors we like and what colors pair well together. In two of this week’s pairs, color is a crucial component of comparison and communication between the paintings. For both Cannon & Dwan and Chinkan & Burdett, each pair shares either similar color palettes, tones, or hues. This is one of the more direct ways we as viewers make visual comparisons.

Composition:

For a pair like Baker & Douthit, compositional similarity is the key for appreciating the couple. Though two completely different subjects, each painting has a single, central object or person, with similar rounded shapes. This causes us to make associations between the two; the figure becomes quirky with their cookie pal and the cookie begins to take on a personality. It shows both the artist's attention to craft and our own understanding as a collector.

Size and Scale:

When we pair two paintings, we become very aware of each relative shape and scale. The relationship becomes glaringly obvious. Similar shapes or identical size allows us to make direct comparisons between the two regardless of any other compositional, color, or subject matter factors. This is something we can play around with - pairing two pieces that are similar or using size to emphasize details of its twin.

Like in Yang & Harper’s pair, we see that similar subject matter can bring interesting comparisons between two paintings. We naturally look for what is similar or dissimilar. What is missing? The individual scenes begin to meld into one –– we begin to make our own narratives. What do we see in a piece when paired with another artist’s work?

With these new viewing tools in hand, happy collecting!