SAN FRANCISCO – The e-mail announcement for Kimetha Vanderveen at the Peter Mendenhall Gallery (February 11-April 1, 2023) reminded me of the afternoon I spent in his sunny studio at San Francisco’s Hunter’s Point shipyard in late October 2022. Until then, I don’t had seen her work only digitally, not in person. After an email introduction from a mutual friend, we met at a coffee shop in early February 2022 in Koreatown, New York. Although I had no idea when, or even if, I would be traveling again then, I told Kimetha that I would visit her studio the next time I was in San Francisco. Something about the modest scale of the work and the evocation of light through materiality piqued my curiosity. This is how, six months later, I found myself in his studio.
As Vanderveen began showing me his works, many of which were nuanced monochrome oil paintings on panels less than eight by eight inches, I came back to a question posed by Joe Brainard and Thomas Nozkowski: how big should it be? a work of art ? ? While many abstract artists working in monochromatic fashions certainly made larger pieces, I didn’t think Vanderveen’s works needed to be larger. What was it about them that required them to be small?
We often think of monochrome paintings as a solid field of a single color. Vanderveen does something different. She paints a pale color over another so that the traces of the previous layer show slightly. In one work, I found myself focusing on a brushstroke that moves across the surface, gently and precisely, causing the color to change slightly on either side. Vanderveen is a tonalist. His paintings speak of the interplay of materiality and light, of the connection between the palpable and ephemeral world in which we live.
Vanderveen wants the viewer to scrutinize his paintings, to become aware of the changes in tones and gradations, as well as the interaction between the paint and the light emanating from its material surface. These are meditations on the passage of time, which in my opinion is the essential subject of his work.
As soon as I saw the watercolors that Vanderveen had placed on the table in front of me in his studio, I wanted to write about them. The 15 watercolors, each measuring five by seven inches, were all done near a lake in Camden, Maine, in a matter of hours in the summer of 2022; it started early in the morning and ended in the middle of the afternoon. They are a quietly joyous journal of the changing light and the passage of time. At the same time, the sense of passage of time and estrangement from the material world introduce notes of loss and mourning into each view.
Vanderveen divides the horizontal format into three areas: lake, hills and sky. The middle stripe is usually the darkest in color and the most defined in shape. The perspective changes throughout, as the artist shifts position slightly or looks in a different direction. She seems to have used only four pale colors in all the works: grey, blue, green and yellow. The surface of the paper is still visible. As she used a brush, the puddles or dried spots show no sign of her hand. Some works approach representation, while others only became cohesive as landscapes after I remembered what I was looking at – and even then I wasn’t always sure what I was looking at. saw. This sliding seems to me crucial for the paintings. Vanderveen is not so much trying to name something as portraying – in these works at least – change and impermanence, the passing moment. While the watercolors are meant to be reminders, a retelling of a day spent by a lake in Camden, they also speak of a world fading from sight and the failings of memory. The modestly sized watercolors oscillate between form and dissipation. I remembered the first stanza of Henry Vaughn’s poem “They are all gone into the world of light”:
They are all gone into the world of light! And I alone sit ling’ring here; Their very memory is fair and bright, And my sad thoughts doth clear.
That’s why I kept looking at Vanderveen’s paintings and watercolors, and why they stuck in my mind.
Kimetha Vanderveen continues at the Peter Mendenhall Gallery (180 South Lake Avenue, Suite 110, Pasadena, CA) through April 1. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
