Li Xubai / Clear Rhythm of Brook and Mountain / 2008 / Ink and color on paper / 25 3/4 x 25 3/4 inches (65.5 x 65.5 cm) / Goedhuis Contemporary

From the gallery:

Li Xubai’s work exemplifies the interpretation of much of the best Chinese traditional painting in that it subtly incorporates very contemporary stylistic themes embodied in an ostensibly classical aesthetic. It is this openness to the contemporary world that is so elusively expressed in these lyrical landscapes of what appear to be a traditional pictorial style.

Ten years ago in the NY Times Holland Cotter had this to say about Li Xubai:

His stippled, daublike brush technique creates an illusion of tangible form through tonal modeling (the effect is a bit like digital graphics). Yet nothing feels reliably solid. Rock outcroppings have a fungal sponginess; waterfalls are bursts of white light; mountain ranges hang suspended in air. The notion of the painted landscape as a mirror of subjective states here takes on a literal, anatomical cast, with streams and fissures suggesting blood vessels, sinews and musculature. {Read More…}

Li Xubia @ Goedhuis Contemporary 42 East 76th Street thru July 31.

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Dorathea Rockburne / Angular Momentum / 2008 / 36" x 48" / watercolor on Dura-lar / www.dorothearockburne.com

www.dorothearockburne.com

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Gordon Fraser / untitled / 2008 / watercolour, pastel, guache on paper / 44 x 30 inches (2 Panels) / gordonfraserfinearts.com

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I’ve must admit I wasn’t too familiar with Philip Guston’s work until the big retrospective at the Met a few years ago, but have become a huge fan since. If you haven’t read Musa Mayer’s biography of her father, Night Studio it definitely a great read. Anyway, as with Nick Stillman in his recent essay in The Nation, I find that what draws me to Guston is his movement between figuration, abstraction, back to figuration. The freedom not to be stuck in a style, a motif, or direction. A process unfolding from personal dictates or needs. It goes without saying that the circumstances of the art world are much different now than they were back in the ’60s and ’70s. More than at any other time today artists have a freedom to choose their own direction, their own materials, process, etc., some have called it a free for all. However, there is a pressure to settle on a style, develop a personal brand, and stick to it. This satisfies both the expectations of the market and helps prevent a type of emotional paralysis in the face of an overwhelming array of decisions and choices by providing a sense of direction. I think it’s an unreasonable expectation for artists to remain committed to a certain style for their entire career. First, with a few exceptions, I don’t think anyone is naturally that obsessive or rigid. Second, it would be no fun to be that rigid. For me it is fun to jump around between abstract, figure, landscape, etc. It helps me maintain that element of play necessary to my own work, which is not to say its not work, it just has to be playful.

Anyway, check out Nick Stillman’s review of the Guston exhibit at the Morgan Library and Museum through August 31. Here’s a brief excerpt:

If, like in Clement Greenberg’s ’50s, art critics were still considered arbitrators, I would argue that Philip Guston’s art got better as he got older. His transformation late in his career from a successful and comparatively polite Abstract Expressionist into a conjurer of cartoonish tableaux of internal unrest and lowbrow humor garnished with uncomfortable personal admissions was an act of bravery, especially given the public’s lack of enthusiasm for his ribald new direction. As long as he is remembered, Guston’s need to reintroduce concrete subject matter into his art will be his legacy. This is ground firmly trod on by a gaggle of essayists, biographers, critics and friends of the artist; there’s no shortage of recent literature on Guston’s late work that praises it as deliciously, perfectly, bathetic–work that never descends into the flippancy that tends to mar the majority of art that is expressly funny, explicitly political or both.

Honestly, though, it’s difficult for me to think about Guston from an art critic’s perspective. Among the countless explanations of Guston’s return to figuration, the one I most agree with was pronounced by an artist, Willem de Kooning: “It’s about freedom.” Guston’s black humor, his exploitation of the absurd and grotesque, his merger of the political with the personal and his spirit of defiance in the face of complacency and aging is something to be appreciated on a gut level. You get it, or you don’t. I’m not suggesting that Guston’s work is anti-intellectual or even particularly populist. What I’m saying is that Guston’s work–especially from 1970-1980–is borne of intuition and inexorability, qualities that can be alienating as often as they are inspiring. [Read more...]

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Sheetal Ghattani /Untitled / Watercolour on paper / 36 x 36 inches / Bodhi Art

What sets Gattani’s works apart are her philosophy and attitude towards painting. Her manipulation of the medium, watercolour on paper is to mediate through colours without them suggesting any referential reality. Encountering her abstractions leaves one puzzled since they are large areas of colour, which defy definition in terms of specificity, for instance, red or mauve. In the delicacy of soft textures lie the subtexts in her canvases, which gradually settle upon one’s sensibility and one begins reading into them, forms that bring forth the character of her otherwise placid works. Her abstractions do not beckon but gently whisper, and once that whisper becomes audible it translates into a communion, wherein one is compelled to respond. In evoking these gentle persuasive responses from the viewer lies the success of her abstract compositions. Sheetal’s process of creation largely conditions the nature and character of her works. She predominantly employs black paper on which she brushes layers of paint washes, completely in communion with her materials and tools. With her contemplative wide stroked gestures, Sheetal builds up layers of paint that in the end leave an impression of her self. And this form of abstraction is clarified by Sheetal, who says, “Abstraction is in its deepest sense, based on realism, as in reality — reality of the present moment, free from any thoughts, memory conditioning. Only that pure present moment exists. So painting is a `time-manifested’ process and I become only a means.”

A silent journey through her most recent show titled Silent Soliquyoy, Bodhi Art, Singapore (2007) may freeze the viewer to one description namely ‘similar.’ Yet her similarity is built into the very idea of difference and this difference is the basis of her ‘magical moments’ and ‘inspirational relationships’. This is where Sheetal strikes at the heart of the matter, reconceptualizing her ‘moments’ according to the quality of light and poetic play with materials through an active imagination that enables her to create similarly different works that offers varying significations

The artist lives and works in Mumbai.

www.bodhiart.in

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David Antonides / Transcoded / Watercolour on Paper / 49.75 x 38.5 inches / www.davidantonides.com

I’ve had the opportunity to work in the studio with David on a number of occasions and have learned a lot by watching him work.

Water for me is a medium which intermediates the tangible with emotion and spirit. It flows between my intention and its own laws of nature and serendipity – its a collaboration of sorts. I explore the contrast between the subtlety of complex colour transitions and the strength of dense, robust marks. Watercolour can make a strong statement and be monumental. It can have weight and gravity. [Read more...]

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Elise Ferguson / You Me / 2008 / pigmented plaster, aluminum, silver leaf / 18 x 24 inches / envoy gallery

Arnold Kemp / Climate / 2008 / watercolor, acrylic paint, flashe, mixed media on linen / 14 x 18 inches / envoy gallery

Aude du Pasquier Grall / Le Cycle Masculin N°7 / 2005-2008 / video installation; ed. 5 / envoy gallery

I happened upon this show in the Lower East Side a few weeks back, shortly after it opened. Small textured paintings in the front room sparkled and glittered. I slipped behind the curtain into a video exhibit projected on two walls. I’m usually not a big fan of video exhibitions, usually because it’s impossible to watch because people are afraid to walk fully into the room, clogging up the entrance, and I usually walk in at some point in the loop with no idea where it is coming from where it is going and for how long. I loose patience quickly. Anyway, this was fun because it wasn’t crowded, I could sit on the floor, and besides, the artist was there sitting in a chair, with her elbows on her knees, filming us watching the video, setting up this weird pomo redundancy observer/observed dynamic. I only wish I had done my little doggy yelp!

Envoy Gallery, 131 Chrystie St., through 7 June 2008

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Anyway, the thought occurred to me last night that if I bought a new house, or had construction work done on a house, and within a few years it started to fall apart because of shoddy craftsmanship and materials, I would be suing the contractors and developers. I’m surprised there isn’t as much outrage when the same thing happens to works of art. If were going to drop $60,000 – $100,000 on a piece of artwork, I don’t care who the artist is, I would want to make damn sure that it would not fall apart in 5-10 years. Maybe there is and I just don’t know about it. Maybe from the collectors’ point of view it is just one of the risks of investment.

But in all fairness to the artists, there is so much stupid money out there right now. If someone is willing to pay me $20,000 for the newspaper I clean my brushes with, then god bless them and thanks for the money. It’s like a fox in the hen house. Anyway, I’d just make sure I’d sign a contract absolving me of all future responsibility for the condition.

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Music of Silence IV / 24” x 24” / 2007 / silverpoint / acrylic on wood / © Susan Schwalb. All Rights Reserved. www.susanschwalb.com

Excerpt from Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art
Feminist Art Base: Susan Schwalb

Susan Schwalb is one of the foremost figures in the revival of the ancient technique of silverpoint drawing in America. Most of the contemporary artists who draw with a metal stylus continue the tradition of Leonardo and Durer by using the soft, delicate line for figurative imagery. By contrast, Schwalb’s work is resolutely abstract, and her handling of the technique is extremely innovative. Paper is torn and burned to provide an emotionally free and dramatic contrast to the precise linearity of silverpoint. In other works, silverpoint is combined with flat expanses of acrylic paint or gold leaf. Sometimes, subtle shifts of tone and color emerge from the juxtaposition of a wide variety of metals. In recent works, Schwalb abandons the stylus altogether in favor of wide metal bands that achieve a shimmering atmosphere reminiscent of the luminous transparency of watercolor. [Read more...]

www.susanschwalb.com 

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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.

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