Beijing Studio June 2009

Stacking

Xiaopu Village, Songzhuang, China

Downtown Xiaopu Village, Songzhuang, China

Paul Jenkins

When I saw Jenkins' paintings in Paul Mazursky's Unmarried Woman in the late 1970s, I thought nothing of it...but later, they had an impact. Both kitschy and beguiling, the paintings offered the pour as a solution to my work, when I was questioning how to make a spontaneous painting in the manner of Chinese scrolls. Jenkins was influenced by metaphysics and this too is interesting, for part of my love of Chinese painting has to do with its confluence of all matters, earthly and ethereal, in landscape.

Two Great Blogs on China in June 2009

Stefani Foster LaBrecque and James Prinz blogged their recent trip to Dunhuang, Gansu Province, where they represented Northwestern University in training the Dunhuang Academy photographers to use a rig for photographing the MogaoKu (Mogao Caves). Jim's blog is linked above and Stefani's can be found below; both offer rich visual essays of China.
http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=106496542856&h=fBdmj&u=HOIMz&ref=mf

Beijing Sojourn

Paintings made during my six week stay in China, inspired by the MogaoKu Caves, Songzhuan Artist village, and Beijing.

Transitions

Watching the Wire, reading Walkabout, preparing for China

“The fiction of race keeps people from aligning with their material interests. Race ameliorates class conflict, allowing the minority (wealthy) to rule the majority (the poor). Race is our greatest and most useful invention and is created and recreated constantly. It is un-subtle and does not respect the complexity of our lives at all." Kirsten Pai Buick

Review! by Nell in New Zealand Art Montly

Florida

Review! Antennae, UK

Grantpirrie Window through March 28, 2009

Bats fly over the Domain

Each night in Sydney, the bats fly from the Botanic Gardens over the highway to the Domain, where the Gallery of New South Wales is located. They are loud, squawking, and the wings flutter, one hears cries as they swoop and eat insects...hundreds of them fly at dusk, each night...

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