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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Judith Godwin Early Abstractions
September 3, 2008 – January 4, 2009, Tobin Theatre Arts Gallery, Brown Gallery, www.mcnayart.org

The earliest paintings in the show resemble cell structures, with graphic black lines defining the interlocking forms within a matrix of colors that seem to refer to cubism. Another early work, “Nucleus IV,” contains references to the nude figure. “Male Study” and “Woman” are more complex arrangements that resemble early de Kooning. But more neutral space became a key part of her style when she began to experiment with pours and stains, such as “Ode to Kenzo,” which introduces an element of Asian minimalism.

Gradually, her style becomes looser, more painterly and more dramatic. “Purple Mountain” has a peak punching through the top of the picture plane, with the landscape defined by broad, dark brushstrokes. “Night” and “Blue Storm” use dark blues and blacks with accents of gold and brown to suggest the fierce energy of nature. “Black Cross” features a soaring black cross with a broken arm.

A few of the strongest works deal more with psychological states, such as “Longing.” More horizontal paintings with dramatic dark blotches against a white background such as “Into the Depth” and “Maze” seem to be maps of the artist’s subconscious, with dark, violent emotions pushing and pulling against a curtain of light. In these later paintings, Godwin pared down color and emphasized dramatic brush marks.

However, as Sims explains in his essay, while Godwin’s early work seemed to avoid anything that can be described as feminine, her more recent work has more womanly touches — introducing collage elements, such as black sequins and ribbons set into the pigments, and using rounder, more organic shapes. She also uses lighter colors. {Read More…}

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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

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Norihiko Saito: A Hill in His Heart / 2007 / 70 x 165 inches / mineral pigments on screen panels / © Norihiko Saito. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of the artist and Dillon Gallery

I was able to run down at lunch today to the Dillon Gallery to catch the Ma: New Traditions in Nihonga exhibition before it closes on 4/22. While I can’t speak to the history of Nihonga painting, I thought the work was excellent with both strengths and weaknesses. As a painter when I look at paintings I look at a number of things, first what is the space depicted by the artist, how are they create space in their work, what are they spacial divisions? Is it flat, is it a deep space, perspective, overlapping planes? What are the major shapes and forms and how do they move in space. For the most part the paintings in this exhibition were very flat, relying more on elegant divisions of the surface – positive and negative spaces, contrasts of intense pigments or metal leaf with the airy quiet of the washi paper or silk support – to move the eye and create a sense of mood or drama. At notable exception is Asami Yoshiga’s Invitation Pond, a stunning piece of sumi ink on multiple layers of translucent silk, that moves your eyes into a deep atmospheric space. All of the pieces, use beautiful and luscious pigments that sing and sparkle on the surface and almost appear to be woven in to the silk. It made me lament our over ground tube paints that tend to be more filler than pigment.

The show is a visual treat for the eyes offering a wonderful play of colours, textures, and light. While satisfying my hunger for visual stimulation the works incline toward the decorative and leave weighter issues and ideas aside, but then again there more then plenty of conceptual work to go around. Ma: New Traditions in Nihonga Painting is a fabulous little show not to be missed.

Nihonga is a technique whose roots extend back more than a thousand years. The term, created in the 19th century to distinguish traditional painting methods from Western-influenced art, has often been synonymous with art of the past. Its practitioners incorporate time-honored materials such as silk, rice-paper, ground semi-precious minerals as well as gold and silver leaf into their paintings. Nihonga artists have tended to look to the visual forms and conventions of the past during most of this century. The most recent generation of Nihonga painters, however, has reinvigorated the style in an attempt to change the way the practice is perceived. For a preview click here.

Asami Yoshiga / Invitation Pond / 33 x 47 inches each, 2 pieces / sumi ink on silk / © Courtesy of the artist and Dillon Gallery

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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.

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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...]

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