No more counting days. I know I’m getting tired now as my concentration is really wandering. Got pulled out of the studio yesterday and didn’t get to write. Was thinking a lot about layering paint, pigment. Again sitting down to do blocks of tone is a mechanical practice I fell into pretty easily. Watched an interview with [Arshile] Gorky’s wife Agnes “Mougouch” Magruder before I came down to the studio. I haven’t looked at his work in a long time. I love it. The beautiful arabesques, moving shapes, the geometry of the compositions. She talked about how hard he worked which helped me get off the computer and come down here. Even if only to do these color studies. I don’t know if this is just… I don’t know if I’m just torturing myself by not allowing myself to jump in and work straight away on a painting. But then again is the discipline of drawing and painting. Or the finished product. I mean I love dragging the pencil over paper. At one point while I was working today I was just aware of the rough resistance of the paper as I repeatedly stroked it with the cyan prismacolor. And it’s a pretty smooth drawing paper, but I could really feel the friction as the tip of the pencil lightly brushed the surface. It’s a focused, concentrated way of working. Not that the way I worked before was unfocused. It’s not that there was anything wrong the the old way. Just time to move on and try something new. A feeling that I just couldn’t bear to stand in front of the easel  working that way anymore. No specific reason why other than a feeling. I was talking about why I’m doing this to Tone like I had to have a reason other than some amorphous unarticulated feeling is pushing or pulling me in this direction. My mouth was moving and words were coming out and it was just hot air. I could feel myself grasping for a reason. But do I really need one?

Easel with gradient studies

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

Today seems to be about color, but as I look around my cube all I see is black white and gray. OH NO……… I’ve got to get out and get down to see this exhibit at the Painting Center in Soho.

Placing Color is an exhibition that explores painting as both a place of action and destination. The exhibition presents paintings by three artists: Brett Baker, Kayla Mohammadi, and Carrie Patterson. Seen together, the artists’ intensely individual approaches create places that are both intimate and immense, unified by sensitivity to the means of painting in ways of touch and color.

Painting, the simple means of placing color on a flat surface, is extraordinary in its ability to transport us from the context of our daily existence to new places – complete, vibrant worlds within the boundaries of a two-dimensional frame. Placing Color seeks to reposition the works by the participating artists beyond an interpretation of painting as a site of illusion. The exhibition extends the notion of the painted surface itself as a location or a destination that is defined by the artist’s actions upon it.{Read More…}

Brett Baker / untitled / oil on canvas / 96 x 108 inches / 2006 / www.brettbakerpaintings.com

www.brettbakerpaintings.com

Carrie Patterson / 18 Feet St. Francis Xavier / Acrylic on Linen / 2008 / www.carriepatterson.com

www.carriepatterson.com

Kayla Mohammadi / Here and Now II / 2006 / oil on canvas / 30" x 40" / www.kaylamohammadi.com

www.kaylamohammadi.com

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

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

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…}

Pierre Bonnard (French, 1867-1947) / White Interior / Oil on canvas / 109.5 x 155.8 cm 

So your editor awoke this morning and was going through that google reader thing, because really what else is there to do on a Saturday morning, and there was this fancy picture by french that degenerate artist with a trembling eyeball and wet dog shaker Pierre Bonnard, and well he’s got those pretty colourses so I stared blankly at the screen for a few minutes and was like, ok what the hell he did put that cadmium yellow on the wall and in the woman’s hair so he must be crazy and that chair on the left really keeps the white wall from flying out of the canvas which means he probably knew what he was doing unlike some painters I know. Plus his composition is like a how to on how to divide up the space to create a firm foundation on which to smear all those pretty colourses. Anyway, that ultra-reactionary institution for rich old people, tourists, and your editor (shhhh….i’m that creepy guy in the corner with sloppy cloths and a sketch book watching everybody while I steal from the picturses), the Metropolitan Museum is putting on a show of these pretty pictures in january because they think it’s better for you to come and pay them to stare at the light of these pretty colourses in your track suit amidst the smell of old people than to sit at home popping the xanax in front of your sun-lamp trying to get over your mid-winter depression because Madoff stole all your precious monies because you didn’t give it to the Met to name a wing after you. Anyway, here’s some stuff from the fancy press release written by a curator in a brooch or bowtie since that’s always what they wear over there otherwise you can’t get in the door, unless of course your in a nylon track suit and speak some fancy language that isn’t ENGLISH…wait how come the let me in???

More modern than is commonly recognized, the late work of Pierre Bonnard is remarkable for the artist’s individualistic approach to color, light, perspective, and composition—particularly as seen in his interiors and still lifes [ie, he didn't know what he was doing, if only he followed the book then we wouldn't have to put on this show for you people who like to smoke the ganga and look at colour, and we could go back to looking a fat naked pasty white people].

Bonnard’s late interiors and still lifes explore a multitude of nuanced color relationships among glowing yellows, violets, reds, oranges, greens, and whites

Although Bonnard’s subjects were close at hand, he rarely painted directly from life, relying instead on pencil drawings sketched rapidly in little diaries. Four of the artist’s diaries from his years at Le Cannet will be loaned by the Bibliothèque national de France, Paris. The diary notations lay out idiosyncratic marks as reminders of color, tone, intensity, and contrast. These shorthand sketches were critical to the genesis of large-scale paintings, which Bonnard developed slowly, through a process of continual editing and revision. He often worked on several paintings at once, tacking the unstretched canvases to his studio wall in order to allow for alteration of the periphery of the painting and its overall proportions. In creating his paintings, the artist deferred to the memory of perception. His interest lay in exploring how diverse objects interrelate within a pictorial field, rather than dwelling on the literalness of any object or figure.

I recently picked up Colours by David Batchelor and this morning I was reading a piece by Charles Blanc written in 1867. He comes from a 19th century background that favours drawing/draughtsman/form over colour/colourists. What’s funny is that while the overall implication of his writting is that pure chiaroscuro drawing is the pinnacle of art, he says some things that are right on about colour, and, in my opinion undermine his assumptions . Here are a few excerpts:

…colour is mobile, vague, intangible element, while form, on the contrary, is precise, limited, palpable and constant…

Thus colourists can charm us by means that science has discovered. But the taste for colour, when it predominates absolutely, costs many sacrifices; often it turns the mind from its course, changes the sentiment, swallows up the thought. The impassioned colourist invents his [her] form for his colour, everything is subordinated to the brilliancy of his [her] tints. Not onlythe drawing bends to it, but the composition is dominated, restrained, forced by the colour.

 The predominance of colour at the expense of drawing is a usurpation of the relative over the absolute, of fleeting appearance over permanent form…

Frank O’Cain who I studied with at the Art Students League talks about this idea of colour as light. As he likes to say,

The palette is chosen to create an effect of light, to be able to develop a spatial reality, and also to penetrate through the surface a painter’s needs and rejections. Some colors will be likeable, and others distasteful. Through this preparation, a painter has chosen to have color reflect light, light to relate to color, and energy to take form in shape. Wat it comes down to is this: every color you choose responds to another color so that it creates light for the eye. We react to both the responses of the colors to each other as well as to the surface, to light as it bounces off color. {Read More…}

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about colour lately and expecially this idea of colour as light. I don’t have any profound insights or revelations to share, but I have been thinking about how we develop our colour sense and how our experiences shapes our responses and uses of colour. In my own case I began to think about the effect of staring at boxes of light (computers and teevee screens) for hours everyday for 3 decades has had an effect on my colour sense. In particular, I have been thinking about the Chuck Jones animations I used to watch as a kid and how flat transparent colour on celluloid illuminated, filmed, projected and then transmitted and projected again through the pixels of a teevee influences my  choices of colour as a painter. I don’t have any conclusions, but it is interesting to think about. Anyway, a quick google search revealed all these great Tom & Jerry and Bugs Bunny stills, which among other things (content & composition), are full of rich colours.

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…}