The Rose Window at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

The New York Times by Holland Cotter has a nice article about light with lots of great little tidbits.

At this dark time of the year, we like light. So we have festivals of light: Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve too, with its bright parties, and fireworks, and the fabulous walk-in lantern that is Times Square.

Poetic and pragmatic is an apt description of New York and its light. This is an island city — of its five boroughs only the Bronx is part of the North American mainland — with an island light, alternately obdurate and romantically moody. It can be too candid. Noon light in New York is not going to make you look rosy if you’re pale, or rested if you’re tired, or younger than you are. But its toughness is democratic: it falls on everybody and everything the same way.

When the poet John Ashbery described Porter’s colors as “transparent and porous, letting the dark light of space show through,” he might have been speaking of Hopper too, or of this Hopper at any rate. Like Porter’s art, Hopper’s exemplifies one version of American-style luminosity, painting that has some sort of spiritual dimension, but is also as unpretentiously humane as a piece of fine, body-friendly furniture. {Read More…}

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As those of you that follow that ARTFAG on the twitter with your fancy iPhones already know, there was trouble in the Art Fag City with stinky puppy farts. Probably because she feeds it some kind of holistic organic vegetarian dog food like this from Whole Foods or Fresh Direct because she hates America and real Americans, like Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber, who shop at Stop & Shop or A&P and feed their dogs Puppy Chow or field dressed moose meat. Anyway, your editor has a problem with farts too, his own, which is why he is up at the butt crack of dawn polluting you with this nefarious odor instead of hibernating like a normal person on the longest night of the year.  Please tell him to stop eating those Turkish figs before he goes to sleep.

ALRIGHTY THEN, and what does this have to do with anything, you might be asking if you haven’t bought THE BOOK, because some evil guy named Madoff or Lehman stole all you dollarses, and so you cancelled chanukah and christmas because that’s what Jesus would do! Well, if you had bought THE BOOK you would know that Paul Gauguin in his Notes on Colour had this to say on the very same topic of flatulence…

And as easily as you let out a fart in order to get rid of someone who’s a pain in the neck, Cezanne says, with his accent from the Midi: ‘A kilo of green is greener than half a kilo.’ Everyone laughs: he’s crazy! The craziest person is not the one you think. His words have a meaning other than their literal meaning, and why should he explain their rational meaning to people who laugh? That would be casting pearls before swine.

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Michael Sanzone / Scottish Landscapes / 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel

Wood is the chosen medium, specifically the natural occurrences that time has on the material and how it cannot be duplicated through artifice. The passage of time is represented through the mosaic-like constructions, with each piece of wood quietly disclosing his story in each ring, chip, and flaw. Sanzone increasingly explores the history of his materials, and in turn his surroundings. ‘I find it important in my new work to collect materials/wood from specific locations, to get to know those locations and the history of the wood that now lies in the finished piece of artwork.’

The works included in Scottish Landscape were constructed during his time spent as an Artist in Residency at the Glenfiddich Distillery. Inspired by the journey of wood used to make the casks, some over fifty years old, Sanzone became increasingly fascinated by the subsistence of each piece. The barrels were built from Spanish or American oak, transported to Scotland, and then filled, tagged, coded, tended to, used, thrown away, found and finally resurrected. These wood constructions not only convey the narrative of this journey, but also act as Sanzone’s memento of a time and place. The distinct colors and shapes of each piece, united with the damp scent of whisky soaked wood embedded with splinters and raised nails, lends to a sensory experience that is the Scottish Landscape from the artist’s viewpoint.

In addition to the wood constructions, there are a series of wood pieces simply referred to as Collaborations.  In a manifestation of ‘the exquisite corpse,’ Sanzone and fellow New York- based artist, M.P. Landis, exchanged these pieces via mail from Scotland to Brooklyn while manipulating the wood with drawings, stamps, words, and various media.  According to the rules established by both artists, each piece had to have traveled back and forth at least four times to be considered complete.  The battered and beautiful pieces reveal this journey, transformed from a blank canvas of wood to an illustrated dialogue between remote locations. {Read More…}

Michael Sanzone @ 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel 532 West 25th Street through 11/25

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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

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Cecily Brown / Skulldiver IV / 2006-2007 / Oil on linen / 85 x 89 inches  (215.9 x 226.1 cm) / gagosian.com

Willem de Kooning. (American, born the Netherlands. 1904-1997). Woman, I. 1950-52. Oil on canvas, 6′ 3 7/8″ x 58″ (192.7 x 147.3 cm). Purchase. © 2008 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. moma.org

So I’ve been thinking this week about these two paintings and painters, specifically about how they develop their forms and the space of the paintings. If we look first at Skulldiver IV  we see that the figural elements are drawn and painted to develop a sense of volume. The legs and arms are cylindrical, in fact, the forshortening on her arm reminds me of the outstretched arms of the figure in Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaeus that wants to reach out of the canvas. In the same way, the figure in Skulldiver IV nearly wants to fall out of the bottom of the canvas on to the floor of the gallery. This is important because it functions to draw the viewer into the scene as a voyeur or participant standing in the room with the copulating figures.

More to come…

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Alastair Michie / Crows Nest / Acrylic on board / Shirley Crowther Contemporary Art

I am not familiar with Alastair Michie’s work, but after reading his obituary in today’s Guardian. I thought I would check it out. This piece has a wonderful palette and sense of rhythm. The composition and division of space is pleasing and draws me into the painting.

A visit to the Venice Biennale in 1962 dramatically changed Michie’s amb-itions and professional life. It was there he encountered the work of the great American abstract expressionists: the scale and sheer energy of Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline and Mark Rothko were decisive in him becoming a painter. He always maintained that he was never influenced by his mother’s work, though he shared something of her facility and strong feeling for colour and texture. His belief in the power of abstract art to convey strong emotions was confirmed by a meeting with Rothko at an exhibition of paintings by his friend John Plumb at the Axiom gallery in London in the late 1960s.

Michie’s abstract works, whether sculptures or paintings, were always influenced by his own experience. He believed that the two activities complemented and cross-fertilised each other, and much of his work, whether in two or three dimensions, is closely linked to the coastal landscape of his beloved Dorset. His abstract paintings can be read as images of land and sea viewed from the air. A favourite haunt, Studland beach, proved a rich source of found objects, including driftwood and wartime remnants such as shrapnel, which formed the basis of most of Michie’s sculpted pieces from the 1950s onwards. [Read More...]

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Christopher Wool / Untitled / 2007 / Enamel on linen / 126 x 96 inches / (320.04 x 243.84 cm) / Luhring Augustine

I guess there is a famous quote by Christopher Wool that goes something like “The harder you look, the harder you look.” I find that the longer I look at his work, or the more that I look at his work, the more I want there to be and it just isn’t. I want there to be more paint, more layers, more color, more erasures. I want it to be something more than a spray painted Brice Marden de Kooning Basquiat derivation. To be something more than a derivative work or a simulacra. I find myself asking, are they alienated pictures, cool intellectual, ironic, sad, frustrated? I don’t know. Standing in front of them I feel an absence, a loss, a longing for something, or a searching for something that I’m just not getting. There is something elusive about these paintings, something always out of reach, yet right there in front of me hanging on the wall.
However, this seems to me to be their goal or function–to frustrate or disturb the tranquility–to crack apart the security of my own assumptions about painting. In fact my first thought- and a dangerous thought for an abstract painter- was to assume that the work was somehow derivative, that Marden, de Kooning, and Basquiat are original, authentic, and superior, while Christopher Wool’s work is secondary, derivative, or even “parasitic.” Though I know very little about Christopher Wool, I would like to imagine that to overcome this idea- that artists in the past were original, authentic, or superior and artists working in the present are derivative- and move beyond this pattern of thinking, is a fundamental theme of Christopher Wool’s work. If not, it’s at least something I am thinking about in response to the paintings at Luhring Augustine and the more I look at them and reflect, the more I see them.

Wool is an American painter known for creating pictorial forms, often void of color due to his loyalty to black and white. First gaining notoriety from his ‘word pictures’ of the late 1980s, Wool now works frequently with enamel paint on canvas, creating layered pieces, marked with paint spatter and sporadic drips.

Other characteristic tendencies include erasing almost-entire pictures then writing over them with black spray paint. He approaches art as a process that needs revision and often makes visible corrections within his works. (artobserved.com)

Chirstopher Wool at Luhring Augustine, 531 West 24th Street through June 21.

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ron ehrlich / pale rain / 2007 / oil on panel / 48 x 48 inches / stephen haller gallery

Went to Stephen Haller Gallery the other day to see Gregory Johnston’s paintings, but was actually much more taken by Ron Ehrlich’s work hanging in the back of the gallery. His paintings had a physical presence lacking in the alkyd sheen finish of Gregory Johnston’s paintings.

Ron Ehrlich’s paintings combine the very American dynamic of action painting with the Japanese aesthetic of wood-fired Bizen ceramics. His application methods include throwing, pouring, brushing, scumbling and glazing. To achieve his remarkable surfaces, some glistening and others matte, he mixes recipes of oil, wax, lacquer, shellac, porcelain dust, and marble dust; and then turns a blowtorch on some areas to fuse the materials into a lustrous glazed finish. The resulting canvases, with their dense layers of oil paint and other media, are simultaneously energetic and tranquil.

Ehrlich’s palette leans toward water hues and earth tones: ultramarine, turquoise, peacock and sky blue; greens ranging from muted moss to sparkling emerald; sunny yellows, ochre, ivory, terracotta, and chalky white; the deep tones of rich soil. Broad horizontal bands of color in the under layers of his paintings are also suggestive of landscapes. The general impression, though, is of heavily textured, densely layered action painting. Often he creates an all-over grid-like texture with many thin vertical drips of color running down the canvas over thickly painted horizontal blocks in the under layers.

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A Discussion About Abstraction with Thomas Nozkowski and Dana Schutz

Sat, May 17, 2008 | 3:00 PM
New Museum theater

In conjunction with the current exhibition by Tomma Abts, Kraus Family Senior Curator Laura Hoptman will moderate a discussion on abstraction as a method and idea with artists Thomas Nozkowski and Dana Schutz.

Thomas Nozkowski is a painter who has had sixty-eight one-person shows. His most recent exhibitions include an installation of new work at the 2007 Venice Biennial, a midcareer survey at the Ludwig Museum in Koblenz, Germany, 2007 and the Fisher-Landau Center, New York, 2008, and a one-person exhibition at Pace Wildenstein, New York, 2008. The New York Studio School presented a twenty-five-year survey of his drawings in January 2003. His work is represented in the collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the High Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Phillips Collection among many others. Currently, Nozkowski is the Bob and Happy Doran Visiting Artist at the Yale University Art Gallery. He is also Professor of Painting at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Forthcoming one-person exhibitions include The Douglas Hyde Gallery of Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland and the Musée d’art contemporain, Montreal, Canada.

Dana Schutz was born in Michigan in 1976 and currently lives and works in New York. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions in commercial galleries in New York, Boston, and Paris. Schutz’s paintings have also been presented in a number of group exhibitions including “Eclipse: Art in a Dark Age,” Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2008; “USA TODAY,” The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, 2007; “Fractured Figure,” DESTE Foundation, Athens, 2007; “Art in America: 300 Years of Innovation,” Shanghai Museum, Shanghai, 2007; “Closer to Home,” 48th Corcoran Biennial, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2005; “Greater New York,” PS1, Queens, (2005); “The Triumph of Painting,” The Saatchi Gallery, London, 2005; and the Venice Biennial, 2003. Her work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and many others. Currently, a group of new work by Schutz is on display at Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin. In July, she will participate in “After Nature,” a group exhibition at the New Museum.

*This event is free with Museum admission but tickets are required.

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Should craft matter? In the age of maufactured obsolescence when products are designed to be discarded in six months or a year, in the age of art as investment when people are paying ridiculous sums of money for ridiculous art, should craft matter? I’ve been thinking about this question lately. Walking through the galleries I see a lot of mixed media paintings where artists have mixed oil, acrylic, ink and other media together in one piece. I have seen paint squeezed out of tubes on to unstretched, ungessoed canvas, drawings and oil paintings on newsprint. All of which suggest either a willful neglect or ignorance of materials and craft. Often times it feels like the balance has swung too far in the direction of experimentation, direct expression, originality for fear of becoming academic. It seems to me there is a mistaken belief that craft knowledge hinders one’s ability to create new and meaningful artwork. Of course craft knowledge and technique alone are no guarantee of making good art, a quick glimpse of the current show of the American Watercolor Society at the Salmagundi Club is enough to prove that point.

Anyway, the thought occurred to me last night that if I bought a new house, or had construction work done on a house, and within a few years it started to fall apart because of shoddy craftsmanship and materials, I would be suing the contractors and developers. I’m surprised there isn’t as much outrage when the same thing happens to works of art. If were going to drop $60,000 – $100,000 on a piece of artwork, I don’t care who the artist is, I would want to make damn sure that it would not fall apart in 5-10 years. Maybe there is and I just don’t know about it. Maybe from the collectors’ point of view it is just one of the risks of investment.

But in all fairness to the artists, there is so much stupid money out there right now. If someone is willing to pay me $20,000 for the newspaper I clean my brushes with, then god bless them and thanks for the money. It’s like a fox in the hen house. Anyway, I’d just make sure I’d sign a contract absolving me of all future responsibility for the condition.

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