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…}

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…}

Ingrid Calame / From #258 Drawing (Tracings from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the L.A. River) / 2007 / enamel paint on aluminum / 72 X 120 inches / James Cohan Gallery

I came across Ingrid’s work yesterday. I am not familiar with her and have never seen her work before. I spent some time looking at her work online trying to engage with the paintings themselves, which of course is impossible online. If nothing but intrigued, I read a bunch of reviews, mostly mixed with critics bemoaning the conceptualism of her work. This made me laugh because I had just read a piece by the poet and writer David Lehman this morning referring to the joke that if you crossed a mafioso and a deconstructionist, what you got was someone who makes you “an offer that you can’t understand.” So I began to think that maybe that’s why I couldn’t really make heads or tails of this work, because the deconstructionist mafioso got crossed with a painter, which is certain to be messy.

Anyway, John Yau, whose writtings I really enjoy, opened a review of Ingrid Calame’s work for the Brooklyn Rail with the following quote from James Hillman, “We sail against the imagination whenever we ask an image for its meaning—requiring that images be translated into concepts.” I thought this was a great thought/observation. He goes on to conclude with the follow:

When you stand close to one of Calame’s visually packed paintings, you are likely to forget that you are looking at a brightly colored copy of stains. It is in the small areas that the juxtapositions of color and layering become visually engaging, and you might get lost in the looking. Standing near to the surface, and narrowing your focus, you don’t see what looks like a big tire track and immediately think speedway. This enables you to overlook, if only briefly, that the painting is made up of literal signs that are meant to remind you of all the little details of everyday life that you failed to notice. After all, there is something contrived and didactic about this equation. With their faint traces of brushstrokes, Calame’s densely crammed surfaces really are something to look at. And spatially, the unpredictable shifts between small and large, near and far, defy any simple reading. The forms begin to float free from their literalness, while the staccato colors and asyndetic transitions bounce you all over the place. Calame ought to aim for more than being mentioned in the same sentence as Pollock, who has seldom been given credit for all the different ways in which he worked.  {Read More…}

Monkeys and Bears in the Kishkindha Forest, from the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas, circa 1775.

Souren Melikian for the International Herald Tribune writes:
Soon, rhythmical repetition became the painter’s overriding preoccupation, leading to some of the most striking creations of the Jodhpur school of royal painting. Its most extraordinary works were inspired by the Ramayana, the ancient epic originally composed in Sanskrit. Recast in late-16th-century verse by the poet Tulsidas, who wrote in vernacular Hindi, the epic which recounts the story of the heroic god Rama gained a renewed popularity. By the second half of the 18th century, Diamond notes, the Hindi version of Tulsidas spread by itinerant ascetics had traveled from Varanasi in eastern India, where it was composed, to Rajasthan in the western part of the country. It was recited at court and selected scenes from it were re-enacted.

A series of monumental folios painted around 1775 deal with it, projecting visions of an enchanted fairy-tale world.

In a landscape representing the forest of the monkey kingdom Kishkindha, pink peaks shoot up above low turquoise-green hills where groups of seated monkeys deliberate. In the lower area, bears stand talking to one another. Right at the top, white geese perched in trees fly off into the sky. Colors and motifs achieve a rhythm in tune with the rhythm of chanted verse.

While the paintings are rather coarse, betraying the decadence that hit Indian art in the 18th century, the poetic feeling remains remarkable. {Read More…}

Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur
October 11, 2008–January 4, 2009
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery

The website also has this great interactive feature with photos and audio clips.

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

Simone Lanzenstiel / O.T. / 2007 / Acrylic and spray paint on cotton / 200 cm x 230 cm  / Barbara Gross Galerie

From Art Knowledge News

The artist begins with imaginary and immediate elements, such as pavement, construction scaffolding, graffiti, or blotches of paint on the floor of her studio. This recourse to found markings is a breakaway move from the conventional means of painting.

Simone Lanzenstiel develops her painting as a series of actions on the canvas. She shakes, splashes, sprays, brushes, scrawls, and wipes – in an apparently accidental, fleeting manner. This creates free, open zones, light and soaring. In contrast, colors are varied and re-worked until they are finally condensed into painterly figures and powerful accents of color; this finely attuned balance lends rhythm to the work.

The artist prefers to work with acrylics and enamel sprays in predominantly cool, brilliant tones, such as blue, green, purple, and magenta. Each painting is specified by a precise color composition, dominated by white. White is used as ground and mask – it is a color and a non-color, passive and active. White simultaneously limits and intensifies the space in which all of the other colors are expressed. Strong and gentle color gradients cover the entire surface of the picture, only coming to an abrupt stop at the edges of the painting. Hence, the paintings seem to have been removed from a larger context, and yet they expand far into the space. {Read More…}

Simone Lanzenstiel’s work featured at Barbara Gross Galerie

Judith Godwin Early Abstractions
September 3, 2008 – January 4, 2009, Tobin Theatre Arts Gallery, Brown Gallery, www.mcnayart.org

The earliest paintings in the show resemble cell structures, with graphic black lines defining the interlocking forms within a matrix of colors that seem to refer to cubism. Another early work, “Nucleus IV,” contains references to the nude figure. “Male Study” and “Woman” are more complex arrangements that resemble early de Kooning. But more neutral space became a key part of her style when she began to experiment with pours and stains, such as “Ode to Kenzo,” which introduces an element of Asian minimalism.

Gradually, her style becomes looser, more painterly and more dramatic. “Purple Mountain” has a peak punching through the top of the picture plane, with the landscape defined by broad, dark brushstrokes. “Night” and “Blue Storm” use dark blues and blacks with accents of gold and brown to suggest the fierce energy of nature. “Black Cross” features a soaring black cross with a broken arm.

A few of the strongest works deal more with psychological states, such as “Longing.” More horizontal paintings with dramatic dark blotches against a white background such as “Into the Depth” and “Maze” seem to be maps of the artist’s subconscious, with dark, violent emotions pushing and pulling against a curtain of light. In these later paintings, Godwin pared down color and emphasized dramatic brush marks.

However, as Sims explains in his essay, while Godwin’s early work seemed to avoid anything that can be described as feminine, her more recent work has more womanly touches — introducing collage elements, such as black sequins and ribbons set into the pigments, and using rounder, more organic shapes. She also uses lighter colors. {Read More…}

Miriam Shapiro / The Twinning of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden / 1989 / 80″ x 116″, (triptych) / Acrylic on Canvas / Flomenhaft Gallery

I entered the Flomenhaft Gallery knowing Miriam Shapiro’s name but unable to recall any images of her work or even how I knew her name. I probably read about her in an art history book, as she is undoubtedly a pioneer and significant figure in the feminist art movement. Growing up in an upper-middle class university town, it could have easily been that I had seen her work, either originals or reproductions, or, if not her work, derivative pieces hanging on the walls in my friends houses. It may even have even been that I had an art teacher in elementary, middle-, or high school that assigned us a project based on her work, echoing and speaking to her influence and importance.

I mention this because the first association I had walking through the gallery was a strong feeling of American Jewish womanhood, coming of age in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and living in the present. It made me think of my friends’ mothers, or other women I know in this demographic. That is in no way meant to diminish the work, categorize it, and put it in a nice easy to handle historically and culturally situated box. It speaks to me of women, struggling to stitch together narratives of identity and self-hood, to redefine femininity and womanhood.

In her work, historical and cultural symbols and artifacts are patched together, personalized and given new meaning. Stories are reinterpreted and retold. Fabric, cloth, and thread are woven together with acrylic and a host of other materials to create rich and exciting surfaces. The colors are lush, saturated, and full of life. The overall effect is that her work can feel simultaneously challenging and comforting, familiar and unfamiliar, radical and ordinary. I would guess, an important piece of our response to Miriam’s work, is determined by our own history, our own identity – whether or not we can see parts of ourselves and our own stuggles with identity reflected in her work, and how we think and feel about what we she reveals to us.

Miriam Schapiro’s Mini-Retrospective, March 13 – April 26, 2008, Flomenhaft Gallery, 547 West 27th Street, Suite 308