LES Afternoon

Drawings in the back room at the wonderful Nikki Maloof exhibition, After Midnight, at Jack Hanley Gallery.
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Charming and wonderful to look at in their own right,  the drawings also serve as templates for paintings.

Elizabeth Murray at Canada, another exhibition with a valuable mix of drawing, collage and painting.
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Curated by Caroll Dunham and Dan Nadel, approaching her work from two perspectives.

Even in quill pen drawings, the patterns, the desire for surface, is apparent.

From the press release: "The drawings in this exhibition fall into four categories: Scrappy works that are truly just notes --  in the way we might write “laundry” she would draw a figure; studies for paintings that fill in the subjects and colors and schemes of a painting, such as Tangled, 1989-90, Bounding Dog, 1993-4, and Yikes, 1982; a set of studies for an illustration job for Travel and Leisure magazine that highlight her rendering chops as applied to an assigned subject; and finally, drawings that were shown in the gallery as complete works. In this last group of works, Murray often used pastel to build colors and textures that she would smudge, remove, or revisit with the tip of a crayon in order to get a crisp edge. This process resulted in layered imagery that gives texture and an illusion of depth that jibes with her shaped canvases. The Whozatt series of 1995, for example, collapses the body in variable spaces, but with a tight focus and constrained series of palettes and tones -- a genteel play on green hues in the first drawing, and a hot pulse of yellow and red in the second. "

Moving to photography as a primary source: Marilyn Minter at Salon 94.
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The paintings are harder to deciper in person. Taken with the iPhone, they immediately snap into focus.

At the wonderful Susan Rothenberg show at Sperone Westwater, a resting dog...
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Detail from a work in the front room, showing a new and fluid paint application  that balances her active mark-making techniques.