Beijing Travelogue: Land and Body at Today Museum + Goloudajie, Second Ring

Beautiful painting--sketchy and light, like an ink drawing, at Land and Body, Today Museum, Beijing (linked above)

A wall of these delicate paintings at Land and Body, Today Museum, Beijing

More from Land and Body, Today Museum, Beijing

Back from two weeks in Beijing. In two short years I forgot how magical China is, but was quickly reminded my first day back with the ornate and textured sidewalks that are such a pleasure to stroll. Having brought only an iPhone, brush pens and sketcbhook, images of the trip are few but there will be more posts on China forthcoming.

When there, I saw some wonderful shows. These include the rotating permanent collection at the Palace Museum in Forbidden City, where a seriesof Ma Yuan water paintings held sway. Dubbed "One Corner Ma" for his assymetrical compositions, Ma pursued studies of water idioms that are spellbinding in a group of 20 in the Palace Museum. With their intervals and overlaps, Ma's water studies invite a Taoist approach to composition.

Ma Yuan, The Waving Surface of the Autumn Flood, from a series of paintings of water

中文: 水圖卷﹝局部, ns 26.8 × 41.6 cm (10.6 × 16.4 in), ink on silk
Palace Museum, Beijing, China

The dazzling Land and Body exhibition at Today Museum (link and images above) opened the day we were there. We arrived late, so there was little chance to do more besides snap these pictures and hope the pure visual power of the work would somehow transmit. What a followup to the Grey Gallery's seminal 2009 exhibition, Icons of the Desert! While that show featured bark paintings, this show presented fabric substrates for the complex yet freely applied markings that notate pathways through the land.

In addition to the paintings the installation includes a hand-painted time line of events that contextualizes the journeys in them. Oh, for an extra day to spend reading the wall inscriptions! I hope the catalogue will be published, as it wasn't at the opening, and makes its way to the US. Also at Today: the Martell Prize Winners exhibition and a very strong, contemporary Permanent Collection that surveys work from the Beijing scene, including a painting by new friend Yang Qian (http://www.artnet.com/artists/yang%20qian/). I thought it would be great shown in tandem with New York painter Alyssa Monks, as they both consider wet surfaces as a veil between our gaze and the figures they paint.

Alyssa Monks (from her website)

Yang, in addition to having a most beautiful studio in Fejiacun where one views his oeuvre of black light paintings, water images and newer collage works, has impeccable taste in Chinese cuisine. Trained in the States and a native of China, he is a genial host and respected artist.

In Beijing hailing cabs is competitive sport, more so than New York. Renumeration is low so cabdrivers decline fares often, despite the fact it's illegal. Knowing this en route to Today from Sanlitun, I sat resolutely in the back of a cab while expatriates, local Chinese and the cabdriver argued in passionate Mandarin about the existence of a Today Museum, and what it would take to get a waiguoren there.After some contretemps he started the car, and off we went.

In the past, Feijiacun and Songzhuang were my local neighborhoods but this trip was pure Second Ring: Line 2, Goloudajie stop, Soluxe Courtyard Hotel. What aesthetic delight to experience the low-slung, humanly scaled hutongs and their nearby restaurants, plentiful public toilets, convenient subway system and beautifully planted trees, textures and colors. That said the best parts of the trip remain undocumented, as I suppose they always must: dusk-light rambles past generations of family members spoiling crowing babies in narrow alleys, motorbikes whizzing past and many drinking pijio, China's delicious, light beer. Or red lanterns hanging in "Ghost Street," creating a sense of celebration in front of the storefronts that by day are business as usual. The compression of places that are thousands of years old with new developments stimulate the senses at every turn. It's as if occupying the singular but dense spaces in the aboriginal journeys at Today Museum were layered with five more sheets of similar density.

The stunning textures and muted tones of a Beijing sidewalk

A rarity--untouched relic of the past in Beijing's lively Second Ring neighborhood

Olitski at the Kemper, Kansas City; Ross, Bluhm and Kossoff, New York

I snipped these images online: Olitski, from the Kemper Museum (linked above), Alexander Ross, from David Nolan Gallery (http://www.davidnolangallery.com/), Norman Bluhm, from Loretta Howard Gallery (www.lorettahoward.com) and Leon Kossoff, from Mitchell, Inness and Nash Gallery (http://www.miandn.com/).

What a week of great shows! In Kansas City, the Olitski survey at the Kemper Museum stopped me cold. The various periods of Olitski's development were fascinating for their exploration of acrylics, particularly the sprayed ones, which toyed with the illusionistic effects of dispersion, but there was a fussiness about the border of each painting that drove me nuts. They reminded me of the posters from my college job in LA at the "postmodern" furniture and frame store in LA.  My enjoyment of the earlier works was primarily historical, a join-the-dots experience. Then, like a crescendo of unexpected force, came four transcendent works from 2002, With Love and Disregard--that demanded at least an hour to absorb their chromatic fullness, their compositional depth and heft. What color, light, surface, abandon! Olitski didn't stop pushing the paint, ever--the results are fissured, planetary realms with complex spatial shifts. Thrilling to see a painter in his 80s hit his stride! Also enthralling to see someone play recklessly with the possibilities of their life's work and come up with something so convincing. It was like watching his brain move through his hand, which is the embodied value of painting. In the final four paintings, there was no false note, regret; they were sure-footed risks. This was not true throughout the show due to the fussiness of earlier work; thus meant the more. Olitski was a whole-hearted explorer! What inspires is that he found this in summary, not early on. And these are GREAT paintings, filled with ideas and images.

The earlier sprayed works, especially the topographies, brought to mind three paintings I saw today by Ben Schumacher in the current show "We Regret To Inform You There Is Currently No Space or Place for Abstract Painting" at Martos (http://www.martosgallery.com).  I am noticing more historical shows tracing such relationships, such as Unpainted Paintings uptown and the Painting show on 25th St. Given our eight years in the Middle East, it comes as no surprise that 1970s postwar abstraction, on the heels of 1950s postwar abstraction, seems newly relevant. Also, relationships between expressionism and Color Field seem important now, in a way I would liken to Impressionists and post-Impressionists--aware of the nationalistic implications as well.

Down 29th Street from Martos, Alexander Ross's exhibition at David Nolan revealed the artist's expansion of his bell-pepper-like forms into surreal landscape spaces recalling de Chirico. Ross's palette was startling, as was his paint--licking and encircling form, strokes like fire; becoming protagonists of thick and juicy facture that catches the light, causing a shimmering veil of pattern viewing the paintings from aside. And the color! Ross has always built color in a gradated range of color, not dissimilar from how pastels are made. He's hit new strides in this show--reds disintegrating into plummy rust tones, acid greens like slightly soured candy invading the more usual greens tending toward blue. The show revealed a maximal tendency redefining Ross's previously pared down, architectural forms.

On 26th St. at Mitchell, Inness and Nash, Leon Kossoff's palette concocted strange, umber-y brews, with limpid greens and reds furnishing ballast in the roiling surfaces of paint. The drawing in them was not so great, but the "put" of mark and the palette-- superb, pearly; like winter light describing spring--gave his architectural forms, in particular, heft. And on 26th, David Cohen's Fitting Room (http://www.vogtgallery.com/), featured two favorite painters, Mernet Larsen and David B. Brody, whose work has recently been shown in New York and is mentioned on this blog.

These may be the last shows I see before leaving for Beijing Sunday. I wonder what painting will be like there?

Schemas and Terrains: Margrit Lewczuk + Rockwell Kent

Maps, or signs, conflate landscape with diagram, transforming geography into hybrid schemas. Wikipedia defines shema: "The word schema comes from the Greek word "σχήμα" (skhēma), which means shape, or more generally, plan. Schema may refer to:Model (abstract), Diagram, or Schematic, a diagram that represents the elements of a system using abstract, graphic symbols." The distancing layer of stylization help us navigate unfamiliar space; visually, it presages digital screens. I think about schemas after seeing Margrit Lewczuk's exhibition, Drawing Into Paint. Her works re-interpret non-western sources as abstract systems similar to maps or signs. They alchemize graphite, gouache and paint into mysterious patterns that juggle allusions to figure and landscape while merging a map's reductive topologies with the colorful brevity of signage. 

Click the header above to visit Lewczuk's website, and peruse the Brooklyn Rail interview to read about her experiences as a painter. Even better, head to Janet Kurnatowski in Greenpoint to see the paintings live! Check the gallery's website here: http://www.janetkurnatowskigallery.com/

Lewczuk's paintings are pure buoyancy, saturating the light-filled gallery with sonorous, resonant hues barely contained in deceptively simple demarcations of space. Four large paintings anchor the whole, orbited by collages and drawings. It's like entering a 3-d version of the artist's brain. Unique relationships emerge between works: a tiny reddish-purple study parked at the bottom corner of a large, predominantly green painting holds both paintings in mutual abeyance, through the vibration of its intense darks. Correspondences and cross-reference circulate the show. Many of the works portray an image-pattern one might associate with a rounded cruciform, insect head or African textile. Their color and placement of material, texture and edge is extremely specific in a way that anticipates image, but the works abstain from recognizable form. They instead harness structure in the service of materials; deckled or cut edges, surfaces of cascading paint and ferocious graphite markings, contained in discrete areas, vacillate rhythmically together, delighting and enrapturing the eye.

Another version of schema re-emerges in Rockwell Kent's Greenland paintings: Greenland People, Dogs and Mountains, c. 1932-35, oil on canvas mounted on panel, 28 1/8 x 48 inches, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine, below. Kent's Greenland paintings are new discoveries, thanks to Steve Martin's art-world yarn, An Object of Beauty. It's interesting to think about how his stylized terrains and Lewczuk's joyous investigations of color and structure approach composition over the seventy year period that divides them.

From the Kansas City Airport

Waiting for a plane: mechanical difficulties. The weather is perfect in Kansas City; the soil rich; the space stretched green in all directions. I am here unexpectedly, closing the affairs of my beloved aunt, who died unexpectedly last week.

Because of the unexpected circumstances I missed this closing:
http://progress-report.org/1352791/The-Working-Title
This was a group show on contemporary abstraction, curated by Chris Chatterson and Vince Contrarino, at the Bronx River Art Center. A catalogue is available on blurb, and I look forward to its insights on abstraction.

Could be a prelude, or an alternative approach to materials from this: 
A Painting Show
http://www.harrislieberman.com/current.html
A show I would have curated if someone else didn't!

Two more shows I can't wait to see:
Margrit Lewczuk
http://www.janetkurnatowskigallery.com/

Gina Ruggeri
http://nancymargolisgallery.com/?tag=gina-ruggeri

Linked above, Chris Chatterson's posts from my show and New Monuments, both at Lesley Heller, on KCLOG, a blog I relish for its visual connections and pathways through abstraction.


Meanwhile, my eyes find solace in the endless green of fields.

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

October 2010

A Wonderful Poet

I'm traveling through mid-December so posting will be light. The above link will take you to a poet I am currently reading, Jane Hirschfield. Her book Nine Gates is a must.

Musings on Relational Aesthetics

In a summer New York Times article on public sculpture, critic Ken Johnson wondered if, philosophical dimensions of art works aside, does the work visually compel?

This took me to Nicholas Bourriaud’s 1990 book Relational Aesthetics, which describes the evolution of aesthetic to social or philosophical frameworks in art works.  As visual recognition becomes faster and more complex, so that we see a tracking shot as a single image, our understanding of symbols, from keyboards to advertising, is immediate and comprehensive. Given the visual speed at which we absorb information, one might conclude, as Bourriaud does, that visual language becomes one trope among many, a factor in a confluence of factors that include social interaction and time as means of shared experience.  For him, social interactions and time re-invigorate the social aspects of viewing formalist artworks in ways that feel more relevant in contemporary life. For Bourriaud, the object is not necessary to establish a sense of shared connection.

I’ve given this some thought and conclude it is ultimately an academic argument that sidesteps the issue of criteria altogether in favor of a premise that expands the field of what art can be. The performative aspects of relational aesthetics recall Fluxus, Art as Life, Happenings, but the conceptual foundation is different through leveling  visual, social and philosophical frameworks.  Johnson concludes a preference for work that engages the eye beyond function - citing the visual symbolism of Tom Otternes-- but experience tells me art's presence influences people when it is in the world, no matter what. Connections are forged in different ways - how can they be any different than learning styles, or ways of thinking? They aren't, really. 


But, what interests me most in painting is the narrowness of its limitations and strictures; its unforgivability. What once seemed binding now points to freedom. For such a malleable medium, paint can become as complex as any other visual experience, real or filmed. To make a painting come alive, step away from its long, digested history into the present, remains compelling to do and see.

NurtureArt Auction October 12, 2010

Click on above link to preview the works at auction. Please consider donating to this wonderful cause!

Brooklyn Tornado path

Photos by Yiwen Chow.

Yiwen arrived Thursday in the late afternoon; around 5.30 we headed from Bed-Stuy to Tribeca for an errand before openings and the aborted attempt to attend a wine tasting on the LES. Upon disembarking the C train at Canal, we noticed it had rained. But the city's energy felt dense and congested beyond the usual sensory feast; traffic was stalled on Broome, gridlock everywhere and not a cab to be found. Small surprise: a tornado had just blown through while we were underground!

These images were taken Saturday on State St. in Brooklyn Heights.

The scale of the tornado effortlessly shifts perceptions of the landscape. Space reconfigures: the skyline is cropped of tree canopies, the streets shape a new flow of traffic to accommodate felled trees so that cars that once barreled down straight streets now carefully zig zag through leafy green barriers.

Ode to Lefferts Street

Enter Lefferts St. one block south of Fulton at Classon, where you'll find an old hotel with an awning that looks like an over sized bronze tongue. From there Lefferts runs three blocks and ends at St. Marks Place, which faces into it. Biking down the quiet lane, I imagine the London of Mary Poppins, with lives conducted behind dignified facades. The brownstones share the street with old, wooden houses and low-slung, renegade churches. Sycamores arch above, creating respite from the concrete, car shops and traffic on Fulton and Atlantic Avenues.

The transition from being in a place to drawing it--or tracing it, from sketchbooks, scrolls and photos, as I have been doing in the studio, adds a layer of experience upon returning. Brush pens drain images of color, leaving only line and contour to define them. Line simplifies and equates information, reducing image toward gesture. There is great pleasure slowly retracing images of a location, reliving memories and combining them with others. Multiple connections evolve densely layered constructions, rendering landscape just one element in a larger often abstract situation. Yet returning to a place I've drawn, I see it differently, after visually absorbing it.  Meaning returns, not through metaphor, but in the heightened awareness, the new and more familiar relationship. It's a little uncanny.

Goodbye, Summer Days of Bedford-Stuyvesant

As summer wanes, these images conjure the imaginary relief from heat on concrete experienced on sweaty tromps through the neighborhood. One thing that stands out overall is how alcohol-related businesses beckon customers with nostalgic touches of days gone by. An example is the Tip-Top Bar + Grill, which comes alive at nights when its signage alights. Red and green lights -- hybrid lantern and subway stop globe shapes-- twirl above the entrance; when lit, the beer sign allures as a pirate chest would. Such touches make the mundane magical, as do the cardboard displays in liquor store windows that juxtapose faded, corrugated cardboard backdrops with images of cruise ships and martinis.   

Beyond my front door heading to Fulton Street (I'm three doors in) is the unused construction shed that surrounds a building with wood-covered windows. No construction in sight. This same building was where the Claver Place Mens Club used to be. At night, the neighborhood men would gather (with some guest women on occasion) to play pool, drink beer and congregate under low-hanging lamps. Now, homeless folk argue and sometimes sleep under the construction shed.  I miss the men with the aviator glasses, who pulled up chairs outside of the club and chatted in the late afternooons before heading in to their pool game.  

I often look at the willow above Family Dollar and wonder where it grows from - an empty lot? Someone's back yard? It reminds me of Chinese scrolls that have been suddenly transported to another time and place.

Bed-Stuy Mural

Two blocks away from where I live, this mural has become an integral part of my daily landscape.  Ol' Dirty Bastard's visage conjures wonderful memories of late night printmaking binges on a week-long workshop at Texas State University, San Marcos with Jeffrey Dell in 2005. As industrious students and Dell pulled screens into the night, the Wu-Tang Clan with ODB at the mike yodelled us on. I often stop and stare at the eyes in this mural, which brilliant blue unnaturally obliterates the pupils so the eyes float out a bit. The blue suggests a camera flash, offsetting the grim, overall illumination of  institutional photography suggested by the image.

The mural, originally painted by Victor Goldfeld in 2007, has been defaced and repainted twice. For more history and a UTube synopsis, check Goldfeld's site, linked above. For more background you can find an interview with Giacomo Fortunato and Vega on the blog TheCrypt; Fortunato wrote an essay for the online magazine Heeb, Ol' Dirty Lawsuit, in 2009.

Rosanna Bruno's Studio

I.
Today I visited painter Rosanna Bruno, whose work I have known, and followed, since she first arrived in New York in 1993.  She showed me ten or more new paintings since her 2009 John Davis Gallery exhibition, linked above (download the pdf from her name on the gallery menu). These paintings are supple and light. Gestures adorn raw linen surfaces, creating web-like structures to visually climb without the guarantee of gravity.

I'd been thinking about Wm. Powhida's passionate outburst regarding 'canned radicalism' on his blog post* Works of Art. It got me thinking on the possibilities of what is radical in art today, what could be, particularly in painting. Rosanna's painting proposed a redefinition of priorities, in that they do not appear radical in the way that statement-making approaches (ie. Warhol, Schnabel, Halley and Hirst) might. Her paintings inch forward, harnessing the usual suspects--gesture, texture, chroma, scale--to  wrest unsettled, fractured spaces.  They are forged in the crucible of history, acknowledging and trespassing it within those terms. Accordingly, the dance between translucent grounds, delicate swipes of the brush that hint at form, and gestures full of body and movement leads us to...

...such ambiguity between figure and ground that prolonged looking induces vertigo, akin to walking a tightrope. Ropy gestures offer illusions of security and we climb on out, before realizing it's all gesture...we see this with our eyes--we are caught in a labrynth of gestures with no certain place to go.  Forked-tongued gestures and washy grounds intermingle and don't define what's on top and beneath. They establish spatial relationships promptly jettisoned for flickering and staccato rhythms.

*http://williampowhida.blogspot.com/2010/08/work-of-art-rant.html

II.
Is perception radical?

Agnes Martin, Writings, p. 71:
"It is so hard to slow down to the pace where it is possible to explore one's mind. And then of course one must go absolutely alone with not one thought about others intruding because then one would be off in relative thinking."

In this epoch of saturation, is such an endeavor possible? Or is the importance of individual perception historical?

Agnes Martin, Writings, p. 89:

"When interest in graphic art wanes I suppose it is possible to imagine its slipping out of sight but I do not believe in that possibility.

My interest is in experience that is wordless and silent, and in the fact that this experience can be expressed for me in art work which is also wordless and silent...

...We perceive - We see. We see with our eyes and we see with our minds...

...Perceiving is the same as receiving and it is the same as responding. Perception means all of them."

and for this reason, she proposes that, "If we can perceive ourselves within the work - not the work but ourselves when viewing the work then the work is important. If we can know our response, see in ourselves what we have received from a work, that is the way to the understanding of truth and all beauty." (italics hers).

III.
Thinking with one's eyes can be radical, though not perhaps in ways we have come to expect radical to behave. The ability to become visually dislocated while contemplating an object is pure kinesthetic power, restoring bodily awareness through sight. What this changes is perhaps nothing, or everything.

On My Way to Rosanna's: WetSlipper

On my way to Rosanna Bruno's studio, I stopped at Recess, 41 Grand Street, to experience WetSlipper, a collaborative installation by Siebren Viersteeg and David Hardy under the moniker SpiritTours. (The above link provides hours and address.) It was unexpectedly wonderful to don trashbag pantaloons, climb up  a wooden ladder and whoosh out on Grand Street, where one could recover by viewing pithy sayings on tie dyed t-shirts and handmade signage. Though a large landing cushion had recently been removed by city employees due to encroaching on sidewalk space, sliding activities showed no sign of abating. A promising first day for the perfect pick-me-up in the dog days of summer...

The Way We See

Walking through my neighborhood, I fix on particular landmarks. The Franklin Medical Building, above, is one of my favorites for its mid-century design, compact scale, aqua panels and dated signage. Once likely a hub of activity, now slatted blinds hang loosely in the windows; the roll up remains locked.  I wonder what happened to the doctors who practiced there; who owns the building now, and its role in the neighborhood before closing. Often in my neighborhood, space assumes the linear shape of avenues lined by brownstones, undifferentiated in memory.

The article Culture Wires the Brain: A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective, cited on Integral Options Cafe (http://integral-options.blogspot.com/ on 8/6/2010), proposes a singling of landmarks as cultural:

..."There is evidence that the collectivist nature of East Asian cultures versus individualistic Western cultures affects both brain and behavior. East Asians tend to process information in a global manner whereas Westerners tend to focus on individual objects. There are differences between East Asians and Westerners with respect to attention, categorization, and reasoning. For example, in one study, after viewing pictures of fish swimming, Japanese volunteers were more likely to remember contextual details of the image than were American volunteers. Experiments tracking participants' eye movements revealed that Westerners spend more time looking at focal objects while Chinese volunteers look more at the background.

...Park and Huang note that, "with age, both cultures would move towards a more balanced representation of self and others, leading Westerners to become less oriented to self and East Asians to conceivably become more self-focused."

The holistic perception in Chinese scrolls initially attracted me for the dissolution of binaries. In scrolls, space undulates with a "butterfly" perspective that shifts from length to depth. This leads me to reconsider drawing now, how parts fit into the whole by working from the whole at first. Same with my neighborhood, as it undergoes gradual but persistent gentrification.

Hyphenation

Elisabeth Condon, Notes on a Landscape I, 2010, brush pen on vellum, 12 x 9 inches 

Mai Long of Slot Gallery (Sydney, Australia; linked above) offers the most gorgeous definition of space describing the exhibition Here and There:

"It was our desire to offer a space for these artists to explore the notion of ‘hyphenation’ that we all experience today, living and working between places, cultures and definitions; where ‘real space’ is a layered construction of memory, found object, acquired histories and an alert reading of physical space. Essentially, this project is an exercise in transmigration and translation."