Picture the blurriest photo you’ve ever seen. The sort where the light pools in odd places, the shapes lose their outlines and solidity, and where the blur is more important than what is in focus.
Such is the nature of Christopher Pendleton’s drawings and paintings in the latest exhibit at the John Sommers Gallery.
Pendleton finds inspiration in shaky photos taken at high speeds while driving at night. The show is titled, “Drawings/Paintings/Experiences, Vol. 1 Ephemera, A Compendium of the Esoteric.”.
He said he has no real skills as a photographer, and he just sort of stumbled into the idea one day driving home from Las Cruces.
“It just was a happy accident,” he said motioning to the canvases of abstract light streams and landscapes hanging on the walls. “I was leaving (Las Cruces) at night and I thought, ‘I wonder what the picture would look like if I was driving. I wonder what motion would look like just frozen.’ I took the picture, and I was completely taken back with what it looked like. You saw everything. You saw the jitter of the camera. You saw the movement and blur of speed. It was just fantastic. I was like, ‘That would make such a great painting.’”
Long horizontal paintings stretch along the angled walls of the gallery. Amorphous flows of color, sometimes beige and brown, other times red and black, run together. These pieces, while stationary, replicate horizontal movement, Pendleton said. Perhaps it’s the colors pouring into one another, but Pendleton said the structure of the paintings helps as well.
“The canvases are really fast,” he said. “I am driving when I take the picture, and I think the scale of the canvases lend themselves to motion and movement. It sort of gets the idea of speed across. I call them hyper-landscapes as far as the way they are hanging on the wall. Your eye doesn’t have much room to wander from bottom to top at all. You only have five and a half inches to look up and down, and then it’s over. It’s just about looking at them.”
The crown jewel of the exhibit is a set of 20 vertical paintings placed next to each other horizontally. Each painting has a blue background along with high, mid and low streams of merging reds, yellows and oranges. Pendleton said the painting’s original inspiration comes from a semi-truck.
“The picture was of a semi,” he said while pointing to the topmost stream of red color. “I mean it’s not a representation of the semi, but starting out the lines were caused by a semi. They are lines of lights. They are just headlights, taillights, reflections off of cars, the twinkling lights of cities — I mean, everything.”
He uses his photos as a sort of sketchbook, chooses the ones he finds most interesting and then strives to create a painting from there.
“I am not trying to make the final painting look like the photograph, but it’s just having that photograph as a reference point,” Pendleton said. “You can go back and look at, and not necessarily make the painting look like the actual picture, but just so you have something to ground your work. If you get lost or kind of sidetracked you can just go back there. It’s just something to reference the whole time. Well, not the whole time, maybe just half of the way. Then, I just throw away the picture and let it become a painting.”
In addition to the main gallery exhibition, there will be a slide-show in the side gallery of photos that inspired his paintings with loops of “Explosions in the Sky,” the music he paints to. The side gallery features some of Pendleton’s first works in the photo-inspired paintings. The beginning pieces are larger and more colorful. As Pendleton said, there is more chaos to these pieces.
“This was at the very beginning,” he said pointing to the first work that he painted in this manner. “These were more chaotic. Now I have taken a more minimalist approach to painting. The ones in the main gallery are really stripped down to the basic and essential. It’s interesting. It’s so much more important what’s on the canvas or the pallet or the paper. What’s there is going to demand a lot of attention. What’s less demands more attention.”
Pendleton will be at the opening on Friday early for an art discussion with gallery-goers.
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