Leon Berkowitz / Cathedral #3/23 / c 1966 / oil on canvas / 90 x 72 inches / Gary Snyder Art Projects

Leon Berkowitz was one of the early abstract artists in the Washington DC area, and he helped organize the Washington Workshop, which brought together Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Thomas Downing, Howard Mehring and Gene Davis in the 1950s. He was chairman of the painting department at The Corcoran Gallery’s School of Art from 1969 until his death.

James Pilgrim, curator of the Corcoran exhibition, wrote about the Cathedral series:

“In his Cathedral series Berkowitz established a pictorial format through which he could use light to create form. The narrow white triangle that splits the canvas acts, symbolically, as a light source. Light seems to move laterally from this core, creating changes in color intensity (the changes actually result from light reflecting through varying densities of pigment). Light also seems to move horizontally through subtle color changes from cold to warm to cold. The changes in color and intensity produce an undulating spatial effect, a feeling of advance and recession from the picture plane. These horizontal movements are balanced by the tendency of light to shoot upward through shimmering columns of color. Thus a formal tension is established between the horizontal and the vertical.”

Open through May 2nd @ Gary Snyder Project Space 250 West 26th Street, www.garysnyderart.com

Brett Whiteley - Big orange (sunset) 1974

Thanks to ArtNewsBlog for this one!

Though well-known for his art of collisions and oppositions, Brett Whiteley was admired above all perhaps for the relaxed elegance he seemed capable of bringing at will into his imagery. The essence of this elegance, the main focus of the current exhibition, is his curved line related to a deep fascination for the aesthetics of Eastern and Asian cultures.

As with many of his contemporaries in the 1960s, he felt an impact from those cultures that shaped at once a personal philosophy and an artistic methodology. He travelled extensively throughout Asia, including India in 1965, Bali in 1978, 1980 and 1989, and Japan during the last few years of his life.

He also focused on certain European artists who had, like himself, become enamoured with non-Western influences, such as Matisse, especially the French master’s spatial ideas sourced from North Africa and Persia. The results were uniquely Whiteley’s but, at the same time, a homage to those whom he regarded as predecessors, in particular in the tradition of calligraphy.

In Whiteley’s best drawing in this tradition, be it on paper or canvas, the unifying quality is an assured fluidity, extending from the media of brush and ink, through watercolour to oil paint. Indeed many of the works here may be witnessed as his attempt to capture a lyrical, Zen-like immediacy uninhibited by processes of thought, as he declared in a notebook of the 1970s:

Calligraphy’s biggest struggle
Is not with ink…
It’s that memory is action
Minus think!

His Lavender Bay paintings in the 1970s, such as Big orange (sunset), are saturated with colour articulated with gestural lines and elemental shapes suggesting boats and landforms suspended in late afternoon light. The horizon, which has disappeared into the top edge, allows the eye to become absorbed into a dreamy floating world. One of his last works, Autumn (near Bathurst) – Japanese Autumn 1987-88, brings all these elements together in the contemporary language of ink, charcoal, paint and collage, but its conception is born out of the act of drawing, as he said in the film Difficult pleasure:

…the attraction of drawing is that there is an immediacy and freshness… not so much that it’s simple, or reduced… it’s just brief, beautifully brief. {Read More…}

http://www.brettwhiteley.org

I never seem to make it over to the New York Studio School’s evening lecture series…and always come across the highlights somewhere after the fact. We have Harry over at Daily Gusto to thank for reminding us of Pat Lipsky‘s talk last week and this example of her lyrical abstractions. Also with Ellen Phelen’s recent comments on beauty still fresh in my mind, it was nice to read this little bit here,

Ms. Lipsky, whose work is mostly abstract and geometrical, gave a cool and elegant defense of painting as the formal practice of creating beauty. She quoted Mark Rothko, saying, “An expression of beauty is an expression of rightness.” {Read more…}

Pat Lipsky, Spiked Red, 1969

(via Daily Gusto)

The are more wonderful recent paintings posted on her website. I am particularly drawn to the cold light of two paintings Dowager and Colbalt.

Tony Magar / Infinity Trail / 2007 / oil on canvas / 64 x 78 inches / Mike Weiss Gallery

Layers upon layers of dripped and splashed paint draw you in and reveal themselves in the changing light. Contemplative, the paintings unfold over time, requiring multiple and sustained viewings. Lyrical and sensual, translucent colors radiate a luminous glow, warming and uplifting. Like a clear refreshing mountain breeze, or dip in a secluded pond of snow melt, I felt cleansed and invigorated after viewing Tony Magar’s paintings.

“To lift the human spirit to its highest level seems to me the purpose of art the light, the air, the sound, the color of the day, these are the things I take home in my eyes to contemplate.” -Tony Magar

Tony Magar, Buddha Sometimes, On view at Mike Weiss Gallery through May 3

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...]