Triangles track across linen, each geometric shape its own image of brush strokes and texture. A structural, quilt-like layer of reds, blues, yellows, and browns 5 1/2 feet wide by 3 feet tall abstracts the layer beneath it.
Joshua Aster’s shop class stands at the entrance to the Harold J. Miossi Art Gallery at Cuesta College. The egg oil tempera piece is one of 24 paintings that make up Aster’s solo Physicality of Joy show on display at the school through Dec. 16.
The Inglewood-based artist said the lines that are visible through the layer beneath the triangles are a loose underpainting. In shop class, the blue lines are a display case that you might find at a butcher shop, while the red lines are a classroom with a table.
“What you see in the end is something else,” he said, adding that the scale of the room or case showing through the image gives the viewer enough information to pull them into the painting, while the triangles pull their eyes diagonally across the painting.
Similar to the underpainting in shop class, much of the work in the show is inspired by memories of place, places Aster’s been and snapshots of current events.
“There’s always going to be sort of a blur from your memory of the image in your mind,” Aster said. “And that allows me to create a new space that bursts through the initial memory drawing and passed through to this new moment, where the geometry of the grid is pulling out new visual excitement.”
Born in Brooklyn in 1976, Aster grew up there and in New Jersey, receiving his undergrad at Skidmore College and eventually his Master of Fine Arts from UCLA. He’s been painting for almost three decades and has run through all the media in that time: acrylic, watercolor, oil, before stumbling across egg oil tempera. It’s transparent, luminous, and allows for layering.
It’s an emulsion that Aster adds powdered pigment to, but the process begins with creating his canvas. He and his wife, Kristin Calabrese, (an artist and professor) own Stretcher Options, which makes custom canvases for artists—they mill their own wood, stretch the artist’s fabric of choice over the stretcher bars, and can prime it to get it ready for paint.
Aster starts with a linen canvas, which he primes with two coats of rabbit skin glue and three coats of a gesso ground (sort of like primer or glue) that includes linseed oil. After that, Aster can start painting. He shakes up an egg with an egg’s worth of water and an egg’s worth of linseed oil to make his emulsion. To make his palette, he puts out little drops of the egg medium and mixes each of those with his preferred color of powdered pigment.
“I just found that that surface and that medium has really allowed me to develop what Physicality of Joy shows,” he said. “For me, it slows down the process so I can focus directly on the colors, on the very small area on which I’m painting.”
The egg oil tempera dries quickly and shows every brush stroke. Aster treats each little triangle in his pieces as if it was its own painting. As he paints across the canvas, he said, “there’s this slow reveal that begins to happen as the entire surface becomes refracted.”
The end result is a mosaic of colors that you can look at for a long time, seeing more and more in the abstracted images he creates. He works on one painting at a time, and all of the pieces in Physicality of Joy were painted in the past year or so.
Although Aster’s work has always included structural elements, the triangles are a recent focus that he started painting just before the pandemic started. As the quarantine hit and everyone was stuck inside, “maybe the memories of place and this sort of room discovery was being investigated,” he said. The triangles started filling up the backs of shelves in the rooms he was painting, and then they started covering more and more of the paintings.
“They wanted to move forward, to sort of cover everything and sort of hold everything together as our world was falling apart,” Aster said. “You can be joyful, but there are terrible things going on—how do we negotiate that and how do they pull on each other to get a more psychic depth.”
Miossi Gallery Coordinator Timothy Stark said Aster is a painter’s painter, meaning he’s very interested in the process of painting and building systems of process into his paintings so that he can focus on the “painting itself rather than anything else.”
“The paint is translucent, so there’s no hiding anything,” Stark said. “Every mark that he makes is on display for the viewer to come up and investigate.”
That’s part of what Stark loves about Aster’s work: Everything that went into the painting is available to the viewer—Aster’s process is transparent, and his finished work draws you in. It’s fresh and original, Stark said.
“I think that there is a larger kind of conversation around these works with Josh and understanding memory and his artistic attempt to kind of intermesh and make sense of memory and make sense of social events that are happening,” Stark said, adding that the paintings enable and challenge viewers to take their time with each work. “You go from needing to visually figure it out to just existing with it. … existing with the color relationship, existing with the feelings. … You kind of need to relax into it.” Δ
Editor Camillia Lanham is existing with her feelings. Send relaxing tips to clanham@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Nov 10-20, 2022.