A spiral staircase leads to artist Malu Tan’s second-floor studio in North Tryon, an industrial district in uptown Charlotte, N.C. Her building is a converted bomb shelter. The studio is not very big, she says, and it has just two windows. She rolled black rubber over the concrete floor. “It’s like a gym,” she says. The walls are white, covered with paintings and hanging objects.
She uses preliminary color sketches to get her colors right. These are not normal paintings, she says. You can’t layer and color your previous strokes. “My work is not that delicate,” says Tan.
Tan’s work is part of the show “In Between the Layers,” opening Friday, July 5 at On Center Gallery in Provincetown. It features works by Tan and artist Kevin Box. The show will be up through July 11.
Tan begins with a foundation, a small grid, to frame her paintings and uses inks and acrylics to introduce color. She lays that color and begins scraping. “It’s a dance,” she says. “I play a lot of music when I do it.” She turns on opera, ballet, ’70s disco, or rock and it creates a mood, she says.
Layering takes on new forms in Tan’s Just Give Me One More Day, acrylic and ink on multiple acrylic panels. We see the underpainting show through absences in the upper panel above it. The distance between the two panels creates a space to witness her organized abstractions. Scrapes and graphs, lines and blurred ink swells, continents drift over one another — is this Tan’s constantly shifting world?
Tan grew up in the Philippines and left for New York in her 30s. She moved to Charlotte seven years ago after raising a family in Wilton, Conn. She spent three years in London in between. Tan is the only one of her siblings to leave Manila for the U.S. Her family still lives in the Philippines.
She says that she paints to find herself and to find home.
Tan evokes the complicated emotions of leaving in a painting called Departure I. We see bold cobalt shapes and plumes of blood-red paint adhere to the white panel. Plaster cracks like dropped plates on top of paint. One drip bleeds down through graphed lines, almost like a musical note that has fallen off the sheet. The drop lands in a small pool of cracked plaster.
Vertical graphite bars at the top left of the picture plane have no gaps, giving the impression of a striped garment, something one could wear. A deep Prussian blue above the cobalt is central to the picture; the memory and leaving behind are present here. The physical loss is in this crimson — the unknown in this empty spruce. Underneath is deep red ink, like a cut that won’t stop bleeding.
In Yesterday I Saw the Sun Shining, we see two acrylic panels once again. It’s not that Tan’s materials are textural or have weight aside from the plaster. The colors are often light. The textural element comes from her organized scrapes and dabs, dots and charts. Underneath the first panel we see a scraped honeycomb resembling a beehive. Plumes of jade and six columns of pure yellow. Tan spreads a rake on burnt umber — or did she use a fork?
“I thought, what if I pulled out the layers and painted on double sheets of plexiglass,” she says. “I used both sides of the two sheets of glass and pulled out colors. You can see more of a layering, but they don’t physically touch. If you look more from the side, they’re more dimensional.”
In Everything’s Like Sunday, Tan controls the picture plane through addition and subtraction. Cracked plaster reveals the cobalt blue ink beneath it. Paint stamped on paint. Faint diagonals are etched on sand and burnt orange acrylic. Bold cobalt forms move forward, painted over the light. Clawed ink reveals a body of yellow. Orange ochre bleeds down the panel and stops at an arranged dot as if Tan aimed the drip.
Ahead is a landscape of raw emotion evoking a personal revolution. Ultramarine streaks onto the blue out of a cardinal red collar. A maroon grid traps a key lime shape. “I want my work to be more dimensional than flat,” says Tan. “Sometimes I make a grid — it’s my way of building.”
One can make out a path through this “Colorscape,” as she calls this series of paintings. Red veins inside cracked plaster at the bottom left resemble a handprint or a leaf pounded against the panel. Automatic graphite drawings overlay the paint. Although abstract, this painting feels more traditional in terms of balance. A faint rectangle lives behind unfinished shapes.
Tan’s Beneath the Moonless Sky evokes an earthly landscape and the boundaries of nature. She uses forest green, army green, and a stroke of raw umber, coffee-brown. Mocha acrylic is scraped under swirls of graphite. Unstable vertical lines point to the beginnings of construction.
We see tight, scraped angles and ballooning gestures of graphite pulled over bright sunshine yellow. Dots chart the painting, with thick plaster blossoms and cracks in the center like a ceramic flower tossed by someone alone after a bad date. There’s an excavation in Tan’s explorations. Her work makes you want to paint and get into the mess of it, try your own hand, then step back and see.
Tan is influenced by Joan Mitchell’s use of color and abstraction. She looks to Matisse for his use of color. German painter Anselm Kieffer’s dark paintings affected her work. “I’ve been able to explore them in depth because he had a show at the White Cube Gallery in London,” she says. “He has these massive installations.”
Tan received a certificate of painting from the Art Academy in London in her late 40s while her kids were in school. “It’s more a studio school than theoretical — it was about the act of painting,” she says. “I was in classes with a bunch of kids, and they all wanted to become professional artists. It blew my mind because I’m from the Philippines — my father had a rubber factory. It was never in my mind that art was something people did for a living.”
Tan initially studied banking. She and her sister started a leather handbag business with a factory in the Philippines. She left the business after art school.
“It started slow,” she says. “I joined guilds, met people, joined shows.” When she moved to Charlotte, all her contacts were back in Connecticut. “Things are different today because of the internet,” she says. “People are more connected. Now I get curators doing studio visits via Zoom.”
Tan currently has a show of abstract work and installation pieces at the Water Works Visual Art Center in Salisbury, N.C. “I have one painting, How Far I’ll Go, inspired by a Chinese scroll,” she says. “It’s four pieces of panels that join. The scroll is about a journey through time and space.”
She is game for almost anything. “I was walking and saw a ballet studio,” she says. “I said, ‘Hey, I’ll go for it.’ That’s how I started dancing.
“Artists usually have a specific series they’re known for, but I do other things. I like change. I like experimentation. I like being alive. I want my work to show the experience of joy.”
