My friends

Albany Museum of Art

Brooklyn, Brooklyn

Missing it keenly -- the warm kitchen -- clementines -- the night cold.

Solo Museum Exhibition

Thursday, November 12th, 2009 is the opening of my solo exhibition
A World of Splats, Gestures and Images
at the Albany Museum in Albany, GA.

A catalogue is available with an interview by Tyler Emerson-Dorsch.

I am extremely excited!

New Collages

Carl Plansky, Rest in Peace

In many ways, he epitomized New York.

Beijing Views: Summer Palace, Forbidden City, Trucks...

New American Paintings

Edition No. 82, curated by Ron Platt of the Alabama Museum of Art...I'm in it!

The Camera Lies Fallow

Wanting to write more--take less pictures--collages in the studio abound, ready for the next step.
Thinking with my eyes, how travel makes its way felt into a painting through the process of making.

The Daily Rumi: August 8, 2009

You that come to birth and bring the mysteries,
your voice-thunder makes us very happy.

Roar, lion of the heart,
and tear me open.

-Coleman Barks, trans.

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

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