SECTION FIFTEEN
THE ART PAGE

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COLUMN SEVENTY-TWO, JUNE 1, 2002
(Copyright © 2002 Al Aronowitz)

SIMPLE HONESTY:
TRANG NGUYEN-PAINTING FROM THE HEART


TRANG NGUYEN

by Alec Clayton

(Alec Clayton is an art critic, a novelist and a painter from Olympia, Washington).

How does one describe honesty in a painting? Lack of pretension? No tricks or gimmicks? A straightforward presentation of things seen or felt--–an image unadorned and unpolished? Yes, all of this. But how does one recognize it and articulate it? Perhaps it can't be done.

In the works of so-called primitives or "outsider" or unschooled artists honesty may be implied in the choice of subject matter. A painter may paint her favorite toy from childhood, the store where she buys her daily bread, the fishing hole where she hauled in a ten-pound catfish---subjects that may be meaningless to others but through sheer lack of artifice convey to viewers the importance this subject holds for the artist. Or she may convey honesty through choice of media or method of execution (in the case of outsider artists this would mean cheap materials and crudity of paint application).

In the work of a trained artist, however, there are no such readily available and easily discerned clues to honest intent. Yet, if the work is truly honest, we know it. Such is the case of Trang Nguyen. Nguyen was born in Saigon, Vietnam. She immigrated to the US during the 1980s as a boat person, and began her artistic career shortly after graduating from California State University, Long Beach in 2001, where she studied with painter Domenic Cretara.

I discovered her paintings when another artist whose works I greatly admire, Darlene Nguyen-Ely, directed me to her website (http://trangnguyen1.tripod.com/page1.html). I have seen her paintings only on a computer screen, but that was enough to convince me that Trang Nguyen is the real thing, an artist who paints from the heart, with directness and simplicity.

Her paintings are small landscapes in oil on wood. She may very well adjust and rework her paintings; she may struggle with nuances of color and composition; but the end result looks like it has been painted in a few simple strokes of paint to surface with no reworking whatsoever. Road to Pendleton (Pendleton, Oregon) is a Hopperesque landscape. A stark barnlike structure rests on a precipice against the horizon, where a bridge meets a bluff. A blacktop highway angles in from the bottom. The whole picture is a series of horizontal, vertical and diagonal planes in dark browns and blacks against an empty blue sky. It is loneliness personified, with no hint of life.

The road and shadows in Road to Pendleton are an impenetrable black. The same dense black shows up in most of Nguyen's paintings, most effectively in Rainy Night in Monroe (Monroe, Washington), Red Barn, and Somewhere in Arizona. Rainy Night in Monroe is a night scene with street lamps and car lights reflecting on a wet blacktop. The shimmer of water on the road and the veil of rain seen under the streetlights is as real as anything I've ever seen without being a photo-realist depiction. That's quite a trick: to be painterly, with drawing that verges on clumsiness, and yet come across as absolutely realistic.

Red Barn is another Hopperesque composition wherein building and landscape come together to create a simple structure in dark and light. An edge of a curved-roof barn cuts the picture plane in half, and a tangle of electrical wires ties together the two almost symmetrical halves of the picture. The horizontal droop of the wires mirrors the vertical sweep of the roof. It is a compositional device that gives away the hidden training beneath these seemingly simple pictures.

Trang Nguyen's career is in its infancy, and I hesitate to say more without seeing a lot more of her paintings, but I suspect she may be an artist to watch in the near future.  ##

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