Like many of the best abstract painters, southern Humboldt County artist Jerry Pruce talks about his practice — almost in riddles — as a kind of search for something he cannot quite define. The paintings and drawings document the search, rather than the elusive object, and 50 years of that work have been on display in the Thonson Gallery at the Morris Graves Museum of Art. The exhibition, titled Jerry Pruce: A Retrospective of Abstract Artwork from 70s to the Present, wrapped up Oct. 18.
Early in his career, Pruce was inspired by cubism, stating that he was drawn to the angularity and the shallow depth of field in the works of artists like Pablo Picasso. Pruce appreciated how cubist art distills images down from realistic representation. This influence, and the influence of impressionist painter Paul Cezanne, are most evident in the earliest work included in his retrospective, a boxy, earth-toned rendering of three pitchers on a table with apples.
In his later pieces, Pruce abandons representation. Most of Pruce’s work in the Morris Graves show is almost entirely non-representational, comprising of large fields of muted colors, circles, geometry and symbols. He notes that he was fascinated by new media artists in the 1960s, including Dan Flavin, who worked with light. Pruce’s mentor Howard Jones told him around this time, “You’re free to do whatever is important to you — there are no rules.”
The cubist influence remains though even in Pruce’s late works, showing up in the way he folds the space and breaks his abstract forms into planes. Ultimately, cubism is about time. Picasso and his fellows attempted to represent the movements of three-dimensional objects in time on a flat surface. That attempt to paint time — an entirely immaterial construct — may be the connection that persists most strongly into Pruce’s later practice.
The bulk of the work in Pruce’s retrospective locate him closer to Agnes Martin’s airy geometric fields, Richard Tuttle’s playful manipulation of symbols and Brice Marden’s earth-colored squiggles. Like all three of them, Pruce’s work aims to depict something far more ephemeral than any object. What, exactly, he isn’t very clear on, but he knows it when he sees it, and the act of painting seems to be his process of looking.
Some of Pruce’s images are inspired by crystals. He says he is attracted to the forms and how they appear to be lit from within. Some of his smaller drawings act like geometric portraits of crystalline behavior, rather than drawings of specific crystals. The sharp lines of these compositions contrast with more wavy, flowy lines in other works, which he calls a departure from his cubist inspirations and a “lyrical counterpoint.”
Pruce also seems to want to locate a set of elemental shapes and themes. Many of his images include combinations and variations of non-representational loops, rings and spheres. He says he has a fascination with words, letters and numbers. His interest in symbolic representation seems to be limited to the symbol. Raised images of disjointed letters on paper divorce the symbols from what they represent, and transform them into lines and curves floating in space.
All the work in Pruce’s show utilizes a limited color palette, often developed through an intensive layering process — as many as 50 layers. Most of the pieces employ natural, rusty colors, acid green and a variety of whites and blacks. The outlier is a very light, cool pink that vibrates apart from the others. Pruce identifies the color as the aura of the Pranic healer Ammachi, as seen by one of her devotees, and as “a peaceful color.” These associations suggest the possibilities of other hidden references in the colors and abstract marks in Pruce’s seemingly minimal and self-referential work.
Pruce says that, through his work, he is seeking “abstract knowledge about reality that cannot be expressed through words and concepts.” He says, “The intellect is deceptive and alluring. It creates … illusions that reality can be found in some place other than the present moment.”
“I remain humbled by the mystery and abstract nature of the creation,” says Pruce, “and view the image-making effort as some attempt to give face to it.”
Jerry Pruce’s artwork is on display online at jersart.com. The Morris Graves Museum of Art is open from noon to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays. Admission is $5 for adults and $2 for seniors and students with ID. Museum members and children under 17 are free.
L.L. Kessner is an Arcata-based artist and writer.
This article appears in Why California Housing Costs are So High.