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P e g g y F e r r i sD E S I G N E R A B S T R A C T I O N S

P e g g y F e r r i sD E S I G N E R A B S T R A C T I O N S

Skid, 200824 x 24 inches each, acrylic on canvas

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Abstraction Has its CentennialThe 2009 exhibition of recent abstract paintings by Peggy Ferris, Designer Abstractions (the occasion forthis catalog), is timely. It occurs during the one hundred year anniversary of abstract art. In addition,the exhibition arrives as abstract painting – until recently, moribund – is in the midst of both a re-con-sideration and a revival in California.

Thanks in part to the Los Angeles art writer, critic and curator, Peter Frank, art patrons got re-acquaintedwith the major role abstract painting had in shaping Southern California as a national and internationalart center. His series of exhibits, Driven to Abstraction, demonstrated the vitality that abstract paintingbrought to the West Coast art scene from 1950 to 1980, preceding its marginalization by century’s end.Frank and other contemporary art watchers have also been attentive to the re-emergence of abstract artand practice since 2000, charting the ascent of noteworthy abstractionists such as Kimber Berry, RichardBruland, Alex Couwenberg, Jimmy Gleason, Andy Moses, Sandeep Mukherjee and Tom Pathé.

In art, history never fails to be a trustworthy guide to insight, perspective and wisdom about the art wevalue, and finally, love. To best appreciate the accomplishment of Peggy Ferris and the recent group ofCalifornia’s abstract artists, one needs to re-visit the legacy of abstraction at its centennial.

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The BeginningsOne hundred years ago, the first completely abstract painting came into existence. This didn’t happenin isolation. Like a contagion, modernist ideas infected artists throughout Europe, freeing them fromthe centuries-long grip of representational image making, and spawning myriad art movements. Pre-dictably, the earliest abstract paintings found few admirers wherever they were displayed. Except for atiny cadre of avant-garde enthusiasts (self-styled “Modernists” of various stripes), the art establishmentand the public were amused, confused or outraged when they confronted images seemingly made onlyof patchy patterns of pigment and un-anchored amorphous forms. This was Europe before World WarI, and the cultural certitudes of the last century still held sway.

Feeding Frenzy, 200330 x 48 inches, acrylic on canvas

F O R E W O R D

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George Braque and Pablo Picasso get much of the credit – or blame – for their pioneering explorationsof the frontiers of abstraction with their cubist compositions that fragmented the notion of the worldas a stable, seamless, ordered visual panorama. For centuries, art academies had assumed such was theoptically correct view of reality. The cubists countered their critics by asserting that the real world didexist in their paintings – and more accurately, too. The simultaneous perspectives of cubism reflectedthe mobile and restless manner with which a person actually experienced – saw – life. There was nosuch thing as steady state perception, a single view. But the distinction of complete abstraction, art thateschewed describing the outer natural world altogether, would go beyond the cubists.

The Russian émigré Wassily Kandinsky is often credited with discovering abstract art in 1909 when hereturned to his Bavarian studio at twilight and squinted at one of his paintings standing on its side. Theresult was an epiphany – a “new view”; he took this as a revelation of what his art could be. By 1913,Kandinsky had devised an abstract visual language for his future work. Auspiciously, in that same yearRobert Delaunay, working in Paris, painted his first non-representational image, a circular canvas calledSun, Moon. Simultaneous. This work launched a series, and the artist was convinced that the optical ef-fects achieved from his array of colored shapes were emblematic of his finding himself at the dawn of anew era, which he identified as “the modern consciousness.” Delaunay’s assertion was crucial for givingabstract art a raison d’être. For him, the subject matter of art was not out there in the world, but insidethe artist’s head: in making his painting Delaunay (and other abstractionists) confirmed his state ofbeing within modernity. For the last one hundred years, this notion has never lost its power as a motivatorof abstract practice.

The earliest glimmerings of abstract art shone during a heady time of optimism and progress in Europe,and as the twentieth century waxed, then waned, abstraction gradually wove itself throughout the fabricof Western culture and art – appearing and re-appearing in various guises – and eventually coming tothe Americas. If it was a continuous thread, it was one that alternated between woof and warp, changingdirections as the circumstances of the art world shifted and re-aligned. It was seen as triumphant in the1950s. By the 1980s, however, the trajectory of abstraction lost propulsion, modernism became old-fash-ioned and historical, and the art world moved on to other things. To be sure, some artists continued mak-ing abstract art, but for the most part it seemed quaint. Then, too, there were those artists and criticswho insisted that for abstract art to be authentic, it had to create difficulties for the viewer. The audiencefor abstract art shrunk accordingly.

The Post-Modern Interlude

Before it went fallow, modernism was the seedbed of abstract art. Post-modernism began to emerge asthe successor culture around 1970, and was a decided rejection of most modernist ideas and practices.In the teeth of modernist orthodoxy, post-modernism reintroduced traditional or classical elements ofstyle (even prompting the resurgence of figurative and narrative painting, a pariah under the reign ofmodernism). But it also probed and exploited modernist styles - distorting, caricaturing and hybridizingthem in ways that would turn the tables on aging modernists. It was their turn to be confused and out-raged (and certainly not amused!) by post-modern upstarts who indifferently trampled on or looted theonce-triumphant modernist era in search of a new vision.

Unlike its purity-questing predecessor, post-modernism sees knowledge as partial and situated, with noone interpretation as superior to another. For artists this was frightening, giddy – and liberating – mainlyfor smashing the barriers of the Manhattan-centric art world and surging past its censorious gatekeepers,expanding the artistic field beyond the old modernist precincts. Moreover, in adopting a cool, ironic,and skeptical stance, post-modernism allowed for a vast re-consideration of what art was and could be,creating opportunities to develop new, less restrictive, and eventually, more authentic criteria for artmaking. It also rehabilitated (via feminism and gay culture) ornament and decoration in art, paying se-rious attention to surfaces in addition to depths. Further, it blurred the distinctions between high andlow culture, finding vitality and excellence in popular and commercial imagery. As a result, post-mod-ernism allowed a new generation of artists to explore new visual vocabularies, even – surprisingly – lead-ing to the creation of a new kind of abstract art.

Into the 21st Century: Peggy Ferris and “Designer Abstraction”

Coinciding with the spread of post-modernism, and after a personal hiatus of nearly twenty years, SantaBarbara’s Peggy Ferris re-entered the art world to start making abstract paintings in 2003. Earlier, andsince 1983 (following her B.F.A. in graphic design/packaging at the prestigious Art Center College ofDesign, Pasadena), Ferris built a progressive and successful graphic design business on California’s CentralCoast.

By the millennium, however, she yearned to return to fine art practice, the love of her youth, and sub-sequently scaled back her design business and built a painting studio behind her home.

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As it turned out, Ferris’ career change was timely and definitely conducive to producing a new kind ofabstract painting. As an undergraduate in the late 1970s, she studied art in the Netherlands where shewas inspired to take up hard edge abstract painting. Thus her formational practice was from Europe andnot California, which had a major role in establishing hard edge abstraction in the 1960s. This freed Fer-ris from a subservience to the West Coast legacy, permitting her to ruminate on her art with a healthydegree of independence from regional traditions. Returning to the U.S., she pursued graphic design, andfocused her energies on commercial commissions for nearly two decades. With abstract painting in de-cline during the 1980s and 1990s, this proved an ideal interregnum for Ferris to do something else untilthe fortunes of abstraction improved.

A Design Stigma?

Fine art aficionados need to be reminded that graphic design was key to the careers of many of the im-portant individuals and groups of the modern and post-modern era: Oskar Kokoschka, the AustrianWiener Werkstätte, Piet Mondrian, the Dutch De Stijl group, the German Bauhaus school, El Lissitzky,and in our time, Andy Warhol and Barbara Kruger. Despite the historical confluence of art and designand post-modernism’s inclusiveness of popular and commercial art, there remains a residual suspicionof design in the official contemporary art world. I believe this is a holdover from modernism and its ten-dency to purge art of various “corrupting influences.” Of course, this restrictive essentialism – especiallyevident in late modernist Minimalist Art – is what sparked the post-modern insurgency in the firstplace. Further, there has also been an aversion to disciplined skills and principles – key to the formationof designers – as if such an approach would interfere with spontaneous expression or cloud an inner au-thentic purity. This hoary notion is a relic from Romanticism, and denies the role technical mastery hasin actually enhancing an artist’s creativity.

Ferris, with her distinguished design education and two decades of meeting demanding challenges fromclients, finds herself at mid-career, grateful for the experience, discipline and confidence earned as a de-signer. Design suited her balance of left and right brain thinking and problem solving, and prepared herfor a career as a fine artist. In other words, rather than floundering in wasteful trial and error (as domany recent art school graduates), she had the background to readily adapt to studio practice and ex-perience the joy of making art. (For more on the role of design in preparing an artist, see Appendix)

Hard-Edge and Gestural Painting

One of the blessings of post-modern culture was its climate of permission for artists to take their workin multiple directions at once. In contrast, the imperative of a late modernist graduate school educationwas to find your one good idea and milk it for all it was worth for the rest of your career. But this ledto a corralled vision and boring art. (see: Kelly, Ellsworth.) Since 2003, Ferris has taken two approachesto her abstract painting: the hard edge work she had been musing on since studying in Europe, and ges-tural painting with its more spontaneous approach.

Ferris’s hard edge work combines two techniques. First, the composition and colors are worked out ona computer, using a Photoshop software program. This is an extension of her design work, and allowsFerris to quickly and continuously “morph” the shapes – all or in part – until a desirable compositionemerges. In addition, it spares her from lengthy exposure to paint fumes – she has an allergic condition.Moreover, software design programs have vast palettes and Ferris’s professional familiarity with themhelps her to efficiently achieve her compositions and color schemes. Once the artist obtains the desiredimage, she grids the design on a prepared canvas and mixes the colors to match those produced on thecomputer. To achieve the crisp outlines characteristic of a hard edge composition, she laboriously laysdown masking tape along the contours, making sure the seal is perfect so no pigment can bleed under-neath the tape to the adjacent area. The patience required to produce a complex, layered and dynamicpainting like the diptych, Koi Pond, would be mind-boggling if it were not for the preliminary technicalwork done on the computer.

Opposite: Koi Pond, 2003; 36 x 72 inches (diptych), acrylic on canvas

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Dance Floor, 200724 x 24 inches each, acrylic on canvas

The composition of Koi Pond was never an attempt, à la Claude Monet’s Argenteuil pond and water lilypaintings, to describe an actual place, much less her impression of it. Rather it is a poetic association –perhaps from a memory – that evokes the meandering currents and aqueous reflections we associatewith dappled light upon water. To prevent the cool-hued work from lulling the viewer, Ferris has chargedthe composition with streamers of warm orange, accenting and flowing with the “currents” – her “fish.”Optically, the painting holds calmness and energy in tension. The serpentine patterns makes it hard forthe eye to rest, but the carefully calibrated color scheme lends Koi Pond a restful palette, encouraging theviewer to linger and trace the layers of doubling back forms and shifting tints. There is a bonus, too: thedelightful illusion of overlaid transparent colors (actually produced by carefully mixed opaque colors.)

The triptych, Dance Floor, an acrylic on three square sequential canvases, also shows abstract patternsin serial motion. Through her preliminary computer-based experiments with various configurations,and as if using a kaleidoscope to shift her forms, she obtained serial images that suggest the torso of afemale (the dominant sea-foam green shape) swaying in a dance. The pointed white ellipses at the baseof the composition recall the diagrams of foot placements used in teaching dance steps. Dance Floor isthus an abstract work about the mobility of the body. In addition, the alterations of forms suggestmusical progressions or even varying linguistic emphases, with the black wedges serving as punctuation.

While continuing with her hard edge work, Ferris was drawn to do paintings that were more relaxed intheir organization. It was as if a muse coaxed her to place greater trust in her right brain. This, however,did not mean abandoning the designer’s grid – those verticals and horizontals that structure most designwork. Rather she increasingly saw the grid as an armature upon which she could freely construct an ed-ifice that evoked her fascination with city life. In this approach, Ferris becomes a fanciful architect whocommunicates her excitement about the urban environment through an exuberant array of forms.

Nowhere is this more vividly presented than in City Love, an acrylic and mixed media work on Yupo (syn-thetic paper). Compositionally, the work is vertically tripartite and horizontally bisected. Does the greenrectangle below suggest a park, with a blue sky above? And are the darker verticals at left and right meantto suggest buildings? Overall the surface is marked by erect, playful striations in yellows, reds and blues.One is attempted to associate them with windows, banners, watercourses, or bands of light. But theymight simply reflect the joy of striding along a boulevard on a bright day.

More moody is Metro, an acrylic and oil stick composition on canvas from 2008. The grid is less pro-portional; the diffusive forms abut one another. They appear as if caught in a sidelong glance. Metro isalso more muted in its associations than City Love. Its dominant harmonious colors – red, blue and gray,are toned down, suggesting a cityscape in shadow. The most contrastive elements are the patch of yellow

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Above: City Love, 200714 x14 inches, acrylic/mixed media on Yupo

Opposite: Metro, 200836 x 36 inches, acrylic/mixed media on canvas

(a lowering sun?) at top left and the smallsquare at upper right.

Not all of Ferris’s gestural paintings areovertly architectural. Others use the civicgrid more as an emotional jumping offpoint, like Deja Vue or Cool. Perhaps theseare meant to convey the rush of sensationsfelt during an urban sojourn. Ferris lives in asecluded ranch-style home in the sylvanfoothills overlooking Santa Barbara, and ad-mits to an onset of heady feelings when shevisits New York and San Francisco.

The main difference between the work ofPeggy Ferris and other California abstractpainters of the early 21st century and themodernist abstraction from the last century,is that the recent images fairly bask in theiraccessibility. To this end, these artists haveno qualms about using approaches from aboisterous array of artistic practices such as graphic design, custom car/hot rod painting, so-called“kitsch” landscape imagery, the urban landscape, ethnic and “new age” symbols, and garment decoration.Further, they successfully bend and transform these genres to make engaging work while inviting theviewer along for the ride. Well and good. It is about time that abstract painting came in from thecold – an exilic period after modernism fell apart and threw off its sour mandate to inflict anxiety onthe public. To paraphrase New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, it is OK to have an art experience thatdoesn’t require us to crawl over broken glass to get to it. That affirmation of pleasure is a most welcomebit of encouragement as we acknowledge abstraction’s one hundred years.

Gordon Fuglie Curator of Exhibitions & Collections, San Luis Obispo Art Center Summer, 2009

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Deja Vue, 200836 x 36 inches, acrylic/mixed media on canvas

Cool, 200836 x 36 inches, acrylic/mixed media on canvas

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Connected, 200836 x 36 inches, acrylic/mixed media on canvas

Meditative Space, 200936 x 36 inches, acrylic/mixed media on canvas

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On the Grid, 200814 x 14 inches, acrylic/mixed media on Yupo

View from Above, 200814 x 14 inches, acrylic/mixed media on Yupo

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Metropolis 4, 200614 x 14 inches, acrylic/mixed media on Yupo

A p p e n d i x

The Designer as ArtistThe 19th century art writer and social theorist, John Ruskin, remarked that the greatest art containedwithin it the greatest accumulation of good ideas. Graphic designers will resonate with that observation.Their work is nothing if not the realizing of an idea, or ideas, in the crucible of a challenging visualproblem. Stated simply, design is the planned arrangement of elements to form a visual pattern. To de-sign, then, is to organize a complex of forms and images (and sometimes, texts) so that they inter-relateor complement each other. Good design goes hand in hand with good art. Via creative means, designand art reach for a solution that is original, imaginative, fresh or unusual. To be successful, design musthave form (its visual elements) and content (what the artist wants to say) in equilibrium.

Obviously, key to a design’s success is its communication – the viewer not only gets the idea, but alsofinds the design compelling. The designer achieves success by first deploying her creative process, the in-tegrated activities of thinking, looking and doing that are fed by her intellect, feelings and intuition.

In my view, good design ought to be foundational for the art we find persuasive, whether it happens by“accident,” intuition or careful planning – or all of the above.

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Hard-Edge PaintingsAcrylic on canvas

Koi Pond, 2003 36 x 72” Minor Chords, 2003 24 x 36”Feeding Frenzy, 2003 30 x 48”Genie, 2005 24 x 72”

Gestural AbstractionAcrylic, mixed-media on canvas

Connected, 2008 36 x 36”Cool, 2008 36 x 36”Deja Vue, 2008 36 x 36”Metro, 2008 36 x 36”Meditative Space, 2009 36 x 36”

Acrylic, mixed media on Yupo

Council, 2006 8 x 8”Gateway, 2006 8 x 8”Levitation, 2006 8 x 8”Still Standing, 2006 8 x 8”Metropolis 3, 2006 14 x 14”Metropolis 4, 2006 14 x 14”Metropolis 5, 2006 14 x 14”Metropolis 6, 2006 14 x 14” City Love, 2007 14 x 14”On the Grid, 2008 11 x 11”View From Above, 2008 11 x 11”

Ocean Floor, 2004 30 x 48” eachSlow Break, 2004 24 x 24” eachDance Floor, 2007 24 x 24” eachSkid, 2008 24 x 24” each

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