Serena Bocchino, Intersection of Graphic Art and Jazz; "The Romance Series"
John Eischeid
Imagine waking up one Saturday morning to find Jackson Pollock and Miles Davis
sitting in the living room, watching cartoons and chatting about their relationships
with others, their relationship with God, and the genesis of the universe. Such
is the work of Serena Bocchino: eclectic, imaginative, insightful and unique.
In her current and on-going Romance Series, she draws on feelings evoked by music,
responding to sound in paint and inviting her audience to respond to her work
in turn. The result is an audible yet visible art, in which swaths of color form
backgrounds like bass tones and harmonies, punctuated by the dots of rhythmic
cymbal crashes and laced with meandering melodies of dripped color. As the title
suggests, the series draws on her relationships with other people and with God,
relationships which she sees as common to everyone. As she writes in a statement
on the series, "I made art as most children do. The difference is that I
just kept doing it."
"My real excitement," says Bocchino, "is with the line."
She uses both vibrant colors and subtle hues, availing herself of a highly original,
playful palate derived from cartoons, pop culture and the chromatic subtleties
in the paintings of Agnes Martin. Bocchino’s current color schemes are more vibrant
than those of her earlier work; a lip-stick red streaks across the minimalist
Love, and lush greens grow against a backdrop of pale shades in Let It Grow.
The painter attributes this new vibrancy to her mother, who was also an artist,
and to the overwhelmingly colorful environment she created. "And,"
Bocchino says, "I just like cartoons."
Jazz is a major influence in this series, where Bocchino uses the nuances of
her diverse palate to blur the distinction of foreground and background. In Raining
Rhythms on Me and Symphonic Adventureland, lines piece come and go, sometimes
picking up where another left off, sometimes not. By working with such pure abstraction,
she elegantly and intuitively reveals this structural similarity between music
and painting, aptly rendering the musical compositions of Miles Davis and Charlie
Parker in the abstract language of Jackson Pollock, Agnes Martin and Joan Mitchell.
The avenue by which she arrived at this particular mode of painting is equally
subtle and mysterious: it was a gradual progression from the shape of an instrument
to the shape of the sound it makes. Rather than attributing this change to one
moment of inspiration, she describes the change as a gradual and perfectly sensible
exploration: "After grad school, I was looking for protagonists in my painting,
and it was actual instruments. I did a series on saxophones, then I abstracted
the saxophones, then, in the early nineties, I started doing abstractions."
While Bocchino captures the spontaneity and improvisation of jazz on the surface
of her work, there is method and process lurking beneath. "I get an idea,
and I have to explore it in more than one medium. That’s why I use drawing and
sculpture. It has to be an idea that I’m crazy about," she says. Rather
than merely thinking about her work, Bocchino thinks with it. "The drawings
assist me in working out color, composition, lines and shapes that interest me
and need to be explored and fully understood before I can go on to the next idea,"
she writes in a statement on the series, "The sculpture enables me to completely
see an idea as it is drawn in space."
This process of exploration lead to what she calls a "tangent series,"
a body of works that is related to the whole, but not within the same formal
or stylistic bounds. In addition to sculpture and works on vellum, the series
also includes a number of purely minimalist abstract works such as Love and Amen.
Even the choice of jazz demonstrates some degree of order and method. She alludes
not only to the music itself, but to its cultural and spiritual resonance, acknowledging
the role jazz played in breaking boundaries, challenging old forms and creating
new ones. "Jazz is freedom music, gospel music. It’s jazz because of the
idea of freedom and all the connotations that kind of work has." When asked
how she traverses the psychological distance between the music and her works,
she says simply, "I think that’s the spiritual connection. I really do.
Some people say, ‘Do you just put the tune on?’ But I think it’s more than that."
She also says that the series was not consciously about her relationship with
music, but inevitably the relationship was something that was addressed. That
such seemingly free association lends itself to order offers insight into the
manner in which she works: intuitively and unencumbered by paradigms.
Nearly all art now references or is interpreted in the context of that which
came before it in the same genre. Bocchino has gone one step beyond conventional
wisdom and looked outside the confines of canonized art history. The result is
not merely something new, but a new revelation of similarities which traverse
the boundaries of genre. "It’s like Charlie Mingus used to say to his wife,"
she says, "Something like, ‘I’m the musician, but it’s really something
else that’s working.’ You can learn technique, you can learn style, but
art is really a gift from God."
