Asia on my mind

Thinking about Asia, as I prepare to leave for Australia next week. This is a six-foot tall ink portrait I made in Taichung, Taiwan, in 2004--my first trip. I prepared all day for the changeable experience of painting the dynamic city: lights switched on and off, the sky changed, and this is what Taichung finally looked like, late at night.

Bridget Riley interview with Michael Craig-Martin

Painting is, I think, inevitably an archaic activity and one that depends on spiritual values. One of the big crises in painting--at least a century or two, maybe even three centuries old--was precipitated by the dropping away fo the support of a known spiritual context in which a creative impulse such as painting could find a place. This cannot be replaced by private worlds and reveries. As a painter today you have to work without that essential platform. But if one does not deceive oneself and accepts this lack of certainty, other things come into play--they may be the reverse of what one would expect. Rather like colour, whose instability can become another form of certainty. So the absence of something, especially something necessary but which cannot be easily identified or discovered, has sometimes led to a very exacting quest in modern art. At the end of his life, Monet painted his largest, grandest and in many ways greatest paintings about virtually nothing; about looking into a huge expanse of water set with a few lilies in which unexpected colours appear in the depths, or elusively in reflections. It is a most mysterious, extraordinary subject in which he invests all his experience and power. In the end there seems to be hardly any subject-matter left--only content.

Travelling, Travelling

Preparing for Grantpirrie's window project in Sydney at month's end...weaving space through seven panels.

This Land Was Made for You and Me

Someone mentioned the other night that a pour was never an accident. No. But it is a mystery and that is the allure.

Chinese Landscape

Brooklyn Rooftops and Barkley Hendricks

It's time to pack the paintings and head to a warmer clime and palette. Already feeling nostalgic. Packing up is hard to do. This rooftop image reminds me of the Barkley Hendricks show at the Studio Museum. The blanket of snow (now gone) and the sharp contrasts conjure the structural and delightful white paintings, which knocked me out. Hendricks' is one of the best shows I have ever seen. Link to Google Image search is above, and look for Hendricks' WHAT'S GOING ON? I would have liked to post it here to see with the photo, but copyright issues were unclear.

December in Brooklyn

Transition

Figuring out how New York enters into it. More narrative than I've gone in the past. Have to think about this. Find the language for the grids, the overpasses, the tunnels, the structures around me.

Grey World

Night Studio

ShapeShifter Filmed on Vernissage TV

Click link above to see Vernissage TV film of Dorsch's ShapeShifter opening...

Shapeshifter

This image from Shapeshifter (linked above) was taken yesterday by Tyler Emerson-Dorsch, curator. The two paintings in the image are my most recent, incorporating my interest in moving from one area of a painting to another with combined applications: transparent pours, Chinese idioms and textures or gestures impacted by New York, where these were made.

Because I would miss the opening I consoled myself with a visit to Chelsea, where I saw fabulous painting and excellent photography:

Al Held at Kasmin, spatial swoops and geometric density
Trenton Doyle Hancock at Cohan, simplified and elegant religious icons
Small Abstractions at Robert Miller, history in the making
Petah Coyne at Lelong, dissolute fantasies to swoon in
Haeri Joo at Erben, young, combination of Shutz and Cecily Brown
Cora Cohen at Steinberg, elegant surfaces and beautiful edits
Jason Karalek at Audiello, splashy buoyant abstraction
Andrew Guenther at Freight & Volume, idiosyncratic reliquaries
Jessica Rohrer at PPOW, geometry in depth with quotidian features
Vincent Desiderio at Marlborough, traditional single figures most compelling
Fang Lijun at Arario, small shelf sculptures work as image and abstraction
Meredith Allen at Thorpe, sumptuous photographs of plastic, funereal and optimistic
Cindy Sherman at Metro Pictures, over the top outtakes on aging and power
Lisa Sanditz at CRG, landscapes of gesture inspired by China
Stephen Westfall at Lennon, Weinberg, new works inspired by airmail envelopes etc.
Tomma Abst at Zwirner, elegant, color saturated abstractions that play with depth
Jonas Wood at Anton Kern, collage aesthetic painting inspired by Brian Calvin
Terry Winters at Matthew Marks, mushy delicious paint atop grid structures
Joan Mitchell Sunflowers at Cheim and Reid, breathtaking fields of Monet-like strokes and dazzling color combinations
Through window (gallery closed): Karen Heagle at I-20, what looked like in the gloaming, delicious big bird forms and splashy paint

On other days but also great:
Alfred York at Spengemann, bucolic, quiet pleasures
Katia Santibanez at Danese, fierce meditations on nature that become pattern, almost white noise that in the drawings, flicker on and off

Winter Now

Saying Goodbye

Returning from Madrid to find the leaves have fallen

The two bottom photos were taken the day I left for Madrid, 11/05/08, a most wonderful day in the United States. The top photo was taken this morning, one week later, the early hour a result of jet lag.

Autumn

Brooklyn Autumn

Under the Influence

Under the Influence

Lenore Gray Review: Uncommon Ground

Almost by definition, artists are people with a knack for keeping in touch with their inner child. But some artists do it better — or at least more diligently — than others.

A case in point is Elizabeth Condon, a Brooklyn-based artist whose dreamy, semi-abstract paintings are currently on display at the Lenore Gray Gallery. In her artist’s statement, Condon cites both Doctor Seuss and Chinese scroll-paintings as artistic inspirations. In lesser hands, that might be a recipe for disaster. But Condon makes it work, deftly fusing the free-flowing, nonlinear perspective of Chinese painting with the free-flowing, nonlinear logic of the Seuss books.

In Two Places, for example, a series of recognizable images — a house, a tree, a river — float in a sea of softly pulsing colors. The result feels like a dream or memory suddenly, if fleetingly made visible. Other works evoke fantastic landscapes, whether it’s a night sky filled with glowing stars and planets (Dispersion) a fairy-tale forest filled with wisps of sea-green fog (The Woods) or a swirling garden scene (Night Flowers) worthy of another age-defying artist: Paul Klee.

The show’s other contributor, Jerry Mischak, also has a Seussian streak. Indeed, Mischak, who teaches sculpture at the University of Rhode Island, is best known for using duct tape, a material that he can coax into almost any shape from sleekly geometric to sensuously organic.

It’s a talent that is on full display in City in Balance (Let’s Share a Place), a large duct-tape sculpture in which a miniature city seems to sprout from the limbs of a gnarled tree. Though the message — something along the lines of “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all live in harmony with each other and with nature” — is serious, Mischak’s approach is more playful than political.

Through Nov. 6 at the Lenore Gray Gallery, 15 Meeting St., Providence. Hours: Mon.-Fri. 10-4:30, or by appt. Contact: (401) 274-3900.
Bill Van Siclen