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Opinion:
A Painter Walks A
Tightrope
Charlotte Park and the role of chance
By Robert Long
The South Fork is remarkable not only for the number
of notable painters and sculptors who have worked
here but also for the number of artist couples who
made their way east.
This was true as far back as
130 years ago (Thomas and Mary Nimmo Moran), but
especially in the middle of the 20th century: Lee
Krasner and Jackson Pollock, Willem  and Elaine de Kooning, Hedda Sterne and Saul Steinberg,
John and Rae Ferren, Miriam Schapiro and Paul Brach,
to name a few. Most of them wound up in Springs,
where it was cheap and quiet.
The painters Charlotte Park and
James Brooks abandoned New York for Montauk in 1949,
two years after they married, and soon afterward
moved to Springs, where Ms. Park still lives. Mr.
Brooks, who died in 1992, was a bona fide member
of the Abstract Expressionist boys club, but Ms.
Park, too, drew the attention of critics when she
began showing in New York in the early 1950s. (Born
in 1918, she earned a degree at the Yale School
of Fine Art in 1939 but didn’t paint seriously
for another decade.)
The Spanierman Gallery has mounted
a show, curated by Ronny Cohen, of about 40 of Ms.
Park’s works in oil or gouache or mixed media,
on paper or canvas, made between 1950 and 1963.
The show illustrates just how important a role chance
played in the work of the painterly Abstract Expressionists,
such as Pollock, Philip Guston, and Ms. Park. Some
of her pictures seem aimless though they display
all the hallmarks of classic gestural abstraction.
Others have the aura of inevitability that surrounds
masterpieces.
Ms. Park is of the raggedy-Cubist
faction of Ab Ex; she often patched together abstract
landscapes of rough, vaguely organic-looking shapes,
sometimes in black and white, a la de Kooning, and
sometimes in colors tending toward the hot end of
the spectrum. Early on, a critic wondered if she
had been inspired by the sea, but her pictures look
insistently nonobjective to me. The images from
the early ’50s are densely packed, flat, and
sometimes cartoonish.
In works from the mid-1950s such
as “Peterboro” and “Departure,”
the iconography is similar but Ms. Park has added
color, and the level of drama rises considerably.
She liked orange and sienna, playing them off against
midrange blues and black.
Some pictures suggest that Ms.
Park was affected by the work of fellow artists
such as Lee Krasner (“Untitled, 50-16,”
a forest of pinks and greens), Franz Kline (“Untitled,
50-54,” with its big, simplified swipes of
paint), and even Robert Motherwell (“Untitled,
50-86,” a balancing act of orbs in a wobbly
grid).
Others have an obdurate air of
otherness. A gouache-collage in red, white, and
black surprisingly evokes both calm and extreme
restlessness. “Departure,” a 36-by-45-inch
canvas in brash oranges and blues, seems to represent
a group of figures, but their outlines are quickly
absorbed by the painting’s dynamic composition
— it won’t let you decide for sure on
the most obvious things, such as scale and spatial
relationships.
In paintings like “Departure”
Ms. Park marked out a place for herself in the land
of gesture. Later in the 1950s, and into the early
1960s, she made color her primary subject, starting
with earth tones and moving gradually toward brighter,
almost floral tints, particularly in a pair of untitled
50-inch-square canvases. There is just a hint of
Morris Louis here, but Ms. Park remained interested
in texture, which is all but irrelevant in optical
and color field painting.
Two richly hued vertical canvases
from the late 1950s are interesting to consider
side by side. “Resurgence,” which is
about 7 feet high and 4 feet wide, has a dead spot
at its midsection, as if the artist couldn’t
quite find a way to tie together the top and bottom
passages of the picture. In “Hotspur,”
on the other hand, everything is fused: form and
formlessness, warm and cool, up and down, foreground
and background.
Many of Ms. Park’s colleagues,
having established one or two trademark images,
repeated them for 40 years. But she walked a tightrope,
always trying to find something new to say.
The show can be seen at the Spanierman
Gallery, which is off Newtown Lane in East Hampton,
through June 26.
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