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

Beatriz Milhaze / Mariposa / 2004 / Acrylic on canvas / 98 X 98 inches / James Cohan Gallery

Unfortunately I missed her recent exhibit a James Cohan Gallery, but Joanne Mattera has a great post about the show on her blog, from which I stole the title for this post.

Also from Carol Kino’s review in the NY Times comes this great quote:

“In the beginning,” she said, “I felt a connection between Spanish Latin American and Brazilian, which is more Portuguese: the Baroque churches, the costumes, the ruffles, things that have volume or a sculptural shape.”

But ultimately, she said, although she wanted to incorporate all those things into her work, “I wanted to put them together based on a geometric composition. Because at the end of the day, I was only interested in structure and order.” {Read More…}

Merrill Wagner / Large Flower Small Owl / 2006 / Paint on steel / 87.75 x 82.25″ / sundharamtagore.com

I checked out this show this past week. I wasn’t familiar with Merrill Wagner’s work, but I loved how she painted with the steel. It’s interesting, Richard Serra’s work makes you really feel the presence and the weight of the steel, whereas with Merrill’s work I found myself enchanted with the surface, the rust, the marks left by the heat of forging, etc. There was a delicacy and lightness about the steel.

Wagner’s oeuvre explores the possibility of steel and slate as a painterly surface. Wagner begins with found materials, either die-cut scraps of steel, or pieces of slate, and transforms them into abstract landscapes or flowers. She imbues the surface with an unexpected softness yet still maintains an architectural form. Painted directly from nature, her forms allude less overtly to geometry than to a structural topography. Her assemblages are suspended by magnets giving them a floating quality. Her innovative utilization of the dichotomy between the softness of the pigments and her subject and the rigidity of her surface has earned her the acclaim of the art world.

Merrill Wagner @ Sundharam Tagore, 547 West 27th Street, through 10/15

Kansuke Fuji / Banana / 860 x 610 / Ippodo Gallery

I stumbled up the Ippodo Gallery today on 26th Street. A nice little space in the basement of the building that it shares with the Onishi Gallery. Kansuke Fuji’s work felt very still and serene. Strong negative shapes and visually pleasing surface geometry. While the work is representational, the pieces really move toward abstraction as the shapes and forms in themselves take on more importance than their identity as objects.
Kansuke Fujii @ Ippodo Gallery, 521 W. 26th Street, through July 3rd

Jem Southam / Vaucottes / February 2006 / 46.5 x 55.25 inches / edition of 6 / chromogenic dye coupler print / © Jem Southam. Courtesy of the artist and Robert Mann Gallery

I almost have to stop using my preamble “I’m not usually a fan of photography, but…” A great example of abstract photography. For me these photos are about the colors and the compositions. They become something more than a literal record of the cliffs of Normandy. The geometry of the compositions create a powerful sense of space that for me communicate the embodied feeling of standing at the cliffs. William Myers writing in the New York Sun had this to say:

What I see in Mr. Southam’s images is a meticulous use of found materials to produce complex works of abstract design. They are like the nonobjective paintings of mid-century except, of course, they are objective. Or they are like highly patterned Islamic art, except the patterns do not recur. Colors, shapes, and scale are the elements of these sophisticated compositions. [Read more...]

Jem Southam: The Rockfalls of Normandy
March 10 – May 20
Robert Mann Gallery
www.robertmann.com