Raggedy Ann's Foot

Dana Schutz Interview

2012-01-17T17:54:00.002-05:00

Keith Mayerson skillfully interviews the incomparable Dana Schutz for the exhibition, "8 Americans," which he organized for Maruani & Noirehomme Gallery, September 10 - October 29, 2011 in Brussels, Belgium. Click on the link above to access the interview as well as others with Schutz and Mayerson's fellow exhibitors Hilary Berseth, Joe Bradley, Ann Craven, Francesca DiMattio, Wade Guyton and Jacob Kassay.

Hawaii: Masterpieces of Landscape Painting from the Forbidden City

2012-01-01T13:36:00.002-05:00

Honolulu Academy of the Arts exhibition - welcome!

More from the exhibition--this looks like Wang Meng

The final exhibition photo before museum intervention--cannot identify the gorgeous bamboo, rock and calligraphic composition to left--Wu Zhen?--see another image on museum website, linked above. How beautiful the ornamental doorway!

View from Moana Surfrider - like Chinese landscape...

Westin's Moana Surfrider hotel, founded 1901

Hawaii Botanic Garden

Hawaii Botanic Garden shoreline

Looking up at million year old Mauna Kea (13, 796 ft.) from the Saddle Road at about 6000 ft. in Hilo

Public park in Hilo, island of Hawaii (all photos courtesy PM)

Leaving LA I flew east instead of west, missing the easiest way to see the once-in-a-lifetime exhibition at the Honolulu Academy of Art on view through January 8, 2012. A friend who just returned alerted me to it and forwarded these photographs; she'd taken a few of the show before a guard intervened and included some breathtaking images from the rest of her trip that create a sensitive and immersive exchange between painted and actual worlds. How hopping on a plane to see it beckons, right now, right away: this is a major exhibition of Chinese scrolls, including the Four Yuan Dynasty Greats: Huang Gongwang, Wang Meng, Ni Tsan and Wu Zhen. The Yuan Dynasty was the first in China ruled by foreigners--learned culturati and government officials had the choice of working for the Mongols or retreating to private life (most chose the latter, as hermits in the mountains). These painters, and others, developed the literati tradition of painting initiated in the art-friendly Song Dynasty, first ruled by Emperor Huizong, himself an artist ultimately overtaken by the Jin Dynasty of Manchuria as he was too focused on painting to develop the military. Working collaboratively with the Jin, one of Huizong's sons later founded the Southern Song Dynasty, but tended toward poetry, along with painting and calligraphy the three beauties of ancient Chinese culture.

Lunch

In this delicious lunch of cabbage, tofu, enoki mushrooms and pork, prepared by my husband, an armchair traveler might discern volanoes, trees, plateaus and mountains surrounded by a porcelain moat, preserving Shih-Tao's dictum that "Painting is guided by the mind."

Los Angeles

2011-12-23T19:28:00.001-05:00

A gorgeous Caspar David Friedrich at the Getty, West Los Angeles

One of my favorites from the Getty villa in Malibu in years past: Winterhalter

Gerome!

Some sumptuous brushwork - lost by the iPhone - David

Jacques Louis David, The Bonaparte sisters 1821

Fleshy and brassy diagonals in David


Jacques Louis David, Farewell of Telemachus and Eucharis, oil on canvas, 34.5 x 40.5 inches

Sunset looking south toward Hollywood


Exene Cervenka and John Doe from X in the film at Geffen Contemporary

Los Angeles, in time to see Pacific Standard Time at the Getty (LA history, circa 1945-81) and Geffen Contemporary (1974-1980). At the Getty: gorgeous David Hockneys, Ronald Davis, Ed Ruschas, Helen Lundberg. Was not allowed to photograph them, but the permanent collection yielded world-class examples as above. The Geffen Contemporary (linked to header), showed work that constitutes my first artistic influences at UCSD and UCLA: William T. Wiley, Judy Baca's mural drawings, Linda Montano, Gronk, Paul McCarthy, and new artists such as Patrick Hogan and Theaster Gates. En route to the Geffen, reminisced about clubs past and present, including the Whiskey, Roxy, and remembering afresh the Cathay de Grand, Lhasa Club, Club Lingerie and Rodney Bingenheimer's English Disco.

Transformation

2011-12-16T22:56:00.004-05:00

"'Antiquity' is but a tool of knowledge; 'transformation' involves recognizing it as but a tool while refraining from using it in this way. For I have never seen anyone achieve transformation by using antiquity as a tool. Often I lament those who are mired in antiquity, unable to transform themselves because their knowledge has trapped them. It traps them in stylistic imitation so that their vision is narrowed. For this reason, the superior man just uses antiquities to expand the potentials of the present."

..."I am myself because 'I' naturally exists. The whiskers and eyebrows of the ancients cannot grow on my face, nor can my body contain their entrails. I express my own entrails and display my own whiskers and eyebrows. Even when there may be some point of contact with some msater, it is he who comes close to me, not I who am trying to become like him. Nature has endowed me thus. As for antiquity, how could I have learned from it without transforming it?"

Shih-T'ao, Enlightening Remarks on Painting, 1700. Translated by Richard E. Strassberg, Pacific Asia Museum Monographs, No. 1, 1989

Frank Bowling, Sarah Walker, Fabian Marccaccio and Rebecca Morales at Seven

2011-12-14T09:23:00.001-05:00

Frank Bowling - a new discovery. Both paintings approx. 95 x 69 inches

Ah Susan Whoosh, 1981 @ Hales Gallery - http://www.halesgallery.com

Bowling - detail


Another beauty by Bowling


Sarah Walker at Pierogi at Seven Art Fair-http://www.pierogi2000.com/artists/sarah-walker/


Sarah Walker, Having Built Here BEfore, 2010, acrylic on panel, 20 x 22 inches These paintings get weirder and weirder, in the best way--complex rhythms and structures but also look fun to make.

Fabian Marcaccio - http://www.bravinlee.com/

Marcaccio, Detail - he's baaaaack!

Rebecca Morales @BravinLee Programs - http://www.bravinlee.com/ - new discovery

Light and Space East Coast style at imPulse and ABMB

2011-12-10T15:05:00.001-05:00

Brookhart Jonquil at Dorsch Gallery, ImPulse. For more on Jonquil, click link above.

Florescent orange paint at the end of each wood strip and metal attachments contributed a snowflake or jewel-like feeling.

I think by Aaron Curry at Michael Werner, but now cannot be sure. Loved these.

Aaron Curry again.


Robert Miller's booth, ABMB: Paul Jenkins Phenomena high alter wall, 1977, Acrylic on canvas, 75 x 150 inches, 190.5 x 381 cm © 2011, ProLitteris, Zurich

An unusual monochrome by Jenkins.

Steven Parrino--at Skarsdedt?

Rico Gatson at Seven, Miami

2011-12-09T20:34:00.002-05:00

Rico Gatson - "Angela"

More Gatson-washed out image that conveys materiality of surface.

Black and white fire.

So glad to see these at Seven having missed Gatson's Exit Art retrospective. Love the reductive elegance of his work. Its content is firmly embedded within material: a visual experience that conjures historical events without literalness. Click link above to read more on the artist and see more of his work.

Figuration at Seven and Pulse

2011-12-06T21:30:00.003-05:00

Sarah Peters at Winkleman, Seven Art Fair
To visit her gallery page at Winkleman, clink link above

Sarah Peters, quartet of portraits.
To visit her website, go to: http://sarahpetersart.com/


Robin Williams, Golden Nugget, oil on linen, 62 x 80 inches, PPOW at Seven Art Fair


Detail, Williams


Julie Heffernan, PPOW at Seven Art Fair


Heffernan at Mark Moore, Pulse


Heffernan, detail


Allison Schulnik at Mark Moore, Pulse


Katie Miller at Conner Contemporary, Pulse


Erik Thor Sandberg at Conner Contemporary, Pulse

Daniel Weinberg Gallery at Pulse

2011-12-05T22:23:00.000-05:00


A gem from Alexander Ross - the dealer's private collection

Thomas Nozskowski

Steve di Beneditto, high on the wall -- another gorgeous and unexpected example of an artist's work from this gallery

Patricia Piccini: Prone, 2011, Conner Contemporary at Pulse, Miami

2011-12-04T21:16:00.004-05:00


Patricia Piccini's Prone, 2011 - moving, delicate, beautiful, horrifying, human.

The work engages our empathy, integrity and commitment
in a freighted encounter.


Below, excerpt from an interview with the artist.

The Naturally Artificial World
Laura Fernandez Orgaz and Patricia Piccinini
(Click link above to visit artist's website and find full article).

"My interest in medical science began when I was a teenager. My mother was sick for many years before she died. During that time I hoped and prayed that science - medicine - could help our family. In the end there was no help but I still feel that I am waiting for science to help; to help me, to help my family and to help the world I live in. However, I also know that science is not perfect , no matter how clever it seems to be. Science did not help my mother. I understand that it cannot always deliver its promises. I understand that disappointment.

However - and this will sound very strange - it is not really science itself that I am interested in, as much as how it impacts on people. I think my creatures are actually more mythological than scientific. They are chimeras that I construct in order to tell stories that explain the world that I live in but cannot totally understand or control. Like most myths they are often cautionary tales, but they are also often celebrations of these extraordinary beasts. You need to remember that the gods of the ancient myths had great power but also very human motivations. They followed their own interests, with very little feeling for the effects they might have on normal people."

Happy Thanksgiving!

2011-11-24T11:33:00.000-05:00

Pat Pasloff

2011-11-15T17:00:00.003-05:00

I had been considering a post on 'frame of reference' and how the desire to share one--or not--affects art making, when I espied a post on Facebook that Pat Pasloff passed away Sunday. Linked above is the tribute article by David Cohen at artcritical.

The timing is especially unusual as I am reading Geoffrey Dorfman's Out of the Picture: Milton Resnick and the New York School (Midmarch Arts Press, 2003) and just a week before her passing, watched two videos of Pasloff with Milton Resnick on UTube (A World of Art: Works in Progress -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euFTYZ93XFk) to inspire me in the studio.

I once spoke with Pat on the phone, when she began to reminisce about the old days in our (at the time) Chinatown neighborhood. Gruffly, she stated that painters in her day didn't need cd players, heat, or even hot water to paint; she didn't understand the need for luxury so many artists had now. Curiosity (could I paint in silence every day? Go without heat longer than a few hours in winter?) vied with admiration for her grit. The admiration grew over the years seeing her at exhibitions, circling and looking, intently looking: in every way, the real deal.

Rest in peace.

Inspiration

2011-10-29T16:53:00.000-04:00

Cover: Duffy and Celia Philo/Duffy Design Concepts

Breughel

Stones 1972 Tour

Santa Monica Pier

Matterhorn

Orange web fencing

Rockwell Kent

Shen Zhou - scroll at the Met last fall was like a film!


Alan Bates, Jill Clayburgh and Paul Jenkins painting: Unmarried Woman


Brian Ward, photography; Terry Pastor of Main Artery, Design

Wang Meng

Jules Olitski

Permutations of the Mark

2011-10-16T22:55:00.003-04:00

Jamison Brosseau, from Go Figure, curated by Eddie Martinez, at Dodge Gallery (linked above)

Jackie Saccoccio and Andrew Gbur at 11 Rivington

Saccoccio

Eva Lundsager at Greenberg Van Doren, uptown

Let me know who this is: from Go Figure, curated by Eddie Martinez

Allison Schulnik, from Go Figure, Dodge Gallery

Joel Dugan, from Centotto, Bushwick

Permutations of the Body

2011-10-01T23:33:00.000-04:00

Lisa Yuskavage - thesis painting for the current show at Zwirner

To the right of the small painting, a lone figure contre jour, though the time is sunset

Detail, left of mound - light brushwork, as if watercolor

Triptych: theme of doubling arises

Triptych: right two panels. Transfer of early shrink imagery into a community of observers.

Doubling again, using pyrotechnic flowers to shift from pictorial to symbolic space, then back.

On 20th St., Nick Cave at Jack Shainman with another kind of body permutation...

These join bodies together and also separate them from other bodies.

They are garments that contain the language of desire (fashion) and differentiation.

Permutations of the Body, Part II

2011-10-01T23:16:00.004-04:00

Irvin Morazan, detail of shrine figure at Asya Geisberg

Morazan: another view (read more about the show at link above)

Irvin Morazan from the exhibition Salvajes at Asya Geisberg

Karen Heagle at I-20

Heagle

Heagle, after Chardin. At once blunt, and affable. Heagle's use of red is a standout.

Nicola Tyson at Petzel


Nicola Tyson at Petzel Broad, loaded brush strokes--brilliant emerald greens that don't translate on camera. Love the rooster figure on right.

Molly Zuckerman-Hartung at Anna Kustera. Another kind of body, if you will--the corpse of stain painting?

Zuckerman-Hartung

Zuckerman-Hartung at Anna Kustera

NurtureArt Auction Link!

2011-09-19T22:13:00.001-04:00

Click here to see what's available! Tickets are on sale now.

Urban Grit + Garden: Rosy Keyser @ Blum, Kris Chatterson @ Bailey, Joan Mitchell @ Cheim & Read

2011-09-17T21:25:00.005-04:00

Front room: Rosy Keyser

Small gem by Keyser

And another. Matt, gloss, density and texture.

Chatterson - side view close-to

Chatterson's worked surface, melding gesture and digital output

Chatterson setting up beats that conjure Mark Bradford's work and expressionist references.

Chatterson, centering in

Joan Mitchell, surface detail

iPhone whites out the Mars Violet, lavendar and lemon yellow palette.

Joan Mitchell: open-centered stroll through color

Zao Wou-Ki

2011-09-11T20:41:00.000-04:00

L'Envolee Lyrique at Le Petit Senat, Paris, 2006

2011-09-11T20:36:00.002-04:00

NURTUREArt Auction

2011-08-31T19:14:00.002-04:00

Check out NURTUREArt's auction on October 11, 2011 at the Chelsea Art Museum. Tickets for the auction can be purchased at the following link: http://nurtureart.org/?p=2451

Read Sharon Butler of Two Coats of Paint for a great history of NURTUREArt by clicking the link above. NURTUREArt is an artist-run organization that supports both artistic and curatorial endeavors.

Robert Morris, Anti-Form

2011-08-15T21:24:00.004-04:00

Artforum (April 1968)

In recent object-type art the invention of new forms is not an issue. A morphology of geometric, predominantly rectangular forms has been accepted as a given premise. The engagement of the work becomes focused on the particularization of these general forms by means of varying scale, material, proportion, placement. Because of the flexibility as well as the passive, unemphasized nature of object-type shape it is a useful means. The use of the rectangular has a long history. The right angle has been in use since the first post and lintel constructions. Its efficiency is unparalleled in building with rigid materials, stretching a piece of canvas, etc. This generalized usefulness has moved the rectangle through architecture, painting, sculpture, objects. But only in the case of object-type art have the forms of the cubic and the rectangular been brought so far forward into the final definition of the work. That is, it stands as a self-sufficient whole shape rather than as a relational element. To achieve a cubic or rectangular form is to build in the simplest, most reasonable way, but it is also to build well.

This imperative for the well-built thing solved certain problems. It got rid of asymmetrical placing and composition, for one thing. The solution also threw out all non-rigid materials. This is not the whole story of so‐ called Minimal or Object art. Obviously it does not account for the use of purely decorative schemes of repetitive and progressive ordering of multiple unit work. But the broad rationality of such schemes is related to the reasonableness of the well-built. What remains problematic about these schemes is the fact that any order for multiple units is an imposed one which has no inherent relation to the physicality of the existing units. Permuted, progressive, symmetrical organizations have a dualistic character in relation to the matter they distribute. This is not to imply that these simple orderings do not work. They simply separate, more or less, from what is physical by making relationships themselves another order of facts. The relationships such schemes establish are not critical from point to point as in European art. The duality is established by the fact that an order, any order, is operating beyond the physical things. Probably no art can completely resolve this. Some art, such as Pollock's, comes close.

The process of "making itself" has hardly been examined. It has only received attention in terms of some kind of mythical, romanticized polarity: the so-called action of the Abstract Expressionists and the so-called conceptualizations of the Minimalists. This does not locate any differences between the two types of work. The actual work particularizes general assumptions about forms in both cases. There are some exceptions. Both ways of working continue the European tradition of aestheticizing general forms that has gone on for half a century. European art since Cubism has been a history of permuting relationships around the general premise that relationships should remain critical. American art has developed by uncovering successive alternative premises for making itself.

Of the Abstract Expressionists only Pollock was able to recover process and hold on to it as part of the end form of the work. Pollock's recovery of process involved a profound rethinking of the role of both material and tools in making. The stick which drips paint is a tool which acknowledges the nature of the fluidity of paint. Like any other tool it is still one that controls and transforms matter. But unlike the brush it is in far greater sympathy with matter because it acknowledges the inherent tendencies and properties of that matter. In some ways Louis was even closer to matter in his use of the container itself to pour the fluid.

To think that painting has some inherent optical nature is ridiculous. It is equally silly to define its "thingness" as acts of logic that acknowledge the edges of the support. The optical and the physical are both there. Both Pollock and Louis were aware of both. Both used directly the physical, fluid properties of paint. Their "optical" forms resulted from dealing with the properties of fluidity and the conditions of a more or less absorptive ground. The forms and the order of their work were not a priori to the means.

The visibility of process in art occurred with the saving of sketches and unfinished work in the High Renaissance. In the nineteenth century both Rodin and Rosso left traces of touch in finished work. Like the Abstract Expressionists after them, they registered the plasticity of material in autobiographical terms. It remained for Pollock and Louis to go beyond the personalism of the hand to the more direct revelation of matter itself. How Pollock broke the domination of Cubist form is tied to his investigation of means: tools, methods of making, nature of material. Form is not perpetuated by means but by preservation of separable idealized ends. This is an anti-entropic and conservative enterprise. It accounts for Greek architecture changing from wood to marble and looking the same, or for the look of Cubist bronzes with their fragmented, faceted planes. The perpetuation of form is functioning idealism.

In object-type art process is not visible. Materials often are. When they are, their reasonableness is usually apparent. Rigid industrial materials go together at right angles with great ease. But it is the a priori valuation of the well-built that dictates the materials. The well-built form of objects preceded any consideration of means. Materials themselves have been limited to those which efficiently make the general object form.

Recently, materials other than rigid industrial ones have begun to show up. Oldenburg was one of the first to use such materials. A direct investigation of the properties of these materials is in progress. This involves a reconsideration of the use of tools in relation to material. In some cases these investigations move from the making of things to the making of material itself. Sometimes a direct manipulation of a given material without the use of any tool is made. In these cases considerations of gravity become as important as those of space. The focus on matter and gravity as means results in forms which were not projected in advance.

Considerations of ordering are necessarily casual and imprecise and unemphasized. Random piling, loose stacking, hanging, give passing form to the material. Chance is accepted and indeterminacy is implied since replacing will result in another configuration. Disengagement with preconceived enduring forms and orders for things is a positive assertion. It is part of the work's refusal to continue aestheticizing form by dealing with it as a prescribed end.

Teleport Me!

2011-08-02T15:13:00.001-04:00

In Taipei at the National Palace Museum: Painting Reunited, through September 5th, 2011.

Click the link above to read all about my favorite painting of all time in the world. You can play with a section of it on the Museum's home page, but only a small section. The desire to see the scroll in its entirety persists. Here at Raggedy Ann's Foot, enter the top image from bottom right, travel down the images from right to left and exit the bottom image at the lower left. It's a bumpy ride, I know, but enjoy the "hemp stroke" mountains and dotting techniques that make this scroll a masterpiece!

When I traveled to Taiwan for the second time, in 2005, with the naive hope of seeing the painting, the closest I got was an oversized cloth-covered catalogue of the Museum's Yuan Dynasty collection. I bought it immediately and dragged the book to China, where in the cold December month copied the scroll, segment by segment, from the book to sheets of rice paper. It did not fulfill my desire to see the scroll in its entirety, but I felt much closer to the composition, and learned how Huang rotates the space, taking us in front of and then behind the rising mountains, offsetting the peaks with lowlands and reefs. Back in the US I lugged the book to a Kinko's, photocopied the segments and pasted them together. Wherever I go, I take the mini-scroll with me, some pages blacker than others, dented now with the times it's been rolled and moved. Still, I yearn to see the painting as conceived by my teacher and mentor, Huang Gongwang, a Yuan Dynasty great. Teleport me.

Studio Visits in Long Island City

2011-07-15T19:13:00.005-04:00


S.E. Nash

S.E. Nash

S.E. Nash's studio

Detail

Several weeks ago I visited Long Island City to visit S. E. Nash. Check her website, linked above, for even better images of her worlds within worlds, constructed from sintra, which resembles paper, but is more solid. (I've just rechecked the link and to my horror, found it did not work. In case it continues not to, the site is senash.com).

I also visited Thomas Martin, whose quirky marker drawings you can see at http://thomas-martin.org. He works small, repeating shapes, and moving back into them with collage-like elements (lines or planes). Thomas has worked with D. Rockburne, and you can see this influence combined with his curiosity about structure.


Thomas Martin, a work from 2009

His collages led me to think about Lisa Hamilton's geometric and folded works on paper from 2010, which you can see here: http://lisahamilton.net. Since I've last seen her work she has taken this concept and run with it in longer, serial formats.

Lisa Hamilton, from 2010

Shows, Part III (Figments)

2011-07-15T18:54:00.001-04:00

Dan Christensen, from The Ghost in the Machine, curated by Stephen Westfall at Lennon, Weinberg

Pure magic: color as space. Wall looks pink, but color seems true-r in painting.

Li SongSong at Pace Gallery, 25th St.

Part of a scroll from Schroeder, Romero & Shredder's worldclass exhibition (linked above)

Japanese wood block prints...gorgeous ceramics...mixed with contemporary art. This gallery is mounting some memorable shows! "Vivid" and "Pavers" from 2010--and now this! Truly a museum quality exhibition--what I am showing here is a mere taste of what is in the gallery.

Shows, Part II

2011-07-08T21:45:00.004-04:00

"Painting Expanded" at Tanya Bonakdar.

Knit painting. Better color than portrayed here.

Josh Faught. Find the fingernail in the pink field of bloom.

Below, Terry Winters at Matthew Marks, 1980s but timely in the revival of lush and painterly paint. Look at the color!

Below, Carrie Moyer in Affinities: Painting in Abstraction, curated by Kate McNamara. This exhibition sparkled with summery slices of brilliant color and thoughtful installation.My phone camera did not capture the show's luminosity.

Moyer, Polly Apfelbaum (table in front), Nicole Cherubini (sculpture). The Cherubi was charming--the Apfelbaum like little cakes for the eyes.

Shifting gears down the street with Jessica Rohrer, PPOW (their website uses this image as well).

Not sure the image can do justice to the strange space that occurs perceptually in Roher's bay window below.

Shows

2011-07-02T09:59:00.005-04:00


Pat Lay at Sideshow


Pat Lay, detail

Pat Lay, who in addition to sculpture has been making collage tapestries of motherboards and other technological images.


Mark Grotjahn, detail

Mark Grotjahn

Grotjahn's surface close-to

More Grotjahn-nice red in back

Grotjahn-detail

Mark Grotjahn's breakout show, passionately and totally painted.

Celeste Dupuy-Spencer

Detail of Dupuy-Spencer, photographed through a crowd of people at the opening with an iPhone

A new presence, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer at Museum 52, showing with Nicole Eisenman and Leidy Churchman.

Third and Final Post: Beijing, Ritan Park and Golou Da Jie

2011-07-02T09:30:00.003-04:00

Ritan Park...

Sun Mural, 6 x 15 metres

Kua Fu chasing the sun...

Beijing was a whirlwind: two weeks of appointments, galleries and on a fine Sunday morning, a memorable bike ride to Ritan Park. A full hour in flowing traffic through Beijing's rotaries, from our hotel near the view above to Ritan, one of China's oldest parks. Built in 1530 as an altar for ritual sacrifice to the sun god, the park features a mural that combines public art with spiritual devotion in its sumptuously glazed and patterned ceramic tiles.

The view above became familiar on the trip. I often sat at this cafe mid-morning over coffee, unable to relinquish the attachment despite the best tea in the world. The view afforded no end of entertainment: a small child bouncing on a huge, green animal toy across the walk, an ancient woman with a cane who stopped to doze on the bench outside and passersby returning home from the night before or hastening to work.

Yangshuo, China

2011-06-25T10:32:00.002-04:00

Every time I am in China, there comes the time to splurge on a 5-star hotel. On a four-day trip to Yangshuo, an hour's taxi from Guilin (see photo above, on approach) and three-hour flight from Beijing, I selected the Yangshuo Mountain Retreat. A western-style dining room, baked cookies served on arrival and spying a New Yorker jarred my Asian immersion, momentarily. Spacious quarters, ambling gardens and room lights that could only be activated by remote control corrected the disjunction: indeed, this is China.

Men rowing long bamboo rafts with chairs affixed floated past my balcony on the clear and gentle Yulong River. No greater luxury than a motorcycle taxi to purchase a ticket and be rowed gently downstream, mountains looming around. Have your photo taken here, eat some beer fish there, beckoned small, river-based business as our raft drifted past. Natural waterfalls puncutated the meandering pace of the raft, sometimes suddenly, drenching us, other times gently. It reminded me of the rocking pace of Disneyland rides as a child: Pirates of the Carribean, particularly. I wonder how many Disney designers traveled to Asia--seems so many of their ideas germinate here.

What I love about China, and for that matter Los Angeles, is the natural abundance in landscape. There does not seem to be any limits to what the land will do. Pine trees growing out of rock? No problem. Water, mountain and desert combined? Why not? In Yangshuo, the karst mountains loomed irregularly from the river, creating a Flintstones-like terrain I cannot wait to paint. Above, the views from my room are still beautiful, photographed on an iPhone in the raw, hot middle of the day. Yet, it was on a night motorcycle ride that the views were most amazing: the mountains' shapes reflected in the river, moonlight glowing, seen at a glimpse as we sped past, the engine of the motorcycle the only noise one heard.

Yuan Dynasty painters and their commitment to landscape as a mode of resistance to unwelcome political rule led to some of the greatest painting in China. Wandering was not simply a matter of spiritual seeking, but an active choice for freedom, to live as one wished beyond the confines of institutionalized demands. Yet, wandering is also practical in my experience of China. Each time I go, the landscape opens itself to deeper exploration, like chapters in a book. One place summons an association to another place, or demands more time spent than I have. There is never just one landscape and never just one reason to wander.

Beijing Travelogue: Land and Body at Today Museum + Goloudajie, Second Ring

2011-06-15T09:17:00.007-04:00

Beautiful painting--sketchy and light, like an ink drawing, at Land and Body, Today Museum, Beijing (linked above)

A wall of these delicate paintings at Land and Body, Today Museum, Beijing

More from Land and Body, Today Museum, Beijing

Back from two weeks in Beijing. In two short years I forgot how magical China is, but was quickly reminded my first day back with the ornate and textured sidewalks that are such a pleasure to stroll. Having brought only an iPhone, brush pens and sketcbhook, images of the trip are few but there will be more posts on China forthcoming.

When there, I saw some wonderful shows. These include the rotating permanent collection at the Palace Museum in Forbidden City, where a seriesof Ma Yuan water paintings held sway. Dubbed "One Corner Ma" for his assymetrical compositions, Ma pursued studies of water idioms that are spellbinding in a group of 20 in the Palace Museum. With their intervals and overlaps, Ma's water studies invite a Taoist approach to composition.

Ma Yuan, The Waving Surface of the Autumn Flood, from a series of paintings of water

中文: 水圖卷﹝局部, ns 26.8 × 41.6 cm (10.6 × 16.4 in), ink on silk
Palace Museum, Beijing, China

The dazzling Land and Body exhibition at Today Museum (link and images above) opened the day we were there. We arrived late, so there was little chance to do more besides snap these pictures and hope the pure visual power of the work would somehow transmit. What a followup to the Grey Gallery's seminal 2009 exhibition, Icons of the Desert! While that show featured bark paintings, this show presented fabric substrates for the complex yet freely applied markings that notate pathways through the land.

In addition to the paintings the installation includes a hand-painted time line of events that contextualizes the journeys in them. Oh, for an extra day to spend reading the wall inscriptions! I hope the catalogue will be published, as it wasn't at the opening, and makes its way to the US. Also at Today: the Martell Prize Winners exhibition and a very strong, contemporary Permanent Collection that surveys work from the Beijing scene, including a painting by new friend Yang Qian (http://www.artnet.com/artists/yang%20qian/). I thought it would be great shown in tandem with New York painter Alyssa Monks, as they both consider wet surfaces as a veil between our gaze and the figures they paint.


Alyssa Monks (from her website)

Yang, in addition to having a most beautiful studio in Fejiacun where one views his oeuvre of black light paintings, water images and newer collage works, has impeccable taste in Chinese cuisine. Trained in the States and a native of China, he is a genial host and respected artist.

In Beijing hailing cabs is competitive sport, more so than New York. Renumeration is low so cabdrivers decline fares often, despite the fact it's illegal. Knowing this en route to Today from Sanlitun, I sat resolutely in the back of a cab while expatriates, local Chinese and the cabdriver argued in passionate Mandarin about the existence of a Today Museum, and what it would take to get a waiguoren there.After some contretemps he started the car, and off we went.

In the past, Feijiacun and Songzhuang were my local neighborhoods but this trip was pure Second Ring: Line 2, Goloudajie stop, Soluxe Courtyard Hotel. What aesthetic delight to experience the low-slung, humanly scaled hutongs and their nearby restaurants, plentiful public toilets, convenient subway system and beautifully planted trees, textures and colors. That said the best parts of the trip remain undocumented, as I suppose they always must: dusk-light rambles past generations of family members spoiling crowing babies in narrow alleys, motorbikes whizzing past and many drinking pijio, China's delicious, light beer. Or red lanterns hanging in "Ghost Street," creating a sense of celebration in front of the storefronts that by day are business as usual. The compression of places that are thousands of years old with new developments stimulate the senses at every turn. It's as if occupying the singular but dense spaces in the aboriginal journeys at Today Museum were layered with five more sheets of similar density.

The stunning textures and muted tones of a Beijing sidewalk


A rarity--untouched relic of the past in Beijing's lively Second Ring neighborhood

Olitski at the Kemper, Kansas City; Ross, Bluhm and Kossoff, New York

2011-05-27T19:54:00.005-04:00

I snipped these images online: Olitski, from the Kemper Museum (linked above), Alexander Ross, from David Nolan Gallery (http://www.davidnolangallery.com/), Norman Bluhm, from Loretta Howard Gallery (www.lorettahoward.com) and Leon Kossoff, from Mitchell, Inness and Nash Gallery (http://www.miandn.com/).

What a week of great shows! In Kansas City, the Olitski survey at the Kemper Museum stopped me cold. The various periods of Olitski's development were fascinating for their exploration of acrylics, particularly the sprayed ones, which toyed with the illusionistic effects of dispersion, but there was a fussiness about the border of each painting that drove me nuts. They reminded me of the posters from my college job in LA at the "postmodern" furniture and frame store in LA. My enjoyment of the earlier works was primarily historical, a join-the-dots experience. Then, like a crescendo of unexpected force, came four transcendent works from 2002, With Love and Disregard--that demanded at least an hour to absorb their chromatic fullness, their compositional depth and heft. What color, light, surface, abandon! Olitski didn't stop pushing the paint, ever--the results are fissured, planetary realms with complex spatial shifts. Thrilling to see a painter in his 80s hit his stride! Also enthralling to see someone play recklessly with the possibilities of their life's work and come up with something so convincing. It was like watching his brain move through his hand, which is the embodied value of painting. In the final four paintings, there was no false note, regret; they were sure-footed risks. This was not true throughout the show due to the fussiness of earlier work; thus meant the more. Olitski was a whole-hearted explorer! What inspires is that he found this in summary, not early on. And these are GREAT paintings, filled with ideas and images.

The earlier sprayed works, especially the topographies, brought to mind three paintings I saw today by Ben Schumacher in the current show "We Regret To Inform You There Is Currently No Space or Place for Abstract Painting" at Martos (http://www.martosgallery.com). I am noticing more historical shows tracing such relationships, such as Unpainted Paintings uptown and the Painting show on 25th St. Given our eight years in the Middle East, it comes as no surprise that 1970s postwar abstraction, on the heels of 1950s postwar abstraction, seems newly relevant. Also, relationships between expressionism and Color Field seem important now, in a way I would liken to Impressionists and post-Impressionists--aware of the nationalistic implications as well.

Down 29th Street from Martos, Alexander Ross's exhibition at David Nolan revealed the artist's expansion of his bell-pepper-like forms into surreal landscape spaces recalling de Chirico. Ross's palette was startling, as was his paint--licking and encircling form, strokes like fire; becoming protagonists of thick and juicy facture that catches the light, causing a shimmering veil of pattern viewing the paintings from aside. And the color! Ross has always built color in a gradated range of color, not dissimilar from how pastels are made. He's hit new strides in this show--reds disintegrating into plummy rust tones, acid greens like slightly soured candy invading the more usual greens tending toward blue. The show revealed a maximal tendency redefining Ross's previously pared down, architectural forms.

On 26th St. at Mitchell, Inness and Nash, Leon Kossoff's palette concocted strange, umber-y brews, with limpid greens and reds furnishing ballast in the roiling surfaces of paint. The drawing in them was not so great, but the "put" of mark and the palette-- superb, pearly; like winter light describing spring--gave his architectural forms, in particular, heft. And on 26th, David Cohen's Fitting Room (http://www.vogtgallery.com/), featured two favorite painters, Mernet Larsen and David B. Brody, whose work has recently been shown in New York and is mentioned on this blog.

These may be the last shows I see before leaving for Beijing Sunday. I wonder what painting will be like there?

Schemas and Terrains: Margrit Lewczuk + Rockwell Kent

2011-05-17T21:24:00.023-04:00

Maps, or signs, conflate landscape with diagram, transforming geography into hybrid schemas. Wikipedia defines shema: "The word schema comes from the Greek word "σχήμα" (skhēma), which means shape, or more generally, plan. Schema may refer to:Model (abstract), Diagram, or Schematic, a diagram that represents the elements of a system using abstract, graphic symbols." The distancing layer of stylization help us navigate unfamiliar space; visually, it presages digital screens. I think about schemas after seeing Margrit Lewczuk's exhibition, Drawing Into Paint. Her works re-interpret non-western sources as abstract systems similar to maps or signs. They alchemize graphite, gouache and paint into mysterious patterns that juggle allusions to figure and landscape while merging a map's reductive topologies with the colorful brevity of signage.

Click the header above to visit Lewczuk's website, and peruse the Brooklyn Rail interview to read about her experiences as a painter. Even better, head to Janet Kurnatowski in Greenpoint to see the paintings live! Check the gallery's website here: http://www.janetkurnatowskigallery.com/

Lewczuk's paintings are pure buoyancy, saturating the light-filled gallery with sonorous, resonant hues barely contained in deceptively simple demarcations of space. Four large paintings anchor the whole, orbited by collages and drawings. It's like entering a 3-d version of the artist's brain. Unique relationships emerge between works: a tiny reddish-purple study parked at the bottom corner of a large, predominantly green painting holds both paintings in mutual abeyance, through the vibration of its intense darks. Correspondences and cross-reference circulate the show. Many of the works portray an image-pattern one might associate with a rounded cruciform, insect head or African textile. Their color and placement of material, texture and edge is extremely specific in a way that anticipates image, but the works abstain from recognizable form. They instead harness structure in the service of materials; deckled or cut edges, surfaces of cascading paint and ferocious graphite markings, contained in discrete areas, vacillate rhythmically together, delighting and enrapturing the eye.

Another version of schema re-emerges in Rockwell Kent's Greenland paintings: Greenland People, Dogs and Mountains, c. 1932-35, oil on canvas mounted on panel, 28 1/8 x 48 inches, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine, below. Kent's Greenland paintings are new discoveries, thanks to Steve Martin's art-world yarn, An Object of Beauty. It's interesting to think about how his stylized terrains and Lewczuk's joyous investigations of color and structure approach composition over the seventy year period that divides them.

From the Kansas City Airport

2011-05-02T16:23:00.002-04:00

Waiting for a plane: mechanical difficulties. The weather is perfect in Kansas City; the soil rich; the space stretched green in all directions. I am here unexpectedly, closing the affairs of my beloved aunt, who died unexpectedly last week.

Because of the unexpected circumstances I missed this closing:
http://progress-report.org/1352791/The-Working-Title
This was a group show on contemporary abstraction, curated by Chris Chatterson and Vince Contrarino, at the Bronx River Art Center. A catalogue is available on blurb, and I look forward to its insights on abstraction.

Could be a prelude, or an alternative approach to materials from this:
A Painting Show
http://www.harrislieberman.com/current.html
A show I would have curated if someone else didn't!

Two more shows I can't wait to see:
Margrit Lewczuk
http://www.janetkurnatowskigallery.com/

Gina Ruggeri
http://nancymargolisgallery.com/?tag=gina-ruggeri

Linked above, Chris Chatterson's posts from my show and New Monuments, both at Lesley Heller, on KCLOG, a blog I relish for its visual connections and pathways through abstraction.

Meanwhile, my eyes find solace in the endless green of fields.

A Beautiful Post: Mira Schor's Orbis Mundi

2011-04-25T09:55:00.001-04:00

For your reading pleasure, Mira Schor's account of moving from her loft of 30 + years into her childhood home. It has the dense texture of one's own memories that may or may not include the vagaries of New York real estate, artist parents and the legacy of immigration.

I associate the post with the book Lee Krasner: A Biography, by Gail Levin, which thoroughly contextualizes Krasner's artistic trajectory from her family's immigration to the US, early art school education in New York and the WPA years, which feel especially relevant now. Levin will speak about her book Sunday, May 15th in the Sackler Wing, 4th floor, Brooklyn Museum at 2PM. http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/calendar/event/4223

Spring is here!

2011-04-15T19:28:00.003-04:00

iPhone photo by Karineh Gurjian-Angelo

Due to installing and opening Climb the Black Mountain at Lesley Heller Workspace this week (linked above), time has assumed a hallucinogenic tenor. No longer dedicated solely to the studio, the days brim with projects long put on hold, shows to catch up on seeing and books to read. The alarming disappearance of Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei into custody and the deaths of legendary artists John McCracken and Sylvia Sleigh intensify the slippery sense of time.

To ground myself, I visited Chelsea for a quick quartet of exhibitions:

Elizabeth Murray, paintings from the 1970s at Pace; James Siena, paintings at Pace
http://thepacegallery.com/

Jennifer Reeves at Ramis Barquet
http://www.ramisbarquet.com/

Joan Mitchell, paintings at Lennon, Weinberg
http://www.lennonweinberg.com/flash.html

The lavish surfaces and rich palettes in Murray and Mitchell mesh delightfully in imaginary combination. Murray's palettes toy with color opposites, while Joan Mitchell's travel from the periphery to the center of the spectrum: full throttle colors muted with earth tones. Murray's compositions skitter and zig-zag over shaped surfaces; Mitchell's maelstroms of marks stretch taut over four sided formats. Mitchell's palette knife scrapings, opaque slashes and fleeting glazes complement Murray's flicks of the brush and obsessive edges in which the paint ridges up, embracing forms.

Jennifer Reeves' paintings echo and deviate the worked surfaces of Murray and Mitchell. The artist functions as a bricoleur, using paint, buttons and sticks to embody written confessionals that move the heart as well as eye. These strange combinations of elements bring new life to eyes scanning text, imbuing reading with texture. Reeves' primarily white paintings straddle winter and spring; their paint-slicked grounds are punctuated with islands of color and toenails of paint that act as object and subtance simultaneously. A stick structure hangs on the edge of a canvas like a hut on a landslide, proposing ephemeral scenarios within landscapes constructed with paint's visual matter.

Returning to Climb the Black Mountain, a context for the paintings is found in related shows: Mernet Larsen and Jonathan Butt at Regina Rex in Bushwick and David B. Brody at Sometimes, 83 Canal St. The improvisational exhibition space Sometimes is open Wednesdays from 10.30 to 6 through April 27th; just go to the address and there is a sign on the door. Regina Rex is open on weekends. Larsen, Brody and I study Asian culture intensively, so it is thrilling to see the visual discoveries of each artist's investigations.

Since Larsen's paintings are discussed in the previous post The Two L's, I'll focus on Brody's paintings here. They are strange paintings, beautifully scaled; easel-sized, the space within them is capacious. They absorb Chinese scrolls and Venetian painting in equal amounts, melding western and eastern perspectives seamlessly. Our eye roams through cutaway views of complex, labrynthian structures that suggest Hilary Harkness as well as Raiders of the Lost Ark. These abruptly shift into vaporous clouds of color or smudge. Our sense of space suspends in time that feels cultural, reverberating between ancient and future civilizations. Check Brody's site for a preview:
http://www.david-brody.com/

I'm excited by the number of painting exhibitions now on, and so glad to be participating in the rich conversation they propose.

Happy spring!

Painting with Pictures, Part II / Art for Japan

2011-04-03T15:52:00.001-04:00

Calendar, April 7, 2011

I am pleased to have three collages included in David Gibson's Painting With Pictures, Part II that opens at Artjail, Thursday, April 7th (see image above). Please join us! Click the link above to read Gibson's blog about the show.

Also Thursday night there is an Art for Japan auction at Studio 57 Fine Arts, right by the Art Students League. If you have not already, consider supporting Japan in the wake of the March 2011 tsunami. Image is here:

If you are out I hope to see you!

"Super Ls" Part I: Judith Linhares at Edward Thorp

2011-03-23T09:44:00.008-04:00

Judith Linhares
Tigress, 2009
42"x57", oil on linen

Who are the Super Ls? Two great painters: Judith Linhares and Mernet Larsen. They are both so good I posted once for each today, linked by the headers Part I and Part II. New York is lucky; they've both got shows up. Be sure to scroll down for Part II to enjoy the the full complement of Super L Painting.

Riptide, at Thorp Gallery (click on link above) is on right now, presenting Judith Linhares, long-term legendary painter. Judith's figures and animals shine bright amidst a universe of bottle greens and vivid lavenders, chicken wings and fir trees--sating their appetites with primordial satisfaction. This stellar show is eloquently reviewed by John Yau in this month's Brooklyn Rail; cut and paste this link: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/03/artseen/judith-linhares-riptide to read his thoughtful analysis on the work. Update: Riptide was reviewed in the New York Times and Village Voice. Another excellent review by painter David B. Brody can be found at Artcritical: http://artcritical.com/2011/03/23/judith-linhares/

It was terrifically hard to pick out which image to post here, as every one of Linhares' paintings offers a vision of life where pleasure and time coast in an excess of luxury, summarized by the juiciness of paint. I urge you to visit Thorp Gallery, 210 Eleventh Avenue, #601, and Judith's website for more (http://www.judithlinhares.com).

Here's a marshmellow roast from the past to send you on your way:

"Super Ls" Part II: Mernet Larsen and Jonathan Butt at Regina Rex

2011-03-23T09:30:00.006-04:00

Mernet Larsen
Committee, 2007
Acrylic, mixed media on canvas
36 x 68

One of several excellent shows up now, Mernet Larsen and Jonathan Butt are deliciously paired by the alternative, artist-run space Regina Rex. Butt's work is new to me (and good; materially related but not at all the same as Fabienne Lassere at Jeff Bailey). I've known Larsen's since 2003, thus she handily occupies the position of Super L (ref. post above). An unusual blend of Constructivism and Japanese painting, her compositions bend and twist space (and the figures within them) into new visual conundrums. Larsen is as engaging an intellect as she is a painter; I have been privileged to work with her in several capacities including co-curating Dragon Veins in 2006 for the University of South Florida's Contemporary Art Museum, a show that presented works by Frances Barth, Chie Fueki and Zhang Hongtu, among others.

This painting is one of my favorite Larsens. It lifts the airless immobility of a faculty meeting into meditative transcendence, a journey from a scroll.

There's much, much more at http://www.mernetlarsen.com. She also shows with Marcia Wood in Atlanta, and Mindy Solomon in St. Petersburg, FL. Update: this show is Pick of the Week at Artcritical, but I can no longer find it on the website to link!

Here is another I've always loved, from 2002 (54 inches square).

Meredith Allen, In Memoriam

2011-03-18T09:21:00.008-04:00

Meredith Allen passed away March 17th. Please click the link above to view this brilliant artist's work.

In addition to her artistic trajectory as a lively and esteemed photographer, Meredith documented artists for Williamsburg, Brooklyn's Waterfront Weekly in the late 1990s. I first met her and her beloved partner, filmmaker Carol Saft, at Cross Pollination, curated by MeryLyn McCorkle and Susan Joyce for the Holland Tunnel Gallery in 2000. Thereafter, we'd see each other at openings, brunches with mutual friends, and for the time Meredith photographed my work, an endearing clarification of priorities for both of us. Her photographs, from dripping ice cones to trashbags, domestic life or street rides, possess the unique ability to both expand and reflect upon collective memory.

Meredith's 2008 exhibition at Thorp, of discarded trash bags, was one of the best shows I've ever seen.

I last saw Meredith March 2nd at Lesley Heller's Daniel Wiener exhibition--in hindsight, a completion of sorts, though I did not know that then. She was, as usual, calm, good-natured and interested in everything around her; there was no sense she would so soon depart. Weeks later, her absence does not feel natural. There is instead a commingling of shock, sorrow and desire--desire to to share what I hope are a multiplicity of images that surround her, to her infinite delight.

Ed Winkleman wrote a lovely tribute at http://www.edwardwinkleman.com/ and links Art in America's tribute as well.

Dear Meredith, Rest in Peace.

Hotels and Midnight Coaches

2011-03-06T11:02:00.024-05:00

Los Angeles c. 1974. The shadows of trees flicker against shuttered windows as I perused the cover art of Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and It's Only Rock and Roll in my teenage bedroom. Sunlight made patterns on the wallpaper, suggesting peacefulness belied by the proliferating collage of rock stars in my closet.

Belgian artist Guy Peellaert's album covers, from Ziggy Stardust to Diamond Dogs, were the primary aesthetic fodder for my closet artwork. Their ennui-soaked visuals brought the lyrics bemoaning the fractured lifestyle of touring expressed in Joni Mitchell's Free Man in Paris, CSNY's Pre-Road Downs and David Bowie's Space Oddity to life. The disorientation of such lyrics resonated with adolescent uncertainty and the cultural backdrop behind it: Vietnam War, Roe v. Wade, women in the workforce, Nixon's resignation, air travel, dissolution of the nuclear family. Before rock and roll touring morphed into commuting, the seedy glamor of "hotels and midnight coaches" still promised magic: I wanted to live in Peellaert's pictures.

Peellaert's images challenge art as an agent of discovery and connection, wherein material embeds meaning and invites prolonged engagement between viewer and process. In a digital world things move faster and are quicker to name and control, which Peellaert predicts in his mechanized scenarios. Rock star protagonists hover like the afterimages of the photographs and paintings they're copied from, grounded only by their sharp silhouettes. On Peellaert's official website (linked above) Michael Herr describes him as a "born icon painter in a world that uses up icons like paper plates." The quote applies to Peellaert's handling of space as well as figures. Brick walls, striped upholstery, cars and cakes enjoy identical treatment, as if simultaneously photographed, airbrushed and photocopied. Our eyes skip over surfaces unburdened by the weight of form; space unmoors as if Ian Beck's 1973 cover illustration of Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road, where Elton John steps into the fictional reality of a poster, had finally materialized.

But now Peellaert's fantastic worlds feel fresh again, backlit by digital culture. His grafted spatial transitions and airbrush-like surfaces presage the inky color, fast transitions and flattened space of painters like Peter Saul, Wendy White and Keltie Ferris, who run with a similarly hard, graphic aesthetic in various ways. Exchanging his groundless, iconic forms as gestures and his color and space for form points to other, equally new possibilities in painting.

Form and Space in Chinese Painting - James C. Watt Lecture at NYSS

2011-02-17T14:08:00.000-05:00

The impeccable and erudite Chairman of the Department of Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, James C.Y. Watt, lectured on Form and Space in Chinese Painting at the New York Studio School January 9, 2011. I forgot my sketchbook so was unable to take notes but the loss facilitated full focus on the cogent images Watt presented. His focus concerned the evolution of form and pictorial space through Chinese history from early ceramic disks through Yuan Dynasty landscape, after the Mongols invaded China and opened its sphere of foreign influence.

From interlocking geometric patterns such as the yin-yang symbol, space evolved on and around spherical containers and maintained its finite structure as interlocking "cells" as in the Dunhuang Cave example at top. These cells, knit together in composite space, later dissolved into strong fore- and backgrounds with indeterminate middle distance bridging front and back, top and bottom, as in Ni Tsan, middle image. In the Yuan period, below, structure gives way to an emphasis on brushwork, resulting in imaginary "concoctions" (Watts' term) as in Wang Meng.

As a devotee of Wang Meng I felt gobsmacked by this categorization of his work as I have long cherished the Chinese dictum that landscape is both observed and translated. The idea suggested a fissure between Song and Yuan Dynastyies as radical as Renaissance painting to Impressionism--a rift I'd never considered in the history of Chinese landscape, which I've idealized in Taoist terms. The spare, geometric images Watts showed us expanded my awareness of Chinese landscape in a new way, reaffirming his allusion to Panofsky's insight that "the history of perspective may be understood with equal justice as a triumph of the distancing and objectifying sense of the real, and as a triumph of the distance-denying human struggle for control; it is as much a consolidation and systematization of the external world, as an extension of the domain of self." Not until Watt's talk did I link the emphasis in traditional Chinese painting on the anthropomorphic landscape with western perspectives, even having just read Panofsky's Perspective as Symbolic Form!

Click on the link above for a 1981 article by Watts about the Chinese zither (quin) in Orientations to gain a deeper sense of the instrument and how it was portrayed in various epochs of Chinese painting. His recent World of Khubilai Khan, Yale University Press, which accompanies his recent major exhibition at the Met, will be my next read.

Thanks to the New York Studio School for hosting such a wonderful lecture series, open and free to the public on Tuesday and Thursday nights. For more information about the spring 2011 lecture series, visit http://www.nyss.org/lectures/spring-2011/.

What are you doing Sunday?

2011-01-27T13:36:00.002-05:00

Self Portrait with Striped Shirt, 2008

Sunday, I shall board the 1:38 from Grand Central Station to the Aldrich Museum to attend the opening reception of Jenny Dubnau's exhibition Head On. Click the link above to check out times, dates and online catalogue for the exhibition. I've known Jenny since the early 1990s; it's a pleasure to discuss painting with her in studio and gallery visits because her engagement with painting is so profound. It's also gratifying to observe her work evolve--she was always good, but the work, though remaining in dialogue about painting and paint, invites directly transmitted experience that transcends the critical.

I'm particularly excited about these paintings as they represent a ripening maturity in her work. Starting from the above self portrait, 2008, Jenny mutes her palette, pushing the most subtle aspects of a color. She alters the internal scale of her figures for a more proportionally rewarding relationship to the space surrounding them and softens the lively dance of her brushwork to the barest flicker. The paintings are material, but atmospheric. Look at the stripes on the shirt, the edges of hair, eye and chin, or the strange double halo of head and neckline--they pulsate. The psychological self portraits from 2005, the nearly slapstick, black and white self portraits of 2006 and exquisite portraits of aging loved ones from 2007 search and give way, after a cataclysmic encounter with Velasquez' Las Meninas, to a more distanced, yet penetrating perception.

In Las Meninas, Jenny witnessed "vast circular space, through which dust motes fell," and that space offered the pivot she felt her work needed: literal room for human presence. In the double portrait below, the influence of Spanish painting is clearly felt in the atmospheric space and beautiful charcoal palette that invites the eye to roam. The figures and space share equal weight, enveloping and holding each other.


Carrie and Sheila, 2008

R. With Grey Shirt, 2009

After Spain, Jenny began to hire models. This brought a natural evolution to the Aldrich show, which includes artists, curators and others associated with the museum new to her acquaintance. The emotional space evolves a more compassionate feeling in the work. It imbues perception, in a paradoxical shift of emphasis, with the agency to negotiate the mechanics of vision through the body. This activity, encapsulated in flickering brushwork, becomes the true subject of the paintings.

Peter Saul at Haunch of Venison, 1230 6th Avenue (48th/49th), Last Day Today

2011-01-14T23:16:00.001-05:00

Trumpets of joy at this briliant survey exhibition by Texan bad-boy Peter Saul. For many years, Saul taught in Texas and is now living in New Hampshire. His satiric antics are in full play in the twenty paintings of this show. Painter Susanna Coffey commented that the paintings looked immediate, as if done yesterday--and are loaded with visual ideas: flat, blocky areas of color surrounded melting refrigerators or jets, pearlescent, pellet-like teeth and sponge-like die. It's hard to know where to land first: juicy refrigerator still lifes, with striped and checkered backgrounds, linseed oil still looking wet on the surfaces; the razor-sharp articulation of "Columbus Discovers America," 1992-5, in which low, muted color sweeps into a Byzantine goldmine of yellows and Indian reds that turns out to be a group of women in chains; or the tour-de-force painting of cops on a subway crash epic from 1979, or the weird and furry paintings Saul is doing now. The overriding impression is, what a colorist. The second is, look at those edges! The longer you look, the more rewarding, on a purely visual level, the paintings become.

Saul lived and worked in Europe for eight years, returning to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1964. He states in the exhibition catalogue that Americans weren't really studying their culture yet, so he was able to plumb its riches from afar. His work intersected with and/or likened to R. Crumb, the Hairy Who and Guston, and these intersections come immediately to mind when you see the paintings; they also conjure, from a greater distance, Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, also in Europe in the late 1950s.In the catalogue interview with Chris Byrne, Saul responds to a question about why he draws distortion: "I like to draw cartoony because it adds a feeling of movement." He adds, "a great many mistakes are a good thing because they slow down the viewing, and become interesting points to look at..." and cites an incident in London in 1956 when artist Pietro Annigoni was criticized for making one of the Queen's arms too long and Saul, with 20,000 others, stood on line to see it. Saul states, "like Ingres he was trying to stretch the body a little further. A few years later I began to think about this event: 20,000 people looking at a mistake."

Saul's show is one of those that makes you wan to drop everything and paint.

Happy 2011!

2011-01-01T09:35:00.001-05:00


OPENING RECEPTION: January 1, 1-3PM

Monday, Monday: Post Blizzard

2010-12-27T09:03:00.000-05:00

Blizzard, 10 PM

2010-12-26T22:54:00.000-05:00

New Year, New Work, New Faces

2010-12-24T06:44:00.001-05:00

My painting Interlude is included in the second incarnation of New Year, New Work, New Faces, opening the second year of STOREFRONT gallery in Bushwick. The exhibition page is linked above; scroll the gallery's home page to read articles and reviews about the gallery, its founders and the artists who have shown there. STOREFRONT has quickly become a Bushwick staple, and its programming is excellent.

A benefit for Norte Maar, gallery co-founder Jason Andrew's community organization, will take place December 28 from 7 to 9 and the exhibition opens January 1, 2011, from 1 to 6 PM. Norte Maar sponsors local activities as well as summer 2010's Camp Pocket Utopia, documented earlier on this blog as well as AT World and Two Coats of Paint.

Wishing all a very happy 2011!

Cadaqués, Spain

2010-12-12T12:27:00.001-05:00

Photos by Sergio Sagnier

Joan Wickersham, Writer.

2010-12-08T09:26:00.000-05:00

It is my pleasure to introduce writer Joan Wickersham, creator of Suicide Index, one of the best books I have ever read. Click on the link above to find out more about Joan and her work. Rarely has this reader experienced such searing honesty and elegant skill together and the combination, not to mention the content, is unforgettable. If you think a book about suicide does not pertain to you, take a look anyway. If you experience the human condition, there will be something for you in it.

Joan writes a column for the Boston Globe so once you finish Suicide Index and feel bereft, there is a way to read more.

Monet and Abstraction - A Show Essential to Know About

2010-11-29T12:25:00.001-05:00

One of the greatest exhibition catalogues ever. My regret is not having seen the exhibition personally. Click on link to find out more.

Let Us Face the Future. British art 1945-1968 - Fundació Joan Miró

2010-11-29T12:21:00.000-05:00

Let Us Face the Future. British art 1945-1968 - Fundació Joan Miró

New York Touchdown

2010-11-20T18:50:00.004-05:00

I took a Chelsea sojourn between 29th and 23rd streets today:

29th St.
Steve di Beneditto at Nolan, two in particular, the Quarry and a smaller painting on the same west wall; beautiful pencil drawings in the back;

26th St.
Vivid, Female Currents in Painting - too many wonderful painters to name, curated by Janet Phelps (click on link to visit Shroeder, Romero and Shredder) and Pavers, those who pave the way...among the group of Pavers and Vivids: Judy Linhares, Carrie Moyer, Rosanna Bruno, Susanna Coffey; a particularly sharp Wendy White, more, more! You've got to go.

Lee Krasner at Miller, 26th - an ultimate Paver - oh, this show is good - the umber paintings are perfect, and there is a plummy, patterned pathway in alizarin crimson or similar, that is just delicious. Rhythm and pattern start here;

Philip Pearlstein at Betty Cunningham - saw this quickly but the beauty was on the back west wall, no head - just body and toy;

25th St.
Stephen Mueller @ Lennon, Weinberg- sucks sky-space into cups of colorful fades;

Hans Hartung @ Cheim and Reid - like Krasner, a just-right historical show at this moment in abstract painting; makes me think about the typically western desire to 'construct' a painting offset by traditional eastern mastery of idioms that gives "bone" to immediacy.

Thomas Noskowski at Pace - of all the shows, this thrilled me to the marrow with its unbelievable freedom. Drawings, paired with paintings - informing each other - reveals the shifts in decisions and visual logic so natural to working in the studio - inspiring. (Image above, snapped from the Pace website - go see this show!)

23rd St.
Ellen Lanyon @ Pavel Zoubok - elegant, illustrative, fun-to-paint still life narratives accompanied by a tableau of the actual objects and lively collaborative book with poet / curator Lynne Cook

Julie Schenkelberg@ Asya Geisberg - not enough time to see but through the window - looks promising, a wild ramble through domestic rubble.

22nd St.
Keltie Ferris at Horton - touches of Mark Bradford and Chris Martin conflate in urban cityscapes, while having nothing to do with this painter at all! Expansive, spray-painted musings on painting and being.

Larissa Bates at Monya Rowe - she has done her homework on Indian and Chinese idioms, and her works in gouache show the gyrating structures in those works - and a delicate touch with the oils as well.

Look forward, after Barcelona and Cadaques, to view the rest of Chelsea more in depth. But am gratified and visually nurtured viewing the simultaneous history and presence of abstraction, today.

November 11, 2010

2010-11-10T21:04:00.000-05:00

October 2010

2010-11-02T14:33:00.000-04:00

A Wonderful Poet

2010-10-23T16:39:00.001-04:00

I'm traveling through mid-December so posting will be light. The above link will take you to a poet I am currently reading, Jane Hirschfield. Her book Nine Gates is a must.

Musings on Relational Aesthetics

2010-10-12T22:37:00.007-04:00

In a summer New York Times article on public sculpture, critic Ken Johnson wondered if, philosophical dimensions of art works aside, does the work visually compel?

This took me to Nicholas Bourriaud’s 1990 book Relational Aesthetics, which describes the evolution of aesthetic to social or philosophical frameworks in art works. As visual recognition becomes faster and more complex, so that we see a tracking shot as a single image, our understanding of symbols, from keyboards to advertising, is immediate and comprehensive. Given the visual speed at which we absorb information, one might conclude, as Bourriaud does, that visual language becomes one trope among many, a factor in a confluence of factors that include social interaction and time as means of shared experience. For him, social interactions and time re-invigorate the social aspects of viewing formalist artworks in ways that feel more relevant in contemporary life. For Bourriaud, the object is not necessary to establish a sense of shared connection.

I’ve given this some thought and conclude it is ultimately an academic argument that sidesteps the issue of criteria altogether in favor of a premise that expands the field of what art can be. The performative aspects of relational aesthetics recall Fluxus, Art as Life, Happenings, but the conceptual foundation is different through leveling visual, social and philosophical frameworks. Johnson concludes a preference for work that engages the eye beyond function - citing the visual symbolism of Tom Otternes-- but experience tells me art's presence influences people when it is in the world, no matter what. Connections are forged in different ways - how can they be any different than learning styles, or ways of thinking? They aren't, really.

But, what interests me most in painting is the narrowness of its limitations and strictures; its unforgivability. What once seemed binding now points to freedom. For such a malleable medium, paint can become as complex as any other visual experience, real or filmed. To make a painting come alive, step away from its long, digested history into the present, remains compelling to do and see.

NurtureArt Auction October 12, 2010

2010-09-30T14:27:00.000-04:00

Click on above link to preview the works at auction. Please consider donating to this wonderful cause!

Brooklyn Tornado path

2010-09-22T14:10:00.001-04:00

Photos by Yiwen Chow.

Yiwen arrived Thursday in the late afternoon; around 5.30 we headed from Bed-Stuy to Tribeca for an errand before openings and the aborted attempt to attend a wine tasting on the LES. Upon disembarking the C train at Canal, we noticed it had rained. But the city's energy felt dense and congested beyond the usual sensory feast; traffic was stalled on Broome, gridlock everywhere and not a cab to be found. Small surprise: a tornado had just blown through while we were underground!

These images were taken Saturday on State St. in Brooklyn Heights.

The scale of the tornado effortlessly shifts perceptions of the landscape. Space reconfigures: the skyline is cropped of tree canopies, the streets shape a new flow of traffic to accommodate felled trees so that cars that once barreled down straight streets now carefully zig zag through leafy green barriers.

Ode to Lefferts Street

2010-09-13T17:47:00.002-04:00

Enter Lefferts St. one block south of Fulton at Classon, where you'll find an old hotel with an awning that looks like an over sized bronze tongue. From there Lefferts runs three blocks and ends at St. Marks Place, which faces into it. Biking down the quiet lane, I imagine the London of Mary Poppins, with lives conducted behind dignified facades. The brownstones share the street with old, wooden houses and low-slung, renegade churches. Sycamores arch above, creating respite from the concrete, car shops and traffic on Fulton and Atlantic Avenues.

The transition from being in a place to drawing it--or tracing it, from sketchbooks, scrolls and photos, as I have been doing in the studio, adds a layer of experience upon returning. Brush pens drain images of color, leaving only line and contour to define them. Line simplifies and equates information, reducing image toward gesture. There is great pleasure slowly retracing images of a location, reliving memories and combining them with others. Multiple connections evolve densely layered constructions, rendering landscape just one element in a larger often abstract situation. Yet returning to a place I've drawn, I see it differently, after visually absorbing it. Meaning returns, not through metaphor, but in the heightened awareness, the new and more familiar relationship. It's a little uncanny.

Goodbye, Summer Days of Bedford-Stuyvesant

2010-09-09T08:35:00.008-04:00

As summer wanes, these images conjure the imaginary relief from heat on concrete experienced on sweaty tromps through the neighborhood. One thing that stands out overall is how alcohol-related businesses beckon customers with nostalgic touches of days gone by. An example is the Tip-Top Bar + Grill, which comes alive at nights when its signage alights. Red and green lights -- hybrid lantern and subway stop globe shapes-- twirl above the entrance; when lit, the beer sign allures as a pirate chest would. Such touches make the mundane magical, as do the cardboard displays in liquor store windows that juxtapose faded, corrugated cardboard backdrops with images of cruise ships and martinis.

Beyond my front door heading to Fulton Street (I'm three doors in) is the unused construction shed that surrounds a building with wood-covered windows. No construction in sight. This same building was where the Claver Place Mens Club used to be. At night, the neighborhood men would gather (with some guest women on occasion) to play pool, drink beer and congregate under low-hanging lamps. Now, homeless folk argue and sometimes sleep under the construction shed. I miss the men with the aviator glasses, who pulled up chairs outside of the club and chatted in the late afternooons before heading in to their pool game.

I often look at the willow above Family Dollar and wonder where it grows from - an empty lot? Someone's back yard? It reminds me of Chinese scrolls that have been suddenly transported to another time and place.

Bed-Stuy Mural

2010-08-26T09:57:00.007-04:00

Two blocks away from where I live, this mural has become an integral part of my daily landscape. Ol' Dirty Bastard's visage conjures wonderful memories of late night printmaking binges on a week-long workshop at Texas State University, San Marcos with Jeffrey Dell in 2005. As industrious students and Dell pulled screens into the night, the Wu-Tang Clan with ODB at the mike yodelled us on. I often stop and stare at the eyes in this mural, which brilliant blue unnaturally obliterates the pupils so the eyes float out a bit. The blue suggests a camera flash, offsetting the grim, overall illumination of institutional photography suggested by the image.

The mural, originally painted by Victor Goldfeld in 2007, has been defaced and repainted twice. For more history and a UTube synopsis, check Goldfeld's site, linked above. For more background you can find an interview with Giacomo Fortunato and Vega on the blog TheCrypt; Fortunato wrote an essay for the online magazine Heeb, Ol' Dirty Lawsuit, in 2009.

Rosanna Bruno's Studio

2010-08-18T20:08:00.012-04:00

I.
Today I visited painter Rosanna Bruno, whose work I have known, and followed, since she first arrived in New York in 1993. She showed me ten or more new paintings since her 2009 John Davis Gallery exhibition, linked above (download the pdf from her name on the gallery menu). These paintings are supple and light. Gestures adorn raw linen surfaces, creating web-like structures to visually climb without the guarantee of gravity.

I'd been thinking about Wm. Powhida's passionate outburst regarding 'canned radicalism' on his blog post* Works of Art. It got me thinking on the possibilities of what is radical in art today, what could be, particularly in painting. Rosanna's painting proposed a redefinition of priorities, in that they do not appear radical in the way that statement-making approaches (ie. Warhol, Schnabel, Halley and Hirst) might. Her paintings inch forward, harnessing the usual suspects--gesture, texture, chroma, scale--to wrest unsettled, fractured spaces. They are forged in the crucible of history, acknowledging and trespassing it within those terms. Accordingly, the dance between translucent grounds, delicate swipes of the brush that hint at form, and gestures full of body and movement leads us to...

...such ambiguity between figure and ground that prolonged looking induces vertigo, akin to walking a tightrope. Ropy gestures offer illusions of security and we climb on out, before realizing it's all gesture...we see this with our eyes--we are caught in a labrynth of gestures with no certain place to go. Forked-tongued gestures and washy grounds intermingle and don't define what's on top and beneath. They establish spatial relationships promptly jettisoned for flickering and staccato rhythms.

*http://williampowhida.blogspot.com/2010/08/work-of-art-rant.html

II.
Is perception radical?

Agnes Martin, Writings, p. 71:
"It is so hard to slow down to the pace where it is possible to explore one's mind. And then of course one must go absolutely alone with not one thought about others intruding because then one would be off in relative thinking."

In this epoch of saturation, is such an endeavor possible? Or is the importance of individual perception historical?

Agnes Martin, Writings, p. 89:

"When interest in graphic art wanes I suppose it is possible to imagine its slipping out of sight but I do not believe in that possibility.

My interest is in experience that is wordless and silent, and in the fact that this experience can be expressed for me in art work which is also wordless and silent...

...We perceive - We see. We see with our eyes and we see with our minds...

...Perceiving is the same as receiving and it is the same as responding. Perception means all of them."

and for this reason, she proposes that, "If we can perceive ourselves within the work - not the work but ourselves when viewing the work then the work is important. If we can know our response, see in ourselves what we have received from a work, that is the way to the understanding of truth and all beauty." (italics hers).

III.
Thinking with one's eyes can be radical, though not perhaps in ways we have come to expect radical to behave. The ability to become visually dislocated while contemplating an object is pure kinesthetic power, restoring bodily awareness through sight. What this changes is perhaps nothing, or everything.

On My Way to Rosanna's: WetSlipper

2010-08-18T19:59:00.002-04:00

On my way to Rosanna Bruno's studio, I stopped at Recess, 41 Grand Street, to experience WetSlipper, a collaborative installation by Siebren Viersteeg and David Hardy under the moniker SpiritTours. (The above link provides hours and address.) It was unexpectedly wonderful to don trashbag pantaloons, climb up a wooden ladder and whoosh out on Grand Street, where one could recover by viewing pithy sayings on tie dyed t-shirts and handmade signage. Though a large landing cushion had recently been removed by city employees due to encroaching on sidewalk space, sliding activities showed no sign of abating. A promising first day for the perfect pick-me-up in the dog days of summer...

The Way We See

2010-08-13T15:15:00.001-04:00

Walking through my neighborhood, I fix on particular landmarks. The Franklin Medical Building, above, is one of my favorites for its mid-century design, compact scale, aqua panels and dated signage. Once likely a hub of activity, now slatted blinds hang loosely in the windows; the roll up remains locked. I wonder what happened to the doctors who practiced there; who owns the building now, and its role in the neighborhood before closing. Often in my neighborhood, space assumes the linear shape of avenues lined by brownstones, undifferentiated in memory.

The article Culture Wires the Brain: A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective, cited on Integral Options Cafe (http://integral-options.blogspot.com/ on 8/6/2010), proposes a singling of landmarks as cultural:

..."There is evidence that the collectivist nature of East Asian cultures versus individualistic Western cultures affects both brain and behavior. East Asians tend to process information in a global manner whereas Westerners tend to focus on individual objects. There are differences between East Asians and Westerners with respect to attention, categorization, and reasoning. For example, in one study, after viewing pictures of fish swimming, Japanese volunteers were more likely to remember contextual details of the image than were American volunteers. Experiments tracking participants' eye movements revealed that Westerners spend more time looking at focal objects while Chinese volunteers look more at the background.

...Park and Huang note that, "with age, both cultures would move towards a more balanced representation of self and others, leading Westerners to become less oriented to self and East Asians to conceivably become more self-focused."

The holistic perception in Chinese scrolls initially attracted me for the dissolution of binaries. In scrolls, space undulates with a "butterfly" perspective that shifts from length to depth. This leads me to reconsider drawing now, how parts fit into the whole by working from the whole at first. Same with my neighborhood, as it undergoes gradual but persistent gentrification.

Hyphenation

2010-08-04T10:30:00.006-04:00

Elisabeth Condon, Notes on a Landscape I, 2010, brush pen on vellum, 12 x 9 inches

Mai Long of Slot Gallery (Sydney, Australia; linked above) offers the most gorgeous definition of space describing the exhibition Here and There:

"It was our desire to offer a space for these artists to explore the notion of ‘hyphenation’ that we all experience today, living and working between places, cultures and definitions; where ‘real space’ is a layered construction of memory, found object, acquired histories and an alert reading of physical space. Essentially, this project is an exercise in transmigration and translation."

Tractors in the Landscape: Upstate New York

2010-07-27T16:01:00.003-04:00

Traveling to Camp Pocket Utopia on Amtrak, I witnessed numerous construction sites. Typically the machines were at rest--lending an air of mystery to the upheaval that lay still as the train sped past. This conjured memories of driving from New York to Florida, when I painted toy tractors amidst gestures and splats to demarcate space and light. Later, in China, this work by Gui Xing took one step further: building a tractor from gestures. Here, two tractors in honor of the construction that surrounds us on the road.

What is considered “ink” painting? A conversation with Liang Quan

2010-07-27T13:26:00.006-04:00

Click on link to read how Liang Quan references Chinese scrolls. The below footnote from the interview describes the way I think about and approach pictorial space in my work.

*Notes on the Southern School of Chinese landscape painting.
During the Ming dynasty (1555 – 1636), the theory of the Southern School of painting emerged in association with the concepts of Southern Chan (Zen) Buddhism. The artists of the Southern school are associated with the Buddhist concept of the individual self as the key to sudden and intuitive enlightenment. Their approach to the creative process of painting and the styles they adopted emphasized on direct personal experience. Paintings in the Southern style place importance on the development of a kind of abstract space, where there is no emphasis on layering or depth, and have largely influenced subsequent Chinese painting history.

Amanda Church Reviews my Dorsch Gallery exhibition Walkabout in ArtPapers 34:04

2010-07-10T09:57:00.005-04:00

Click on link to view installation photos of Walkabout. I have also written about the ideas behind developing Walkabout in previous posts, archived January - March 2010 on this blog.

Flower (Re) Power Curated by Terri C. Smith at the Housatonic Museum of Art, Bridgeport, CT

2010-06-23T15:46:00.005-04:00

For more images, click on link and select photos from the exhibition's blog menu.

Musing on Painting: Field and Window

2010-06-13T15:55:00.007-04:00

Jackie Saccoccio's exhbition at Eleven Rivington (press release linked above) expands the traditional 'window' of painting into three dimensions. Her large, tripartite painting and companion window drawing intersperse pockets of depth with flatness, amplifying the field-like space through which, starting with impressionism, we view abstraction.

At Saccoccio's opening it seemed impossible to discern the space created by the installation. My eyes hooked on details--plume-like pours of white, an area of purple peeking out through tangled glossy and matte blacks, a marking system of square-like shapes peeking out beneath a tumult of activity on top. Though the gallery press release explicitly states that the viewer becomes sandwiched, as it were, between the window drawing and three-panel painting, the scale kept it conceptual. The green-tinted window drawing collapsed street reflection and painting, merging multiple layers into a cacophony of visual and aural information that threatened to submerge any spatial discernment. I couldn't visually penetrate the holes in the green drawing's surface to descend into deeper space but remained perceptually between the window and room. In the press release, the neat encapsulation of Saccoccio's reproduced painting did not jibe with my experience of its internal scale, which augured an unexpected sense of flatness that took perception for a ride.

My eyes had encountered something unforeseen: a painting they did not understand. It was thrilling to feel so visually nonplussed in an age of image saturation that is so overtly legible. I returned to the gallery during regular hours to find the payoff that eluded a room full of people: painting about movement seen in passing, changing like light as one crisscrossed the empty gallery. Time and movement dictated ways the green tint on the window impacted and flattened the blacks, then in passing switched their depth; how the artist's signature square shapes blinked on and off as one traversed the painting surface, how divisions between canvases punctuated the flow of white transparencies slowly spreading over the painting's surface as if reflections or clouds: but decidedly NOT. Movement yielded stasis, fleetingly--before I, or the painting, uprooted again for another phase of space and perception. Image became dream: something experienced in memory, but never coalescing as solid form.

Resolutely flat then "opening the window," the painting becomes an experience of space both real and unreal, conjuring and dissolving the body simultaneously. The dimensional aspect literally layers perception while flat color flattens the layers, forming shifting fields before our eyes. Impressionist style, our eyes complete the work. But this is not impressionist painting; it is an aggregate of marks that (perhaps like Impressionism when new) demand to be assembled in new ways. Or--it is the world.

Saccoccio's work as well as that of Franklin Evans, whose piece at PS.1's Greater New York echoes her concern with dimensional abstraction (in his case, through the use of masking tape taken from his studio walls), inform my own interest in combining field and window. It comes as no surprise the artists collaborated on the gallery installation Blue Balls, first shown in SoHo and incarnated as Collision this fall at the RISD Museum. His work shares with hers the dimensional aspect; the dissemination of form in favor of layered impressions that coalesce into a greater whole.

My endeavor to collapse dimensions and flirt with the pictorial while resisting the takeover of literal form seems impossible: what would the logic of a painting be? How could... but multiple modes of seeing have become part of perceptual experience: can painting embrace it well perceptually, conceptually and materially? The work of these artists and Saccoccio's show re-invigorate the question.

check out Jackie's website: http://www.jackiesaccoccio.com

Consciousness Painter

2010-06-08T15:20:00.003-04:00

This appraisal of my earlier work by Stephanie Lee Jackson (linked above) suggests the devolving role of form in my work.

In Memorium: Louise Bourgeois and her Salon

2010-06-01T07:03:00.010-04:00

When artist Jo Darbyshire was here from Australia, she visited Louise Bourgeois' Sunday salon with Melissa Levin of Toronto, who photographed the event.

Like so much else Louise Bourgeois initiated, her Sunday afternoon salons will resonate for a long while to come.

I first went in 2002--can't even remember the year actually. Trembling, I called on a Monday. Allo? a tiny, but sharp voice answered and asked if I was an artist. What kind of work did I make? What imagery? Come at 3, she said, and hung up. I'd been advised to bring good whiskey or excellent chocolate; these offerings accumulated on a large wooden spool/table and were passed around the room.

Lugging a 48 inch tondo of a Raggedy Ann Madonna holding a baby doll, not cognizant that she reviewed art on a 2 x 2 table, I ascended a rickety stairway to the room pictured above. It was packed with artists, curators, poets and singers holding sketchbooks, architectural plans and photographs. Louise Bourgeois sat behind the table and received every one, assisted by an art world friend who served as a facilitator. The process lasted seven hours. People began to drink whiskey and eat chocolate to keep going. When details caught Bourgeois' eye she'd ask pointed questions very directly. She interrogated a man who'd attached a rock to the middle of his painting, dismissing the desire to provoke without a broader intention (how I remember her viewing the work). That night, as people filtered out, she drew a perfect circle with a blue ballpoint pen on a sheet of sketch paper. You could feel her moving into the experience of making, fueled by the conversation and looking at work.

Two years later, the immediacy of her presence remained intact, though by this time procedures were more organized. The film camera rolled, the facilitator kept things moving. The room itself served as a lively protagonist, with curled and peeling articles and invitations from decades past festooning the walls. Its enclosure provided a space for artists to experience themselves in the greater sense as a tribe, a vital component in civilized life that was and would continue to be passed along through generations. No doubt this is attributable to Bourgeois' unflagging devotion to intuition, memory and experience as crucial to making art. The sense of lineage that crystallizes when artists share their work attests to art's power and constitutes the legacy of her salon.

Thank you, Louise Bourgeois.

A Jungle of Signs, at Feature (Sunday, May 9, 2010)

2010-05-10T16:18:00.007-04:00

From Feature Gallery's website (linked above):

A talk by Professor Michael Taussig (Dept. of Anthropology, Columbia University) who is one of the most innovative, distinguished and socially engaged voices in cultural anthropology. An interdisciplinary thinker and engaging writer, Taussig's work combines aspects of ethnography, story-telling, and social theory. An area of long standing interest, Taussig will be discussing aspects of Latin American ayahuasca-based shamanism and its historical interface with Western magic.

In 2007, visual artists Jesse Bransford and Karsten Krejcarek spent time in the city of Iquitos, Peru and the surrounding jungle. In a public conversation they hope to further elaborate on the experiences in relation to their art and art making in general. Topics will include globalization, adventure narratives, monkeys and telepathy.

***

Bransford and Krecjarek went first, describing their embodied experience of the jungle through the filter of ayahuasca, with a vibrant slide show behind them illuminating their trip and resulting exhibition of Bransford's work in the gallery. After them, Taussig, whose book What Color is the Sacred constitutes, for me, one of the first written accounts of pure visual experience, did not disappoint. He lectured for one hour straight, responding to the two artists' points with barely a reference to notes. He also played recordings of Amazonian rituals, amplifying and vivifying their accounts with his own. The experience as a whole embraced multi-valent, experiential intelligence that broadens rather than contracts horizons. My people!

Bransford mentioned Latin American modernism as possessing qualities that relate to his experiences in Peru, but did not link its purely visual language with unfiltered, drug-induced experience. When I mentioned this to his friend in the audience, he noted the colonial aspect of modernism under discussion problematized such notions. Taussig offered a way out, stating that images diagnose a situation and by visualizing it, change it.

When I think of multiple identities, experienced in the above travels as well as daily life, I do not see how pictorial logic can remain coherent and remain visually relevant to experience. Yesterday's talk confirmed this. "The magic of otherness" might lure, initially, but once dispelled in a direct encounter, complicates and expands comprehension, perceptually and conceptually. It may become part of us, and us a part of it, but what this actually looks like cannot already have been imagined.

Brooklyn

2010-05-07T19:23:00.004-04:00

I am here.
Outside my window, the tree is now bending with the wind and is a dry, but very deep green.

Multiplicity

2010-04-27T18:19:00.012-04:00

On her website (linked above), Toronto-based Narrative Therapist Bonnie Miller writes,

"I love Calvin and Hobbes, and was sad when Bill Waterson, its creator, closed shop. He did it to pursue his other identity as a 'real' artist. I guess that, like many of us, Bill felt that he had only the time or energy to express one identity at a time.
...the assumption seems to be that the self is fixed, singular, and internal.

...There is another set of ideas about identity, floating around out there, that suggest these assumptions:

* that we each have many identities
* that these identities are 'performed' or played out, under different circumstances
* and that these identities are shaped and received by our social surroundings- the setting, the people in the setting, the expectations of those people, and how we react to those expectations."

In painting, diverse paint applications and collage-like composition become essential to envision space in visually convincing ways. Taking cues from traditional Chinese landscape, collage compositions jettison binary structures such as horizon lines or figure and ground. The dis- or re-integration of form, color and space that results imparts the psychological and visual effects of globalization and digitization.

Collage-like space emerges in 1960s Pop Art, reflecting then-current innovative technologies in science, space travel and foreign relations. Artists James Rosenquist and Robert Rauschenberg, in particular, fractured space by merging diverse elements--Rosenquist, through the vehicle of sign painting, Rauschenberg, through chance. Both men studied Asian philosophy and inserted its teachings within the cacophony of images they experienced as culture.

Does geographic location dictates aesthetics, like perceptions defines the self? Immersion into a new space overwhelms and inundates--but does it eradicate aesthetic origins? The doubled state of being that results between an old and new self-in-situ can be bridged by diverse elements in painting. The end-game first postulated in postmodern recycling finds new possibilities in the unknown reconfiguring of the familiar.

James Rosenquist, Painting Below Zero, p. 290

2010-04-25T20:47:00.002-04:00

Frank Stella aid something interesting about the split-second nature of art. He said that the baseball player Ted Williams was the quintessential modern artist because of his fast eye--Williams claimed he could see the seams no a baseball as it came over the plate at ninety miles an hour. I want that instant punch when you look at one of my paintings, too--the immediacy of an ad or a billboard--but at the same time I want you to be able to read things in my paintings as they slowly rise to the surface. I'm often impressed by seeing something obliquely. That way I won't get tangled up with its meaning to the point that I forget the very thing that originally enticed me. I'll take it in in that initial flashing way, and then I'll take the time to look deeper.

What I think Frank meant is that seeing a painting is sometimes like love at first sight, something that doesn't have any barriers to it. With some paintings, you don't need words--or titles, either. You get it without anything intervening between you and your vision of it. Afterword, after you've absorbed that first visual blitz, you realize that there's something deep in that black area that you hadn't seen right away.

Guilin

2010-04-16T16:38:00.003-04:00

Guilin’s landscape is a phantasm of mountains misshapen through lost layers of bedrock, surrounding the Li River in a Seussian panorama. Cross-pollinating Guilin’s terrain with the wide-mouthed pipes, crosses and ladders of Brooklyn's rooftops, I feel sure the collision of exaggerated naturalism and human-scaled geometry will yield a living, breathing landscape in the spirit of Yuan Dynasty scrolls.

Walkabout

2010-03-28T14:40:00.005-04:00

A view of Walkabout: Stadium on the left, Field Notes on the right.

Field Notes is an eight-panel painting in the dimensions of Huang Gongwang's 1347-50 scroll Dwelling in the Fu'ch'un Mountains. I schematized his composition in flourescent blocks of color, projected images from the scroll in segments on the canvas and added sketchbook drawings of the Fountainhead residency, Miami, where I was working when I began the painting. To this compendium of images, I added sketches from traveling I-95 between Tampa and Miami, a Tampa convenience store, and paint itself in order to collapse color, form and gesture.

Field Notes refers to Michael Taussig's book What Color is the Sacred? and Fred R. Myers' Painting Culture. Both use the example of the anthropologist as artist, which I adapt to my practice as a painter. Taussig speaks eloquently of how color becomes all encompassing, a force that intoxicates the eye and heart. I consider this in relation to painting formless sensations that occur in the immersion of travel. It also relates to the formlessness of non-ego. I aim for such formlessness when I am painting to more accurately convey perceptions unbridled by habit. This happens naturally in new situations and places.

So the metaphor of anthropologist as artist seems apt for transcribing the world experientially. Combining "found" landscapes such as Gongwang's scrolls, my sketches, photojournalism, etc. pictorial space becomes a version of wallpaper--a repeating pattern with sudden ruptures of heightened perception. In graduate school, I remember developing large scale, unstretched canvases with "holes' in them through which new spaces emerged. They felt and looked too raw at the time, but with hindsight, perhaps the first harbingers for work I am making now.

March 13, 2010, Dorsch Gallery

2010-03-16T20:34:00.001-04:00

Want to see these together

2010-03-10T15:19:00.001-05:00

Walkabout

2010-03-06T16:05:00.001-05:00

Ocketopia

2010-03-06T16:04:00.000-05:00

Stadium, 2010

2010-02-26T23:06:00.001-05:00

Going into the 13th hour. Space heater on. DJ Shadow on Pandora. Paint flows like water. Color spreads across the room.

Thoughts on Walkabout

2010-02-15T10:35:00.007-05:00

The above link takes you to today's Times article on recently deceased Chinese Prof Xie Zhiliu's preparatory studies and copies, which his daughter donated to the Met in 2005. Curator and Scholar Maxwell Hearn thinks the exhibition, which reveals Xie's commitment to copying Song Dynasty masters, will change Chinese scholarship, but as far as I know, copying was the mode of learning traditional techniques in China from time immemorial. Perhaps now given Westernization this does not apply, but copying was always done in Chinese tradition.

Somehow the article unlocks my preparation for the Dorsch exhibition Walkabout. I have been mulling the concept of Walkabout for some time, related to the concept of moving through a Chinese scroll as applied to my own travels, including the Fountainhead residency I am on now. Walkabout becomes a process of experiencing a new place and making work about that. The spiritual implication of movement, initiated in painting with explosive pours and subsequent travel through the (global) landscape, supplant walking the land with moving at speed from one place to another. Movement speaks to disolocation, query-leading to the loss of ego so crucial to the requisite emptiness that painting demands.

Within the permeable landscape one finds structures and places to rest--like the rock formations in Australia or the Scholars Houses in Chinese scrolls. My interest in the shape and metaphor of Parasol House, a rounded geometric structure (tower, awning, pavilion)--turned out to be the umbrella held over Buddha, which I discovered in MogaoKu (Dunhuang Caves) last year. Parasol is the ultimate provisional shelter, a halo turned flat; a hub of connection.

All I have known going into this Walkabout is that the Chinese plum blossom idiom is the visual foundation. In Miami, I have reconciled its shape with the old, gnarled seagrape trees that line Morningside Park's waterfront. Yet, I have wondered how to integrate this concept into a larger panorama, when stuck in the image-base of "tree."

Xie Zhiliu's drawings re-opened a dialogue of space that moves from depth to flatness--simultaneously page and landscape proper. Suddenly image becomes mark, unburdened from invention. I cherish Chinese mix-and-match, from clothing to calligraphy to landscape to faith. It frees me from invention to introduce gestures, colors and sketchbook images without an organizing narrative. Form is a signifier--not mine to empty--yet, without the burden of invention, it becomes spacious, inviting.

So today I foray into material, color and mark--not unlike the way I used to draw secret images inside the wallpaper of my childhood room--compressing space into layered non-narratives that are "seen at a glimpse" and made as a doodle.

Walkabout

2010-02-14T12:01:00.002-05:00

From Wickipedia (linked above):
Walkabout refers to a rite of passage where male Australian Aborigines would undergo a journey during adolescence and live in the wilderness for a period as long as six months.[1] In this practice they would trace the paths, or "songlines", that their people's ceremonials ancestors took, and imitate, in a fashion, their heroic deeds. Merriam-Webster, however, defines the noun as a 1908 coinage that refers primarily to "a short period of wandering bush life engaged in by an Australian aborigine as an occasional interruption of regular work", with the only mention of "spiritual journey" coming in a usage example from a latter-day travel writer.[2]

Landscape

2010-02-13T13:00:00.007-05:00

In the California Light and Space show that just closed at Zwirner, Peter Alexander's cast fiberglass wedge took me by surprise. Standing in front of it, the Pacific Ocean materialized right before my eyes: once again, I lived in LA, the light, the space of the ocean directly ahead.

The Alexander puzzles me. Its sensory capacity is overwhelming, similar to how Michael Taussig discusses anthropoligist Malinowski's perception of color in his book, Is Color Sacred? --yet, as an object, the wedge functioned similarly to a snowglobe. Once I found the illusion inside, would I be able to recover the initial moment of spontaneous perception?

As a painter in the age of sensory overload, I wonder about the emotional heat in illusion. I understand the need for distance; if imagery is proximate, readable; will it provide space for an object to be considered reflectively beyond the sensate? Even as I ask the question, I recognize its inherent Modernist foundation.

Gober's Charles Burchfield catalogue and the ancient Chinese painters' integration of spiritual, emotional and perceptual navigate the slippery terrain of temperature. As I write, waiting for pours of paint to dry on the first few panels of an epic landscape, my mind turns to my current location, Miami, and ways to express its impact in paint.

I begin to see my heritage as an American landscape painter, visionary division. Visionary sidesteps the binaries and gets to the core of immediacy.

Morningside Park, Miami, Friday morning

2010-01-29T16:59:00.001-05:00

Nocturne

2010-01-08T22:18:00.000-05:00

2009-12-25T12:26:00.000-05:00

Painting

2009-12-18T11:59:00.001-05:00

Paint is embodied. That is part of its importance.

Xio Yau and Wei Baogong

2009-12-14T20:47:00.003-05:00

Wei took the picture of Xiao and I in the post below this. Xiao's son, whom I got to know well, is called "humanity" in Chinese. I could not understand the word, sadly...and so called him wo de xiao peigno (pidgin is off)-- my little friend.

They live in the village next to mine in Songzhuang, as they have for 9 years. Wei paints, Xiao is a mastermind organizer and coordinator. Formerly a soldier in the army, she met Wei and now lives the art life--facilitating, translating, planning, orchestrating.

We met in 2005 at Red Gate. Xiao arranged for Wei and a friend to take me to the Great Wall on a freezing December day. They picked me up early; we ate dried grape fruit on the way. Delicious. The three guys wore green Mao coats with fur lining that were very warm. Once we reached our destination, about two hours north of Beijing, we crossed a footbridge and paid a few yuan to a local family before heading to an old, crumbling part of the wall. We were the only ones on it that day. Mountains rose and fell around us; shadows moved across them as the sun shifted over the sky. After several hours of hiking, we returned to the family's home, where they made us a warm meal. A photograph of Mao was on the table.

Afterward Wei, his friend and Xiao drove me to a Buddhist temple, with expansive grounds. They told me to go in alone. I entered a passage lined with bamboo. Moving over the grounds, I saw enormous Buddhas, an 8,000 year old tree spread over a lattice and another extremely high mountain with a criss-crossing path. I sighed. How could I not climb it, though my feet were frozen solid and my legs sore from the Wall? And as I climbed, and climbed, I reached the top, where Beijing spread out before me, a flat field illuminated by a gold sun in the distance. As I descended the second major climb that day, I heard bamboo soughing in the wind. The van with Xiao, Wei and their friend idled in the parking lot outside.

I was transformed. I had seen scrolls from my own perspective, the journey they represent over a duration of time and moving through a place.

Wei loves Yuan Dynasty painters and has a copy of Huang Gongwang's landscape book. He is a classic Buddhist Chinese scholar, adept at painting, calligraphy and also serving tea. Four years later after the Great Wall, when the picture below was taken, he was sharing his books on the great Chinese painters. Later, we shared philosophers--he did not know Francois Chen, but told me about Red Pine and others working in the United States. I continue to learn a lot from Wei Baogong and Xiao Yau.

My friends

2009-12-13T19:00:00.000-05:00

Albany Museum of Art

2009-11-19T17:55:00.002-05:00

Brooklyn, Brooklyn

2009-11-17T20:53:00.001-05:00

Missing it keenly -- the warm kitchen -- clementines -- the night cold.

Solo Museum Exhibition

2009-11-07T15:30:00.002-05:00

Thursday, November 12th, 2009 is the opening of my solo exhibition
A World of Splats, Gestures and Images
at the Albany Museum in Albany, GA.

A catalogue is available with an interview by Tyler Emerson-Dorsch.

I am extremely excited!

New Collages

2009-10-24T16:41:00.000-04:00

Carl Plansky, Rest in Peace

2009-10-12T21:18:00.001-04:00

In many ways, he epitomized New York.

Beijing Views: Summer Palace, Forbidden City, Trucks...

2009-08-29T17:13:00.004-04:00

New American Paintings

2009-08-28T18:28:00.002-04:00

Edition No. 82, curated by Ron Platt of the Alabama Museum of Art...I'm in it!

The Camera Lies Fallow

2009-08-18T21:53:00.003-04:00

Wanting to write more--take less pictures--collages in the studio abound, ready for the next step.
Thinking with my eyes, how travel makes its way felt into a painting through the process of making.