	Artistic Biography There are several different essays on Dan Christensen and his work.
	Dan Christensen By Eric Ernst 2003
	"Artists, Not Ideas, Are Focus At the Parrish" By Eric Ernst - Southampton Post 19th Dec 2002
	*Essay extract from catalogue of Dan Christensen's Oct/Nov 1994 show* *at Gallery ISM in Seoul, Korea* By Dr. Kenneth W. Moffett Director of the Museum of Art Ft.
	Dan Christensen - 'The Circular Paintings' by: James Monte
	A NOTE ON DAN CHRISTENSEN’S PAINTINGS by: James Monte
	TERRY FENTON an article on Dan Christensen

	Dan Christensen By Eric Ernst 2003
	There's an unbridled exuberance which emanates from the paintings of Dan Christensen that reflects a reverential awe with the objects of the world around us that are usually more felt than seen. Appearing as momentarily captured abstract images of nature, ones that appear stationary enough for us to capture their essence, they are also as unceasing in their movement as the constellations in the sky, the lazy flight of a firefly, or the sound of a saxaphone twisting a musical note into the wind. Conjuring mysteries out of revelations, he creates a sense of an almost child-like excitement in his use of space, light, and color that is the realm of those who never acknowledge the inevitablility of losing our sense of wonder. Perhaps one of the most entertainingly adventurous artists working today, Mr. Christensen utilizes a vocabulary of images that is constantly challenging the constrictive limits of stylistic categorization. Balancing the delicate simplicity of minimalism with the confidant and aggressive emotionalism of the action painters, he creates a certain tension within the picture plane that can be superficially jarring while nevertheless bucolic and tranquil beneath the surface. In no small part, this is due to his masterful marriage of line and color that allows each to create their own flow and which becomes a visual manifestation of improvisational and rhythmic motion. In "Late Lola" (acrylic on paper, 2001), Mr. Christensen uses undulating white linear forms that rhythmically pulse and sway, seemingly about to break free of the picture plane but which nevertheless continually focus its intensity inward. This sense of harnessed energy is accentuated by the presence of a rather stoical geometrically architectonic shape that anchors the composition without being static or ponderous and a deep red ground that helps emphasize the symmetry and proportion of line and mass. Conversely, in "Carriage" (acrylic on canvas, 2002), the artist allows those same undulating white lines to actually stretch beyond the limits of the canvas, creating movement beyond what the viewer can actually see and into realms that can only be imagined. The image reflects a dynamic sense of movement that is further emphasized by the circular forms in the lower portion of the canvas which give the effect of east-west motion, as if the image were speeding across the surface of the work. Similarly, in "Serpens" (acrylic on canvas, 1968) the artist uses bands of interlocking ribbons of color that weave sensuously across the picture plane establishing a languid but seemingly purposeful rhythmic flow. Rather than dominating the composition, however, the contrast between these bands of brilliant pigment and the blue and red washes in the far background serve to draw the viewer's eyes into some indeterminate point between the two that one is cognizant of, but which is invisible to the naked eye. Throughout these works, however, what makes Mr. Christensen's use of line and color to create his rhythmic composition so effective is his intrinsic understanding of the use of light as an integral component of the work rather than something which simply highlights another element. As a result, he is able to express movement and emotion that strikes the viewer on an unseen, almost subliminal level. This is particularly true in works such as "Ice Rider"(acrylic on canvas, 1997) which pulses with an energy only partially imparted by the artist's use of expressive circular brush strokes that dominate the edges of the pictoral composition. Instead, its emotional power is drawn from his ability to create a sense of forceful presence from the luminescence that seems to emanate from within the colors themselves but that never seems to overwhelm them. They impart a certain intensity that is visually arresting but never harsh or glaring and the painting echoes with the words of the poet Henry Vaughan who wrote I saw Eternity the other night Like a great ring of pure and endless Light. All calm, as it was bright. Eric Ernst 2003
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	"Artists, Not Ideas, Are Focus At the Parrish" By Eric Ernst
	Over the past few years, the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton has created an identity marked by an extraordinary attention to developing exhibitions that were as much curatorial statements as elemental displays of artwork. While most often thought-provoking and edifying in terms of their intellectual depth and scholarly approach to artistic issues, this practice has occasionally led to the thesis of a given exhibition actually overshadowing the works within in. Individual pieces can become obscured by a blinding haze of psycho-historical musings and curatorial conjecture, leaving the artist as little more than a peripheral figure whose work is presented primarily to prove someone else's point. Happily, this is not the case in the current exhibit. Curators Alicia Longwell and Katherine B. Crum have created a simpler context in presenting what amounts to three separate exhibitions of leading East End Artists whose work stretches chronologically from the 1950s through the present day. Bereft of editorial or curatorial overview beyond the observation that they represent three generations of the artist community of the East End, the exhibit is direct and straightforward in illuminating the diverse imaginations and styles that exemplify each artists work. Dan Christensen, who moved to the Springs back in 1969, has always reflected a certain purity of spirit to other artists of the region, not simply because of the quality of his paintings, but also in his own innate sense of direction, which has allowed the work to continually evolve and develop without being anchored to what is commonly referred to as a "signature style." Whether a remarkable act of courage and vision or an artistically petulant manifestation of ego, this has flown in the face of art world dogma, which practically requires artists, should they crave fame and fortune through their work, to develop a certain "je ne sais quois" that immediately allows a viewer to identify a work by a certain artist at a glance. Whether or not this dictates that an artist will be consigned to a lesser plateau in the annals of art history is, to my mind, hopelessly superficial and immaterial. For those such as Mr. Christensen, the issue is the vision of the moment, without worrying about whether it fits into a convenient category created by people who themselves have never picked up a paint brust. That being said, the work in the Parrish exhibition does, in fact, reflect a continuous fascination that has transcended any sylistic evolutions in Mr. Christensen's output. This has to do primarily with his use of light, which is as much of a component in the structure of the paintings as the actual application of pigments to canvas. As much as Ingres bellowed about line and as much as David bowed to color, Christensen leads the viewer to pay homage to light, not simply as a component that high-lights a more important element, but as an integral aspect of the structural composition itself. This is especially true in works such as "Untitled" (acrylic on canvas, 1968), "Sarajevo" (acrylic on canvas, 1969) and "April Blue" (acrylic on canvas, 1995) in which the use of light transcends being simply an atmospheric component and instead takes on a sense of power and physicality that is nothing less than masterful. Even in the paintings that work from a darker pallette, however, such as "Malagasie" (acrylic on canvas, 1981) and "Greystroke" (acrylic on canvas, 1970), Mr. Christensen is able to conjure an inner luminescence that creates an understated, though decidedly exhuberant, ambiance.
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	*Lauderdale, Florida Reprinted from the catalogue of* *Dan Christensen's October/November 1994 show at Gallery ISM in Seoul, Korea* - By Dr. Kenneth W. Moffett Director of the Museum of Art Ft.
	Dan Christensen is one of America's finest abstract painters. In his career of almost thirty years he has demonstrated mastery, consistency and a willingness to continue to challenge himself. He has done many different series in a wide variety of styles. In his current pictures he uses the image of a circle and it is these which make up the majority of the pictures in this show. They should offer a Korean audience easy access to his work. The circle is perhaps the most arctypal of all visual forms. Children's first drawings are attempts to close lines into circles and the circle is one of the earliest images made by man, being found on objects etched over 30,000 years ago. The word "mandala", is Sanskrit for "majic circle" and denotes an image of a circle used as an aid to meditation. Along with light, the circle is the most apt symbol of oneness, eternity and perfection. As such, it is central to all religions and mystical philosophies like that of Plato. The west, with it's rationality and belief in resurrection has stressed the right angle, the cross. But the circle very often occurs with it, as in the Geek and Celtic crosses of in the symbolism of baptism. However, it is the East which has made the circle central in all of its great religions: Hinduism, Taoism and Buddhism. Modern art as an abstraction from descriptive realism began in Europe and arrived quickly at geometry, cubism and with Mondrian, the right angle. Up until this point modern art remained true to its western origins. (1) But after World War II, modern art converged with Eastern art, revealing itself as not an abstraction or reduction so much as pure lyricism, as solely a personal feeling for an idiom or a medium like Far Eastern ink painting and calligraphy. Modernism now offered pure lyricism on a monumental Dan scale and in the full bodied medium of paint on canvas. (2) It was at this point in modern art that the circle emerged in both the East and the West side by side with the freest of free form, calligraphy like that of Jackson Pollock. So, for example, Jiro Yoshihara, founder of the Japanese Gutai movement in the fifties, is best known for his huge canvases which look like the famous zen symbol for enlightenment, the Enso, a single circle done as one free hand brush stroke. Christensen follows Western tradition in his emphasis on light , color and strict geometry. He places luminous concentric circles in a square, He wants to present parallel bands of different hues in a powerfully focused, even hypnotic way, without any distracting design interest. Yet, despite their formal rigor, chromaticism and painterly values. Christensen's circles are very like a religious mandala. They, too, ask for our full attention and contemplation They, too, offer spiritual elevation, even exaltation. In addition, they have the authority of large physical object hanging of the wall, and they contain a sense of freedom, a reference to the artist, which is characteristic of all lyrical traditions, both East and West. (1) Robert Delauney is the only one of the early modernists who favorer the circle. (2) Life size or over life size cursive calligraphy was done in China at least as early as the Tang Dynasty. By Dr. Kenneth W. Moffett Director of the Museum of Art Ft.
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	Dan Christensen - 'The Circular Paintings' by: James Monte
	THE CURRENT EXHIBITION of Dan Christensen’s paintings at Salander-O’Reilly Galleries illustrates the logical development of the work of this gifted artist to it’s present fruition. The last year of his career has proven to be one of the richest. Perhaps the reason for this circumstance lies in the concentration the artist has paid to the works produced over the past four-year period. For the most part, the images of these recent paintings are circles bleeding outwardly into further encircling shapes. In this, Christensen has discovered a format that he feels comfortable with, and one that provides him with the freedom for his concentration on the larger issues of picture making, such as color, surface and scale. An artist’s desire to eliminate the concern for subject matter, conventionally speaking, is nothing new to the history of art. The liberation of certain artist’s from the burden of investing energy and concentration in that which is unimportant, subject, is the motive which lead painters including Constable in his canvases of Helimgham Dell, Cezanne, in his pictures of Mount St. Viictoire and Monet, in the numerous compositions of his garden, to use the same motif repeatedly. The best of Christensen’s recent pictures are overpainted time and again using sprayed, mist-like color. The surfaces become dense with continuous overpainting, and grainy if one stands close to them. As one moves away, the color nuances rise to the surface, informing the final color effect on the picture plane. Such seemingly divergent yet simultaneous effects of delicacy and rich painterliness are achieved only through the application of coat upon coat of finely misted paint. In a sense, the color in these recent paintings could not have been achieved through overpainting with traditional brush and knife technique. The fully aerated particles of paint can be deposited with a spray gun so that underlying hues rise to the surface despite numerous overworkings. Traditional glazing and scumbling does reveal and enhance underlying color. However, it cannot reveal as many layers of differing hues as can the spray gun method. One gets the sense that Christensen got what he could from simply misting the spray on in thin layers in the first of these recent paintings. In later works, he challenges that method by constructing and containing color and building outward with more and more layers of paint. Looking back to pictures painted as early as 1966, one senses certain continuities within Christensen’s work. A 1966 canvas recently retrieved from storage and, at this writing, stapled to the artist’s studio wall, reveals his early involvement with rich color, seemingly atmospheric, and yet without precedent in nature. Individual blocks of color laid out like punch card holes float on and in the painted surface. Masses of rectangles are there to be looked at, yet the painting has little to do with geometry. To get the right nix of tone, color and surface resonance into this painting, hard work is a given, and yet the youthful artist accomplished the feat without a labored or overworked surface. There is an elegance, a gravity, in this painting that is to be seen again in the spray paintings of 1967-69. Some sprayed pictures of the late 1960s contain stacked loop shapes that repeat regularly, such as the painting,”T.C.”, in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Within others the sprayed lines become calligraphic, describing arcs and vine-like shapes. As in recent circular pictures, colors bleed out from overlays of different hues. It was within these paintings that Christensen broke with simple color combinations and pushed high-key color all over the canvas surfaces. An excellent example is the painting “Grus”, 1968, in the collection of the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. Christensen stopped the sprayed loop paintings abruptly in 1969. What came instead were paintings stapled on top of indoor/outdoor carpet, and in turn stapled on top of hardwood flooring. The spray gun and motor driven pump were put in a studio corner. Christensen began a group of paintings later called the plaid series. What is true of these pictures is that they represent a very unique contribution to the history of pure abstraction. Rather they are evolved from the chance procedures of American artists such as Gottlieb, Rothko, and Motherwell. The layout of Christensen’s paintings was seldom predetermined. Colors wee premixed, but tools such as paint rollers of various sizes and window-washer’s squeegees were ready as if they were a batch of small artist’s brushes in a clay pot. Drawn and painted lines of color became three feet by twelve feet in length and width. Shapes and colors intersected at right angles and yet most were done spontaneously. There is a nervous, quirky vitality in these pictures seldom seen in geometric painting before or since. Christensen seemingly reacted against the minimal art of the time with these pictures. Much of minimal art in the 1960s and 1970s depended on a repetitive dullness in color, structure and layout. He introduced a freshly conceived approach to geometric configuration, a necessary antidote to that all-consuming dullness. If Christensen reacted to minimal art with the plaid series, he reacted to his own past with the white and brown slab paintings, which followed between 1971 and 1975. Both series were done in the same manner and with the same tools as the plaid series. Hints of color emerge at edges of squeegeed slabs of white pigment. The drawing and shaping with paint allows previous layers of color to pop up in the paint substance is moved and scraped away from the underlying layers. There is no geometry here. Instead, there are crossed layers, shapes coming through with small fluid ridges of pigment defining those shapes. They are allover paintings in the same sense that Pollock and Still produced allover paintings. One thinks of Miro’s large abstract murals and easel paintings as precursors as well. The difficulty of seeing and thus achieving aesthetic success in the white and brown series is high. The shapes and colors seem at times ghostly, hidden under veils of paint. And, once again, when Christensen felt he had attained what he could from these two groups of paintings. He set about for a major change in the work. Between 1976 and 1984, what occurred within the artist’s paintings is less easily definable than what happened before and since those dates. The heavily painted slab pictures allowed the artist to take advantage of every surface incident of the ongoing painting activity. The accumulation of paint over paint is what gives these paintings their ghostly facture. The general loosening within the process of painting the white and brown slab pictures led to the painterly abstractions to follow, and yet the change is less fundamental than it first appears. The later pictures are in most cases filled with very graphic images—thin, loose calligraphy opposing large, loosely shaped areas of color. Other shaping methods include vertical tree-like structures with large areas of color hanging like sails from branch-like shapes. Many of these pictures have deliberate dark and light contrasts in addition to carefully adjusted color relationships. These paintings forego the allover paint handling of earlier work and are conceived as scattered large and small color fragments that, when the work succeeds, come together as a whole. Generally the wholeness works within the rectangle and does not visually push at the top, bottom, and sides of the painted surface. Yet another side of Christensen’s artistic personality emerges within this body of work. A shaping of thickly painted color turns into a fantastic creature, in one instance a goggle-eyed amphibian emerging from a luminously painted ground. The power of this painting and others like it appeared, Christensen remarked, “…as just part of the painting process.” Within the latest paintings from 1985 to date, this creature-like form continued to appear. The early, centered ellipses from the mid-1980s sometimes seemed to be faces without specific features emerging from the highly keyed color grounds. In talking with Christensen about this occasional presence within the work, he seemed unfazed and accepting. Meanwhile, the ellipse shapes became heavier with layered paint and the figurative presence was occasionally seen. In certain instances these recent spray paintings recall the abstract fantasies of Miro’, in others the disc shapes of Gottlieb. Like their precursors, the plaid paintings, these current circular paintings keep slipping out of the iron embrace of geometry. It is, of course, part of the pleasure of good painting that it eludes the labels and descriptions of those who try, year after year, to categorize and thus quantify it. Christensen’s art has happily slipped the entangling nets.
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	A NOTE ON DAN CHRISTENSEN’S PAINTINGS by James Monte
	Inside an art storage warehouse in l967, I was shown an odd yet compelling painting. The work was by Dan Christensen; the dealer was Nick Wilder. The layout of the painting consisted of parallel rows of small, thin rectangles, dozens of them, on a piece of canvas in the neighborhood of 200 inches in length. The rectangles bunched up together and opened out in a curiously random way. The random pattern plus the uniform rows kept the painting moving. It didn’t have the one-look-and-you-got-it quality of too much high art of the period. Another characteristic the painting had was a subtle atmospheric presence. The bars of color were not uniformly painted, nor was the color ground. That particular painting is not in the current exhibition at the Vered Gallery, East Hampton, New York. A work on paper from the same period is. During the latter part of l967 Christensen began spraying the paintings that were to become known as the loop pictures. The series ended in 1969 and was shown in the artist’s first New York exhibition at the Andre Emmerich Gallery. It was this body of work that brought Christensen critical success in the American and European art press, and also critical praise from reviewers in New York Magazine, Newsweek and Time magazine as well. The spray pictures were made with the kind of free gesture one associates with calligraphy. By varying color and then misting color over color as the picture developed, the artist achieved delicate surface change, giving the illusion of a kind of high keyed supra-landscape space. During the twenty odd years following the completion of the loop pictures, it becomes apparent that what the varied approaches Christensen used have in common is de-emphasizing of drawing and layout. What is stressed is color interaction in combination with subtle space articulation. Each subsequent series including the Plaid series 1969-71, the White paintings 1971-73, the Brown paintings 1974-75, as well as the freely shaped biomorphic abstractions 1976-84, and the recent spray paintings 1985 to; date, depends on similar underlying pictorial concerns. The so-called Plaid paintings, I believe, bear out this notion. At first glance they appear in the tradition of American geometric abstraction. In some ways they are, but fundamentally they are different. This group of pictures was painted flat on the floor with various sized paint rollers and, in some cases, without benefit of masking tape or pre-arranged layout. Completed in the period 1969-71, the pictures have a spontaneity rarely achieved in so-called geometric abstraction. Why this is so, and how these pictures came about is the subject of a much longer piece of writing. Suffice it to say, the arrangement of Christensen’s studio setup was crucial in creating the final look of these pictures. Premixed buckets of acrylic and enamel paints alongside trays, rollers and industrial brushes gave the artist’s studio on Great Jones Street in Manhattan the look of a newly set up small factory. “Aegean Porch” was completed in 1971 and at 6’ x 15’ rivals the size of the real thing. It’s sea-green ground is overlaid with bands of black, tan and blue each parallel to the painting’s length. A raw sienna-like brown post of color and a thin, light red post completes the color shaping. The tan and black stand in for land and sea demarcation. The blue is a surrogate deck. The absence of a lintel atop the brown and red posts allows the eye to wander freely in the upper and middle portions without constraints. This painting gives the viewer a position or place from which it can be viewed. For want of a clearer explanation let’s call it post and lintel. All four sides are used so that the picture is seen into; then one is drawn back to its flat surface. Less a gestalt exercise and more like a transition from pattern (plaid) to land or seascape (depth). An exhibition such as the present one, covering as it does more than twenty years of work, is ideally the domain of our museums. But insofar as recent American painting is concerned the 1989-90 art season has seen the beginning of museum quality exhibitions in privately owned galleries. Whatever the cause one should be grateful for the occasion to be able to see paintings of this caliber.
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