Annabel Emson / After Dark / oil on canvas / 2008 / 214 x 244 cm / Wyer Gallery

 Teetering on the edge of abstraction and representation, Emson’s paintings reflect the patterns that arise naturally in the structure of the world around us. However, despite drawing inspiration from both the natural and manmade environment, she does not depict recognizable landscapes in existence somewhere but, working intuitively and spontaneously from memory, alludes to some less tangible or fleeting place or space, rooted in memory perhaps but which has become something other, independent, self-determining and lawless.

Her paintings seem to reflect a joy taken in the physicality of painting as well as paint’s material possibilities. She plays with juxtaposition of colour, its temperature, intensity and emotional pitch; the manner and form of the application of paint and the part played by rhythm and sound, both in the process of painting itself and the form and structure of visual composition. This experimentation with the language and application of paint has lead to an ostensibly disparate note in a collection of canvases that differ in scale and style and where abstract works containing broad, energetic or gestural brushwork sit alongside others in which more considered figurative ideas have worked their way in alongside layers of abstraction to suggest a narrative or something more descriptive.

However diverse at times, the works are linked to each other by an index of recurring motifs and images, referencing and building upon each other as part of an extended conversation. Reduced to their core, these are paintings about their process and each work a consequence of a new question that is understood most fully in its relation to its counterparts.{Read More…}

From the ArtCollectors

Layered Days, Jose Parla’s latest exhibition and first solo show in New York, is on view now at Christina Grajales.  The show presents a new body of  paintings, adorned in layers upon layers of Parla’s signature abstract lettering and textures. Here, the artist’s graffiti roots combine with modern abstract expressionism, conjuring up recollections of both Cy Twombly and Jackson Pollock. In addition, a wall installation builds upon Parla’s themes of history and story telling, through an array of artifacts and photographs combined with original canvas, wood, and ceramic pieces. A hard cover catalog has been published to commemorate the exhibit, and Parla graciously decorated fan’s copies on opening night. Layered Days is on view till Dec. 20.

Jose Parla – Layered Days
Nov. 8 – Dec. 20
Christina Grajales Gallery
10 Green Street, 4th Floor
NY, NY 10013

Doug Trump / Choice / 2008 / oil, pencil, collage, ink, on canvas / 65 x 72 inches / Reeves Contemporary

I spent time at Reeves Contemporary Gallery yesterday and was impressed with the abstract paintings of Doug Trump. His work actually touches on a few of the issues I brought up in my piece about craft, I could see areas where the oil paint, laid on over ink or acrylic was cracking, but that does not take away from his work in the least. I plan on going back a few more times before the show closes. His transparent colors, hiding and revealing shapes forms and gestures, create quiet compelling spacial shifts and rhythms that are a visual treat. I’ll come back to this later….In the meantime, here’s what the gallery has to say:

Doug Trump’s newest oil paintings employ rich, industrial color and collaged surfaces, punctuated by gestural marks in pencil, ink, and charcoal. The artist continues over-painting, sanding back painted layers and then obscuring the surface again with new color fields, a process giving Trump’s works their complexity and depth. While the artist’s process remains consistent, the work no longer focuses upon a unified, balanced composition, but rather prizes expressionism as manifested through color and brushstroke. He is allowing his own energy – and thus the energy in the paintings – to jump from one area to another, without qualifying it, without constraining it within a preconceived or determined canvas. Through this spontaneous yet measured approach, Trump allows the paintings to breath in their own vitality. Ultimately, Trump is creating paintings with agitation and friction. For the viewer, there is ample room to move into the work, and receive its kinetic energy.

Doug Trump is on view at Reeves Contemporary, 534 w. 24th Street, through May 24th.

John DiPaolo / Silhouette Inca #5 / Oil and Enamel on Canvas / 63 x 70 in. / 2008 / © John DiPaolo. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy the artist and Dolby Chadwick Gallery

“It’s not about picture making,” he [DiPaolo] explained, “you can do that better with a camera. Painting is about soul and that’s what people see in it more than anything.”

For the past thirty years John DiPaolo has painted lush non-representational canvases in his San Francisco studio, driven by a passion ignited when he was a young child. An accomplished draftsman capable of rendering with verisimilitude, he worked in a hard-edged pop style until graduate school before abandoning references to the outside world in favor of a deeper engagement with the act of painting. Since then DiPaolo has created a body of work drawn from his inner resources. Dipping beneath surface appearances, he taps into a creative force strong enough to compel him to return to his studio day after day, filled with anticipation for the aesthetic adventures that lie ahead. [Read more...]

www.dolbychadwickgallery.com

Bill Jensen / LUOHAN (PERSONA) / 2005-2006 / Oil on linen / 28 x 23 inches / © Bill Jensen. Courtesy ofthe artist and Cheim & Read Gallery

I read two reviews of the paintings of Bill Jensen, a painter living here in NYC and an instructor at the New York Studio School, over the past month – Bill Jensen Notes from the Loggia by John Yau in the Brooklyn Rail and Art in Review; Bill Jensen By Martha Schwendener in the NYTimes. InJohn Yau’s review in the Brooklyn Rail of Bill Jensen‘s recent painting exhibit at Danese Gallery here in New York City. He discusses the centrality of drawing to Jensen’s practice and his debt to both Chinese calligraphy and Abstract Expressionism, both important sources of inspiration for my own work. Yau also goes on to state that Jensen is, “…exploring a territory that is connected to very divergent aspects of Abstract Expressionism (Ad Reinhardt, James Brooks and Jackson Pollock)—lightless light, the interplay between order and disorder, and gesture as form. In all three areas of this territory, which abut and overlap, larger chaotic forces emerge as the shaping feature.” For Schwendener this means that, “Bill Jensen has never settled down with one style,” a trait usually frustrating to galleryists and historians.

A frequent topic of conversation in the studio is what we refer to as the two schools of abstract painting – on the one side there are the gestural, expressionist painters and on the other side are the geometrical, color-field, lyrical abstactionists, and minimalists. This leads to a lot of useless conversations about left brain vs. right brain, emotion vs. intellect, expression vs. conceptual, etc., that really have nothing to do with painting, and devolve into figuring out which camp you belong to and sticking to it. However, I am more interested in mining the territory between the two poles and Jensen’s paintings are a great example of the many possibilities available. In his work we see both gestural marks, bimorphic or automatistic shapes, as well as brilliant colors and transparencies, shifting planes and moving spacial relationships. Jensen will lay in a gesture in a rich pure color opaque color and then come back and run a transparent right over top. Or lay in a thick opaque colorful gesture and then while the paint is still wet scrape it to create a film with transparent and opaque areas.

Finally, Schwendener indicates that while Jensen paints in oil he makes his own paint, allowing him to regulate its viscosity. I think this is a particularly important point for painters and something I have tried to bring into my own practice (I’ll talk more about this in the future). The ubiquity of artist supplies has lead to a plethora of easily available tube paints and painting mediums, the quality of which varies from brand to brand. While this frees up the artist from having to spend copious amounts of time and energy grinding pigments, cooking mediums, and making paint, it brings a certain uniformity and homogeneity to color and surface of paintings. Making ones one paint not only allows the artist to control the viscosity but to control pigment content, pigment mixtures, fillers, etc., as well as the drying time, finish and whole lot of other qualities that come into play in the process of painting. Jensen’s work shows us how important mastering the craft of painting really enables us to explore the limitless complexities of painting.

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.