A Beautiful Post: Mira Schor's Orbis Mundi

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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!

OPENING RECEPTION: January 1, 1-3PM

Monday, Monday: Post Blizzard

Blizzard, 10 PM

New Year, New Work, New Faces

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

Photos by Sergio Sagnier

Joan Wickersham, Writer.

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

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

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

New York Touchdown

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