| HOME ARTISTS' WORKS THE GALLERY EXHIBITIONS CONTACT US |
|
|
|
|
|
|
REVIEW
GALLERY SCENE; It's Charlie Parker by way of Paul Klee:[HOME EDITION] At first glance, Norton Wright's paintings seem like wild collages of color and motion. Specific images -- a photograph of a nude woman, a newspaper headline, sheet music -- suddenly surface through the bursts of paint and angular ink lines. In other paintings, touches of visual whimsy are juxtaposed against bold sweeps of color and Rorschach-like blotting. Paul Klee comes to mind. Maybe touches of Joan Miro or Robert Rauschenberg. But jazz names such as Thelonious Monk, Terry Gibbs and Lee Konitz seem far less likely associations. Less likely, that is, until one looks closely at the labels. One is titled "What Four? (Saluting Miles Davis)." Another, "TheIsland of Thelonious Monk (Saluting Thelonious Monk"). And still others: "Good Vibes (Saluting Terry Gibbs)," "Floating Castle (Saluting Lee Konitz)" and "Far From Home (Saluting Kenny Burrell)." The group of 20 canvases, which also includes tributes to Dizzy Gillespie, Freddie Hubbard, Pat Metheny and Marian McPartland, is what Wright calls his "JazzWorks." It's on view in a solo exhibition that opens Saturday and runs through May 12 at the Schomburg Gallery in Santa Monica's Bergamot Station. Why jazz? "Because it's hugely exciting to me," Wright says. He means the music itself, of course, but also jazz as a metaphor for how to live. "I've always had that image of the jazz man as a high-wire artist in a circus. The higher he climbs, the more he tries, the greater risk, the bigger the possible fall," Wright says. "But the great ones just go out there and do it. Bird did it, Monk did it, Trane did it. "And Jackson Pollock did it too." Wright's jazz paintings are the product of a return to art after a lengthy career in television, during which he produced "Captain Kangaroo," "Sesame Street," the Emmy Award-winning series "Freestyle" and numerous TV movies. His interest in painting started in the 1950s, when he was still in prep school, as a way for him to assert his emerging individuality. Jazz, arriving in his life about the same time, complemented that quest. "I came from a family so conservative that they thought Lester Lanin, the famous society band, was a little risque," Wright recalls. "But one Friday night when I was about 14, by sheer accident I heard a radio broadcast with a sound the likes of which I'd never heard before. It was bebop. It was Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Bud Powell. You can't imagine what that experience was like. It just lit me up." Jazz stayed with Wright in the 1960s, when he moved on to Yale, where he was one of the university's first art history majors, and studied with Josef Albers, the legendary Bauhaus artist. Fascinated by the similarities between the visual arts and the musical arts, he began then to develop the abstract style that characterizes the paintings in his JazzWorks. The paintings aren't a specific attempt to visualize anyone's music, he says. He just listens to the work of, say, Terry Gibbs or Dianne Schuur over and over and sees where it takes him. The Monk painting, for example, has dissonant colors -- reds against greens -- which remind Wright of Monk's striking diminished seconds on the piano. The Gibbs painting, by contrast, "has those sea creatures -- like the staccato sounds of Terry's vibes. And it's an upbeat painting, a happy painting, like Terry himself." The Burrell painting, with its map-like imagery, is intended to reflect the feeling of being out on the road, thinking of the person you love back home. It was inspired by a specific song that the guitarist wrote for his wife. "Visual arts unfold in space, and music arts unfold in time," Wright says. "And a lot of these paintings endeavor to present an experience that unfolds in space as well as in time." After a lengthy and successful career in television and film, Wright sees his return to fine art, and to jazz, as a "means of survival." Film and TV production are dominated by left-brain thinking, he says. Once he got back to painting, he realized how much of his life had been spent with a stopwatch in a control room or on a filming location. "It's just the reverse in jazz -- completely right brain. Whitney Balliett, the New Yorker jazz writer, once described jazz as the 'sound of surprise.' And he was right. You want to be surprised. And when I do these paintings, I try to surprise myself, and I try to surprise others. "I guess the bottom line here is that I'm trying to see if a painter can approximate the process that a jazz musician does when he improvises and goes into areas that are a little scary, a little risky. That's really called being alive, and jazz musicians are very much alive. "How important is that to me?" Wright asks himself. "Well, the truth is that I sometimes feel that I might trade all the movies and the television shows I've ever made to just be Erroll Garner for three minutes." *
"JazzWorks" |