By Joan Baum
"Fiesta", 1988, two panels acrylic on canvas, 48 x 60 inches
The phrase has probably been used a lot, but it works – Tom Kranjac’s large acrylic and smaller oil-stick abstracts on paper can rightly be called “doctored art.” Painting and photography, early passions, led to the study of art, though a close second, medicine, and in particular psychiatry, won the day, and Dr. Kranjac became a practicing psychiatrist, and served for several years as the faculty head of clinical services at Columbia University’s Psychoanalytic Center. He still maintains a practice in the city, seeing patients during the day, but he paints at night (“even in between patients”) in a studio attached to his office, where he worked on most of the 19 large paintings and the 69 drawings on paper on display here – a small part of a substantial oeuvre that dates back decades.
“Abstraction is one of my deep and abiding concerns,” he says, a reflection of a, “longstanding interest in exploring color and gesture and shape and structure,” particularly as these elements are “suggestive of nature.” Indeed, many of the drawings evidence their titles – seascapes, dunes, nightscapes, sandscapes – where high horizon-line streaks separate sky and land, or water, and where colors, solid and wash-like, hint at place, time of day or season, as in Grey Beach/Dunes (Bellport), Blue Scape, Red Scape, Orange Field, Blue Summer, and Grey August, almost all done within the last two years.
The larger works are particularly impressive, with their bold and balanced use of three or four colors as unifying motifs, and, collectively, in displaying Kranjac’s varied brushwork, color combinations and style. By contrast, Rustic Jazz, a large vertical diptych acrylic on canvas, from 1987, seems almost an anomaly with its warm red and green-inflected orange pressing onto an orange and green-inflected crimson rectangle – both sections surprisingly embossed with daubs of raised pigment – the whole eliciting a cry of “it pops!” from an admirer.
"Dark Encounter", 1982 - 1983, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 36 inches
Also especially noticeable are Kranjac’s black-suffused Dark Encounter with its surprising but well-placed touches of blue green and muted pink, and Dark Crimson, both sharing a wall and contrasting dramatically with the larger and smaller abstracts that use black as dry-brush effect. The more somber hues are not typical of Kranjac’s work, however, which tends toward livelier signature elements: uniform color masses, whether designed as similarly sized free-form swaths or as stacked color squares, and a distinct use of vertical zigzag lines – dare one analogize the doctor’s graphic to EKGs?
Kranjac, whose work has been exhibited in several galleries in the city, and whose striking, blue-hued Oceanscape (1983) appeared on the cover of a Hamptons weekly this past March, is nicely served by The Gallery at The Southampton Inn where the smaller works occupy the main downstairs corridor but also dot the conference rooms where most of the large acrylics can be found. Not incidentally, The Southampton Inn has been among the first businesses on The East End to welcome painting, drawing and photography, providing the area’s growing number of visual artists, many of them emerging artists, regardless of age, much-need additional venues – a separate gallery or just exhibition space.
Though Kranjac speaks of Raoul Dufy as a major influence in his love of art (oh those playful, bold blues), the suggestiveness is more of early American post-impressionists and modernists - John Marin, de Kooning, Prendergast. Dr. Kranjac may fondly be recalling a childhood sighting of a Dufy on the wall of his dentist. Back then the Met’s Cezannes ruled, at least until young Kranjac, barely into adolescence, discovered Freud in his local library – Totem and Taboo, to be exact, and was “awed by the depths of the insights.” It was like “Windex had suddenly been applied to my glasses,” he remembers. Ever since, he has been increasingly aware of similarities in the transformative powers of art and psychoanalysis – both involving study but also both appreciative of the need to yield to an inner “rhythm” about how to proceed creatively.
The word “rhythm” comes naturally to this multi-talented man who, since high school days, has also been playing jazz guitar. It was clearly painting, however, among all the arts, that claimed his constant and evolving attention, challenging him further to see how he could establish texture and mood with “the least [painterly] information.” The minimalist pieces may be, arguably, his most effective work, as in the color-restricted drawing Dune Pink, which allows the paper (typically white but on occasion, intriguingly brown or gray) to complete the composition. Though all the works at The Inn manifest mainly two styles, Kranjac says he actually went through a geometric period, which no doubt played an important part in directing him to do drawings and paintings as blocks of color set against background areas of subtle underpainting.
The exhibition runs through November 30th at The Gallery at The Southampton Inn, 91 Hill Street, Southampton.
For more information go to www.tomkranjacvirtualartgallery.com
Joan Baum lives in Springs and covers literature and the arts for print and radio.
Copyright © 2007 Hamptons Online · Site by Hamptons Online