Now this is my kind of watercolor – drippy layers of lots of color!

Dorathea Rockburne / Angular Momentum / 2008 / 36" x 48" / watercolor on Dura-lar / www.dorothearockburne.com

www.dorothearockburne.com

Last week, I dropped by Sundaram Tagore Gallery to see the Ho Sook Kang exhibition. Her paintings are built up with teeny tiny gestures, marks or dabs of colour really, that when viewed as a whole capture and communicate a sense of movement and elemental power.

I wasn’t familiar with the artist before seeing the show, so when I got back to the computer I check out what the gallery had to say. Here’s an excerpt,

If abstract art is the consummate means of communicating what Kandinsky famously called “internal necessity,” then it is a matter of the quality of inward depth in abstraction. In American action painting it means enacting raw feeling, implying that the instincts in which it originates are uncontrollable, while in Kang’s Orientalist action painting it means refining feeling, so that it is brought under ego control and stabilized, and can be aesthetically contemplated, that is, incorporated into the conscious self and used to fertilize its growth and understanding. The goal of Kang’s Orientalist action painting is self-consciousness not self-expression–more particularly, the transformation of self-expression into self-consciousness. If American action painting is informed by avant-garde primitivism–the climactic statement of the “noble savagery” that Gauguin pursued–then Kang’s action painting is informed by the Oriental ideal of meditative calm, holding its own whatever emotional and social storms threaten it. {Read more…}

While the academic in me would argue with certain turns of phrase in this piece and the implications/assumptions of both action painting and the “Oriental ideal of meditative calm,” it did get me thinking about a couple of points of comparison. First, in American gestural painting we often find that the expressive gesture functions as metaphor for an individualistic or atomistic conception of the self. Kang’s paintings seem to point to a different conception of the self, one that is more holistic. In her work, the individual gestures function together as a whole to create a unified abstract image. Second, it got me thinking about the Confucian/Classical Chinese idea of the “Doctrine of the Mean” (chung-yung) and so I pulled out one of my books and Wing-Tsit Chang had this to say which I found interesting.

In the Analects chung-yung, often translated the “Mean,” den;otes moderation but here chung means what is central and yung means what is universal and harmonious. The former refers to human nature, the latter to its relation with the universe. Taken together, it means that there is harmony in human nature and that this harmony underlies our moral being and prevails throughout the univers. In short, man and Nature form a unity. {Read more…}

I never seem to make it over to the New York Studio School’s evening lecture series…and always come across the highlights somewhere after the fact. We have Harry over at Daily Gusto to thank for reminding us of Pat Lipsky‘s talk last week and this example of her lyrical abstractions. Also with Ellen Phelen’s recent comments on beauty still fresh in my mind, it was nice to read this little bit here,

Ms. Lipsky, whose work is mostly abstract and geometrical, gave a cool and elegant defense of painting as the formal practice of creating beauty. She quoted Mark Rothko, saying, “An expression of beauty is an expression of rightness.” {Read more…}

Pat Lipsky, Spiked Red, 1969

(via Daily Gusto)

The are more wonderful recent paintings posted on her website. I am particularly drawn to the cold light of two paintings Dowager and Colbalt.

A good friend of mine, Cassie Jones is having a show of new work that  opens this Thurday at Red Flagg Gallery on 28th St. Hope to see you all there!

Cassie Jones, Next to Nothing (2008), Acrylic, Felt and Staples on Panel, 36 x 32 x 13”

Cassie Jones, Next to Nothing (2008), Acrylic, Felt and Staples on Panel, 36 x 32 x 13”

Inspired by scientific illustration and popular design, Cassie Jones’ paintings on paper are spontaneous yet iconic–playful emblems that seem to diagram arcane meanings and relationships. They are also a way of working, says the artist, that allows “mutations, hybrids, and synthetic forms to take shape.”

The paintings on panels explore a similar interest in hybrid forms, but are arrived at in a different way. Made of upholstered, quilted, and painted felt, their rounded, convex surfaces suggest a powerful sense of fertility and growth. Playfully absurd but also faintly sinister, the paintings are characterized by other contradictory elements as well—two-dimensional yet sculptural, reductive yet excessive, familiar yet un-nameable, naturalistic but also abstract—producing effects that are aesthetically pleasing but which also evade easy categorization.

Cassie Jones, Standard Deviations
Thursday, February 12, 2009
5:00pm – 8:00pm

RedFlagg 638 West 28th Street, Ground Floor, between 11th & 12th Avenues

This comes from Fallon and Rosoff in part 3 of a report from Asia announcing the opening of the new contemporary art museum in Bankok. Scrolling down the post, the colours of this Richard Tsao painting jumped out of the screen and slapped me in my face on a slumbery Monday morning.

Another artist concerned with the yearly flooding is Richard Tsao who uses water based colors to tint his flooded studio and then sops up the color with paper.

A quick google search for more information dug of this great photo of Richard Tsao in his studio as well as some clothing designs via Asia Society

Richard Tsao in his studio

There are also some great monoprints over at Art Projects International and a bunch of other work and this other great studio shot over at ChinaSquare Gallery. Uhmm….can I just say, I’d much rather be there than here in my cubicle in front of the computer!

Richard Tsao's Studio

We can’t really talk about colour without talking about and looking at Hans Hofmann. Here is a piece called Towering Spaciousness from the Brooklyn Museum. In this piece Hofmann uses both colour intervals and overlapping planes to create a sense of expansion and contraction in the painting. Each colour relates to every other colour in the painting, thereby determining its relative location in space within the painting. The result is that none of the planes sit in exactly same place in space. The rhythm and movement of your eye as it jumps from plane of colour to plane of colour, or we could say the expansion and contraction of the planes of colour, work to create the sense of an open towering spaciousness within the canvas. Hofmann called this idea, his “push-and-pull” theory, which he wrote about in the book Search for the Real. So, it is the movement of colour/the movement of the eye that creates the illusion of space in this painting, not scientific perspective, which is what Hofmann spent years teaching his students. For me, what’s really interesting, is that when I stand if front of a painting like this, not only do I see the towering spaciousness of the canvas but I can feel it in my body, it’s a viceral physical feeling, something I don’t feel in front of the best realist paintings with precise perspective.

Hans Hofmann (American, 1880–1966) / Towering Spaciousness / 1966. Oil on canvas / 84 1/4 x 50 in. (214 x 127 cm) / Brooklyn Museum, Gift of William Sachs, 68.51

Terry Winters / In Blue / 2008 / Oil on linen / 88 × 112 inches / Matthew Marks Gallery

Terry Winters has a bunch of interesting gems in the Brooklyn Rail interview with Phong Bui, David Levi Strauss and Peter Lamborn Wilson here are a couple

Bui: Are you saying that time can be condensed in the physical act of painting could have a pictorial equivalence of objects being eroded by real time?

Winters: Yes, in that every construction is a destruction. The paintings are a consequence of both of those activities and it’s through the unpredictable and uncontrollable nature of that activity that the pictures emerge. In a way, I’m trying to move forward and to work quickly and proactively. And the destruction that happens in the course of that is what allows the images to develop.

Levi Strauss: Looking at these paintings, one sees into a very complicated space, initially created by the transparency of the paint against the urgency of the grid. You have the knots, that are made from squares and rectangles painted so as to evoke spheres that are then set in motion, and these knots are suspended in a grid, with another grid behind, which is also in motion and bent or warped by radiating lines. Out of all this movement, the eye and mind create what can be a quite vertiginous space. I’m curious about how that space operates when you’re making the painting. Are you painting inside that space, or do you only go into it afterward, in viewing it?

Winters: No, I’m in the space. I mean, I’m not trying to manipulate it in a conscious way. I’m trying to feel my way through the process. It’s haptic. I’m building it right on the surface and the optical consequences are somehow woven into the surprise of the image itself. In some way, all the meaning is tied up in that space. It’s that Joycean condition about the organized chaos, the “chaosmos”. The painting is a product of all the conscious decisions that I have made but the result is something unforeseeable. It’s a paradoxical object.

{Read the full interview}

Yuko Ueda / Memento / 36 x 44 inches / mixed media on canvas / 2008 / yuukoueda.com

What I focus on is expressive colors and harmony of materials. I use plenty of water with acrylic paint, making many thin paint layers to achieve depth of color and luminousity. Inspiration always comes from nature, life and the human spirit. With acrylic paint, I often use pastel, sand, metals, fabrics, paper and pencil. I try to reach a beauty of natural harmony by combining these materials with various colors. {Read More…}

I pretty much learned everything, from watching Chuck Jones animations!

A straight line is in love with a dot; however, the dot finds the line too plain, unimaginative, and rigid. She would rather spend her time with an undisciplined squiggle who is much more fun. The dejected line later realizes that he doesn’t have to be unbending. With a little concentration, he forms angles and various shapes. They are two-dimensional at first, but after much practice, he can form many-sided solids, and even curved figures. When the line demonstrates his abilities to the dot, she realizes that true beauty comes from discipline and that the squiggle is not for her.

Beatriz Milhaze / Mariposa / 2004 / Acrylic on canvas / 98 X 98 inches / James Cohan Gallery

Unfortunately I missed her recent exhibit a James Cohan Gallery, but Joanne Mattera has a great post about the show on her blog, from which I stole the title for this post.

Also from Carol Kino’s review in the NY Times comes this great quote:

“In the beginning,” she said, “I felt a connection between Spanish Latin American and Brazilian, which is more Portuguese: the Baroque churches, the costumes, the ruffles, things that have volume or a sculptural shape.”

But ultimately, she said, although she wanted to incorporate all those things into her work, “I wanted to put them together based on a geometric composition. Because at the end of the day, I was only interested in structure and order.” {Read More…}