Bryan Jennings The Land, The Sky
- Apr 6, 2025
- 4 min read
Written by Michael Klein, Owner & Director
Michael Klein is best known for his work and achievements in the field of contemporary art. As both a dealer and curator, he has had a long and distinguished career as a New York gallery owner and director, representing an international roster of emerging and mid-career artists. He became the first in-house curator for Microsoft Corp.
I saw his work first on Instagram, and in the new age we live in, a dialogue began, of course, online. He is based in the Los Angeles area, and I’m in Upstate New York. Real distance no longer matters, as we communicate online, sharing chats and images.
I am a great lover of landscape painting, Wayne Thiebaud, Alfred Leslie, Alex Katz, and in fact, organized an exhibition in the late 90s for the Asheville Arts Museum in North Carolina entitled Beyond the Mountains, Contemporary American Landscape Painting, including 27 artists. It had a national tour to six venues and a review in The New York Times. Living where I do, with vistas of the rolling hills of the northern Catskills and views of the Mohawk Valley, inspired me. Seeing Jennings’s paintings was now viewing another landscape entirely. Wide open skies, vistas of remarkable colors, and a series of intimate black and white landscapes I found stunning. Simple contrasts of black versus white distinguish land and sky. These images, derived from his years in England, are now a great memory since he resides on our West Coast. That light, that landscape, has helped shape his ideas and his works. It did when David Hockney arrived in LA in the 60s.
The black and white paintings, small in scale, began some 15 years ago. Painted using spatulas and knives, not brushes, moving the paint, shaping the paint. Jennings was interested in the physical character of black and white paintings and spent time looking at works by John Virtue, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning. Each one had developed a signature style in black and white. “And I,” Jennings said in a recent telephone call, “added a horizon line.” Door to the River is an homage to the de Kooning of the same title in the Whitney Museum’s collection. It is a tour de force of de Kooning as a masterful painter and the Abstract Expressionist’s own passion for landscape.
To this group of influences, one must add JMW Turner and Gustave Courbet, the European masters who took to landscape and made it monumental. Not simply through representation, but by bringing forth its emotive potential. Skies, clouds, wind, sun, all dramatically combined and composed.
And, with all this study and research, Jennings is 90 percent self-taught, as he explains. The basics of oil painting were learned from a class at Coastline College in Newport Beach. A 30-year career in insurance allows him some part of every day to be spent in his studio, a studio built in his garage, much like that of another California painter, John McLaughlin. Over time, color entered the picture. “Color,” Jennings says, “allows me to be more expressive.” And, like Joan Mitchell’s belief that she carried landscape in her, so too does Jennings. It’s not the physical character of a place, but all the emotional, expressive, and intuitive characters that landscape evokes in the artist and the viewer. The landscape is mitigated by the light of day, weather, and viewpoint, of course.
Case in point, two works illustrated here: Late Afternoon and Vibrations of the Day. In the first, all clouds and sky rest on the horizon line at the end of the day, when light begins to decorate the sky in shades of pink. The more recent painting is more extreme. The light has become our color, and the horizon becomes darker and seemingly overwhelmed by the sky.
Like the early black and white works, these are recollections of the sky, memories of what he has seen and experienced, and what strikes him as crucial to depict and describe. Like Mitchell, it is built on experience. Jennings added, “My aim is to have the viewer feel before they think. My work is about human emotions we all experience, love, loss, and everything in between. I’ve painted a lot of sunsets, but none of them are about the sunset.”
In a relatively short span of time, Jennings has mastered his art and his techniques. Now, as they say, the sky is the limit. His themes of sky and landscape never go out of fashion and have an infinite variety. I imagine the paintings will become more complex and more subtle too, and their scale will continue to grow as he sees fit to present his vibrant views of our world.
Read more from Michael Klein
Michael Klein, Owner & Director
Michael Klein's expertise lies in his role as a private art dealer and freelance, independent curator for individuals, institutions, and arts organizations. Today, Michael Klein Arts works with a diverse group of artists, estates, galleries, and non-profit institutions, providing management, curatorial, and other consulting services. At the same time, the company serves institutional as well as private collectors, focusing on developing collections of emerging, mid-career, and established artists. The company also organizes traveling exhibitions both in the United States and abroad.
