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Shannon M. Lieberman

Oregon Arts Watch March 19, 2024

Jordan Clark’s Portland is bright

The abstract paintings hum with an energy entirely befitting for their caffeine-centered display location – Stumptown Coffee Roasters.

Portland-based Stumptown Coffee Roasters’ downtown location at 128 SW 3rd Avenue is where the coffee shop meets the art gallery. Their current exhibition, Nightshade, consists of seventeen non-objective paintings by local artist Jordan Clark. The work in Nightshade invites viewers to enjoy the bright colors and bold shapes of the surface level, but also to move closer and look at what lurks, faintly, just below that surface. Infused with a palpable sense of movement and surprising contrasts in texture, Clark’s tactile paintings bring exuberance and verve to the sprawling space. 

The ambiance at Stumptown is much more casual, and less sterile, than your typical museum or gallery environment. The earthy smell of coffee beans permeates the air, baristas and customers alike chat about their weekend plans, and on the day I sat down with Clark to discuss his work, the lilting voice of Mazzy Star’s lead singer Hope Sandoval cast a dreamy calm over the space. Clark’s paintings, with their references to the form and materials of street art, work well in this cozy setting. 

Of the 17 works in the exhibition, only two are in a muted palette of blacks, whites, and grays. More typical is Cambria, in which bold strokes of green, orange, and red stretch vertically over a background of deep blue. Across the majority of works in Nightshade, Clark’s canvases practically hum with bright, saturated color. 

Born in Iowa and raised in Wisconsin, Clark’s 2015 move to Portland to pursue an MFA in Contemporary Art Practices at PSU directly impacted his color palette. Moving to the city without ever having visited, Clark was surprised and delighted by the confluence of urban and wild space, or as he puts it, the way that “Portland is a city, but surrounded by Doug firs.” He noticed that it’s also a city of bright colors, from the athletic wear of hikers, joggers, and cyclists to the traffic cones and safety vests of the area’s near-constant construction. 

Clark’s current body of work features colors so bright they are practically neon. While they give the works a strong sense of energy, their matte quality keeps them from becoming garish. “The sheen of paint is really important in my work,” says Clark, noting that he spends a lot of time thinking about this surface luminosity. One of his preferred media, very much in evidence in Nightshade, is Flasche, which Clark likes for its “super matte, rubbery finish.” 

In Downtown, Clark combines Flasche and acrylic but also spray paint and KILZ to capture the feeling of an urban center, its vitality and energy as well as its messiness. Bright swathes of color create organic shapes that overlap and bleed into each other. Spray paint and KILZ,  a brand of house paint known for its ability to seamlessly cover other colors, seal building materials, and deter mold and mildew, are both direct nods to Clark’s background in graffiti and street art. 

As someone “very influenced by railroad culture,” Clark used to paint trains, a vital part of graffiti culture since the 1970s. Clark says KILZ is popular among graffiti artists because the paint “primes and buffs surfaces better than others. It covers and crushes whatever’s under it.” Given his penchant for “layering, masking and revealing,” KILZ allows Clark to make flat, white, “super-matte” areas of color that obscure layers of paint underneath and bring Clark’s brushstrokes to the fore, making the movement of his wide brush hyper-visible. It is a painting that makes evident the degree to which Clark sees his artistic practice as a “process of layering, masking and revealing.” 

Clark’s painting Muskie Lunch, a standout in the show, presents the viewer with two distinct spaces: a gridded background and a colorful rectangle painted in the foreground. The background consists of what looks like unprimed canvas spray painted with red lines that form a sort of grid. “Grid” implies consistency and order, but Clark’s lines are deliberately imprecise, not quite straight or even, until the form seems to dissolve completely on the bottom right of the canvas, where a rounded diagonal line too far apart from the others no longer presents a grid but rather its dissolution. 

Against this scrawled background is a rectangle brimming with color, a space so different from its background that it feels like something separate, a space within a space. It structurally recalls the idea of a painting hung against a red-brick wall. This rectangle contains multitudes: huge, bold shapes in shades of green, a swathe of bright pink that looks scraped away to allow bits of dark green to show through, and lines on the top and bottom that echo the grid-like structure of the spray painted background. My favorite detail is an orange line wiggling on a diagonal across the bottom right corner. A bright pop of slithery color, it actually bridges the two “spaces” of the canvas, extending beyond the colorful rectangle to touch the background grid. The work is both flat and static, and yet Clark’s formal choices keep it from ever reading as such. 

It is here that I see the influence of Henri Matisse’s colorful paper cutouts, work that Clark says he loves. Produced late in Matisse’s career while the artist’s health was failing, the cutouts bring strong, simple shapes to life through the artist’s rich color palette and keen eye for arranging forms to maximize movement. The result is a sophistication and vitality far beyond what seems possible with such humble materials, a description that just as accurately describes Clark’s paintings. It is a thread that connects Clark to his other influences, chief among them artists like Jennifer Bartlett, Laura Owens, and Charline von Heyl who all showed in MoMA’s 2014-2015 exhibition The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World. “They were all looking at Matisse,” says Clark. He credits Bartlett’s work, especially her exhibition Rhapsody, for helping him understand the power of working in variations of an idea until it has been exhausted. Where Bartlett favored organized grids as a means of presenting her huge, installation-like paintings, many of Clark’s paintings in Nightshade present lines and grids as things that can be broken up, made malleable and imprecise.

Clark was able to produce all of the paintings in this exhibition as new work funded by the Stumptown Artist Fellowship. Inaugurated in 2017, the program was the brainchild of May Barruel (of Nationale Gallery). Barruel was the founding curator and initially, the fellowship was  juried by a group of four. Pandemic upheaval changed the program: Wendy Swartz now single-handedly selects and curates work for the Portland Stumptown locations (and has a counterpart who does the same at the chain’s Brooklyn, NY stores). There’s no longer a website for the fellowship nor formal press releases, but it is still a source of support for local artists with a $2000 stipend and accompanying public exposure at Stumptown Coffee.  For Clark, this financial support was vital. “It’s the first time I had the resources and energy to have total creative freedom,” he says. 

Clark sees alternative spaces, coffee shops, record stores, and other non-traditional or pop-up galleries, as vital to the future of Portland’s art scene. In that spirit, he’s currently planning a conceptual exhibition and event, loosely scheduled for April, at Speck’s Records and Tapes in Kenton. The event centers on music as inspiration, as Clark’s idea is to create new paintings based on a specific playlist. He’ll listen to it while he paints, and it will be played and remixed in DJ sets at the exhibition’s opening. Like the coffee shop environment, showing work at a record store disrupts the carefully curated “neutrality” typical of most gallery and museum settings. It creates a scene–something that is noisier, messier, but also more intimate and comfortable.

Spread out across the bright, airy space of Stumptown’s downtown Portland location, the paintings in Nightshade offer up little worlds rich with color, shape, and texture. The surfaces are what draw viewers in, but the materiality of the work, its textures, its physicality, that’s what invites you to have a cup of coffee and stay awhile.

Jordan Clark’s Nightshade is on view at Stumptown’s 128 SW 3rd Ave location through April 23rd. The shop is open weekdays 7:00 am-3:00 pm and weekends 7:00 am-5:00 pm.

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Jordan Clark: The painter’s spaces, inside and out

September 12, 2017

Visual Art

By PAUL MAZIAR

There are eight new Jordan Clark paintings in oil and flashe on view at Stumptown on Southeast Belmont. The exhibition, titled abridge, a breeze, comprises all abstract works — seven on paper and one on unprimed canvas. All of Clark’s pictures are full of life—especially this show of new, brightly-colored work—but they don’t bear any of the typical realism that you might expect from something inspired by life.

I talked with Jordan about his artistic practice and some of his affinities over a couple of pints at a local watering hole. The conversation lasted a couple of hours and, after being transcribed, took up nine typewritten pages. You could say our meeting was congenial, a good time. Having talked with Jordan, it seems clear that despite the supreme effort it apparently takes an artist to cultivate and keep up such prolific work, these things are a byproduct of lived experience. They occur in a continuously balanced cycle of work and play, thought and action, solitude and interaction.

First meeting

The first Clark painting I ever saw, if I remember it right, was actually his entire studio (employed as canvas) during his last year of the MFA program at Portland State University. He was the teaching assistant for a drawing concepts class that I took during my senior year at PSU, and he’d invited the class to his workspace to show us his thesis project.

I remember that some of the colors in that room were ones I’d never seen before, and that the entire room was captivating, overwhelming, crawling with art that hung from every surface of the studio—no, the whole space was the art itself. All kinds of things—stacked frames, roller pins, books, lamps, balls, tubes, tarps, buckets and ropes, all manner of ephemera—were painted or drawn on and imaginatively arranged. It was just fun, free, restlessly creative, no feeling of hierarchy whatever.

Jordan Clark, the studio as a painting

Until that point, Jordan had scarcely said a single word in class, but would rush up to each of us and help mixing paint. He’d come up with these marvelous hues for everyone and hop around the room that way, in quiet thrill, lending insight here and there. During that visit, he shared pages from his drafting notebook. One in particular was the fragment of a scene that he told us was made while riding the bus; it was the curvature of the bus driver’s shoulder and steering wheel framed by the large front bus window. But the way that he rendered and recontextualized it, the original scene was nowhere to be found but in his memory—and then in our imaginations.

Logic logic

When I mention that his artful odds-and-ends were “arranged,” up there, I don’t mean “designed” at all. Although he’s had his training, Clark opts most often for a lack of control. “Have you ever tried painting, drawing with your left hand or with a stick or a big, blunt object?” he asked me. “Like Matisse, when he was really old he would draw with these huge, five-foot long dowels. I think there’s something to that intervention, having a lack of control. I have no interest in knowing exactly how it’s going to turn out.”

On the other hand, he’s not one-note when it comes to these things. “Charlene von Heyl, an abstract painter, says something to the effect that ‘painting and design are so close, but painting goes just beyond.’ And I don’t know if that’s about finding a place where you lose yourself, or lose that logic logic.”

Clark’s abridge, a breeze paintings at Stumptown attract as flat things—objects nailed upon the cafe wall. Then again, awareness turns back to one’s own physicality, standing in front of patrons and craning to get a better look at the paintings. This Stumptown location is small, bustling, and five of its tables line the wall on which many of the paintings hang.

Looking closely at Clark’s paintings is in order, as ever. From afar or at a glance, they’re readily pleasing enough (while avoiding the “décor” stamp), but examination reveals the paintings’ intricacies, connections, Clark’s own attentions. The fact of this apparently wild paint applied to taut planes is enough to stir imagination. In Jordan’s case, the marks are intentional, in part, but are from a situation of strained poise and theoretical depth, so they emerge convulsively, on-the-spot.

Madden

In this, they’re in response to what’s happening to him physically, often spatially. His work is made by way of deliberate positions and rigorous movements that he performs in order to invent new situations, contexts, perspectives in his paintings. Some of his sources turn out to be video games (old Nintendo Madden), sports (soccer, mainly), and public transit (buses, trains, and his own cross-country jaunt on Amtrak).

New experience

“I think all different ways to physically interact are important: standing above or walking all around a painting, then seeing it on the wall. Changing my relation to the composition is a big part of my practice. Sometimes when I’m painting, I’m in a crouched position that’s actually painful. But I enjoy what it makes my body do. I’ll be in some cramped position and will have to force a line in agony, and I enjoy that; it feels like I’m creating some type of new experience. Sometimes I’m responding to something but not knowing why, and that’s also very generative to me.”

He explained his attraction to “things that you can’t always predict,” and his interest in trajectories, and the path something—a ball, a bullet, or, say, water from a squirtgun—will take from A to B. “I think about the zig and zag, the dotted line of the pass; where the players are going in relation to the ball and where they’ll meet, where they won’t. It’s kinda like seeing something before it happens, but there’s only chance and then consequence.”

Material interaction

Clark’s notion that we’re not dealing with good old “illusionistic perspectival space” rings true, and he develops this suggestive claim throughout our talk. But, as it turns out, his work’s also really not as simple as that. He described to me his ongoing intention to create “a different type of material space that can happen when combining a wider range of mark-making,” explaining that “something happens to a matte finish in comparison to a glossy one, and then compared to a wash—new relationships are developed. Now those marks, sitting on a flat plane, aren’t trying to fool anyone into looking into a window. It is what it is. The materials are there, on this flat plane. I try to distinguish a material interaction with this kind of space.”

When all of this is achieved, as it turns out in abridge, a breeze, what’s optical leads to correspondences between forms and spaces that tell a different kind of story. To me, that story is full of the things with which the painter is concerned.

Fragments

On the surfaces of Jordan’s finished paintings, juxtapositions are made between the materials upon the surfaces, and to the surfaces themselves. His handling of paint moves between shiny and matte; it’s often stacked and mingled in layers, near to other areas that are spacious, more isolated due in part to a chosen wash. Despite intention, the abstract painting doesn’t always look flat. In some of Jordan’s pictures, flat “plane” actually appears also like an aerial view of a field, a topsy-turvy landscape.

I don’t know if this impression is due to my own foreknowledge of Clark’s interest in sports, but it seems to have led to some truth (more below). But the forms are still tenuous, abstract—again, fragments re-imagined of things he’s seen—set along lines that sometimes sprint or else have a trajectory, or don’t. It’s hard for me to decipher how all this happens; I’m not a painter. But to my mind, Jordan makes specifically physical, spatial associations as opposed to cosmetic ones, and in this his paintings resonate in surprising ways.

Shape,space

As far as re-contextualizing goes, Jordan explained to me, “I don’t think I’m doing that as deliberately [as before]. I’m still drawing things from the bus and places like that, but I’m letting things manifest instead of trying to control so much. The process changed sometime last year but I still draw these forms. For instance, while on the bus I draw those rounded window corners or the organic contour of someone’s sweatshirt, or the body language of someone being slumped over. Shape.
I try to find some muscle memory to return to, bringing that into the studio. I’m always examining architectural spaces: there are all these squares in front of squares, and then there are planes with rectangles in the middle. I’m always finding shapes.”

We talked about the way that, in skateboarding, you evaluate a landscape as one bigger thing that has all these constituent parts in proximity. And in Clark’s case, it’s often forms and spaces relative to the game of soccer. The fact that Jordan is often on a field (his routine involves regular soccer games and practices), there’s a clear sense of those spaces and actions in his paintings: “Spatial awareness. My work is about spaces closing in and spaces opening up, and what that does [to me]. You’ve seen static on a television, well there’s something about that that intrigues me. What type of space is that?”

Games

“There’s a relationship to soccer and playing these smaller games on smaller fields; you have less time to react, people are closing in on you compared to having a large field and having more time and space to deal with the ball or the defender or whatever. It’s so much easier, more manageable when the anxiety of having people in your face is gone. I compare it to being in Downtown Portland or Southeast instead of far North, where you have more space to breathe.”

Letting it all out

When the subject of art and politics came up, he told me that during his last semester of his MFA studies, “we talked about what we should do. What should you do as an artist during this time? In the studio, I’ve been letting it all come out. Now, I think it’s important to be an artist. Art in a way, from certain people, has great monetary value, but by not completely buying into the capitalist machine, by not actively participating in it, you can be just as powerful. It’s a protest. And with art, just like protesting, you’re not going to get the immediate effect.”

Unexpected

We talked a little about Matisse and the trend in contemporary art to latch onto the artist’s more decorative tropes (my criticism) in terms of thinking critically about your work and the others around you. Jordan talked about his affinity for “the unexpected” in Matisse’s less conventional work. He told me he’s “into the kind of painting that assesses ‘what are we looking at?’ instead of ‘oh yeah, that’s an odalisque reclining’,” and he went on to add that, “going from the observed, and breaking from the past, I try to think about the painting on its own terms instead of what it should be. Maybe that’s where painting goes beyond design [returning to von Hayle’s idea].”

Inside and outside

When Jordan talked about artists that he admires, it was without the gold-standard hyperbole, as if they’re geniuses that are going to change the world. Rather, he talked about them as part of lineages. For Clark, they’re actual people doing good work that responds, in one way or another, to the world, bringing to light realities within. When he talked about spaces, it was with a similar keenness to his formal insights and theoretical epiphanies. His memories of moving from the Midwest to Portland on the train were particularly remarkable.

“Madison, Wisconsin. That’s the type of space that gets me. Point A to Point B, you know? There’s the functional aspect; you have a place to rest your head and there’s a luxury in having all those giant windows to look out of. That trip was very inspirational to me; I had never traveled on the ground across America like that. The way the horizon changes, the different foliage and plants, the type of culture going from the Midwest to these desolate places with ranchers and abandoned ghost towns in South Dakota and Montana. In Montana the sky does just open up and become HUGE. I always heard people talk about Big Sky and all that and I didn’t know what they meant. And I don’t know how that happens. Maybe it’s not having references, like the forest. As the horizon line extends, the sky grows larger, becomes more than just the atmosphere above you.”

NOTES

Jordan Clark is from Madison, Wisconsin. He got his BFA at University of Wisconsin-Stout, before coming to Portland via Amtrak on a cross-country move to undergo the MFA in Portland State University’s Art Practices program, which he completed in 2017. Soccer, moving in transit, and the hazy Northwest landscape are among some of the things that inform his thinking and his work of late. abridge, a breeze is on view through September 27 at Stumptown, 3356 Southeast Belmont in Portland.