Paintings by James Williams II

Text by Lisa Preston

Little Rooster, a series of oil paintings by James Williams II, tells the story of a young boy who lives a seemingly idyllic life in the United States during the 1930s. The boy has a loving mother and a wealthy scientist father who direct all aspects of his life. When adversaries of the family are introduced into the story, the boy is assigned a bodyguard, the ultracool and courageous Red Rooster, who possesses strengths the boy doesn’t see in his own father. As the boy’s admiration for Red grows and their relationship deepens, the boy adopts the name “Little Rooster.” Eventually, despite his longing to remain a child, events force him to confront the burdens of adulthood, including the life-changing decision to continue Red’s heroic legacy on his own.

The idea for Little Rooster came to Williams about a year ago, in a dream so vivid he began to write down the details. Williams was listening to a lot of blues music and the name for his Little Rooster character was inspired by Sam Cooke’s version of the Howlin’ Wolf song of the same name. Williams was also particularly moved by the lyrics of Gershwin’s “Summertime,” a melancholy testament to parents’ loving protection of a child who will someday leave them:

One of these mornings

You’re going to rise up singing

Then you’ll spread your wings

And you’ll take to the sky

But until that morning

There’s a’nothing can harm you

With your daddy and mammy standing by

The work dramatizes many scenarios from the artist’s childhood while also tackling broader concepts that resonate with us all: how we define right and wrong and how we make life decisions.

Williams feels that while adults often see the world as gray and monotonous, children visualize color and endless possibilities. He illustrates his epic story with bright color palettes and stylized figures that reference vintage comic books and the moral lessons of children’s books. Marrying the lexicon of pop culture with his more painterly sensibilities, which are informed by more “high art” sources such as John Singer Sargent, Williams is on path toward mastering the formal aspects of his craft.

For Williams, painting presents a challenge that is deeply rewarding. He first started using watercolors, then acrylics, and eventually oil. His peers observe Williams as contemplative, almost exacting in his work. “I take pride and pleasure in building the frame, stretching the canvas,” he explains. “I think in layers, so it comes natural to work in oil. Oil presents many possibilities—you can mix it with other media to create many different mixtures and textures.”

Similarly, Williams does not feel bound to present the Little Rooster story in strict sequence. If he needs to skip a few moments to create another moment he can. His job as artist is simply to identify the relationships between the characters. Observant of the oral tradition of the blues music that originally inspired his story, Williams is open to audiences interpreting elements of the Little Rooster story differently than he may have conceived them and discussing their own versions. “I have made my story, so someone can take something out of that and make their story. What doesn’t change is Little Rooster himself.”

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James Williams II holds an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Arts and a B.S. from The State University of New York College at Cortland. He is a recipient of the 2009 MICA Bromo Seltzer Award and the 2009 MFA Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, and was awarded the Tom Miller Scholarship and the Mount Royal Scholarship at Maryland Institute of Arts. Little Rooster has been shown at IAM Gallery in New York City. Williams’ work has also been exhibited at Onondaga Community College in Syracuse and RTLK Architecture Gallery in Baltimore.

Painting by Andrea Chung

Text by Joshua Korenblat

We have an intimate relationship with sugar; its taste often evokes sweet personal memories. Yet in her painting, Agatha Barton III, Andrea Chung imbues sugar with a resonance far beyond the family kitchen.  For Chung, sugar and spice, its twin ingredient, evoke memories bitter and sweet, epic and familiar: Houston, her childhood home, and the colonial West Indies, the Caribbean island home of her ancestors. Chung paints a portrait of her grandmother, who lived in the West Indies, and mixes sugar into her paint medium. Many people identify cane sugar with the Caribbean, but colonizers imported it from India, its native land. Slaves and indentured laborers sent to the Caribbean worked in service to imperial economics afforded by sugar.

“Sugar contains the history of the Caribbean and with it, the history of cane plantations, slavery, indentured servitude, the history of rum and piracy and on a more personal scale, the history of black cake and tamarind balls and the history of family gatherings and holiday sweets and dessert,” Chung says.

In Agatha Barton III, medium and meaning intersect. Unlike many Western figurative painters, such as Jan Van Eyck or Vermeer, Chung’s paint does not purely create an illusion of other surfaces and textures: jewel-like, light as fabric, smooth as enamel.

Instead, the seemingly incongruent paint medium of sugar becomes a metaphor for history, “With my work,” Chung says, “I encourage my viewer to look for the paint, or rather the ingredients that stand in place of the paint.”

In the West Indies, cultures intermingled like the ingredients of a flavorful dish. Similar to other members of the nomadic Hakka people of China, Chung’s paternal grandfather left China for economic opportunity; he came to Jamaica as a stowaway on a boat. Meanwhile, Chung’s paternal grandmother was from the West Indies. Chung notes that Chinese laborers were denied immigration to the United States by an act of Congress in 1882, and that in part most West Indian Chinese owe their legacy to this exclusionary act.

Many men and women in the West Indies are now prone to diabetes and fibroid tumors, perhaps because of the omnipresence of sugar in their diet. Chung herself has also suffered deleterious health effects related to this genetic legacy. The story of sugar, that glittering good packed away in cane fields and baked into so many Caribbean dishes, quietly becomes a human story. Other edible goods tell the same story, such as the curry brought over from South Asia to the West Indies, with its mellifluous blend of spices: coriander, tumeric, and cumin. Each spice tells us a story in its own voice, and ultimately food becomes the currency common to our bloodlines.

In her art, Chung reveals how the past can visit us even with our eyes closed—maybe in a spoonful of curry—its taste and smell pleasing and powerful, its rich, familiar nature at once embodying past, present, and future.

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Andrea Chung was born in Newark, NJ 1978, and raised in Houston, Texas.  She received a BFA at Parsons School of Design in New York and a MFA at the Mount Royal School of Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland. She also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2008 and was a recipient of a 2008-2009 Fulbright Scholarship to Mauritius. Chung’s work as has been featured in the NEXT exhibition at Art Chicago, Off Color, curated by Hank Willis Thomas and Kalia Brooks at RUSH Arts, ACADEMY 2008 at the Conner Contemporary in Washington, D.C., the Arlington Arts Center in Virginia, the Sonya Hayes Stone Center at UNC Chapel Hill curated by Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, the Gateway Gallery at the Maryland Institute College of Art as part of Transformations, the 3rd Annual Conference on African American Art hosted by MICA’s Center for Race and Culture and Harvard University. Her work was featured in the academic journal, Small Axe and was most recently displayed at Le Flash in Castleberry Hill in Atlanta, Teachers College at Columbia University and in the 2009 Verge Art Fair at Art Basel.

Painting by Marc Trujillo, Courtesy of Hackett-Freeman Gallery

Text by Joshua Korenblat

Marc Trujillo evokes an urban landscape that at first seems devoid of humanity, rendered with a distant, realistic eye. Yet he lights his gas station not with the coldness of mercury vapor lights, familiar to anyone pumping gas late at night, but rather with the moody, warm illumination of a painter’s brush, all golds and purples.

Like Edward Hopper, a realist painter of eerily quiet urban landscapes, Trujillo remains deeply interested in the fictive craft of painting, the preoccupations of people as they relate to their community, and the role of storytelling even in a mundane moment. Both artists invent willfully within their paintings–the lighting, the surfaces, and the shadows all play a role in creating a mood in which to set a contemporary play.

For Trujillo, places such as gas stations and shopping malls are purgatories, abodes for transitory souls consumed with destinations, distractions, and duties, rather than their present surroundings. In this way, Trujillo paints from what he calls “the middle ground of existence,” gas stations rather than postcard destinations like the Grand Canyon. He does not create sentimental pictures. Scenes of extreme drama play into sentimentality, a sense that the artist or writer has provoked emotions without having actually earned that moment, through a quiet characterization, steadily unfolding, or the evocation of a painterly mood.

By settling his gaze on prosaic places that other people bustle past, Trujillo asks us to reconsider our notions of drama and narrative. Trujillo cites Peter Breughel’s “The Fall of Icarus,” (c.1558) as a surprising work, which embodies his contemporary storytelling philosophy. Breughel, from the Netherlands, paints gently humorous scenes of peasant life gone awry with sin and gluttony in the Calvinist dogma of his time: humanity is deeply flawed and prone to mischief. In the Icarus painting, however, the scene seems idyllic: in the foreground, a man plows his field with a yoked horse, and beyond him, a shepherd attends to his sheep. In the sea beyond them, grand ships sail, buffeted by the wind, possibly to do business with a gleaming city on a distant shore. Yet after peering more closely into the painting, one sees a tiny pair of legs in the sea, flailing amidst a splash, an unceremonious corona of water. Icarus, the mythological Greek character who had built wings of wax only to fly too close to the sun, crashing to the world below, now plays but a small role in the painting.

Breughel suggests that even in the moments of greatest tragedy or peril, life goes on. Trujillo sees this painting as a testimonial to a different kind of narrative, where the high moments of human drama invert with the quiet moments we too often rush past or subsume to other thoughts.

Trujillo refocuses the viewer on the material of daily life. He asks us to pause within the transitory landscapes we construct for commerce, or merely to wile away our time, and see them as eerily new. How can we feel harmonious in such spaces, which often become the setting of our daily life and our community?

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Marc Trujillo is an urban landscape painter who depicts the big box retail stores, self-service gas stations, and fast-food chains that make up a large portion of the urban environment. Free of political or moral overtones, these works function both as modern North American genre scenes (much like the 17th–century Dutch genre scenes of marketplaces, courtyards, and flower stalls) and as painterly meditations on color, light, and form.

According to art historian Andrew Forge, in Trujillo’s paintings “time is rescued, transformed from loss to duration [and] absence is given presence.”1 All of the places Trujillo depicts contribute to the increasingly fast-paced world in which we live, where attention spans have diminished beyond the point of no return. Trujillo, however, subverts this freneticism by capturing it in an objective, but highly aesthetic manner, that allows the viewer to experience an alternative reality present in such quotidian locales.

Although based on direct observation, Trujillo’s paintings are completely synthetic and rigorously structured. While the places depicted are nominally in the Los Angeles area, they are in actuality generic environments that are familiar to most Americans. From these boxy, cookie-cutter industrial building designs, Trujillo builds compositions based on complicated arrays of angled planes and radial lines that recede into deep space.2 The depiction of light, both artificial and natural, is handled with extreme care as is the overall color balance within each painting.

Marc Trujillo exhibits nationally on both coasts and is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2008 Rosenthal Family Foundation Award in Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a 2001 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. The artist grew up in Albuquerque, NM, and currently resides in Los Angeles.