Art Promeneur

The first thing Jonathan told me when I met him for this interview was the story of his previous job at Starwood Hotels. As Head of Design in charge of developing six different brands for the St Regis, Sheraton and Westin among others, he felt that when trying to shop for an interior not all parts were equal. One could choose and pick from a vast selection of good furniture lines (“you could trip over them….there were so many”), carpets, wall coverings ( “brilliant people doing modern products”) and other objects that could lend a patrician look to the hallways, lobbies and rooms of the hotels in his care. One thing was missing: good lighting. Referring to it he says” It is as if someone has created this black hole, this pit. There was no quality to it”. 

Due perhaps to the indispensable and democratic nature of electric power, lamps have always tended to be utilitarian rather than aesthetically pleasing. They come in all shapes from street lamp posts or recessed ceiling lighting to simple bulbs and neon tubes. They all seem to have one thing in common: they are uninspiring if not downright ugly.

 Upon leaving Starwood lighting stuck out in his mind as a sore thumb. Literally his brain lit up. His decision to fill what he felt was a gap came to him instantly. And so began his new career. Was his choice made by his nose for business or his eye for art? He did not vacillate when answering: “It was totally art on my part. I was truly exhausted”. He added: ”My position was very demanding and I was going to do the thing that made me happy, the thing I love”.

 There is a quality to Jonathan’s enthusiasm that forces you to give him your full attention. He is precise and articulate and even his phrases reveal his perfectionist nature. In the search for that elusive quality missing in lighting accessories, he turned for inspiration to the Beaux Arts school. It provided him with the historical support to articulate his lighting creativity in a modern interior. He began collecting antique lighting early on and always admired the heaviness and solidity of those artifacts. “You touch them and you do not feel they are going to break. They just have a permanence”.

 When he surveyed the horizons at the beginning of his new career he found three distinctive types of product on the market: the high quality and superminimal (Artemide), (“If you want that look, ultra modern, that is fine but it is not for every room”), reproduction antique lighting (“designers and manufacturers looking back to the nineteenth century…and doing them in the most cost-effective production methods”) and antique lighting proper (“the challenge with this is that things do not come in multiples”). This shrewd commercial scrutiny led me inevitably to ask him where did he place himself in this hierarchy. Was there a Jonathan Browning category? He neatly sidestepped a direct answer: “When I decided to design this lighting line I said, I am simply going to design what I wish I had designed in my favorite era, which is the turn of the century”.

He deploys his skill as a raconteur when describing his fervor for this period : “ I took History of Architecture at school ( Jonathan attended the Southern California Institute of Architecture) from the Egyptian times to the present and when I got to the École de Beaux Arts I had a meltdown, I just went beside myself with the beauty of those buildings, specifically those of Claude Nicolas Ledoux…they are so harmonious! Not just stripped down classicism, he was striking this outrageous balance between detail and minimalism…” 

As a newcomer into a world where questions related to the materials employed, the physical making of the article or practical knowledge seem to matter, he chose to push them aside and keep his mind on the design. He emphasizes his total absence of marketing research, his financial illiteracy of the new undertaking. And you believe him. His enthusiasm is unfeigned. “I did not know how much my stuff would cost to make. That was a big surprise to me. I did not know how to make my designs. I was going to design a collection that reflected my two sensibilities which are my big passions, my loves in the history of design: one is the École de Beaux Arts and the other industrial design”. Jonathan admires the implacable rigor the French apply to the neoclassical style through that school so influential in the United States architecture at the end of the nineteenth century. He adds: “it was the invention of the machine to make things rather than man that produces this fabulous minimalism that I also love. I wanted to put these two esthetics together in the blender. I have no interest in reproduction lighting”.

 Luckily the foundry he found rendered his vision impeccably “It was a total happy accident. Their work is so exquisite, it has museum quality. Everything I did after that fell in the same category”

Before meeting Charley for our appointment I was not sure what was going to be the subject of our chat. Charley is a well-known mural artist but he also paints somehow discreetly and rather marginally from the mainstream contemporary art market. He and his partner and associate Mark Evans have rendered much nobility to the waning art of muralism. They met 25 years ago and Mark was the catalyst which sparked Charley to further explore the richness of art history. Their murals grace places like the Stanford School of Education, the Monadnock building in downtown San Francisco and the Atlantis Hotel in Dubai sealing with their visual narratives the inspiring epic of those spaces. In their commissions they have drawn on Islamic arabesques, Baroque techniques and Mexican mid century muralism. No style seems to be too challenging or demanding. Their commercial success and brilliant craftsmanship has not made Charley dogmatic or overconfident. As it happens, it is the exploratory manner he dispIays in his paintings that intrigued me. I wanted to understand why somebody successful and gifted would spend his free time in the solitude of his studio after a full day’s work challenging and challenged by a white canvas. 

“I love to paint. This is the only thing I can do”. We are sitting in his studio bathed by the glorious morning light of a prolonged Indian summer in San Francisco. Charley has a modulated cadence in his voice that never strays no matter what he communicates. To love one thing and to be able to do it for a living bestows a blissful disposition on the lucky ones that can achieve it. “I was 15 when I sold my first painting and then got my first commission to do a portrait”. He claims he always thought he was going to make money from his artwork but was not quite sure what final form the work would take. “Was I going to be a portrait painter? I did not know”.

Charley comes from that crop of virtuoso students whose outstanding skills can be predicted early in art school. But he insists: “I was not a prodigy in the sense that I was doing this brilliant work at a young age. It took me a long time to get where I am now.” But I had to ask that nagging question: Why painting in his leisure time? was not his work as a muralist fulfilling him? “When I started painting murals it was a way of making a living. When I paint I do not have to cater to anybody’s taste or whims, so I have the freedom to explore”. Charley’s relation to both mediums brings to mind the idea of someone in a comfortable marriage keeping a seductive mistress on the side. He experiences a burning and vital passion when he stands in front of the canvas in his studio. 

His heterogeneous sources of inspiration do not point to any specific school or period, rather they remain open to what images flash through his mind. I asked him what painters inspired him the most and he was reluctant to give me a spontaneous answer. After some pondering he exclaimed “Francis Bacon. I love the way he applies paint and the way he breaks the surface on a canvas. It speaks to me. He is a painter’s painter”. There are echoes of Bacon in some of his works but none of the violence and suffering that the British artist elicits. His second choice was Matisse. I was surprised at this choice as Charley’s canvasses, unlike his murals, are restrained in the use of color. He does not feel particularly comfortable using it. “Black and white, brown and white, a limited palette”…As if he felt he had to explain it further he almost murmurs: “It gets out of control”.

 And now he has embarked in an unfamiliar approach: abstract art. It takes him away from his comfort zone. “I never tried minimalism before. I always have done just a narrative”. The new images are sumptuous and large, evocative and mature. Looking at his abstract paintings is like seeing an entirely separate sensibility at work. The exploration persists first and foremost with his skillful way of preparing the surface of the canvas. “ I do not use a brush for my canvasses. I only use it to remove paint or apply thinners. In the studio all the work is done with brushes. Here I work with rags and brayers.” Brayers? He uses lithograph’s brayers. He believes in the sweeping gestures of the instrument. The end result is a polished surface of pearly hue.

 The light is cool and soft. I feel he has not taken enough advantage of the glorious California light. I always experienced it as a magnificent gift of nature to artists. He wants to disabuse me.  “How about the light of the Mediterranean or Venice?” he exclaims. He confesses “I paint with artificial light. I paint in the evening. I have more control”. That word again.