The Resonant Surface: Movement, Image, and Sound in California Painting

Ernest Bruce Nelson, The Summer Sea, 1915, Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 in. UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art, Gift of The Irvine Museum
John M. Gamble, Calce de Oro (Poppy Field near Banning), circa 1939, Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 in. UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art, Gift of The Irvine Museum
Gordon Onslow Ford, Constellations and Grasses, 1957, Casein on mulberry paper, 38 x 56 in. The Buck Collection at UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art © Courtesy of the Lucid Art Foundation
John Bond Francisco, Scrub Oak in a Canyon, circa 1910, Oil on canvas, 26 x 34 in. UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art, Gift of The Irvine Museum
Arthur F. Mathews, Monterey County Landscape, 1907, Oil on canvas, 26 x 30 in. UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art, Gift of The Irvine Museum
Lee Mullican, Untitled, circa 1950, Oil on canvas, 24 x 20 in. The Buck Collection at UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art
Oskar Fischinger, Triangles / Blue Triangles, 1949, Oil on Masonite, 27 x 21 in. The Buck Collection at UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art

Curated by Erin Stout, PhD

September 11, 2021 – February 12, 2022

The Resonant Surface encouraged us to slow our gaze and to experience paintings in an embodied and immersive way. Musical landscapes, rhythmic abstractions, sound and color experiments, and other multisensory subject matter played with the immediacy of visual perception. The exhibition considered these kinds of explorations in image, movement, and sound in early to mid-20th century California painting. It traced the ways artists have long used painting to investigate the complex nature of perception beyond vision, building connections across time, space, images, objects, and sensations.

Four main themes developed these connections: correspondences, rhythm and abstraction, dynamism and flux, and visual music. By activating our multiple senses—looking, but also listening and feeling—the 26 presented works of art could be experienced as vibrant, interconnected surfaces that “resonate” within and beyond the spaces they occupy.