Arshile Gorky / How My Mother's Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life / Oil on Canvas / 1944 / Seattle Art Museum

Great artists are not driven by theories or concepts, but by memory and sense impressions of hallucinatory vividness. Hence the centrality of the apron, the patterns of which foreshadow Gorky’s habit of drawing abstract forms from nature: “My Mother told me stories while I pressed my face into her long apron with my eyes closed.” In the painting named after it, the apron’s design is streaked and smeared, as if dissolved in the waters of memory and nostalgia: “All my life her stories and her embroidery kept unraveling pictures in my memory.” It is the unraveling that seems to be recorded in How My Mother’s Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life. {Read More…} -John Ash, ArtForum, Sept. 1995

Seattle Art Museum

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 went to the New Museum on Saturday to see the Mary Heilmann, To be Someone and Elizabeth Peyton,  Live Forever shows, which I hadn’t had a chance to get to before. I started up on the 4th floor in the Peyton exhibit and walked my way down.  I’ve always been attracted to the colours and sensitivity of Elizabeth Peyton’s work, especially the drawings. However, probably because I don’t really care about Kurt Cobain or Jarvis, I found myself on Saturday really looking at the grounds of her paintings and how she prepares the surface. In fact, I found the thick, sometimes smooth sometimes uneven white grounds with rough edges to be the most interesting aspect of the paintings. They provided both an interesting textural contrast to the really loose and thin paint that she uses and added a brightness/luminosity to her colours. My wife, Sauman, who’s not a huge fan or Peyton’s work, pointed out to me that none of her subjects smile, ever, which gave a strong sense of sadness or loneliness or isolation, despite the seeming intimacy of the people and everyday scenes depicted in her work.

It was such a contrast then to walk into the galleries of the Mary Heilmann exhibition which struck me as fun, playful, light and airy. I had never heard of Mary Heilmann before this exhibition and I am not familiar  at all with her work beyond the little bit that I read, but it really struck me as lacking any of the pretension of a lot of contemporary abstraction of the last 30 years. The zen phrase “nothing special,” that is used to refer to the ordinariness or everyday mind, kept popping into my head as I walked through the exhibition. I don’t know why that kept coming up, maybe because I could just relax and really enjoy the paintings visually rather than having to think about them too hard, or that they had a playful everday presence about them. Sauman, on the other hand, wanted to know what was special about her paintings because it reminded her a lot of the work of some of our peers at the ASL or other work she has seen in Chelsea, whereas the ceramic work she found exciting.

There is an excerpt from an interview conducted by Richard Flood on the New Museum website that I found intersting:

RF: I’m sitting here looking at these amazing glazes on your ceramics. Do they have great importance to your use of paint?

MH: Right. In fact, when I went into painting, I really came in with a sculptor’s attitude and used the paint in a way that you use the clay. I thought of it as a physical thing. And so I really didn’t think of doing painting the way you think of drawing and painting, but more like the way you do sculpture. Pouring, casting, pressing, moulding. And then a color, red or orange or black, would be a physical material rather than a color you paint on. It’s a different way of configuring it.

The Elizabeth Peyton show closed yesterday, but the Mary Heilmann is up of another couple of weeks and is a fun treat.

Mary Heilmann, To Be Someone @ New Museum, 235 Bowery, thru 1/28

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…}

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.

Zhao Chunxiang (Chao Chung Hsiang; 1910-1991) / Calling You / diptych, ink and acrylic on paper / 183 x 177 cm / Private collection

Chao Chung Hsiang, as he is usually known, graduated from the Hangzhou National Academy of Art in 1939, and the following year was appointed by the Ministry of Education to work in the Northwest Artifacts Survey Group. He moved to Taiwan in 1948 and then traveled in Europe before settling in the United States in 1958. This abstract expressionist painting, which combines Chinese ink and acrylic color, is typical of his work of the period. He returned from New York to Sichuan in 1990, and died in Taiwan the following year. This work exemplifies a recurring trend among Chinese painters who were familiar with Western modernism to find points of intersection between ink painting and Abstract Expressionism.{Read More…}

Chen Shen Ping / Green River Flowing Through the Mountains / 15″ x 19″  [21" x 25" with silk brocade mat] 39 cm x 48 cm  [55 cm x 64 cm with silk brocade mat] / chinesepaintings.com

I’m intrigued by his use of colour and how the drawing sets up the structure that holds the loose colour in the composition. I definitely see the influence of Zhang Daqian At this point, I think the tightness of the drawn elements competes for attention with the loose colour elements. It sets up a strong contrast, which may be the point, a sort of restrained exuberance. Personally I’d like to see it pushed further, with the tight elements much more deconstructed as well as on a much larger scale. I think the danger is that it can become formulaic very quickly, I want to know what happens next.

Zhang Daqian / Peach Blossom Spring / 1983 / hanging scroll, ink and color on paper / 209.1 x 92.4 cm / Cemac Ltd.

Chang Dai-chien continued to develop his remarkable range of techniques after he left China in 1949. One particularly important breakthrough was his development, in the 1960s, of a bold technique of splashing ink and color on his paper. Although the results might seem to resemble action painting, Chang maintained throughout his life that his technique was Chinese, having been described in Tang dynasty texts on painting. He did not, thus, use the splashed ink technique in a purely abstract manner, but only to suggest real or imaginary landscapes. In this superb painting of his final years, his blue-and-green pigment is used to suggest a mythical paradise, the Peach Blossom Spring, where human discord was unknown. Although he never returned to mainland China, his work was admired and emulated by younger artists who came to know it after the Cultural Revolution. {Read More…}

Grace Hartigan / “Summer Street / 1956 / Corcoran Gallery of Art

From the NY Times

Ms. Hartigan, a friend and disciple of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, subscribed to the Abstract Expressionist notion of the painterly brushstroke as existential act and cri de coeur but, like de Kooning, she never broke entirely with the figurative tradition. Determined to stake out her own artistic ground, she turned outward from the interior world sanctified by the Abstract Expressionists and embraced the visual swirl of contemporary American life.

In “Grand Street Brides” (1954), one of several early paintings that attracted the immediate attention of critics and curators, she depicted bridal-shop window mannequins in a composition based on Goya’s “Royal Family.” Later paintings incorporated images taken from coloring books, film, traditional paintings, store windows and advertising, all in the service of art that one critic described as “tensely personal.”

“Her art was marked by a willingness to employ a variety of styles in a modernist idiom, to go back and forth from art-historical references to pop-culture references to autobiographical material,” said Robert Saltonstall Mattison, the author of “Grace Hartigan: A Painter’s World” (1990).{Read More…}

Also Read: Grace Hartigan is Dead

 Annabel Emson / After Dark / oil on canvas / 2008 / 214 x 244 cm / Wyer Gallery

 Teetering on the edge of abstraction and representation, Emson’s paintings reflect the patterns that arise naturally in the structure of the world around us. However, despite drawing inspiration from both the natural and manmade environment, she does not depict recognizable landscapes in existence somewhere but, working intuitively and spontaneously from memory, alludes to some less tangible or fleeting place or space, rooted in memory perhaps but which has become something other, independent, self-determining and lawless.

Her paintings seem to reflect a joy taken in the physicality of painting as well as paint’s material possibilities. She plays with juxtaposition of colour, its temperature, intensity and emotional pitch; the manner and form of the application of paint and the part played by rhythm and sound, both in the process of painting itself and the form and structure of visual composition. This experimentation with the language and application of paint has lead to an ostensibly disparate note in a collection of canvases that differ in scale and style and where abstract works containing broad, energetic or gestural brushwork sit alongside others in which more considered figurative ideas have worked their way in alongside layers of abstraction to suggest a narrative or something more descriptive.

However diverse at times, the works are linked to each other by an index of recurring motifs and images, referencing and building upon each other as part of an extended conversation. Reduced to their core, these are paintings about their process and each work a consequence of a new question that is understood most fully in its relation to its counterparts.{Read More…}