Travelin'

New painting:18 x 24, acrylic on linen. Images and pours intersect as emblems of full and empty space. In this painting memories of places and their media images yield a mode of realization dictated through touch, whereas my physical presence in a particular place might inspire a more direct, even literal image. This re-enacts Chinese ideals that studio painting synthezes internal and external sensations, as a studio art. But whether in the landscape or observing it through projections and photographs, the idea is to move through painting, fusing image and gesture in the glances of passersby.

Conversations with I-Hsiung Ju

Professor Ju's website

"boneless" tree with outline flowers

plum blossom whiskers

plum tree practice, outline method

Double flower, outline method

Welcome to I-Hsiung Hu's instruction on the Four Gentlemen (bamboo, orchid, chrysanthemum and plum blossom). These idioms introduce the texture strokes that define Chinese landscape, and in so doing, provide elements of calligraphy and stroke order. I'm using I-Hsiung Ju's quartet of instruction manuals, purchased in a 2007 visit to his studio. The Four Gentlemen are dorky, but they are also fun and I am glad to have the thorough, step by step instructions and cultural background for the idioms that I-Hsiung Hu's books provide.

To copy the idioms and memorize the stroke orders is to immerse into a silent conversation with Professor Ju. He issues admonishing "don'ts!"to accompany images that transgress proper application. He wants to redirect focus from crossed branches, awkward downward facing flowers or rigid vertical compositions to alteration of placement, tone and mark. This requires much pre-planning: leaving space on branches to allow one to cross in front, be sure that heavy elements rise to weightlessness with the size and emphasis of the brush, or balance the ink load between dark and light, dilute and dry. The principle of alternity expands within landscape composition, deploying open/closed or host/guest relationships within a balance of empty and full. Way more conservative than the free-wheeling literati whose paintings continue to amaze and delight, Professor Ju nonetheless bestows readers, at least this one, the ability to 'read' Chinese paintings with knowledge. Our conversation is studded with exclamations (I wiped out! Stop saying don't!) and dawning recognition of previously hidden points, such as the distinction between composing and performing, which become philosophically profound.

Luo Ping, whose work was exhibited in “Eccentric Visions: The Worlds of Luo Ping (1733–1799)” at the Met in 2009, took plum to unprecedented levels of expression. Profusions of blossoms drip from flowing branches, rather than the minimal flower arrangements on jagged trunks Professor Ju instructs should be "ugly, pale and awkward." For Luo Ping's family, plum painting was their livelihood. Below, one observes an active shift from the performance role of execution to the composer role of innovator. Within the embodied process of painting, the two fuse together in seamless delight.

http://theanimalarium.blogspot.com/2012/01/chinese-brushstrokes.html
 

Dana Schutz Interview

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

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, 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

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

"'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

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

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

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

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