THE PASSION OF JAN D'ART

The Gray Loft Annual Color Show, 2025

Some colors pop, some shout.

Purple?

Purple wells up. Perhaps quickly like a stain, or slowly like a bloom pushing its way through to the front of the line. But quietly.

Or, it’s already there in plain sight, but like high heat on a kettle’s skin. If it touches you, it makes an impression fierce enough to make just the memory of it almost as strong as touching it again.

Or, sometimes purple is smothering, wrapping your mind like velvet. It feels good, if you can still breathe.

Purple can seem superficial. We think of materials “wearing” a color to take on a character. But purple flips the script: it wears its material. Daytime, it chooses wood or glass. At night it chooses steam. In the afternoon it prefers powder. It chooses the material to let it feel the way it wants to feel.

For purple, it’s the self-centeredness, the narcissism, that somehow makes it welcome. Then when it shows up, it upstages you but it has great ideas. Sure, it acts like it wants to know what you think, but its question is rhetorical. “Don’t you think it’s better this way?” And sometimes it will have decided on its own to just show up uninvited, because like a bruise it thinks you ought to pay attention to something.

Well which is it?

Okay, maybe I’m pressing too much. After all, few things are more subjectively experienced than color, and no one thing I’ve said so far might be what you usually think.

Being there

At Gray Loft Gallery in Oakland’s Jingletown district, the venue’s 7th annual color-themed art show, PURPLE!, is predominantly for photographers. The show’s announcement promises a survey of the beauty, emotion, and symbolism brought by the color. We go there anticipating the different strategies that the respective artists chose to pull that off.

The curators, Jan Watten and Ann Jastrab get the individual works on the walls into conversations with each other, amplifying, clarifying, or just riffing on the possibilities that the image makers found, or created, for the color to do its thing.

The exhibit of each picture is a three-way dance of why the artist dropped a frame on or around purple; why purple made the rest of the image make sense; and what the curators, Watten and Jastrab, thought purple was doing there. That typifies why a Gray Loft show is, overall, usually on another level of artistry itself.

Apparent but not obvious...

Quite a few of the images feature purple as ambience. It’s fair to say that in those works, the purple is about a mood, a dream, or even about the subconscious. Based on our ease of identifying what is there, they each show something we might say is “real”; but it is slightly distanced from “normal” by another layer of experience, the filter of the color. What we wind up engaging is that distancing – not that extra layer, nor what is behind it.

In other pictures, purple is expressive by calling special attention to the presence of something in the view, as if to say “Did you realize that this [whatever] is in this place?” Its effort is to reveal how something is made or how it has presence. It’s as if the scene in the picture was subjected to a blacklight. After all, it would be surprising if a photo show about purple did not include some good bit of Ultra-Violet enhancement, right? And that sends the big message that apparent reality is not the only way that reality can be grasped.

Of course, there is also a contingent of images that really are just celebrations of something being purple - and of our indulgence in that. Whether what this presents is natural or manufactured, purple’s direct sensory stimulation of our nervous system happens on some fetish spectrum from the shock of the new to the seduction of the familiar.

But here, in a sanctuary of aesthetics, we’re not talking about pain versus comfort. The gradations are more like flavors. You can equally love what happens on either end of the span – the exotic or the customary – and cater to your own preference at the moment.

A mosaic of the found and made, the contemplated and the celebrated, excerpted from nearly 70 works on view. (www.grayloftgallery.com)

Aesthetics segues into the thing where the color tells us what our feelings are. But which came first, our feeling or the color? It’s not that far from blue to purple, and in that short distance how do we jump from, say, soothing to passionate? Why does that difference even exist? Do passionate people see more purple, or does purple make people more passionate?

The answer is that we use colors to communicate feelings. Sometimes the feeling is one we already have and we color-match it; but sometimes instead it is what feeling we want to have and we color-explore. And, in “conversation” with ourselves or with others, we don’t necessarily need to know whether the color or the feeling came first. Like learning a language, we start out not knowing the association of some sounds to some meanings, but once we do know, we stop thinking about that and just enjoy the use. The association becomes symbolic and we just run with it. Symbolic color? Same.

I feel compelled to acknowledge that designers, marketers and advertisers traffic in that knowledge pretty vigorously. In our times, our normal visual literacy has been quite generously built with photographs exhibiting designed images. Consequently, we probably all know a lot about color already. This is pretty important, I think, because we all come to art shows bringing what we already know, even if what we hope to experience is something more.

Sometimes a great notion...

In that regard, one of the most ambitious things an artist can do is create work that somehow extends the conventional meaning of symbolic elements into new meanings. And another ambitious thing is to successfully make something newly symbolic, whether as a more public visual language or as an intensively private one. This could be using purple to give us a new idea about something; or the work might aim to give us a new idea about purple itself. We might see it in some given work, or it might emerge from some group of them.

At this show’s opening, Ann Jastrab, Jan Watten’s partner curator, very generously pushed Watten into the foreground of the visitors’ attention. But they were a great team. As you go through their show, what emerges is the curators' work in exploring and amplifying our chances not just to see exceptional individual pictures; they cultivate our opportunity to contemplate and even experiment with our own sensibilities about color. And that is why there is an exclamation point in the show’s title.

Gray Loft Gallery Exhibit in conjunction with the inaugural PhotoCarmel!

Closing Reception: May 10, 5:00 – 7:30 pm