I was talking with a friend of mine last night about abstract landscape painting and I came across Raquel’s work this morning. What I find interesting in this work is how all the slabs of yellow paint sit at different points in space. I really get a sense of the interrelatedness of all the strokes, textures, and colors in developing the spacial tension in this piece.

Raquel Mazzina / Jaune / 122 x 92 cm / oil on canvas / http://www.arthousegallery.com.au

Raquel Mazzina’s work is an exploration of the artist’s emotive response to landscape. Topographical appearances are left behind, concentrating on the light, atmosphere and spirit of place. This intuitive and emotive approach results in a sensuous and luscious painterly surface. Her masterful use of colour conveys the seasonal changes from Autumn to Spring. {Read More…}

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The Rose Window at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

The New York Times by Holland Cotter has a nice article about light with lots of great little tidbits.

At this dark time of the year, we like light. So we have festivals of light: Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve too, with its bright parties, and fireworks, and the fabulous walk-in lantern that is Times Square.

Poetic and pragmatic is an apt description of New York and its light. This is an island city — of its five boroughs only the Bronx is part of the North American mainland — with an island light, alternately obdurate and romantically moody. It can be too candid. Noon light in New York is not going to make you look rosy if you’re pale, or rested if you’re tired, or younger than you are. But its toughness is democratic: it falls on everybody and everything the same way.

When the poet John Ashbery described Porter’s colors as “transparent and porous, letting the dark light of space show through,” he might have been speaking of Hopper too, or of this Hopper at any rate. Like Porter’s art, Hopper’s exemplifies one version of American-style luminosity, painting that has some sort of spiritual dimension, but is also as unpretentiously humane as a piece of fine, body-friendly furniture. {Read More…}

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Pierre Bonnard (French, 1867-1947) / White Interior / Oil on canvas / 109.5 x 155.8 cm 

So your editor awoke this morning and was going through that google reader thing, because really what else is there to do on a Saturday morning, and there was this fancy picture by french that degenerate artist with a trembling eyeball and wet dog shaker Pierre Bonnard, and well he’s got those pretty colourses so I stared blankly at the screen for a few minutes and was like, ok what the hell he did put that cadmium yellow on the wall and in the woman’s hair so he must be crazy and that chair on the left really keeps the white wall from flying out of the canvas which means he probably knew what he was doing unlike some painters I know. Plus his composition is like a how to on how to divide up the space to create a firm foundation on which to smear all those pretty colourses. Anyway, that ultra-reactionary institution for rich old people, tourists, and your editor (shhhh….i’m that creepy guy in the corner with sloppy cloths and a sketch book watching everybody while I steal from the picturses), the Metropolitan Museum is putting on a show of these pretty pictures in january because they think it’s better for you to come and pay them to stare at the light of these pretty colourses in your track suit amidst the smell of old people than to sit at home popping the xanax in front of your sun-lamp trying to get over your mid-winter depression because Madoff stole all your precious monies because you didn’t give it to the Met to name a wing after you. Anyway, here’s some stuff from the fancy press release written by a curator in a brooch or bowtie since that’s always what they wear over there otherwise you can’t get in the door, unless of course your in a nylon track suit and speak some fancy language that isn’t ENGLISH…wait how come the let me in???

More modern than is commonly recognized, the late work of Pierre Bonnard is remarkable for the artist’s individualistic approach to color, light, perspective, and composition—particularly as seen in his interiors and still lifes [ie, he didn't know what he was doing, if only he followed the book then we wouldn't have to put on this show for you people who like to smoke the ganga and look at colour, and we could go back to looking a fat naked pasty white people].

Bonnard’s late interiors and still lifes explore a multitude of nuanced color relationships among glowing yellows, violets, reds, oranges, greens, and whites

Although Bonnard’s subjects were close at hand, he rarely painted directly from life, relying instead on pencil drawings sketched rapidly in little diaries. Four of the artist’s diaries from his years at Le Cannet will be loaned by the Bibliothèque national de France, Paris. The diary notations lay out idiosyncratic marks as reminders of color, tone, intensity, and contrast. These shorthand sketches were critical to the genesis of large-scale paintings, which Bonnard developed slowly, through a process of continual editing and revision. He often worked on several paintings at once, tacking the unstretched canvases to his studio wall in order to allow for alteration of the periphery of the painting and its overall proportions. In creating his paintings, the artist deferred to the memory of perception. His interest lay in exploring how diverse objects interrelate within a pictorial field, rather than dwelling on the literalness of any object or figure.

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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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 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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Because of isolation lasting centuries, Chinese artists have developed their own world of images, without connections to what is produced in Europe and the United States. The case of the Yi School is highly significant. Although it was born at the margin of the abstract art and conceptual art that have dominated the Western art world in recent decades, it maintains points of contact with these two. It is art lived as an experience of retreat and meditation that explores contemplation, unity and harmony. The extraordinary development of the People’s Republic of China in recent years and the opening of new pathways of communication and business with the West have stimulated the world’s interest in Chinese culture.  After its presentation in Barcelona, ”la Caixa” Social and Cultural Outreach Projects is taking to CaixaForum Madrid the first major exhibition of the Yi School outside China, organized jointly with the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Culture and the Beijing Culture & Art Foundation. The exhibition introduces eighty-two works by forty-eight Chinese artists of the last thirty years, divided into three periods. Yi art from the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) until the 1980s is characterized by an idealized humanism in opposition to the revolutionary slogans (Yi xiang, “mental image”). The second period is when art at a time of urban and cosmopolitan expansion recovers private spaces and incorporates Eastern symbols and writing (Yi li, “mental principle”). The third period, Maximalism (Yi chang, “mental environment”), arose at the end of the 1990s and devotes its main attention to the process and the context of the art work.

A few months ago, to coincide with the opening of a Representative Office of ”la Caixa” in Beijing, an exhibition of fifteen works by international artists from the ”la Caixa” Foundation’s Collection of Contemporary Art was put on at the Beijing Art Museum of Imperial City. The Yi School: Thirty Years of Chinese Abstract Art represents its counterpoint. It is designed to bring the general public in our country closer to an artistic school that has had decisive weight in Chinese plastic art from the 1970s until now and to make the work of some of today’s leading Chinese creative artists better known.

The Yi School is defined as an artistic tendency in China, based for the last three decades on the aesthetic essence of Yi. It is distinct both from contemporary literature and conceptual art and from Eastern abstract art. In Chinese aesthetics, Yi does not mean just subjective thought, even though it is a fruit of our mind. It is not precisely equivalent to the terms concept, idea or significance, but represents a state of contemplation and meditation by creative artists, the way that artists or poets think about their surroundings or observe them. In this respect, the Yi School is the artistic style best suited to expressing meditation.

If we think that Yi is related not just to the thought of the artists, but also to the real environment and the objectives of meditation, the Yi School cannot be defined by any modern Western concept such as realist art, conceptual art or abstract art, even though it may look like all these tendencies, especially abstract art. In reality, the Yi School brings together almost all the characteristics of these three tendencies without restricting itself to any one of them in particular. This responds to a norm that has always governed traditional Chinese aesthetics, to stop art becoming excessively diverted towards the extremes.

In terms of expression of Yi, the artists have focused in different periods on different aspects of Yi. For example, at the end of the 1970s, during the Cultural Revolution, a series of non-official artists sought individual freedom in opposition to Mao’s propagandistic art. In this context, the Yi School focused on the search for individual expression and for “pure art” against “conceptualized” political art. The Yi School was expressed in the aesthetic form of Yi xiang or “mental image”. Artists sought unity and harmony between concepts and objects of nature, during the process of thinking about and observing the external world. Then the representatives of the Yi School at the end of the 1980s paid greater attention to expressing their ideas about the way to reform reality and cultural modernity through cultural signs. In this period, the Yi School defended symbolic concepts, the essence and start of an ideal culture and society. As such, the Yi School during this period is called Yi li or “mental principle”. Thus the Yi School of this epoch represents Yi Chiang or “mental environment”. Creating works of art is equivalent to meditating in a private space.

Yi School – 30 Years of Chinese AbstractArt
4 June – 21 Sept 2008.
CaixaForum,
Av. Marqués de Comillas, 6-8
Barcelona

Read a nice review of the show at Blog on Art in Barcelona

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Simone Lanzenstiel / O.T. / 2007 / Acrylic and spray paint on cotton / 200 cm x 230 cm  / Barbara Gross Galerie

From Art Knowledge News

The artist begins with imaginary and immediate elements, such as pavement, construction scaffolding, graffiti, or blotches of paint on the floor of her studio. This recourse to found markings is a breakaway move from the conventional means of painting.

Simone Lanzenstiel develops her painting as a series of actions on the canvas. She shakes, splashes, sprays, brushes, scrawls, and wipes – in an apparently accidental, fleeting manner. This creates free, open zones, light and soaring. In contrast, colors are varied and re-worked until they are finally condensed into painterly figures and powerful accents of color; this finely attuned balance lends rhythm to the work.

The artist prefers to work with acrylics and enamel sprays in predominantly cool, brilliant tones, such as blue, green, purple, and magenta. Each painting is specified by a precise color composition, dominated by white. White is used as ground and mask – it is a color and a non-color, passive and active. White simultaneously limits and intensifies the space in which all of the other colors are expressed. Strong and gentle color gradients cover the entire surface of the picture, only coming to an abrupt stop at the edges of the painting. Hence, the paintings seem to have been removed from a larger context, and yet they expand far into the space. {Read More…}

Simone Lanzenstiel’s work featured at Barbara Gross Galerie

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Jeremy Gilbert Rolfe chats with David Shapiro in a 1987 Bomb Magazine interview

DS I guess the usual question asked of you, and we should hear your answer again, is why you intransigently keep to the idea of “good painting,” in an era of bad manners, Warholism, and absurdism. Since you have praised Smithson and Joel Shapiro, you are not dogmatically “about” abstract painting, but your response to abstraction is perhaps the C major of your work, or how would you deal with this topic?

JG-R I am of course pleased that you should ask me this question although at the same time I must say you’ve put it in a form which seems to me to be a little odd. I mean I make abstract paintings so my work is at that level not “about” abstract painting at all, it is abstract painting. As to my critical work, I hope I have by now made it reasonably clear that I don’t write about things from a point of view which, intentionally at least, seeks to valorize or privilege other things. I think I am mostly interested in thought, and seek to treat it properly with regards to its context and address wherever I might encounter it in an interesting form. As to abstraction, the questions which interest me are those having to do with the space of painting. Space as an invisibility made visible. That seems to me to be the province of abstract painting and, in my case, for the possibility of articulating relationships of non-relationship. I am interested in complexity, and it seems to me that abstract painting is an art in which one can have complexity as opposed to invoking it. {Read More…}

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