From Malibu (With Love)

Hayton Oei
From Malibu (With Love) 
2021
Flashe and liquid acrylic on linen
55 x 145
$7,700

This work appropriates the language of Mary Weatherford to capture the temperature, mood, and colors of a sunset in Point Dume, Malibu in California. Set on the cliffs of Point Dume, this site is also a legendary figment of the childhood imagination as it is where Iron Man’s house is portrayed in the movie franchise. The freewheeling brushstrokes are an attempt to recreate the subconscious effects experienced by the artist as he stood entranced by the natural beauty of the sunset and reflects on his own nostalgia for his city of Los Angeles, and the smallness of his existence in the boundless cosmos. But it is the artist who ultimately prevails in this existential struggle between individual and natural sublime, for it is the artist who delivers this recreation and commits its ephemeral beauty to perpetuity, reflecting a deeply Romantic impulse to assert individual consciousness through the power of imagination. The mythical forms created here represent a merging of the artist’s Los Angeles identity, British Romantic poetics, and a continuation of Abstract Expressionism expressed by Rothko, Pollock, de Kooning, and Motherwell.

The composition is composed of paint, neon light and the draping of the neon light wire. The neon light mixes the paint color to create pulsating undulations of hue and intensity, recreating both the color of the Malibu sunset and the complex subconscious emotions of the artist as he admires its beauty. Just trying to arrive at the right paint colors, and the resultant combination of color with the imposition of the neon light, was an arduous process that represents the yearning for homecoming, and recreates lost memories of childhood in the city. It is an emotional outpouring of the artistic soul to reclaim belonging in a beautiful hometown.