Shows

Pat Lay at Sideshow

Pat Lay, detail

Pat Lay, who in addition to sculpture has been making collage tapestries of motherboards and other technological images.

Mark Grotjahn, detail 

Mark Grotjahn

Grotjahn's surface close-to

More Grotjahn-nice red in back

Grotjahn-detail

Mark Grotjahn's breakout show, passionately and totally painted.

Celeste Dupuy-Spencer

Celeste Dupuy-Spencer

Detail of Dupuy-Spencer, photographed through a crowd of people at the opening with an iPhone

A new presence, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer at Museum 52, showing with Nicole Eisenman and Leidy Churchman.

Third and Final Post: Beijing, Ritan Park and Golou Da Jie

Ritan Park...

Sun Mural, 6 x 15 metres

Kua Fu chasing the sun...

Beijing was a whirlwind: two weeks of appointments, galleries and on a fine Sunday morning, a memorable bike ride to Ritan Park. A full hour in flowing traffic through Beijing's rotaries, from our hotel near the view above to Ritan, one of China's oldest parks. Built in 1530 as an altar for ritual sacrifice to the sun god, the park features a mural that combines public art with spiritual devotion in its  sumptuously glazed and patterned ceramic tiles.

The view above became familiar on the trip. I often sat at this cafe mid-morning over coffee, unable to relinquish the attachment despite the best tea in the world. The view afforded no end of entertainment: a small child bouncing on a huge, green animal toy across the walk, an ancient woman with a cane who stopped to doze on the bench outside and passersby returning home from the night before or hastening to work.

Yangshuo, China

Every time I am in China, there comes the time to splurge on a 5-star hotel. On a four-day trip to Yangshuo, an hour's taxi from Guilin (see photo above, on approach) and three-hour flight from Beijing, I selected the Yangshuo Mountain Retreat. A western-style dining room, baked cookies served on arrival and spying a New Yorker jarred my Asian immersion, momentarily. Spacious quarters, ambling gardens and room lights that could only be activated by remote control corrected the disjunction: indeed, this is China.

Men rowing long bamboo rafts with chairs affixed floated past my balcony on the clear and gentle Yulong River. No greater luxury than a motorcycle taxi to purchase a ticket and be rowed gently downstream, mountains looming around. Have your photo taken here, eat some beer fish there, beckoned small, river-based business as our raft drifted past. Natural waterfalls puncutated the meandering pace of the raft, sometimes suddenly, drenching us, other times gently. It reminded me of the rocking pace of Disneyland rides as a child: Pirates of the Carribean, particularly. I wonder how many Disney designers traveled to Asia--seems so many of their ideas germinate here.

What I love about China, and for that matter Los Angeles, is the natural abundance in landscape. There does not seem to be any limits to what the land will do. Pine trees growing out of rock? No problem. Water, mountain and desert combined? Why not? In Yangshuo, the karst mountains loomed irregularly from the river, creating a Flintstones-like terrain I cannot wait to paint. Above, the views from my room are still beautiful, photographed on an iPhone in the raw, hot middle of the day. Yet, it was on a night motorcycle ride that the views were most amazing: the mountains' shapes reflected in the river, moonlight glowing, seen at a glimpse as we sped past, the engine of the motorcycle the only noise one heard.

Yuan Dynasty painters and their commitment to landscape as a mode of resistance to unwelcome political rule led to some of the greatest painting in China. Wandering was not simply a matter of spiritual seeking, but an active choice for freedom, to live as one wished beyond the confines of institutionalized demands. Yet, wandering is also practical in my experience of China. Each time I go, the landscape opens itself to deeper exploration, like chapters in a book. One place summons an association to another place, or demands more time spent than I have. There is never just one landscape and never just one reason to wander.

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.