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James Budd Dixon
In preparing for the First Glimpse exhibition [which introduced the public to Gerald Buck’s private collection gifted to UCI], I visited IMCA’s collection storage to see several works I had selected from the collector’s dog-eared notebooks. James Budd Dixon’s Red and Green #1 was not on my list. The painting was out, leaning in a corner, and half unwrapped nearby the works I had chosen to view. Its loamy, thick, encrusted, fetid, forest-floor energy caught my attention immediately. I spent a good deal of time with the painting that day, eventually deciding that I wanted to include it in First Glimpse and was willing to swap a work to give Red and Green #1 a prime wall in the exhibition.
It’s not a particularly clear or neighborly picture. It is all about the internal search of the painter made external through a kind of brutal material exploration. Its clotted, sludgy surface has a gloomy air of painting as an embodiment of murky nature—decay—an all-over impasto that appears to have been mixed in a cauldron with a wooden spoon as much as it was painted with brushes on a stretched canvas. Budd Dixon’s inelegant motions feel hard won and brutally strained. The painting feels primordial.
I’m a painter first and like all artists I have my ways of constructing works that is particular to my personality and connected to my motives. As an artist pushing at my own boundaries, I tend to gravitate toward works I can’t fully understand—and towards ways of painting that are unlike my own and go against the grain of my predilections. Red and Green #1 fits this bill. It’s a painting that shows its own struggle of becoming. In that way, it is like fully entering into another painter’s process—a process that challenges my own to perhaps look for more mess. Or at least be open to the difficulties of making a more monstrous picture.
Kevin Appel
Artist
Professor and Chair, Department of Art, UC Irvine
Interim Associate Director (Curatorial), Langson IMCA
Carlos Almaraz
Staff Pick | Monthly Muse February 2021
This pastel drawing holds my gaze. It’s as if the artist was counting on the human urge that renders us incapable of averting our eyes from a disastrous scene. Through this act of observation, I become one of the bystanders—looking on as the house is devoured by flames and engulfed in a billowing cloud of black smoke. I am helplessly frozen in place, in awe of the unstoppable force of nature. Yet beyond this terrible scene, and in contrast, is another spectacular natural event on which my eyes can’t help but linger—a striking and vibrant sky.
Chanelle Mandell
Associate Museum Registrar, Langson IMCA
Anna Hills
Staff Pick | Monthly Muse November 2020
San Gorgonio from Beaumont by Anna Hills reminds me of long, winding drives up to the mountains, the sight of our destination in the distance, and the expectation of an enjoyable time hiking and backpacking in nature. Even though over 90 years have passed since the artist made this painting, in many ways the view has changed very little. While houses, roads, and other aspects of our modern life have altered the landscape, the outline of the mountains and the round top of San Gorgonio, I imagine, would be recognizable to Anna Hills today.
Dawn Minegar
Assistant Museum Registrar, Langson IMCA