Sometimes when discussing work, in an effort to seem less subjective, artists will employ formal terms learned under the yoke of education to describe what a specific piece is doing. You might hear how a painting moves or about its rhythm. But sometimes artists are reduced to more zealous and simplistic expressions of "wow" mingled with "oohs" and "aahs." These words were uttered several times, interspersed between "neat" and "what fun," when standing in the presence of Olive Ayhens' work on display in the Watkins Gallery.
These words don't describe what her paintings look like, but they still give a sense of the feelings that arise when looking at them.
The paintings appear almost as watercolors, ranging between nearly acidic colors and washed-out palettes. She builds the color slowly with glazes and washes. The paintings are thicker than one might think, textured in some places where paint has been carved through with the handle of her paintbrush to accent either the geometry of the architecture or the flow of water.
The images seem child-like, almost na?ve in their rendering. Buildings and bridges bend, dance and sway. Cars look like big bubbles. For all the complexities of the space and content, the simple style invites the viewer to meditate on the pieces and gain a fuller understanding of the disarmingly inventive skylines of Manhattan.
Jonathan Bucci, the curator of the Watkins Collection, said he is pleased to have her work on display, because of the community exposure to Ayhens' abilities and ideas.
"Olive's paintings are American," he said. "They combine the great American wilderness with the great American city. They are intense, absurd, beautiful pieces by a serious painter."
Ayhens is also an artist in residence at AU this year.
"Not only has it been great for AU to have Olive teaching here this year and showing her paintings, but the whole city is lucky to have an opportunity to see Olive's work," Bucci said.
Luis Silva, chair of the Department of Art at AU, was impressed by the complexity of the paintings' figures.
"They demonstrate her emersion and knowledge of the space; they seem lived in," Silva said.
Ahyens' dexterity for this technique comes from her preparatory drawings made on site. She says it's part of a discipline that goes back before she entered art school.
"In figure drawing class we would draw from statues of Greek gods, and I would get fixated," she said. "I must've drawn hundreds of studies."
Numerous drawings are interspersed throughout the gallery space, most of them studies of Manhattan.
"I try to give a sense of place in my work," Ahyens said.
The drawings are small and intimate, and unapologetically depict the city as crowded and tall, but not claustrophobic. The drawings are almost maps of how a space is organized, which are unlike the paintings. The paintings give the sensation of how the space they imitate feels physically.
Ayhens said she doesn't work on site in her paintings, nor does she work from the study, despite her training working with studies. The cerebral quality of the paintings is evidence to her technique. Horizons of some paintings are elevated into the upper one-fifth or -sixth of the canvas. One painting offers no horizon line at all, just a hodgepodge of rooftops with only the slightest indication of any space below for a road.
Some paintings offer odd realities, as she has transplanted the experiences of her past into the paintings of her present. Skyscrapers crop up in Yellowstone National Park, amid oversized buffaloes. Cars get stuck like logs in a jam in a Western American stream running through the canyon walls of Manhattan. The Williamsburg Bridge stretches into a fog out of the San Francisco Bay, only to be swallowed, leaving the viewer isolated from Manhattan. While these juxtapositions give insight into what the artist might be thinking about as she looks at these spaces - conjuring up images of the past and plopping them in unexpected locations - they don't come across immediately as alarming. Her style prohibits it.
Ahyens came to D.C. from the Bay City area of California by way of New York, where she currently resides. She has been all over the United States, having taught and earned residencies in parts of Texas, Utah and Montana as well as New York and throughout California. She was educated and trained at the San Francisco Institute of Art during the reign of Richard Diebenkorn - shortly after the East Coast Abstract Expressionist influence of Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still made a resounding impact on the institution, as well as Ayhens' work.
"I know abstraction well," she said. "It's all throughout my background."
Despite not using it directly in her work, she is aware that it has influenced her sense of plane, space and color.
"Paintings by Olive Ayhens" will be on display in Watkins Gallery until March 5. The gallery is open Monday through Friday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., and Saturdays, 1-5 p.m. Ahyens' exhibit will be the last of the final season in the Watkins Gallery before the collection and department move into the Katzen Center in the fall.
