Six Paintings for a Room in Berkeley

These six paintings were made with Room 200C in 2195 Hearst at UC Berkeley in mind. In this room there are seven windows in-between which are six short walls, each approximately three feet wide. Looking out through the windows one sees an intersection, buildings, cars and pedestrians, trees and hills. From the beginning it was my intention to make six paintings to hang between the windows using a blue and green palette. In making these paintings I determined that these paintings would refer to the Berkeley landscape.

Qinglü (also called qinglübai or qinglü shanshui) is a style of Chinese blue and green landscape painting made principally during the Sui (581–618) and Tang (618–907) dynasties. A rich and powerful color effect was achieved using two mineral colors— azurite blue and malachite green. In Fantastic Mountains: Chinese Landscape Painting from The Shanghai Museum, Liu Yang writes that this style “developed during the Six Dynasties period (222-479) to become the prime mode for landscape painting,” and “enjoyed its heyday during the Tang dynasty but remained vital thereafter.”

These paintings use a variety of ways to directly and simply make a painted image. The paint is applied in dots, gestures, drips, strokes, line, and filled-in shape. The black outlines are calligraphic and have different qualities: smooth; thin; barbed; abrupt; flowing. The blue and green don’t blend or mix, so the colors remain distinct and clean. The linen ground is not hidden, providing a warm background in which the fabric is plainly visible. The aluminum paint seems to both give off and flatten light; its contrast with the linen points to both the natural and the artificial, which is what paintings are.

Chris Ashley
April 2006
Oakland, California