Field and Focus: Roland Flexner and Mark Bradford

Roland Flexner's  interest in Scholar's Rocks and Asian philosophy is well-represented in his expansive new work at D'Amelio, mercifully located above ground on 22nd St. The exhibition reminds me of Asian scholar Roger T. Ame's discussion of field and focus in the T'ao de Jing, wherein consciousness shifts between one to the other, in equipoise.

A surprise in the new work is color: purple and ochre, offsetting the black and white terrains on the longer walls.

The work revels in the landscape-like spaces that emerge from pouring, blowing and manipulating liquid graphite.

Flexner has been working with spontaneous pours, combining soap with sumi ink since 1996, and more recently has turned to liquid graphite. His work in the 2010 Whitney Biennial prefigures this current work.

The experience of traveling a landscape in Chines scrolls, or Hiroshige's 100 View of Edo,
is exemplified on an intimate scale in Flexner's images.

Flexner worked on Yupo, a water-resistant mylar surface that captures every movement he makes with liquid graphite: scrapin itg, blowing it with a straw, pouring.

This is the Flexner I would love to own.
The linework within the spreading liquid graphite exemplifies the beauty of the scroll, "Autumn Colors" by Yuan Dynasty painter Zao Mengfu, which rejects the softened brushwork in Song Dynasty painting for the earlier and cruder brushwork in the Jin and Tang.

A beautiful surprise: an early Flexner "pour" painting, in metallic silvers and gold!
The painting resonates personally because of the work I have been making with glitter and liquid metallics.

The field: landscape writ large as urban poster: Mark Bradford at Sikkema Jenkins

Florescent orange, printed material, paint

Bradford: an almost hieroglyphic gesture emerging. From close to, there is a lot of metallic silver paint in this work.

Paper becomes soft with sanding. Gesture eroded, like a trace.

Found billboard material, paint, collage elements sanded down to equivalence.

Paper as paint - patternmaking.
Also meaningful personally as the adhesive mylar I've been using performs a similar function.

A tantalizing view of the back rooms at Sikkema Jenkins. There are many such views in this superb and handsome show.
If we experience Flexner and Bradford in terms of focus and field,
we begin to understand how each concept embraces the other.

Bridge Red Studios, Miami + TSA, New York

Karen Rifas at N. Miami's Bridge Red Studios, an artist-run studios and exhibition space

More Rifas, who does so much with so little.
Check out Bridge Red Studios (close to MoCA) here:
http://www.knightarts.org/community/miami/opening-bridges-to-overlooked-art

Mysterious monoliths by Bob Thiele, who shows with Howard Scott, NY + Dorsch, Miami.

Thiele's studio - passing through the high-ceilinged rooms with these dense and impenetrable works s is like treasure hunting in an art cave, in the best way. Evidence of practice over time.

NY studio with a Miami source of light in Thiele's studio

Close view of a tondo by Thiele - the surface shimmers like silk, even glitter

Brooklyn's new TSA Gallery: 9 x 12 graphite drawings by Blaze Lamper

Lamper's Release Into Summer, 2012, graphite on paper, 9 x 12 inches

Gorgeous landscape composed of corsets by Todd Knopke

Another piece by Todd Knopke

Andy Ness' Juggler at TSA's Finders Keepers, curated by An Hoang for Frederieke Taylor Gallery

If this show is any indication, TigerStrikesAsteroid is a wonderful addition to Bushwick!
See link here:

http://newyork.tigerstrikesasteroid.com/

References for Final Preparation: The Seven Seas

George Bethea, Miami, FL: acrylics on canvas, 48 x 60.
See more Bethea at http://www.flickr.com/photos/georgebethea/

George Bethea. Camille's Blue, acrylics on canvas, 48 x 60 inches. Bethea studied with Walter Darby Bannard; their lineage includes Jules Olitski, whose show at the Kemper last year was featured on this blog in April 2011.

Susan Homer, Brooklyn, NY: DETAIL of painting that is weirdly the same size as Bethea's!

Homer, the whole image. See more Homer at www.SusanHomer.com.
She exhibited with MetaphorContemporary; her paint is juicy, she works like a novelist.

Space for Worship

God-minotaurs under ecclesiastic light, or so I thought in 1973.

Thought Bubble, 2012, 65 x 54

Led Zeppelin II, designed by David Juniper

White-hot glistening shadowy flows, 2012, 65 x 54

Guy Pealleart, 1970s rock star illustrator (Diamond dogs insert?)

Art & Culture Center of Hollywood, FL, coming up.

The Freewheeling Landscapes of Olive Ayhens

Olive Ayhens Website

A world of variation: Olive Ayhens' landscapes

Detail: Bonnardian dabs of color

Cars, each uniquely treated

Coastal painting, somewhere in Europe--can't remember now; where she spent time painting

Detail of the coastal city

Traffic - a recurring theme in Olive's work (she has also painted at the old WTC residency and all over the world)

New painting - animals resting in a Moorish castle;

So much love in her unique logic of animals.

Multiple perspectives, as we've come to perceive the world;

And right next to it, a gorgeous cemetery painting from the 1990s

Uneasy co-existence of elements in a newer painting

Thermonuclear plants and

a pink hotel.

Olive in the studio

In 1996 I flipped over an Olive Ayhens painting at DC Moore for its painterly facture and humorous drawing portraying a traffic jam of cars falling between rocks as if water. The serendipitous combination of real elements and imaginary landscape delighted the eye and engaged thoughts on time, place and how they are experienced and remembered. Since that show Olive exhibited and was represented by Frederiecke Taylor until its recent close; she is making new paintings in her Brooklyn studio. It is always an inspiration to see her work as it is harnessed to the real world, but not limited by its rules. Here are some of the paintings in her studio at the moment.