Deceased--Karl Benjamin

 Karl Benjamin
December 29th, 1925 to July 26th, 2012

Mondrain 

1957

Stage II 

1968

"Karl Benjamin dies at 86; painter created colorful geometric works"

A longtime Claremont resident, Karl Benjamin taught at Pomona College and Claremont Graduate University. He created tightly balanced compositions that seem to shimmer, vibrate or explode in space.

by

Suzanne Muchnic

July 26th, 2012

Los Angeles Times

Karl Benjamin, a painter of dazzling geometric abstractions who established a national reputation in 1959 as one of four Los Angeles-based Abstract Classicists and created a highly acclaimed body of work that celebrates the glories of color in all its variations, has died. He was 86.

Benjamin died Thursday of congestive heart failure at his home in Claremont, said his daughter Beth Marie Benjamin.

His work had been displayed last year in "Karl Benjamin and the Evolution of the Abstraction, 1950-1980" at the Louis Stern Fine Arts gallery in West Hollywood as part of the region-wide Pacific Standard Time exhibitions.

Benjamin was a longtime resident of Claremont and a vital part of the college town's art community. After retiring from a 20-year teaching career in public elementary and middle schools, he was a professor and artist-in-residence at Pomona College from 1979 to 1994 and taught at Claremont Graduate University. Through most of those years he also pursued an abiding interest in orchestrating intricate arrangements of color on canvas.

Working with a full palette and a vocabulary of stripes, squares, triangles, circles, rings and irregular shapes, he created tightly balanced compositions that seem to shimmer, vibrate or explode in space. His work fell out of fashion in the 1970s and '80s, but he made an astonishing comeback in later years when his paintings suddenly looked fresh and smart to younger artists, critics and curators.

"I can think of no other artist whose paintings exude the joy and pleasure of being an artist with more intensity than Karl Benjamin's, nor any other artist whose long teaching career has left no blemish of cynicism on his practice," critic Dave Hickey wrote in the catalog of a 2007 survey of Benjamin's paintings at Louis Stern Fine Arts. "He is always the kid in the candy store, the kid with the rock in his pocket drawing it out, showing it to you and exclaiming 'Wow! Look at this.' "

Times art critic Christopher Knight praised the Claremont Museum of Art for making "just the right choice for its inaugural exhibition" in his review of a 42-year survey of the artist's work, also in 2007. "Benjamin emerges as a colorist of great wit and inventiveness," he wrote.

Born Dec. 29, 1925, in Chicago, Benjamin began his college education in 1943 at Northwestern University but dropped out the same year to enlist in the U.S. Navy. At the end of his military service, in 1946, he moved to California and resumed his studies at what is now the University of Redlands.

Three years later, he received a bachelor's degree, married Beverly Jean Paschke and began teaching in an elementary school in the San Bernardino County town of Bloomington. After two years he shifted to a teaching position in Chino's public schools. He and his young family moved to Claremont in 1952.

Benjamin's art career began in 1951 when he was asked to add a component of art to his students' curriculum. Initially working with crayons, he became intrigued with choosing colors and figuring out the effect of placing one hue next to another. Color, in and of itself, soon became his subject matter.

At home, he began experimenting with oils and eventually took classes at Claremont Graduate School (now Claremont Graduate University), earning a master's degree in 1960. He received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1983 and 1989.

In a 1986 essay Benjamin wrote: "I am an intuitive painter, despite the ordered appearance of my paintings, and am fascinated by the infinite range of expression inherent in color relationships." Although he often set up a systematic structure based on numerical progressions, modular constructions or random sequences, he came up with surprising results.

He showed his work in 1954 at the Pasadena Museum of Art and in 1958 at the Long Beach Museum of Art. But he rose to fame in 1959-60 with "Four Abstract Classicists." The landmark exhibition — also featuring the work of Lorser Feitelson, John McLaughlin and Frederick Hammersley — offered the L.A. artists' cool, hard-edge abstractions as an alternative to the East Coast's relatively emotional Abstract Expressionism. After appearances in Los Angeles and San Francisco, the show traveled to London and Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Benjamin subsequently showed his work widely and was represented in major museum exhibitions such as "Geometric Abstractions in America" at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1962; the 30th and 35th editions of the "Biennial Exhibition of American Painting" at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., in 1967 and 1977; and "Painting and Sculpture in California: The Modern Era" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the National Collection of Fine Arts in Washington, D.C., in 1976.

Cal State Northridge organized a traveling survey of his work in 1989, and Pomona College presented a retrospective in 1994, when he became a professor emeritus. Benjamin also played a prominent role in "Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design and Culture at Mid-Century," a 2007-09 national traveling show organized by the Orange County Museum of Art.

His work is in many museum collections, including those of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Museum of American Art.

Besides his wife and his daughter Beth of Boulder Creek, Calif., he is survived by another daughter, Kris Benjamin Jones of Claremont; son Bruce Benjamin of Santa Cruz; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

Karl Benjamin [Wikipedia]

Karl Benjamin website

Deceased--Pat Passlof

Milton Resnick with Pat Passlof

Pat Passlof
August 5th, 1928 to November 13th, 2011

"Pat Passlof, Abstract Expressionist Painter, Dies at 83"

by

Margalit Fox

November 15th, 2011

The New York Times

Pat Passlof, an Abstract Expressionist painter whose canvases vibrate with unpredictable line and thick, luminous color, died on Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 83.

The cause was cancer, according to the Elizabeth Harris Gallery in Chelsea, which represents her. A long-planned exhibition of Ms. Passlof’s work is scheduled to go on view at the gallery on Saturday and run through Dec. 23.

A member of the New York school of Abstract Expressionists who was less widely recognized than male colleagues like Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, Ms. Passlof had been immersed since the 1950s in the heady, impecunious cultural ferment of Downtown Manhattan.

As a profile of her in The New York Times last month recounted, she lived and worked in a former synagogue on Forsyth Street, on the Lower East Side, which she had bought in the early 1960s and renovated almost entirely herself.

Ms. Passlof’s husband, the painter Milton Resnick, had, until his death in 2004, lived and worked in a renovated synagogue of his own, around the corner on Eldridge Street.

As Ms. Passlof told The Times, for nearly half a century there had been three of them in the marriage — he, she and art — and by mutual agreement the demands of art often trumped those of connubiality.

Ms. Passlof’s canvases are distinguished by the primacy of the brushstroke: they were sometimes so thickly worked in oils that reviewers commended their smell as well as their visual aspects.

This deliberate, dense layering of paint makes it hard for the viewer to tell what is figure and what is ground, and the constant, jockeying interplay between the two gives Ms. Passlof’s work much of its dynamism.

She was also known as a master colorist. In some paintings her palette centers on muted, desaturated earth tones; in others it exploits saturated colors from deep night blues to vibrant oranges.

To a degree, Ms. Passlof cleaved to the pure geometry the Abstract Expressionists adored. In “Eighth House,” a recent series, each painting depends crucially on sets of colored bars, organized in alternating vertical and horizontal bands like the blocks of a quilt.

But her geometry is almost always fluid and off kilter — lines disappear, reappear and go quietly askew — which lends her work a sense of buoyancy.

Patricia Passloff was born in Brunswick , Ga., on Aug. 5, 1928. She parted company with the final “f” of her surname early in her career, after she finished a painting only to discover she had left insufficient room for a full signature, her sister and only immediate survivor, Aileen Passloff, said in an interview on Tuesday.

She studied with de Kooning at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and earned a bachelor’s degree from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. In the late 1940s she moved to New York, where she took private instruction from de Kooning.

Ms. Passlof, who was a longtime faculty member of the College of Staten Island, has work in the collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington and elsewhere.

Though her art was rooted in abstraction, Ms. Passlof did not shun representation. Some years ago, intent of painting the human figure, she hired a model. It was then she discovered she could not paint legs — at least not the kind that came two to a set — to her own satisfaction.

She resolved to concentrate on more-than-two-legged creatures. The result was a noteworthy, hauntingly allegorical series featuring centaurs.

Shanthi Chandrasekar...physics and spirtuality

"Day-dreaming gives dimensions to her creativity"

by

Chennai

July 25th, 2011

The New Indian Express

Having drawn inspiration from the mystery that is being surrounded, Shanthi Chandrasekar’s works reveal an exclusive blend of Indian heritage and inner deliberations

“As far as abstracts are concerned, colours relatively come into contact which forms different line shapes and patterns,” says Shanthi Chandrasekar, a self-learned artist who holds her first art show in India. She’s put up in Maryland and comes to India for artistic exposures.

Shanthi’s 35 art pieces and sculptures are an outcome of her visual adventures where the tenets of physics intersect with spirituality. Her art represents an effort to figure out abstract concepts without any hitches. Lured towards spirituality and meditative experiences, Shanthi associates every aspect of physics and psychology with that of her art pieces to explain intricate artistic techniques. The artist’s ongoing search for the meaning in her spiritual discoveries is from microcosm to macrocosm.

Shanthi is interested in movements of lines and illusions. She says those imaginary lines have links and react to her senses. “I’m totally lost when I paint. Day-dreaming has brought numerous dimensions to my creativity,” she grins. Quiz the reason for her involvement in physics? The artist spent her early days in Kalpakkam near the Atomic Energy circle. “All are made of atoms; physics and human lives are inseparable,” she tells.

Having obtained her degrees — BSc Physics in WCC and MA Psychology in Annamalai University, she explains that the latter has helped her immensely in observing art viewers’ mentality. Shanthi is in all glee as she expects her college faculty to visit her abstracts. “I play with the mathematical aspects of various shades and that denotes nothing can be taken for granted,” she substantiates.

On talking about the viewers’ perceptions, she says when a person finds a blotch in her work; it shows his/her negative approach towards life.? “When you can’t understand the paintings at your closer stretch, move backward and see it from a distance. So as your life problems; when you go away from it, those seems insignificant,” she says.

Communicating a positive approach is all she does through her art pieces. “I didn’t want to title my works as I love people perceiving concepts in their own ways,” she smiles.

She has used pen and ink drawings with acrylic on canvas. The illusions of simplicity and complexity are the concepts behind her ‘Maya’. The other concept implies Shakti, which means power.? She has interpreted the inner courage as a glory of power for women. Giving importance to one’s levels of determination, her abstracts convey a deep sense of dignity.

Also Shanthi has carved the wooden blocks into distinctive personalities with its own set of qualities and weaknesses. Despite the characters’ weaknesses, an identity has been established that makes one proud which unites them for a cause. ‘Yathra’ expresses journeying. While many are unintentional about their paths, it tells one on distinguishing the right from wrong ones. Her Chakra series emit energy — the black holes of mind and elucidates one’s state of mind where no thoughts can enter or exit without the third eye (source? of knowledge). The artist’s red dots convey her purposeful memories on a white background.

The artist beams that her US house is flooded with paintings and sculptures. Interestingly, she is reluctant to sell some of her paintings. Reason is that she would gift those to her parents. Also, Shanthi works from her studio at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, Silver Spring and conducts classes at Arts & Humanities Council of Montgomery County, Washington DC suburb.

Shanthi Chandrasekar website