The Museum of Ventura County has acquired Big Platter, a 27 foot wide tapestry that features the promenade near Surfer's Point in Ventura. The work was installed in November 2020 and will be kept on permanent display.
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| Big Platter | Installation view - Museum of Ventura County |
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| Big Platter | Installation view - Museum of Ventura County |
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| Big Platter | 87 x 330 inches | Jacquard Tapestry mounted on Panel | John Nava 2017 Collection: Museum of Ventura County |
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| Big Platter | Installation preparation - Museum of Ventura County - November 2020 |
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| Big Platter | Installation - Museum of Ventura County - November 2020 |
Notes on Big Platter from a 2018 exhibition:
The Sea
Degas, said any artist who sets up outdoors to paint should be watched by the police and stung with “just a little buckshot”*. Without going that far I have generally thought of myself also as a studio artist - doing my work within that quiet and private space. For me the exception has been the shore where, over the years, I have set many of my pictures. Perhaps the coastal region we all share exerts a powerful pull and draws out even the most solitary painter. It is the meeting place of air, water and earth - vast, timeless and always beautiful. It has been my particular fascination to place ourselves - the human image - into this nexus.
Ventura Promenade
There is a long tradition in art of the Arcadian image. Arcadia as the setting of an harmonious image of people within nature. For me Seurat’s famous “Grande Jatte” is a modern (19th century) version of this image. A quiet, sunlit shore with the bourgeoisie of Paris taking the place of the idealized shepherds who populate the Arcadian paintings of Poussin. “Big Platter” (“grande jatte” translates as “big platter or bowl’) makes the Ventura Promenade the setting for my version of this image. The promenade near Surfer’s Point is, in fact, a magnetic gathering place for our community - a place where all sorts come to stroll, to surf, to rest in the sun. We find ourselves immersed in this beautiful nexus of shore, sea and sky completing the composition. I wanted to make Ventura’s own Arcadian image.
The Tapestry
The “pointillist” painting manner used in the “Grande Jatte” is another memorable aspect of Seurat’s masterpiece. In the early 1800’s the optical blending of color was an innovation of the recently developed technology of Jacquard weaving. The directors of Jacquard’s tapestry mills worked out the phenomenon of the juxtaposition of colored fibers in weaving and wrote about it. Seurat read and made notes about these discoveries and translated the ideas into paint using distinct touches of color that “blended” at a distance to create the image. In “Big Platter” I took the image back into the Jacquard weaving medium that inspired Seurat. In another allusion to Seurat’s pointillism I developed a sort of colored mosaic of patched texture in the weaving to depict the scene.
John Nava
* ”If I were in the government I would have a brigade of policemen assigned to keeping an eye on people who paint landscapes outdoors. Oh, I wouldn't want anyone killed. I'd be satisfied with just a little buckshot to begin with.”
Edgar Degas
