Painting Perceptions

Peri Schwartz: Interview
Painting Perceptions

Larry Groff interviews painter Peri Schwartz on the occasion of her recent exhibition at Gallery NAGA in Boston. Asked about her most recent work, Schwartz comments: “My new work uses the same elements that have been my subject for almost twenty years. The difference is that in the early Studio paintings it looked more like an […]

Beth Bernhardt: Interview
Painting Perceptions

Larry Groff interviews painter Beth Bernhardt. Bernhardt remarks: “I generally start most paintings from observation or in the case of larger works, from studies made on site. I tend to make a lot of starts and save the analysis for later. I don’t think of it as a process really, more like tendencies or ways […]

Robert Birmelin: Interview
Painting Perceptions

An engaging conversation between painters Larry Groff and Robert Birmelin. Asked about how he “[leads] the viewer’s eye through your paintings in unexpected ways” and evoking “visual surprise,” Birmelin comments: “I’m interested in movement, in the transient moment of noticing. In the eye as it selectively focuses within a changing, often overloaded environment… I was […]

Watteau’s Eloquent Formalism
Painting Perceptions

John Goodrich visits Drawn to Greatness: Master Drawings from the Thaw Collection and shares his observations about Watteau’s striking formalism. Goodrich writes: “Superficially, Watteau is all fanciful froth – charming subject matter, feathery modeling, a light, darting touch. But what distinguishes Watteau are his extraordinary and comprehensive intuitions about formal rhythms — in this case, […]

Susannah Phillips: Interview
Painting Perceptions

Larry Groff interviews painter Susannah Phillips. Phillips comments: “The important thing for me, whatever the source of the colour, be it observed or invented, it should work in the painting as a whole. I might drop the real colour of the object in favour of something I want instead; so, for example, a cloth that […]

Expressionism Revisited
Painting Perceptions

John Goodrich reviews Crossroads: Lynette Lombard, David Paulson, and Thaddeus Radell at Sideshow Gallery, Brooklyn, on view through October 8, 2017. Goodrich writes: “Lombard’s paintings are unpopulated by human figures, and also appear to be anchored in immediate observations – though these are heightened by twisting, vertiginous plunges of space. Despite such distortions, Lombard’s sure sense […]

Mystery and Rapture: Landscapes by Four
Painting Perceptions

Tina Engels blogs about the recent exhibition Mystery and Rapture: Landscapes by Four, curated by William Bailey, at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Civitella Ranieri, Italy. The show featured works by Mario Fallani, Marco Fallani, Dan Gustin, and Langdon Quin. Engels notes that selections made by curator “[William] Bailey [convey] the resonance of different cultural spheres that results […]

Thaddeus Radell: Essays in the Epic
Painting Perceptions

John Goodrich reviews Thaddeus Radell: Hard Rain at John Davis Gallery, Hudson, New York, on view through June 18, 2017. Goodrich writes: “Throughout these paintings, the candid attempts and re-attempts to define each subject become, in effect, stories of their own: encapsulated histories of a transcendental quest. Radell’s work, in short, revels in the epic […]

Richard Raiselis: Interview
Painting Perceptions

Larry Groff interviews painter Richard Raiselis. Raiselis comments: ” I often say that I paint what I see. I do my best to paint the differences that I perceive where colors touch, both inside a form, like the change of color on the sunny and shady sides of a house; and outside the form, like […]

Donald Beal: Interview
Painting Perceptions

Larry Groff interviews painter Donald Beal whose work will be on view in On the Shoulder of Giants, curated by Thaddeus Radell, at Westbeth Gallery, New York, on view through March 25, 2017. Beal comments: “The paintings done from life have given me the chops I need to meaningfully push color and tone around until it eventually […]

Joan Wadleigh Curran: Interview
Painting Perceptions

Larry Groff interviews painter Joan Wadleigh Curran. Curran remarks: “I think of my approach as a kind of hybrid involving careful description that incorporates still life and a kind of portraiture. I find objects seductive and hope for a kind of animism in how I paint them. I am particularly interested in the power of […]

Susan Abbott: Interview
Painting Perceptions

Larry Groff interviews painter Susan Abbott. Abbott remarks: “I used to go back and forth on trying to figure out how to construct my paintings. It felt like a very big philosophical issue to me, and was exhausting (much more so than the actual painting) to try to decide whether there was a right and […]

Derek Buckner: Interview
Painting Perceptions

Larry Groff interviews painter Derek Buckner whose work was recently on view at George Billis Gallery, New York. Buckner notes: “… one of the reasons I am drawn to the industrial landscape is because it is visually different than what we see in our usual urban surroundings. The trucks are different, the structures are different, they […]

Grant Drumheller: Interview
Painting Perceptions

Larry Groff interviews painter Grant Drumheller whose work will be on view at the Prince Street Gallery, New York from December 1 – 29, 2016. Drumheller remarks: “The notion of making a painting is the farthest thing from my mind. I want a painting experience! Even when I am painting a small image, the beginning […]

Kyle Staver’s Eloquent Color
Painting Perceptions

John Goodrich reviews a recent exhibition of paintings by Kyle Staver at Kent Fine Art, New York. Goodrich writes: “Kyle Staver is a colorist, and one of the best around – which is only to say that in her paintings she makes every color count. In art school, they drill into students the three properties […]

Nancy Hagin on Giorgio Morandi
Painting Perceptions

Nancy Hagin considers the work of Giorgio Morandi. Hagin writes: “I marvel at [Morandi’s] various strategies. He loved to play games with the table’s back horizon line and the tops of the objects. He always placed the salmon shape exquisitely, sometimes sandwiching it tightly between forms. The dominant light brownish gray is beautiful. How did […]

Ying Li: Interview
Painting Perceptions

Larry Groff interviews painter Ying Li on the occasion of her exhibition Geographies at Haverford College, on view through October 7, 2016. Li comments: “I think these two are really one thing; they’re so tied together, looking out and then looking in on the canvas. I try to make that switch as short as possible […]

Zoey Frank: Interview
Painting Perceptions

Larry Groff interviews painter Zoey Frank. Frank comments: “I like the process of working things out during the painting… I like how it complicates the surface and I like how I feel engaged with the entire painting the entire time… I want to try new subjects and approaches because I think it informs everything I […]

Larry Groff: In and Out of Sight
Painting Perceptions

On the occasion of his upcoming exhibition at Prince Street Gallery, New York ( July 29 – August 16), Larry Groff writes about his new paintings and his career as a painter. Groff notes: “To me great landscape painting is abstract painting that also has a structure and is intrinsically bound to certain visual restrictions. […]

Giorgio Morandi: Essence of Landscape
Painting Perceptions

Larry Groff blogs images from a “a rare show in Alba, Italy of Giorgio Morandi’s Landscapes where some 70 landscape paintings were shown.”  In addition to the landscape paintings, Groff also includes an interesting image of Morandi’s view finder. Giorgio Morandi: The Essence of Landscape, curated by Maria Cristina Bandera was on view at the […]