Steuart Pittman Paints in a Personal Language of Watery Abstraction

Steuart Pittman loves a hard edge. In all his pared-down abstract paintings, whether they’re large or small, oil or acrylic, the Oakland artist creates a precise demarcation between background and “object.” Hard edges solidify simple shapes — no matter how mysterious they are — into objects with a firm reality. Pittman’s shapes are a personal language, plucked from memories and real-life encounters, now scattered like clues throughout his Traywick Contemporary show Les Cheneaux.

The show title comes from a specific place, a chain of islands in Northern Michigan that Pittman grew up visiting with his family. (In a show this reserved, text is another morsel of precious information.) Trying to orient myself to this reference point, I zoom out on the map, looking for a nearby city or landmark. Finally, about five clicks out, I recognize the Upper Peninsula and the nearby Canadian border. This is a world away from the Bay Area.

Les Cheneaux archipelago, via Pittman’s depiction, is a place of horizons, flashing details and slightly muted hues. Befitting the show’s watery themes, taking in Les Cheneaux is a bit like beachcombing. Paintings hang high and low, in small clusters and along a hip-high shelf. What at first seems to be a uniform set of materials reveals itself, through close inspection, as a range of paint types and surface textures, as in Ice, an alkyd painting on plexiglass.

By the front door, the bold Dardevle enlarges the red-diamond pattern of an iconic fishing lure, a tiny bit of graphic design meant for fish eyes only. But we’re snagged too. There’s playfulness here — and underlying melancholy. Bits of nature are presented in isolation (Minnows reduces the fish to silver slivers on a green background) or as simplified line drawings (Loon and Foxtail are Pittman’s sole excursions into sketchy oil pastel).

Even paintings that depict what look like a congregation of sails or two boats meeting on the water are stoic in their simplicity. One gets the sense that this place has left an indelible mark on Pittman, but that those memories are tinged with sadness. Wedge is a dark cocktail glass with a quarter-circle of lime perched on its edge. Pilings is a tan battlement against a burnt red background. (In a quote in the show announcement, Pittman acknowledges his own family history is layered atop the homeland of the Anishinaabek people.)

The most somber work in the show is Marquette, a small shadow-box construction of oil on panel. The work is entirely horizontal: a dark gray sky, a strip of dark green (Marquette is the largest of the Les Cheneaux islands), a thin line of bright pink, and a liquid gray green. In some zones, Pittman creates a brushy texture; in others, the wood remains smooth.

Above and below, light and dark. Works in the show tend toward doubles. This is most notably the case in the framed diptych Hessel / Cedarville, a geometric design that represents, possibly, the character of the two towns north of the islands. I find myself looking up more titles. Is Pitkin a reference to a gift shop halfway up the peninsula? I learn about the Soo Locks connecting Lake Superior to the lower Great Lakes. But other references remain opaque: the Josef Albers-influenced Innisfree; the tiny flag-like Pike; what the two ramp shapes of Sloop have to do with a single-masted boat.

And that’s great. A show that overexplains itself isn’t half as rewarding to spend time with as Les Cheneaux is. Nobody walks along a waterfront hoping to come upon a pre-made pile of beautiful rocks and shells. It’s the peering and finding that makes beachcombing worthwhile, along with all the quiet, contemplative time such undertakings — including the adjacent leisure activities of fishing, boating, birdwatching, etc. — allow.

Pittman’s great accomplishment here is to create a show that submerges viewers in references to a time and place we will never have access to firsthand. But the feelings his paintings evoke are familiar, hard-edged solid, and absolutely real. There are “lures” hidden throughout Les Cheneaux, custom-made to tap into our particular stores of nostalgia and unearthed family dynamics. A skilled fisherman, Pittman hooks us in, again and again, for a closer look.

‘Les Cheneaux’ is on view at Traywick Contemporary (895 Colusa Avenue, Berkeley) through May 17, 2025.