Two Artists Thrive On Lines And Color

The two shows at Kehler Liddell Gallery — ​“Parallel Worlds,” by Robert Bienstock, and ​“L.A. Color, East Coast Weather,” by Hank Paper, up now through June 20 — hang well in the gallery together, unified by a love of strong lines and bold color. But Bienstock’s pieces are paintings and drawings, while Paper’s are photographs. Bienstock’s pieces chronicle the past year and a half. Paper’s are the documents of a lifetime of work.

So an audience of a couple dozen learned on the latest episode of SalonThrive, an ongoing artist discussion series supported by the ArtEcon Initiative and inspired by the Paris salons of the past. Each SalonThrive episode begins with a short film, in which the artists discuss their work; after the film, the Zoom audience has a chance to ask the artists any questions they may have. In this case, the discussion revealed how Bienstock and Paper followed very different paths in putting their parts of the show together — and how each artist admired the other’s work.

The title for Bienstock’s half of the show ​“reflects my sense, in many of my pieces, of worlds I’m discovering,” Bienstock said, leaning into its science-fiction overtones. As he discussed his pieces further, one intriguing idea emerged that for the artist, the pieces weren’t as abstract as they might first appear. The shape in one piece was inspired by Beijing Olympic stadium. A window ​“makes me wonder what is inside there.” Another shape struck him as perhaps an office building, a neighborhood.

Bienstock’s pieces in the show were mostly made in the past year and half, and they documented how the pandemic changed his artistic practice. He had been working on a more colorful piece when the pandemic began, and as the reality of life under the Covid-19 shutdown set, he lost the desire to work on it.

“I found myself going back to my roots,” Bienstock said, doing pen and ink line drawings. ​“For probably my first five years” as an artist, he said, ​“I was entirely black and white.” He settled into using color in backgrounds later. But ​“when I’m struggling for artistic direction, I go back to the black and white and it grounds me.” It’s where ​“the patterns crystallize for me,” he said, adding that he often does pen and ink lines on paper as a warm-up for a painting sessions.

At the beginning of the pandemic, he said, ​“it felt like the world was shrinking, doing less, doing with less.” While many felt a sense of uncertainty, Bienstock said he felt a sense of simplicity, of humility. He found inspiration in black and white lines as a ​“more modest artistic approach in a time when our lifestyles had become more modest.” In keeping with that word, he left the works unsigned, and even decided that there was no orientation for the pieces that he favored — the pictures could be hung with any side as the top.

Bienstock said that the shapes and lines conveyed emotional content. ​“Sometimes I’m feeling more blocky and linear. Sometimes my days are so chaotic that I want that structure. During the pandemic I went to heavy black lines…. There is some level of emotional presence. Sometimes it’s a little embarrassing to put up in the gallery because there are intimate thoughts there.”

Some of the pieces in the show were effectively journals; each layer of the drawing was done in a single day, in a single sitting. ​“I was thinking, you buy a nice little journal, and you put your ideas down every day, and hopefully it becomes a body of words.” The next day, he started by drawing inspiration from the previous day. He was also inspired by ​“Asian landscape scrolls, in that you can sit at one end and watch it unfold.” So he was able now to watch the days of the past year unfurl behind him.

Paper’s half of the show, meanwhile, covered much of his life, and ​“shows how I became the photographer that I did, moving from black and white to color,” he said. ​“I didn’t have this idea of East Coast and West Coast until recently”; he just had a lot of pictures of both. The West Coast is ​“a totally different world.” Comparing and contrasting the two was ​“a great way to sum up my life geographically.”

Paper was born in New Jersey, and ​“I hate the cold,” he said. In Chicago, where he moved next, it was also cold. ​“I was doing black and white. That black and white had to do with the weather,” he said. Then, he headed out to Los Angeles to try to sell a screenplay. He’d planned to stay for eight weeks and it became eight years. ​“As soon as I got to California, I discovered color,” Paper said. ​“It did not change the way I shot, though.”

By that Paper meant that he practiced street photography, always looking for a narrative. ​“I think every photograph should tell a story,” he said, or certainly hint at one. ​“There are several elements to it,” he continued. ​“It’s not only spontaneity — sometimes you need patience.”

In telling the stories behind his photographs, Paper revealed his own wry sense of humor. In a photograph of two surfers, he said, ​“what interests me is this little boy standing behind the surfer in admiration.” But ​“what is the surfer going to be when he grows up?”

Another picture came out of a stroll in downtown Los Angeles and see two men standing in an archway. ​“I walked past these dudes and I thought, ​‘I got to get this shot’” because ​“these guys look like the bulldog they’re holding.”

About another imagine of a meeting at a Hamden synagogue, Paper said ​“Judaism is not an organized religion, and that is the proof of that, I think.” In the end, as he looked over his photographs, he saw a comparison between the ​“new-agey, psychedelic California scene” and ​“losing your mind on the East Coast.”

Paper said he gets in close to take his pictures. His subjects can often tell what he’s doing. In the case of the two men with the bulldog, he recalled, ​“he’s looking me over. He’s scrutinizing me. I don’t care what the consequence might be.” In response to a question about whether anyone wanted him to delete a photo, he said he’d had parents ask him not to take pictures of their children, and once a man a bicycle followed him for a half an hour before peeling off.

“I just act natural, like I belong there. I have been lucky so far,” Paper said. ​“But there’s a little anxiety to being a street shooter the way I like to be a street shooter, which is up close…. There’s an element of danger,” and ​“it’s not so much that you overcome it as you learn to live with it.”

“I hope those aren’t going to be my final words,” he added with a laugh.

“Parallel Worlds” by Robert Bienstock and ​“L.A. Color, East Coast Weather” by Hank Paper run at Kehler Liddell Gallery, 873 Whalley Ave., through June 20. Visit the gallery’s website for its latest, expanded hours and other events. The next SalonThrive is scheduled for July 11; registration is free but participants must RSVP in advance.