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

Martin Golland / Blue Room / 2008 / oil on canvas / 43 x 36 in / © Martin Golland Courtesy of the Artist and Birch Libralto

Shapeshift
March 15th – April 19th
Opening reception Saturday March 15th 2–5 PM
Birch Libralato
www.birchlibralato.com

‘Shapeshift’ will be Martin Golland’s debut show with Birch Libralato. Golland’s paintings (drawn upon the traditions of Surrealism and Cubism) attempt to create engulfing architectural spaces that evoke sensation, discovery and disorientation. These slipshod spaces, emptied of figures, suggest the residue of nameless ritual activity.

Golland explains that, “My work is built from a collection of gestures and painting languages that respond to the histories of abstraction and representation. [It] depicts overlooked architectural spaces that trigger experiences of the uncanny. The scenes presented in my work are emptied of figures, leaving only traces of hidden activity. My intent is to mark out the slippage between elements of safety and fear that are revealed in these scenarios.

I use a selection of competing modes of painting that function at various degrees of abstraction and representation. I work with a sourced inventory of leftover modernist styles and my own photography as departure points for my painting. I treat the photograph as a departure point for an improvised fiction. As I translate these elements into painting, the materiality of the paint warps representation and asserts its own pictorial logic through competing ranges of gesture, texture and form.

The discreet transitions between the various zones of the painting act as a metaphor for the fractured phenomenon of perception. Bent perspective and idiosyncratic colour work at cross-purposes to one another but provide temporary cohesion. Despite their disjunctive make-up, the engulfing spaces create an occasion for immersive experience. Each work presents a heightened moment – an upsurge of the visible – where the relationship between what is represented and what is seen becomes problematic and the consistency of the world wavers. As a result, the fugitive shifts of space act as a metaphor for the mind’s sway between reverie and dread.”

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.

Ron Ehrlich / Emerald Glimpse / 2006 / Oil, mixed media on panel / 59 x 59 inches
© Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Camino Real. www.gallerycaminoreal.net

Excerpt from Gallery Camino Real

American painter Ron Ehrlich achieves rich surfaces and subtleties of tone by melding the three dimensional techniques of vessel-making with the spontaneity and vitality of painting. Working on panel, wielding a blowtorch as well as a brush, the brilliant colorist creates an art both vigorous and contemplative.

Ehrlich attacks his work with an energy that is exciting to behold. Watching him paint is an electrifying experience – marking, gashing, splashing, burning, tossing, scraping, and brushing. Ehrlich moves around his studio with an astonishing vitality: enlisting paint, raw pigment, wax, and marble dust to add to the pastiche of his surface materials. He reaches to add an elegant curving line of crayon, hurls an industrial size brush-load of paint in a sudden graceful arcing toss, then meticulously blowtorches a melting stream of paint, flames trailing his gesture.

With a rare level of skill and this complex methodology he tackles his paintings with a contrasting muscularity and intellectual vigor.

The art of Ron Ehrlich is suffused with the vitality and power of nature, which seems to be his underlying narrative. [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.