Monday, July 23, 2012

A Day In Los Angeles

Saturday, July 21st: the perfect day to trek LA, starting at the Rose Cafe in Venice and ending in Studio City for dinner, via Culver City and downtown for shows and coffee. Lovely graphite drawings are on view at two group exhibitions: Angles,  Blum and Poe. There is a lively California Light and Space show at Nye & Brown. The Susanne Vielmetter exhibitions, Kevin Appel and Iva Gueorguieva, would be great to see in tandem with the works below.

Jonathan Borofsky, 1988 - Rose and Main Sts.
How much I loved this clown when first installed; its leg used to twirl, slowly and sadly.

James Gobel, 2011 at Angles Gallery's All I Want Is A Picture of You

The felt is more turquoise than photography allows in Sam, 45 x 40 inches, 2011

A very satisfying graphite portrait by Dan McCleary:
Eowyn Wilcox, 2010, approx. 14 x 11 inches


Me As a Boy, Me As a Girl, Eowyn Wilcox, 2011
approx. 17 x 23 inches

Ivan The Terrible by Mark Flores (2007), 15 x 22 inches
strange and wonderful handling of the material



Judie Bamber, Mom In Profile, 2012, 14 x 18

Bamber, detail

Patrick Lee, Deadly Friends (Head 9), 2011, 11 x 14 inches

Kurt Kauper, Obama study, 2009, 41 x 26 inches


From Yuval Pudik's Fallen Ecotones, 43 x 35 inches
(this is work that interests not only technically but for the subject matter)

Yuval Pudik, Detail

At Blum and Poe:
No Person May Carry a Fish Into a Bar curated by Julian Hoeber and Alix Lambert

Black and white together, painting and ceramic

From a
 quartet of gorgeous drawings

Another.
Rob Reynolds at Nye & Brown, 2011
oil, alkyd and acrylic gesso on canvas, approx. 20 x 24 inches


DeWain Valentine, Double Silver Disk, 1968
Fiberglass reinforced polyester, 64 x 64 x 56 inches
So beautiful with the drawings from the other shows...


Tuesday, July 03, 2012

Milton Resnick: Food for Thought

Resnick @ Cheim and Reid, 2008
A Question of Seeing (Paintings 1958-1963)
One of the best shows that year...look at that big painting!


Agnes Martin, circa 1961, from
Agnes Martin Interview (20:00 version, 1997) from Chuck Smith on Vimeo.
paintingresearch.wordpress.com

"Painting has to become what you really are doing and not what you are reacting to outside of it. And to do that, a great deal of changes have to happen to you. The only way I can tell you what the most important change is, is that the unity, the thing you say makes the painting 'work,' -- if you still say things like that, I don't know -- but it has to happen to you.  You have to become complete in some way; a universe, a complete thing in yourself in order to reach across and breathe some unity upon this thing that you're faced with. If you intentionally avoid that unity within yourself, then you will intentionally avoid doing that in your work. You can say that if there's no unity in your work, then you have deliberately made yourself into that kind of person. You don't want that unity in your work. You've made some kind of satisfactory relationship with your culture. You stand guard with your culture. Your culture demands you bring some kind of crisis to your work and therefore you cannot bring any unity to it. In order to bring crisis to your work you have to bring it to a state of expectancy. In other words, you have to leave your work in the state of mind of being a question. Nothing in the world excites the culture today so much as a question. A question seems very appropriate to whatever you have in mind. Allowing your work to remain questionable is a way of satisfying your cultural condition."

From Out of the Picture: Milton Resnick and the New York School
Compiled and Edited by Geoffrey Dorfman
Midmarch Arts Press, 2003
1972, "Small Thoughts Can Be Beautiful," lecture, p. 184