Buoyed by Buddhism and jazz, artist will share abstractions
Daniel Berlin steps to the canvas with a vague idea of what to paint. His studio routine consists of streaming jazz and letting the abstractions come to him.
“I may have some of the latticework in my head but not the structure or the concept,” he says. “It’s exhilarating, on the razor’s edge. I’m going for the inscrutable.”
A week before his latest exhibit, which opens on Second Saturday (May 11) at the Beacon Artists Union (BAU), Berlin sat in his living room framing and bundling far more pieces than will fit into the gallery.
Even his hangings are improvisational. “It has to be done right, which means making the art come alive,” he says. “It’s easy to make good art look terrible.”
The show’s title, Brief Lives and Other Ruptures, hints at the vicissitudes of life that everyone faces, like loss, regret and physical deterioration. (Joan Harmon will also be showing her sculptures in Animal Dreams.)
Berlin has spent his career in the art world as a creator or behind the scenes at galleries and museums, including a stint as an assistant to pop star artist Red Grooms. “He showed me how and what an artist should be in all aspects,” Berlin says.
After growing up in Illinois, Berlin attended the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poets at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, aspiring to be a creative writer. Instead, he earned an MFA in painting at the University of Colorado Boulder and moved to pre-gentrified Williamsburg in 1984.
“We had it all — junkies, shootings, prostitutes,” he recalls. “But I also had a huge loft for $500 a month.”
Just before 9/11, he moved upstate with his pregnant wife to Accord, in the Ulster County center of what he called the Buddha Belt (because of the area’s many centers and retreats), where he built a house and studio.
Berlin, who navigates life as a Tibetan Buddhist, also constructed a meditation hut not much bigger than a phone booth. His countenance is quiet, serene and contemplative; he produces what he calls “pseudo Mandalas,” or devotional images.
Once he latches onto an idea in the studio, Berlin typically creates a series of works. At the new show, he plans to hang at least 25 of his Brief Lives monotypes, whose outlines evoke the Finger Lakes and feature at least four vertical streaks dominated by dark colors accented with shimmering contrasts. “Brief Lives #11” resembles five feathery corkscrews.
The artist will also display selections from other collections, including Scroll, a textured homage to the ancients, and Central Charmer, one of many series that overtly denote the painting’s center with a shape.
In Central Charmer, it’s a rectangle with a dozen slanted 45-degree lines sticking out, three to each side. But it could be a square, a five-point star, an oblique image or a silhouette of Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem.
Another grouping that emerged from the jazz-fueled sessions includes what Berlin calls “protection paintings,” a reaction to the 2016 presidential election that features menacing faces with sharp teeth placed at center frame and poised to bite.
Berlin sometimes works with watercolors or makes prints, but most of his output is oil-based. Dozens of silver and white paint tubes are piled atop one of his work desks.
His approach, he writes, “can be direct, raw, magnetizing and wakeful.” Or, it could lead to “an outright self-referential flop.” Surrendering to the spark while mindful of quality control, he seeks “that elastic moment where you recognize the space between your thoughts.”
“I’m looking for something between playful and disciplined, like what Miles Davis said about playing notes: It’s not what you paint, it’s what you don’t paint.”
BAU Gallery, at 506 Main St. in Beacon, is open from noon to 6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, or by appointment. See baugallery.org. An opening reception for Brief Lives and Other Ruptures and Animal Dreams is scheduled for 6 to 8 p.m. on Saturday (May 11), and Berlin and Harmon will speak at the gallery about their work on June 2, the final day of the exhibits.
