By the dissonance of the brilliant yellow of the pillow against the rich, somber colors in the rest of smiles as he recalls the first time he saw Paul Gaugin’s 1897 painting Nevermore; he was struck by the dissonance of the brilliant yellow of the composition: “I always remember that painting with great fondness. I loved the idea of being able to use a color that didn’t belong with the other colors. To this day, I love putting a bright lemon yellow into a painting where you wouldn’t expect it.” Huxley’s abstract works, in which flat, geometric forms converse across the canvas, modifying and repeating one another, performing a tumbling gymnastics in an illusory perspectival plane, are known for their bold hues pitched against one another, defying expectation. “It’s a funny thing, isn’t it,” he says, “talking about ‘wouldn’t expect it’? Literature and music are art forms that move in time, and so you can bring in surprises because the audience is witnessing something developing, and they carry an expectation of what comes next. But how do you make a surprise in a painting when you see it all at once?”
“As an artist, there are no rules; you can do whatever you damn well please,” continues Huxley, who embarked on his professional career in the early 1960s, having trained first at Harrow School of Art and then the Royal Academy Schools in London. “We create our own rules and systems. Otherwise, we’d be totally at sea. I’m as guilty as anyone, but I also like to disrupt the system.” His paintings, which gallerist Benjamin Rhodes describes as “on the road to a quietist balance expressed through form, line, and color— an architecture that nods to the human and avoids brutalism,” tease viewers with their contradictions and conundrums.
Sitting in the airy living room of his west London home-cum-studio complex, shared with his artist-curator wife, Susie Allen, Huxley, now 77 and as prolific as ever, smiles puckishly as he explains his so-called “Key” paintings, the series for which he is best known, in which he developed the format of the divided canvas, with internal cross-references between the parts: “I wanted to make paintings that had an outside element that I could bring in so that you could read alternative ideas into them. My hope is that the observer will see these two things and ask, ‘Why are they there next to each other? What do they have to do with one another?’ By posing that question and trying to see if there is an answer or not, I hope that is the beginning of an engagement.”
Initially, Huxley would paint his brightly colored, geometric shapes on one half of the canvas, before painting over them in black and providing the “key” to the original color in the second half. “Then it occurred to me I didn’t have to be honest,” Huxley says. “I think you can lie in paintings, and that’s fair game. You can make private jokes, and they can be amusing.”
Busy sending off works for his forthcoming exhibition at David Richard Gallery in Santa Fe, Huxley reflects on his career. Although this will be his first solo show in the United States in nearly 40 years, his work is firmly rooted in the American tradition. After having his first show in 1963 at the Rowan Gallery in London—something he describes as “a slightly modest and clumsy affair,” noting “I didn’t sell a damn thing!”—he was selected by Bryan Robertson, then director of the Whitechapel Gallery, to appear alongside the likes of David Hockney, Bridget Riley, John Hoyland, and Derek Boshier in “The New Generation: 1964.” Not only did this bring Huxley to the attention of the British public, he also won a trip, sponsored by the Stuyvesant Travel Awards, to the United States. The following year he was awarded a Harkness Fellowship, which enabled him to return to live and work in New York for two more years. This proved to be a formative time, and, thanks to introductions forged by Robertson, Huxley mixed with some of the foremost artists of the New York School—in particular, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Jasper Johns, and Helen Frankenthaler.
“When I first went to America,” Huxley recalls, “Bryan introduced me to a lot of the leading artists of the time, who I admired greatly but never dreamed I would meet face-to-face. It wasn’t so much the style of their painting that influenced me as entering into their world and seeing how they lived and worked. I hardly knew anyone who had been to America, as it was still very expensive. The American culture was with us, but not the reality of it. This trip made the mythology real.” In particular, Huxley remembers Krasner as “a lovely lady and a terrific artist in her own right.” He knew the Motherwells too. A little embarrassed by the mention of so many stellar names, Huxley quickly adds, “I’m not suggesting I’m a groupie, though—if I meet someone who’s very well-known, I’m actually very shy. But they were all warm and welcoming people, and you bumped into them at openings and artists’ parties. If anything, I probably didn’t take enough advantage of it all—I was in my early 20s and a bit blasé.”
The main thing that came out of Huxley’s time in New York was the chance to paint on a much larger scale. “I had a wonderful loft conversion—100 foot long, 30 foot wide, with high ceilings. Prior to that, I’d been living in an Edwardian terraced house, where I could get back only about 6 feet from my paintings. In New York, I did a series that were 9 feet square, allowing me to flex my muscles as a painter. I’ve never painted bigger than that. In fact, subsequently I’ve always painted smaller. That was realizing an ambition.”
These days, Huxley’s painting is a lot more precise than in those early years. He uses masking tape to ensure sharp edges. “I was using tape then, too,” he says, “but I didn’t care if the paint crept underneath. I almost relished that looseness. But now I’m a bit fanatical because the sharper the edge where two colors meet, the more of an impact generated between them.” Although his finished works are still large—especially in the case of his wall paintings, such as his commission for the official Azerbaijan Pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale, for which he painted the walls of the 15th- century Palazzo Garzoni, overlooking the Grand Canal and housing the very window from which Canaletto painted his largest view of the Rialto Bridge—Huxley always begins small, working with pen on paper, in notebooks. Tracing the images through from page to page, much as a graphic designer might, he makes adjustments. Next, he scales up these sketches very precisely onto paper, two foot square. “I paint them very carefully, sitting in a chair, working out the colors, making mistakes, painting them over, rejecting them, and so on. It’s a bit like a sculptor making a maquette.”
Sculpture is, in fact, a new interest for Huxley, who began experimenting with painted steel about five years ago. It wasn’t much of a leap for him to start thinking in 3-D, as his paintings have always had 3-D implications, playing around with shapes that balance and nearly—but don’t quite—touch. The leap, he says, was to break his prejudice that he wanted to work only with implied illusion, not reality. Three of his sculptures will be on view, alongside 12 canvases, in Santa Fe. The canvases come full circle by reintroducing Huxley’s early use of the ellipse as, he says, “an illusion of a circle seen in perspective.” Once again, creating a collision of expectations, Huxley juxtaposes this implication of perspective with an area of flatness, making a painting with a sense of space, but “done with my foot on the brake, so that it doesn’t turn into an illusion of a landscape.”
“Huxley has observed that cubism and Surrealism are the two cardinal moments of 20th-century art, and his painting refers to them consistently,” notes independent curator David Thorp. “It is placed within the spectra that contain the pedigree of European modernism and the global cross-fertilization of postmodernism.” A defender of abstract art’s right to subject matter, Huxley also challenges Minimalism’s mantra, “What you see is what you see.” “It’s a rather doubtful tenet,” he declares. “It becomes a bit of a yoke. I think it’s in human nature to interpret—it’s part of our mechanism of perception.” His belief, noted as early as his statement for “The New Generation: 1964” catalogue, is that painting should be about “question-making, not storytelling.” But does he himself have answers to the questions he raises? “To a certain extent, yes,” he says, “but I hate to explain away paintings too much because that can lead people to assume that what they’re being told is the truth. If a painting’s any good, it’s got many explanations to it.”
Resource: http://www.blouinartinfo.com
“As an artist, there are no rules; you can do whatever you damn well please,” continues Huxley, who embarked on his professional career in the early 1960s, having trained first at Harrow School of Art and then the Royal Academy Schools in London. “We create our own rules and systems. Otherwise, we’d be totally at sea. I’m as guilty as anyone, but I also like to disrupt the system.” His paintings, which gallerist Benjamin Rhodes describes as “on the road to a quietist balance expressed through form, line, and color— an architecture that nods to the human and avoids brutalism,” tease viewers with their contradictions and conundrums.
Sitting in the airy living room of his west London home-cum-studio complex, shared with his artist-curator wife, Susie Allen, Huxley, now 77 and as prolific as ever, smiles puckishly as he explains his so-called “Key” paintings, the series for which he is best known, in which he developed the format of the divided canvas, with internal cross-references between the parts: “I wanted to make paintings that had an outside element that I could bring in so that you could read alternative ideas into them. My hope is that the observer will see these two things and ask, ‘Why are they there next to each other? What do they have to do with one another?’ By posing that question and trying to see if there is an answer or not, I hope that is the beginning of an engagement.”
Initially, Huxley would paint his brightly colored, geometric shapes on one half of the canvas, before painting over them in black and providing the “key” to the original color in the second half. “Then it occurred to me I didn’t have to be honest,” Huxley says. “I think you can lie in paintings, and that’s fair game. You can make private jokes, and they can be amusing.”
Busy sending off works for his forthcoming exhibition at David Richard Gallery in Santa Fe, Huxley reflects on his career. Although this will be his first solo show in the United States in nearly 40 years, his work is firmly rooted in the American tradition. After having his first show in 1963 at the Rowan Gallery in London—something he describes as “a slightly modest and clumsy affair,” noting “I didn’t sell a damn thing!”—he was selected by Bryan Robertson, then director of the Whitechapel Gallery, to appear alongside the likes of David Hockney, Bridget Riley, John Hoyland, and Derek Boshier in “The New Generation: 1964.” Not only did this bring Huxley to the attention of the British public, he also won a trip, sponsored by the Stuyvesant Travel Awards, to the United States. The following year he was awarded a Harkness Fellowship, which enabled him to return to live and work in New York for two more years. This proved to be a formative time, and, thanks to introductions forged by Robertson, Huxley mixed with some of the foremost artists of the New York School—in particular, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Jasper Johns, and Helen Frankenthaler.
“When I first went to America,” Huxley recalls, “Bryan introduced me to a lot of the leading artists of the time, who I admired greatly but never dreamed I would meet face-to-face. It wasn’t so much the style of their painting that influenced me as entering into their world and seeing how they lived and worked. I hardly knew anyone who had been to America, as it was still very expensive. The American culture was with us, but not the reality of it. This trip made the mythology real.” In particular, Huxley remembers Krasner as “a lovely lady and a terrific artist in her own right.” He knew the Motherwells too. A little embarrassed by the mention of so many stellar names, Huxley quickly adds, “I’m not suggesting I’m a groupie, though—if I meet someone who’s very well-known, I’m actually very shy. But they were all warm and welcoming people, and you bumped into them at openings and artists’ parties. If anything, I probably didn’t take enough advantage of it all—I was in my early 20s and a bit blasé.”
The main thing that came out of Huxley’s time in New York was the chance to paint on a much larger scale. “I had a wonderful loft conversion—100 foot long, 30 foot wide, with high ceilings. Prior to that, I’d been living in an Edwardian terraced house, where I could get back only about 6 feet from my paintings. In New York, I did a series that were 9 feet square, allowing me to flex my muscles as a painter. I’ve never painted bigger than that. In fact, subsequently I’ve always painted smaller. That was realizing an ambition.”
These days, Huxley’s painting is a lot more precise than in those early years. He uses masking tape to ensure sharp edges. “I was using tape then, too,” he says, “but I didn’t care if the paint crept underneath. I almost relished that looseness. But now I’m a bit fanatical because the sharper the edge where two colors meet, the more of an impact generated between them.” Although his finished works are still large—especially in the case of his wall paintings, such as his commission for the official Azerbaijan Pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale, for which he painted the walls of the 15th- century Palazzo Garzoni, overlooking the Grand Canal and housing the very window from which Canaletto painted his largest view of the Rialto Bridge—Huxley always begins small, working with pen on paper, in notebooks. Tracing the images through from page to page, much as a graphic designer might, he makes adjustments. Next, he scales up these sketches very precisely onto paper, two foot square. “I paint them very carefully, sitting in a chair, working out the colors, making mistakes, painting them over, rejecting them, and so on. It’s a bit like a sculptor making a maquette.”
Sculpture is, in fact, a new interest for Huxley, who began experimenting with painted steel about five years ago. It wasn’t much of a leap for him to start thinking in 3-D, as his paintings have always had 3-D implications, playing around with shapes that balance and nearly—but don’t quite—touch. The leap, he says, was to break his prejudice that he wanted to work only with implied illusion, not reality. Three of his sculptures will be on view, alongside 12 canvases, in Santa Fe. The canvases come full circle by reintroducing Huxley’s early use of the ellipse as, he says, “an illusion of a circle seen in perspective.” Once again, creating a collision of expectations, Huxley juxtaposes this implication of perspective with an area of flatness, making a painting with a sense of space, but “done with my foot on the brake, so that it doesn’t turn into an illusion of a landscape.”
“Huxley has observed that cubism and Surrealism are the two cardinal moments of 20th-century art, and his painting refers to them consistently,” notes independent curator David Thorp. “It is placed within the spectra that contain the pedigree of European modernism and the global cross-fertilization of postmodernism.” A defender of abstract art’s right to subject matter, Huxley also challenges Minimalism’s mantra, “What you see is what you see.” “It’s a rather doubtful tenet,” he declares. “It becomes a bit of a yoke. I think it’s in human nature to interpret—it’s part of our mechanism of perception.” His belief, noted as early as his statement for “The New Generation: 1964” catalogue, is that painting should be about “question-making, not storytelling.” But does he himself have answers to the questions he raises? “To a certain extent, yes,” he says, “but I hate to explain away paintings too much because that can lead people to assume that what they’re being told is the truth. If a painting’s any good, it’s got many explanations to it.”
Resource: http://www.blouinartinfo.com
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