I went to the New Museum on Saturday to see the Mary Heilmann, To be Someone and Elizabeth Peyton,  Live Forever shows, which I hadn’t had a chance to get to before. I started up on the 4th floor in the Peyton exhibit and walked my way down.  I’ve always been attracted to the colours and sensitivity of Elizabeth Peyton’s work, especially the drawings. However, probably because I don’t really care about Kurt Cobain or Jarvis, I found myself on Saturday really looking at the grounds of her paintings and how she prepares the surface. In fact, I found the thick, sometimes smooth sometimes uneven white grounds with rough edges to be the most interesting aspect of the paintings. They provided both an interesting textural contrast to the really loose and thin paint that she uses and added a brightness/luminosity to her colours. My wife, Sauman, who’s not a huge fan or Peyton’s work, pointed out to me that none of her subjects smile, ever, which gave a strong sense of sadness or loneliness or isolation, despite the seeming intimacy of the people and everyday scenes depicted in her work.

It was such a contrast then to walk into the galleries of the Mary Heilmann exhibition which struck me as fun, playful, light and airy. I had never heard of Mary Heilmann before this exhibition and I am not familiar  at all with her work beyond the little bit that I read, but it really struck me as lacking any of the pretension of a lot of contemporary abstraction of the last 30 years. The zen phrase “nothing special,” that is used to refer to the ordinariness or everyday mind, kept popping into my head as I walked through the exhibition. I don’t know why that kept coming up, maybe because I could just relax and really enjoy the paintings visually rather than having to think about them too hard, or that they had a playful everday presence about them. Sauman, on the other hand, wanted to know what was special about her paintings because it reminded her a lot of the work of some of our peers at the ASL or other work she has seen in Chelsea, whereas the ceramic work she found exciting.

There is an excerpt from an interview conducted by Richard Flood on the New Museum website that I found intersting:

RF: I’m sitting here looking at these amazing glazes on your ceramics. Do they have great importance to your use of paint?

MH: Right. In fact, when I went into painting, I really came in with a sculptor’s attitude and used the paint in a way that you use the clay. I thought of it as a physical thing. And so I really didn’t think of doing painting the way you think of drawing and painting, but more like the way you do sculpture. Pouring, casting, pressing, moulding. And then a color, red or orange or black, would be a physical material rather than a color you paint on. It’s a different way of configuring it.

The Elizabeth Peyton show closed yesterday, but the Mary Heilmann is up of another couple of weeks and is a fun treat.

Mary Heilmann, To Be Someone @ New Museum, 235 Bowery, thru 1/28

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We can’t really talk about colour without talking about and looking at Hans Hofmann. Here is a piece called Towering Spaciousness from the Brooklyn Museum. In this piece Hofmann uses both colour intervals and overlapping planes to create a sense of expansion and contraction in the painting. Each colour relates to every other colour in the painting, thereby determining its relative location in space within the painting. The result is that none of the planes sit in exactly same place in space. The rhythm and movement of your eye as it jumps from plane of colour to plane of colour, or we could say the expansion and contraction of the planes of colour, work to create the sense of an open towering spaciousness within the canvas. Hofmann called this idea, his “push-and-pull” theory, which he wrote about in the book Search for the Real. So, it is the movement of colour/the movement of the eye that creates the illusion of space in this painting, not scientific perspective, which is what Hofmann spent years teaching his students. For me, what’s really interesting, is that when I stand if front of a painting like this, not only do I see the towering spaciousness of the canvas but I can feel it in my body, it’s a viceral physical feeling, something I don’t feel in front of the best realist paintings with precise perspective.

Hans Hofmann (American, 1880–1966) / Towering Spaciousness / 1966. Oil on canvas / 84 1/4 x 50 in. (214 x 127 cm) / Brooklyn Museum, Gift of William Sachs, 68.51

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Terry Winters / In Blue / 2008 / Oil on linen / 88 × 112 inches / Matthew Marks Gallery

Terry Winters has a bunch of interesting gems in the Brooklyn Rail interview with Phong Bui, David Levi Strauss and Peter Lamborn Wilson here are a couple

Bui: Are you saying that time can be condensed in the physical act of painting could have a pictorial equivalence of objects being eroded by real time?

Winters: Yes, in that every construction is a destruction. The paintings are a consequence of both of those activities and it’s through the unpredictable and uncontrollable nature of that activity that the pictures emerge. In a way, I’m trying to move forward and to work quickly and proactively. And the destruction that happens in the course of that is what allows the images to develop.

Levi Strauss: Looking at these paintings, one sees into a very complicated space, initially created by the transparency of the paint against the urgency of the grid. You have the knots, that are made from squares and rectangles painted so as to evoke spheres that are then set in motion, and these knots are suspended in a grid, with another grid behind, which is also in motion and bent or warped by radiating lines. Out of all this movement, the eye and mind create what can be a quite vertiginous space. I’m curious about how that space operates when you’re making the painting. Are you painting inside that space, or do you only go into it afterward, in viewing it?

Winters: No, I’m in the space. I mean, I’m not trying to manipulate it in a conscious way. I’m trying to feel my way through the process. It’s haptic. I’m building it right on the surface and the optical consequences are somehow woven into the surprise of the image itself. In some way, all the meaning is tied up in that space. It’s that Joycean condition about the organized chaos, the “chaosmos”. The painting is a product of all the conscious decisions that I have made but the result is something unforeseeable. It’s a paradoxical object.

{Read the full interview}

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This morning I was thinking about the recent Giorgio Morandi show at the Met, mainly about how lame it is, especially as a painter, that I couldn’t get my ass above 57th Street to get up to the Met. As Peter Schjeldahl tells us in his review of the show in the New Yorker,

He is a painter’s painter, because to look at his work is to re-create it, feeling in your wrist and fingers the sequence of strokes, each a stab of decision which discovers a new problem.

Oh well…Anyway, there are a couple of things I think about when I think of Morandi. First, and I don’t know how to say this other than when I think Morandi I feel New York. Maybe it’s the greys? Maybe it’s the way all the objects in his paintings are jostling each other and competing for space on the surface? Maybe it was something a drawing teacher in NY said to me once? I don’t know, but his work feels like New York to me, some kind of deep psychological association I guess.

Next I find that whenever I think about Morandi, I almost immediately think about Milton Glaser, who studied with Morandi back in the 1950’s, and whose work had a profound influence on the late 20th century visual culture of my youth.

Of course thinking about Milton Glaser includes thinking about Seymour Chwast and Edward Sorel, who together with Milton Glaser formed the Push Pin Studio and published the Push Pin Graphic. While too young to enjoy the graphic, I did grow up oogling over their illustrations in the New Yorker and various childrens books.

Going further, because of stylistic affinities, thinking about Seymour Chwast always leads me to think about the Yellow Submarine.

I sort of lost where I was going with this and I’ll leave it here. But, looking over the examples I have pulled together here, I see a visual connection, and I think the influence of Morandi runs deep in both mine and the collective psyche.

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Ingrid Calame / From #258 Drawing (Tracings from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the L.A. River) / 2007 / enamel paint on aluminum / 72 X 120 inches / James Cohan Gallery

I came across Ingrid’s work yesterday. I am not familiar with her and have never seen her work before. I spent some time looking at her work online trying to engage with the paintings themselves, which of course is impossible online. If nothing but intrigued, I read a bunch of reviews, mostly mixed with critics bemoaning the conceptualism of her work. This made me laugh because I had just read a piece by the poet and writer David Lehman this morning referring to the joke that if you crossed a mafioso and a deconstructionist, what you got was someone who makes you “an offer that you can’t understand.” So I began to think that maybe that’s why I couldn’t really make heads or tails of this work, because the deconstructionist mafioso got crossed with a painter, which is certain to be messy.

Anyway, John Yau, whose writtings I really enjoy, opened a review of Ingrid Calame’s work for the Brooklyn Rail with the following quote from James Hillman, “We sail against the imagination whenever we ask an image for its meaning—requiring that images be translated into concepts.” I thought this was a great thought/observation. He goes on to conclude with the follow:

When you stand close to one of Calame’s visually packed paintings, you are likely to forget that you are looking at a brightly colored copy of stains. It is in the small areas that the juxtapositions of color and layering become visually engaging, and you might get lost in the looking. Standing near to the surface, and narrowing your focus, you don’t see what looks like a big tire track and immediately think speedway. This enables you to overlook, if only briefly, that the painting is made up of literal signs that are meant to remind you of all the little details of everyday life that you failed to notice. After all, there is something contrived and didactic about this equation. With their faint traces of brushstrokes, Calame’s densely crammed surfaces really are something to look at. And spatially, the unpredictable shifts between small and large, near and far, defy any simple reading. The forms begin to float free from their literalness, while the staccato colors and asyndetic transitions bounce you all over the place. Calame ought to aim for more than being mentioned in the same sentence as Pollock, who has seldom been given credit for all the different ways in which he worked.  {Read More…}

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Monkeys and Bears in the Kishkindha Forest, from the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas, circa 1775.

Souren Melikian for the International Herald Tribune writes:
Soon, rhythmical repetition became the painter’s overriding preoccupation, leading to some of the most striking creations of the Jodhpur school of royal painting. Its most extraordinary works were inspired by the Ramayana, the ancient epic originally composed in Sanskrit. Recast in late-16th-century verse by the poet Tulsidas, who wrote in vernacular Hindi, the epic which recounts the story of the heroic god Rama gained a renewed popularity. By the second half of the 18th century, Diamond notes, the Hindi version of Tulsidas spread by itinerant ascetics had traveled from Varanasi in eastern India, where it was composed, to Rajasthan in the western part of the country. It was recited at court and selected scenes from it were re-enacted.

A series of monumental folios painted around 1775 deal with it, projecting visions of an enchanted fairy-tale world.

In a landscape representing the forest of the monkey kingdom Kishkindha, pink peaks shoot up above low turquoise-green hills where groups of seated monkeys deliberate. In the lower area, bears stand talking to one another. Right at the top, white geese perched in trees fly off into the sky. Colors and motifs achieve a rhythm in tune with the rhythm of chanted verse.

While the paintings are rather coarse, betraying the decadence that hit Indian art in the 18th century, the poetic feeling remains remarkable. {Read More…}

Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur
October 11, 2008–January 4, 2009
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery

The website also has this great interactive feature with photos and audio clips.

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Zhao Chunxiang (Chao Chung Hsiang; 1910-1991) / Calling You / diptych, ink and acrylic on paper / 183 x 177 cm / Private collection

Chao Chung Hsiang, as he is usually known, graduated from the Hangzhou National Academy of Art in 1939, and the following year was appointed by the Ministry of Education to work in the Northwest Artifacts Survey Group. He moved to Taiwan in 1948 and then traveled in Europe before settling in the United States in 1958. This abstract expressionist painting, which combines Chinese ink and acrylic color, is typical of his work of the period. He returned from New York to Sichuan in 1990, and died in Taiwan the following year. This work exemplifies a recurring trend among Chinese painters who were familiar with Western modernism to find points of intersection between ink painting and Abstract Expressionism.{Read More…}

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Chen Shen Ping / Green River Flowing Through the Mountains / 15″ x 19″  [21" x 25" with silk brocade mat] 39 cm x 48 cm  [55 cm x 64 cm with silk brocade mat] / chinesepaintings.com

I’m intrigued by his use of colour and how the drawing sets up the structure that holds the loose colour in the composition. I definitely see the influence of Zhang Daqian At this point, I think the tightness of the drawn elements competes for attention with the loose colour elements. It sets up a strong contrast, which may be the point, a sort of restrained exuberance. Personally I’d like to see it pushed further, with the tight elements much more deconstructed as well as on a much larger scale. I think the danger is that it can become formulaic very quickly, I want to know what happens next.

Zhang Daqian / Peach Blossom Spring / 1983 / hanging scroll, ink and color on paper / 209.1 x 92.4 cm / Cemac Ltd.

Chang Dai-chien continued to develop his remarkable range of techniques after he left China in 1949. One particularly important breakthrough was his development, in the 1960s, of a bold technique of splashing ink and color on his paper. Although the results might seem to resemble action painting, Chang maintained throughout his life that his technique was Chinese, having been described in Tang dynasty texts on painting. He did not, thus, use the splashed ink technique in a purely abstract manner, but only to suggest real or imaginary landscapes. In this superb painting of his final years, his blue-and-green pigment is used to suggest a mythical paradise, the Peach Blossom Spring, where human discord was unknown. Although he never returned to mainland China, his work was admired and emulated by younger artists who came to know it after the Cultural Revolution. {Read More…}

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Grace Hartigan / “Summer Street / 1956 / Corcoran Gallery of Art

From the NY Times

Ms. Hartigan, a friend and disciple of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, subscribed to the Abstract Expressionist notion of the painterly brushstroke as existential act and cri de coeur but, like de Kooning, she never broke entirely with the figurative tradition. Determined to stake out her own artistic ground, she turned outward from the interior world sanctified by the Abstract Expressionists and embraced the visual swirl of contemporary American life.

In “Grand Street Brides” (1954), one of several early paintings that attracted the immediate attention of critics and curators, she depicted bridal-shop window mannequins in a composition based on Goya’s “Royal Family.” Later paintings incorporated images taken from coloring books, film, traditional paintings, store windows and advertising, all in the service of art that one critic described as “tensely personal.”

“Her art was marked by a willingness to employ a variety of styles in a modernist idiom, to go back and forth from art-historical references to pop-culture references to autobiographical material,” said Robert Saltonstall Mattison, the author of “Grace Hartigan: A Painter’s World” (1990).{Read More…}

Also Read: Grace Hartigan is Dead

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 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…}

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