art 26 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY january 16-22, 2025 www.montereycountynow.com Monterey Museum of Art staff like to look back at their most successful exhibits and have those artists return—with new material, perhaps on a different artistic stage. Sometimes the retrospectives reach as far as 30 years into the past. That’s the case with The Persistence of Color II by painter Lucas Blok and photographer Jeffrey Becom, one of the four winter exhibits at MMA. The show is associated with a similar exhibit in the same space the artists held in 1999 titled The Persistence of Color. The two colorists and friends for 50 years refuse to be interviewed separately on their work. During the exhibit tour with both it quickly becomes clear why. They have the ability to talk about one another’s art with less reservation than when they describe their own. “It’s a long process; I watched it,” Carmel Valley-based Becom says about his friend’s work, a solitary process of making the colors work. Blok’s pieces are geometric; the colors come from his mind or are inspired by music played by his wife—and there is a sense of music about his pieces; tones are as important as lines, and Blok experiences a sort of synesthesia of sound and hue. “His study of color looks at how color structures the meaning of reality in various cultures,” Carmel-based Blok says about Becom’s photographs from around the world. He has been studying and seeking color in the most remote places. It’s a school day, and students are moving through the interactive color maze that Blok and Becom built together. There are large colored vertical rectangles of plexiglass installed in the room. Touring the labyrinth of color possibilities, a viewer can immerse in green that feels as if you inhabit the bottom of the ocean, or pink like a candy store dream. Each color can affect mood, play with nerves and stimulate imagination. The students are giggling, going one direction then the opposite—a different play of colors blaring from the white walls and white floor. It’s not color that brought Becom and Blok together. They worked at the same gallery in Monterey in the 1970s, but developed a love of colors separately. “There’s nothing like a favorite color,” Becom says. “It has to do what’s next to it. “Every color is terrible or great depending on what’s next to it,” Blok confirms. Other than that, their work is different. While Blok works from his studio, Becom has been seeking colors from Italy to India. With his wife Sally Aberg he published two books on color: Mediterranean Color and Mayan Color. “The painting isn’t finished if you don’t look at it,” Becom says. As he explains it, light doesn’t exist without someone looking at it. The viewer activates the purple, creates the joys of yellow and the energy of red. Some of Blok’s works play multidimensional tricks, also courtesy of color. If there’s a motif that repeats in both artists’ work, it is a portal. In Blok’s art, that’s the rectangular sending us inside the painting—a sort of tunnel toward something mysterious but important. In his photography Becom also loves to capture images of doors, the front of the houses, the shabby walls between them. Once an architect, Becom has recently become the president of the Carmel Art Association. Each of his pieces is connected with a story, with hours of waiting for someone to pass by, for a car to move—always ready with the camera in hand. In his photographs people don’t play a role, unless maybe as shadows. Animals are privileges. In one of the photographs we see a monkey working at the news stand in Peru. It wears a pink uniform. “Color is life, dead things have no color,” Becom says. His statement is followed by a discussion of the mourning color in culture, the Catholic black of the West and Asian widows in white. Wandering around remote cities and villages around the world, Becom finds houses in Mexico painted red and yellow because of the old local fear of witches. There’s another photograph of a young man in a leopard costume in a casual pose. He was dressed for the jaguar dance, considered a Mayan tradition. “I haven’t seen such colors in the U.S.,” Becom says about his need to discover cultures via its palette. Despite working with bold colors, Blok is seriously in love with the Monterey County array of colors and how they work together. “I go places for fun,” Blok says, emphasizing the joys of tourism without work. “Otherwise, I’m in my room, working in slow motion. There are issues I work through color.” Winter 2025 Exhibition opening reception happens 5-7pm Friday, Jan. 17. Monterey Museum of Art, 559 Pacific St., Monterey. On display until April 27; regular museum hours are 11am-5pm Thursday-Sunday. $15/ general admission; free/students, youth 18 and under, military, CalFresh recipients. 372-5477, montereyart.org. Hue to You Two artists explore the role of color separately, but show their work together. By Agata Popęda “Color is life. Dead things have no color.” Painter Lucas Blok (front) and photographer Jeffrey Becom (background) are sharing museum space for the second time. The first occasion took place 30 years ago, in the same gallery. Daniel Dreifuss Lucas Blok Jeffrey Becom
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