Artwork
BURNEY FALLS
The Painting in the Rafters: Bernice Bing Essay by Jennifer Banta
What is the mystery? The mystery is the work in process. Visually, I sense a great order of things and attempt to transpose this mystery into a picture. I used to look for meaningful order in life, now I am accepting things as IS. That nothing is certain, and in my imagery is ever-changing. We are at an epoch of a brave new world, and my hope is that our views will change about how we see our world, not to stay with the things familiar, but to reach out for the unknown.
Bernice Bing, Artist Statement for the Triton Museum Exhibition, 10/18/92
My tiny office with the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center, perched above the SomArts Gallery, is a site for exchange, community, politics, laughter, and ambitious cultural production. SomArts, one of six city-owned cultural centers, has history in every crevice. The ineffable presence of those who came before pervades this space. Stored beneath the rafters above my desk, for example, was a 1980 painting by the first Executive Director of SomArts – painter Bernice Bing. Burney Falls was one of several canvases that she painted of this location in Northern California, sometimes called the eighth wonder of the natural world.
Bernice Bing, Burney Falls, 1980
Oil on canvas, 96" x 77¾"
I was told that Bing’s painting had been haphazardly propped up in the hallway until it was recognized and rescued to higher ground. The fact that Bing’s painting was stored in such a manner would seem to be at worst a high art crime, at best sheer neglect. I could not reconcile this lack of respect, yet it seemed oddly emblematic of the treasure trove that is SomArts, where high and low art commingle.
In 1997, the year before she died, her painting, Burney Falls (1965), was included in Asian Traditions / Modern Expressions: Asian American Artists and Abstraction 1945-1970, a traveling exhibition organized by the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University. Burney Falls (1965) closely references the one-stroke approach of traditional Chinese ink landscape painting, rendered in washed-out blues, browns, and greens. It is also deeply rooted in the natural scene in Northern California where it takes its name and the California Abstract Expressionism that Bing studied.
Bernice Bing "Burney Falls" 1965
Watercolor on paper, 24" x 32"
QUANTUM SERIES
Quantum 1 & 2
In the fall and winter of 1984-85, Ms. Bing visited Korea and Japan and traveled extensively in China, where she presented slide lectures on American Abstract Expressionism to art students. She studied Chinese calligraphy with Wang Dong Ling and Chinese landscape painting with Professor Yang at the Zhejiang Art Academy in Hangzhou. This experience has inspired the unification of Eastern and Western ideologies in her recent abstract paintings.
After serving over two decades developing community arts programs, Ms. Bing returned to the United States to concentrate on her art. In 1991, Ms. Bing was invited to do a one-person exhibition at the SOMArts Cultural Center Gallery, San Francisco (SOMArts), in which she presented new work. A retrospective of her work was presented at SOMArts in 1999.
Bernice Bing visualized the Quantum Universe as a universe that is constantly expanding and contracting. She utilizes this theory in her Quantum 1 and 2 series. Thus, the Quantum series expands by creating additional paintings and contracts by placing them into collections. The works were produced from 1985 until 1991.
Selections from interviews with Bernice Bing by Moira Roth and Diane Tani, August 13 and 24, 1991
Bernice remarked, "Somehow the concept of "quantum" for me has a lot to do with the new kind of thinking in my art. My most recent work responds to ideas about the quantum. It is only fairly recently that I have been reading about the New Physics: I was very inspired by The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra and the "Quantum Healing" by DeePak Chopra, MD, he was using the human body as a metaphor. I was inspired by both these concepts, the new physics and the human body.
During this period, I was planning my one-person Somar exhibition, and out of my senses, I conceptualized the Quantum idea visually. One aspect of quantum theory is that the particles of the sub-atom community can be either an entity unit in itself or become a wave (movement energy). I began painting each panel (unit) separately, which were visually Independent from each other. There was not an apparent relationship between each unit. However, an intuitive sense of the total image was maintained throughout the work in process. The visual elements which kept my focus of the total image involved-color, dynamic of calligraphic line/ideograms, and organic forms of nature."
"Chinese calligraphy has been evolving for six thousand years whereas in our western society we are but primitives experiencing a new aesthetic. In my abstract imagery I am attempting to create a new synthesis with a very old world."
Bernice considered this series important as it defines her work from 1985 forward from her travels and studies in China.
Quantum 1 in the SOMArts Cultural Center exhibition is black and white and comprises forty-five works, each 26 x 40 inches.
"So this Quantum Series will comprise ninety-nine individual black and white pattern panels to be installed on the wall of SOMArts, where each element will become part of the larger image. That is all I can say right now because the exciting part of it is that I have been working only on these individual pieces while keeping in mind the total outcome, yet the total will not be known until the installation." Bernice included forty-five Quantum 1 panels in the SOMArts exhibition. Thirty image panels, four black, and eleven blank panels.
Quantum 2 comprises color and twenty-five quantum panels, including two black, two red, and twenty-one color images; each panel is 26 x 40 inches.
