Zhu Jinshi / The Distant Reaches Are Chaotic / 2007 / Oil on canvas / h: 39.5 x w: 47.2 in / h: 100.3 x w: 119.9 cm / M. Sutherland Fine Arts Ltd

As a factory worker in the 1970’s, Zhu Jinshi studied after-hours with an older artist, Li Zongjin, who had been trained in Western oil painting before the Anti-Rightist crackdown in the 1950’s. Zhu borrowed a book on Kandinsky and was transformed. After studying the text, Zhu realized that Western abstract art had ties to the two thousand year old intellectual and artistic traditions in China. From that point forward, Zhu has attempted to reconcile the two traditions in his artwork.

Zhu was part of the first influential avant-garde group of artists after the Cultural Revolution, the “Stars Group” (Xing Xing), who challenged both aesthetic convention and political authority. The Stars’ use of formerly banned Western styles from Post-Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism was an implicit criticism of the status quo. In 1985, Robert Rauschenberg exhibited a retrospective of his work in the National Gallery and traveled to Beijing to lecture and meet artists. Zhu recalls having a heated debate with Rauschenberg. Zhu attempted to explan that the theoretical bases of Abstract Expressionism, such as gesture and the expressive nature of the brush, were not new, and actually had been part of Chinese aesthetic theory for centuries.

Zhu and his wife, Qin Yufen, an installation and fiber artist, left for Berlin in 1986, a full three years before the fall of the Iron Curtain. Zhu stopped painting for a short time, instead immersing himself in the study of Joseph Beuys, the German performance artist and theorist who championed the power of universal human creativity. During his stay in Europe, Zhu was also greatly influenced by German New Expressionism. His paintings became thicker and more impasto, expressive abstracts. Zhu also collaborated with his wife on several installation projects, but always continued to develop his abstract painting. In 1994, he returned to Beijing and began traveling back and forth each year, as he does today.

Zhu uses various implements, from flat broad wallpaper brushes to wok spatulas, to apply paint in calligraphic, spontaneous strokes. Upon closer observation, one also sees the hectic strokes resembling Western action painting. The effect is one of luscious texture and strong gesture, yet with reference to specific environments, ranging from demolished old neighborhoods in Beijng to homage to Cezanne’s landscapes. In recent years, Zhu has preferred much larger scale canvases; some measuring over twenty feet by twelve feet. {Read More…}

I was talking with a friend of mine last night about abstract landscape painting and I came across Raquel’s work this morning. What I find interesting in this work is how all the slabs of yellow paint sit at different points in space. I really get a sense of the interrelatedness of all the strokes, textures, and colors in developing the spacial tension in this piece.

Raquel Mazzina / Jaune / 122 x 92 cm / oil on canvas / http://www.arthousegallery.com.au

Raquel Mazzina’s work is an exploration of the artist’s emotive response to landscape. Topographical appearances are left behind, concentrating on the light, atmosphere and spirit of place. This intuitive and emotive approach results in a sensuous and luscious painterly surface. Her masterful use of colour conveys the seasonal changes from Autumn to Spring. {Read More…}

Don Christensen / Tumble / 77" x 55" / 2007/ www.donchristensen.com

The composition, color, and drawing that is integral to my paintings are ususally a representation of something I’ve seen before in our world or in my dreams. It can be quite simple, the color of a pedestian’s coat moving by the large gaudy commercial graphics on the side of a truck as it turns into the late afternoon light. It could be the color scheme of a Matisse painting or the pakaging of some candybar. Nothing is sacred and nothing is too prosaic. Whether using found materials or painting directly onto canvas I am firmly in the tradition of pictoral art. The rectangle on the wall is an old traditional, formal device and it still works. It is television, movies, photographs and painting. {Read more…}

www.donchristensen.com

While Art Green’s abstract paintings did not seem to get as much attention as Clark V. Fox’s  Obama portraits in the back gallery space, the saturated colours got me thinking about animation cells again.

Katy Moran / Carla’s Garden  / 2007

Coming back to a contemporary abstract painter I have written about before, and whose work I was struck by back in the spring at the Andrea Rosen Gallery, I was google-stalking the London based painter Katy Moran. Hoping to find some new work or upcoming shows or something, I came across a video interview on the Tate website for an exhibition back in Feb-April 2008 called Strange Solution. Anyway, I thought Katy had some interesting comments on abstract painting, issues that Paul Ching-Bor and I, along some other painters, have been discussing recently at the Art Students League, particularly working from photos and images and pushing toward abstraction. Around the 1:05 mark she comments that for her it is about finding an image that is interesting enough to get started and then leaving that image at the right point. Check out the video here since I can’t post it to the blog. Below is a snippet of what she had to say.

‘They’re finished when I can see a figurative element in them … through the paint I’m searching for the thing it reminded me of, or suggested to me, and trying to get close to that thing.’ The exuberant spontaneity of the gesture is genuine rather than contrived, Moran comments, ‘When I’m making a painting, I get quite excited by how close to awful I can push it, while getting something quite lovely from it as well’.  {Read More…}

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…}

This is a great little video from the Tate of british abstract painter Fiona Rae talking in her studio. It is always great to see how other artists work. It would be nice though if we could all have ginormous studios with 8 ft. palettes and 10 ft. rolling brush carts, instead of our tiny hovels in the shadows of “luxury artists lofts” that sell for $1 mil+ to the now unemployed hedge funders! Anyway, she has some really delicious things to say at about the 2:45 mark.