Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes has just finished his week long review/discussion of the Amy Sillman show currently at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. We can’t
get enough…

Amy Sillman layers paint over layers of paint the way Richard Diebenkorn did. Sometimes she loads up her brush like Park, Bischoff or other Bay Area School types. She shmears wet paint across a canvas like Gerhard Richter. Sometimes she dabs it on almost tentatively, as Guston did in his great Turneresque abstractions.

Then there are the compositions themselves. Her diagonals reject a painter’s tendency to grid, the same way Diebenkorn’s did circa Ocean Park. This one recalls Lee Bontecou’s delicate, small hanging sculptures from 1967. A green, red and gray section on the right-hand side of I (2008, below) seems informed by those atmospheric Gustons. The vaguely cartoony shapes in several of the paintings here (including this one) abstract Carroll Dunham’s body parts. And Sillman’s stitching together of seemingly disparate swatches of sometimes garish color and pattern recall 1980s David Hockney. Sillman’s rejection of a traditional, harmonious, palette reminds me of of abstraction from about that period, including Howard Hodgkin, Jonathan Lasker and Thomas Nozkowski.

Critical Response
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Katy Moran / Pecking Order / 2008 / Acrylic on canvas / 18 x 15 inches (46 x 38 cm) / © Katy Moran. All rights reserved. Courtesy of the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery

Today I got over to Andrea Rosen Gallery to see the abstract paintings of UK artist Katy Moran. An artist of my own generation, it was great to see how she is struggling to find her own way in abstraction. Walking into the space I was pleasantly surprised to see tiny canvases hanging at eye level on the two-story bare walls. A quick loop around the gallery, at the relatively safe 5 ft to 6 ft distance from the canvases, left me feeling a bit disappointed – a disappointment that seemed to be magnified by a longer more considered glance across the room. My first response was that they paintings had no life. They appeared to lack spacial development, to be centralized compositions of oval or kidney shapes in a rectangle, the colors had no juice or luminosity.

However, first impressions are often deceiving and this is definitely the case with Katy Moran’s paintings. As I stood on the precipice, considering whether to wander on to another gallery, or stay and give her work a more considered visit, I asked myself, “What’s really going on here? What is she up to?” Having these thoughts, I stepped up to a painting titled Pecking Order and got in real tight – maybe I was a foot or 10 inches away. Suddenly the whole painting came alive. The space opened up, they gestures and strokes had energy and movement, the colors that a moment ago seemed washed out, tired, and just the plastic of acrylic, found some pizzaz. I could see the foam bubbles of acrylic paint too vigorously stirred, that had burst and been captured in the surface. I could see the lint and the studio dust and I felt compelled to brush off the surface, like brushing the lint on the back of a friend who has just taken off her sweater. I chuckled realizing that she had drawn me in. Brought me in physically and that in close proximity, Katy Moran and her paintings began to speak. Or maybe they always already had been speaking, just in a quiet and soft voice. I made another loop around the gallery, sliding right up close with my nose in the pictures.

After, I read the press release and the write-up on the web, my opinion is forget what they have to say because the person writing has no idea how to look at an abstract painting. The dichotomy between abstraction and realism is not relevant to the viewer’s experience of the painting. Sources and references to recognizable imagery seem to be only a curious piece of trivia. If trying to find the image is your game, then it is better to pick up a Where’s Waldo? book, you’ll have more success. Otherwise if you fall into that only too human trap of finding the image on the cave walls or in the clouds then you miss the whole experience of the paintings. You miss the intimacy of standing with Ms. Moran as she brushes her canvas.

Katy Moran is on view at Andrea Rosen Gallery thru April 23

Tamaracks in November / 2007 / oil on canvas on panel / 24″ x 24″ / © Julian Hatton. All rights reserved. Courtesy of the artist and Elizabeth Harris Gallery

Hatton’s paintings exude a curious faith in landscape as source. His refreshingly versatile abstractions, which follow the modest two foot square format of his previous show in 2006, emphasize the enormous pleasure derived from limited means. Hatton plays with the seemingly logical set of relationships that are responsible for any landscape ascription, with compelling results. While often using nature as a starting point, Hatton remains true to the Modernist tenet of inventing one’s own language. These new paintings show Hatton extending his idiosyncratic vocabulary, broadening his syntax and pushing his organic shapes to the limits of recognizable depiction. Rich color harmonies and complex compositions change radically as moods shift from exuberant to somber. The paintings show a love of color, process and improvisation, with paint qualities ranging from delicate glazes to rough pentimenti. The extraordinary individuality of each painting suggests a deepening appreciation for how paintings work, while, at the same time, testifying to the inexhaustible possibilities of abstracted landscape. [Read more...]

http://www.eharrisgallery.com
http://www.julianhatton.net

Stanley Whitney / SunRa / 2006 / oil on linen / 40 x 40 in.(cm. 102 x 102) / © Stanley Whitney. Courtesy of Stanley Whitney and Esso Gallery

Thanks to Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes for directing me to Stanley Whitney’s work. Having been inspired by the Color Charts exhibition at MoMA, I’ve been in the studio experimenting with the color exercises of Joseph Albers so I was quite struck with Whitney’s paintings and his use of colors.

John Yau in the Brooklyn Rail has a good review of an exhibition of Whitney’s paintings back in 2006. While he focuses mostly on composition and the rhythmatic effect of the juxtaposition of colors, I am curious to see the surface and how the colors are applied. Are the colors opaque, transparent, layered, mixed, pure, etc. Also, with the Albers exercises, I have been studying the light quality of colors and how the character of the color and the light of the color is changed by juxtapositions. Color is light and color is relative. As Hans Hofmann states, “Color in itself is light. In nature, light creates the color; in the picture, color creates light. Every color shade emanates a very characteristic light–no substitute is possible.” I am interested to see character of the light in Whitney’s paintings. How the colors interact, how each color is changed by its neighbors, and finally how the fit together as a whole the color effect of the whole piece.

Excerpt from John Yau’s review,

Whitney works out of a tradition that includes Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, and Alma Thomas. He is a fiercely independent painter who makes no attempt to charm or impress the viewer, and in that regard is the peer of Bill Jensen and Harriet Korman, self-determined abstract artists who have never been swayed by fashion.[Read more...]

after cecille / prismacolor / 5″ x 6″
© 2007 gordon fraser. all rights reserved. www.gordonfraserfinearts.com

I posted the above drawing to a drawing forum on artreview.com and received a number of replies from the impassioned defense, to the legitimate questioning, to the ridiculous dismissal/panning by the court jester who’s now out rummaging through his kids nursery school art projects in the hopes of getting rich. I then posted the following reply. [see the whole conversation here...]

Byron, Alaleh and Jonathan all raise some interesting questions, establishment vs. anti-establishment, abstraction vs. realism, illustration, decoration, basically the stuff we as artists (an the non-artists critics) have been tangling with for the last 150 years! I started to jot down some notes and realized I have a lot to say about all of them. At this point I will have to sidebar those discussions to a different forum so as not to take away from the art being shown here. That being said, given that this is “Show and Tell” I will offer a few comments. For the purpose of the discussion I will try to separate formal questions from questions of content, but in reality in the process of drawing, the concerns interpenetrate and cannot be separated. First, in terms of content, this painting is about desire, pretty straight forward establishment content going back hundreds/thousands of years, so to byron’s point I do not view this piece as anti-establishment. It is a question/conversation/meditation I have been engaged with for about six months and it offers one viewpoint among many. The brief history is that this project began as 5 minute poses in the studio with a clothed model, who happens to be a dancer, over a two week period back in october. The initial studio sketches were executed in watercolour and I have carried on this work in oil, watercolour, collage, and prismacolor pencils, using both the sketches and memory of some poses as inspiration. This is one example.

Now to the more formal issues:
1) Mark making – I have used gestural marks and scribbles to convey the energy and excitement of desire, which often can feel uncontrollable and overwhelming when it is being experience.

2) colour – the dominant colour of the piece is red, chosen first off because the model has red hair and there was red fabric hanging on the wall behind where the model was posing. I then pushed and changed the hue, layering different reds (which unfortunately can’t be seen so well on the computer screen) in order to develop a sense of the warmth, heat, and excitement of desire. The red moves very quickly toward the viewer and allows me to pull the background right to the surface, compressing the space of whole composition. Secondarily, the two blue planes sandwich and squeeze the red plane, creating a dynamic tension and opening up the space of the composition.

3) composition – the compositional structure is very simple, built on a tilted plane, stolen from the italian masters such as Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, etc., to provide a dynamic structure to both house and convey energy and excitement. It helps create the movement and space in the drawing.