Pat Passlof

Pat Passlof was born in Brunswick Georgia in 1928, she idolized and studied with Willem de Kooning at the infamous Black Mountain College. Later, she took his advice and relocated to New York City, beginning a painter’s life. In Manhattan, Passlof continued to get painting lessons from de Kooning and became familiar with the characters infesting the 10th Street artists’ community. With these connections Passlof met the painter Milton Resnick, who she later wed. Resnick then introduced the youthful Passlof to the painting theory of Hans Hofmann, whose ideas, gathered in The Search for the Real influenced an entire generation of painters. The New York art scene of the early 50’s was rife with conflict, power, and personality. And it seems the Passlof was for a time caught in the tsunami, producing lean and ambitious, although somewhat derivative art.

Ionian (1956)

In an example of this early youthful work, Ionian, the upper right corner diminishes into a blue expanse, but this perception is quickly degraded by some form of object, laid flat by a pattern, that appears to enter the space from afar but spins the traditional perspective by bringing any reading to a stop as it is gouged by a thick black line. This line causes a sudden sharp change in the interpretation of the space by pulling the yellow and red striped object into the inner space and hammering it flat. De Kooning often created similar obstructions when he used collage to disrupt any fluid spatial view. something akin to a tabletop rises from the bottom of the canvas into the center of the image plane. This gives the viewer something stable to hold onto before the left side dissolves into a field of spotted, wild brush strokes that seem combine with and float above the virtual table. The rough strokes dissolve on the right into one of the two honest uninterpreted portions within in the work. The thick, white smear, in the lower right combines with crumpled and stained edges whose grimy greens and yellows holding the paintings corner one second and seem to slide under its phantom neighbor the next. The second subjective element locks into the surfaces far corner at the bottom right of the top left quadrant. This white form is surrounded and given heft by thick dark outlines. The shape itself, the paint layers, and the black, white and gray color palette would feel comfortable in one of de Kooning’s black and white paintings from the late 40’s. All of these parts; inside and out, natural and imaginary, pattern and undiluted expanse, all come together to shake a simple interpretation of space or to combine that reading with plastic interests to blast the viewer from a state of peace.

Sutbury 2  (1957)

Some paintings push the observer harder and deeper into the pool of abstraction. Sutbury 2 (1957) is a beautiful plane crash of a painting. But even the dappled and dirty grays that border the work on both sides before shooting into the middle contain enough deft to separate form and distance to create enough surface and emptiness in what would otherwise be a train wreck. On areas the surface paint is scraped away so the underbelly becomes an object. While in others object and weight are pulled apart when an upper layer is painted over a surface so carefully that the foundation becomes a structure and an integral part of the artwork. Rapidly applied strokes add to the urgency of the piece, as does the artist’s signature quickly scribbled across the bottom. These final elements borrow heavily from de Kooning, while the color combinations can be found in the important abstractions of Alfred Leslie.