This is from a couple of month’s back, but I’m am trying to catch up with my favorite art blogs after taking a unexpected hiatus to the political blog world during the election season.

Sharon Butler over at Two Coats of Paint has a great piece where she writes about her summer studio and adjusting  her work to the limitations of her studio. I have recently done the same with my own work and have been energized and inspired. It was such a revelation when I figured out it was easier to adjust my work to the studio than to try to adjust the studio to the work, especially in NYC. Now instead of being frustrated and pissed-off and not painting because I don’t have a huge loft in Tribeca or Williamsburg or Dumbo, I can just be happy painting instead…

Sharon Butler, So Long, Little Shack

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...]