Link to Post:
http://structureandimagery.blogspot.com/2013/05/in-process-with-sabine-tress.html
Paul Behnke photo blogs the progress of Sabine Tress' painting My Beautiful Valentine (2013).
Tress comments: "My work is more and more based on experimenting. It evolves through the working process which leaves a lot of room for changes and surprises. The piece 'My beautiful Valentine' is one of my latest paintings and it is quite big, 220x200cm... I wanted it to be light and open and at the same time bold and impressive. It´s also very tricky because although I want to experiment I also want harmony in the painting and finish it quickly."
Link to Post:
http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/first-abstract-artist-and-its-not-kandinsky
Julia Voss examines Hilma af Klint's background and her emergence as the first European abstract painter, a title famously claimed by Kandinsky.
Voss writes: "When Wassily Kandinsky wrote to his New York gallerist Jerome Neumann in December 1935, he was clearly anxious to reassure him once again that he had painted his first abstract picture in 1911... To be acknowledged as having produced the first abstract painting had become a highly coveted prize. Which modern artist could claim that prize was still being fought over. The other leading candidates were František Kupka, Robert Delaunay, Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich. What Kandinsky did not know is that a Swedish painter by the name of Hilma af Klint had created her first abstract painting in her Stockholm studio in 1906, five years before him. What’s more, she had taken the same path towards abstraction. Without knowing of each other’s existence, the two artists seem to have travelled for a long way like two trains on the same tracks. Klint arrived before Kandinsky."
Link to Post:
http://newamericanpaintings.wordpress.com/2013/05/21/a-conversation-sam-reveles/
Arthur Peña talks to painter Sam Reveles on the occasion of the exhibition Sam Reveles: Aran at Talley Dunn Gallery, Dallas, on view through June 1, 2013.
Reveles remarks: "Very early on my relationship to the canvas was important for me. I remember staring at the canvas and thinking; 'what motivates me to do something to this beautiful white canvas? How do I make that my space?' I would go through a lot of strategies to personalize that space for myself. Early on, the sizes of the canvases related to the size of my body. I had paintings that were the size of my arms or my torso. They were unstretched and pinned to the wall, so they were like skins. And then I remember the color palette was all based on the color of my skin. That was very important. Later, I started copying Old Master paintings; painting them very thinly and using them as under paintings which would take me weeks to make. I would then start to work on top of them and make notations on them. It made me hyper aware of what I was doing. It wasn’t a throw away mark."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/71385/geometry-under-pressure-don-voisines-paintings/
John Yau reviews an exhibition of paintings by Don Voisine at McKenzie Fine Art, New York, on view through June 9, 2013.
Yau writes: "In the formal tensions Voisine establishes in his painting — as the result of a process, his elements never appear forced or extraneous — all kinds of feelings and possible readings come into play. This is one of the deep, abiding strengths of the artist’s best paintings; they become analogical. In the late 1950s, Stella squeezed space and meaning out of painting. Fifty years later, Voisine has found ways to squeeze both space and meaning back in, to open up what has been pronounced closed. Voisine wasn’t the only one to recover painting, but, unlike many others who rejected the narrative of painting’s death, he did it with a reductive vocabulary of hard-edged geometric forms."
Link to Post:
http://www.gorkysgranddaughter.com/2013/05/fabian-marcaccio-may-2013.html
Zachary Keeting and Christopher Joy visit the studio of painter Fabian Marcaccio.
Marcaccio discusses his large scale "environmental" paintings which he describes as "creating a zone where your peripheral vision and your central vision can could keep putting together parts of the painting so the painting really is not an object but is a zone. It is actually a spatial, temporary situation, an expansion of the painting… you can see details that get at a totality."
Marcaccio argues that great painting is about amplification. "There is something that I chase," he says "that is how to amplify the given rhetorics of painting in order to let you have an intimacy with it."
Link to Post:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-marie-thibeault-review-20130513,0,7438731.story
Leah Ollman reviews the exhibition Marie Thibeault: funtown at George Lawson Gallery, Los Angeles, on view through June 8, 2013.
Ollman writes that Thibeault's new paintings "are loosely focused on 'Funtown,' a New Jersey amusement park ravaged last fall by Hurricane Sandy. The paintings are images of motion machines and dynamic motion machines in themselves. Roller coasters and ferris wheels appear, usually fragmented, as central icons within agitated fields of vibrant color. These structures compromised by the storm also serve well as metaphors for the spasmodic rhythm of experience (the coaster) and the cyclical nature of time (the wheel)."
Link to Post:
http://studiocritical.blogspot.com/2013/05/gwennan-thomas.html
Valerie Brennan interviews painter Gwennan Thomas about her work and process.
Thomas comments: "Drawing is a really important part of my process and I generally have quite a few primed pieces of paper stuck on the wall where I can either test out new colours or colour-combinations or possibilities for or within paintings, as well as keeping sketchbooks. I tend to make most of my supports and having a large supply of these is important for me to not get too precious. I am quite picky about these as well so I do spend time on making and priming my boards. Once these are made a sort of visual conversation starts between the drawings and the paintings. Some paintings are more immediate, some not and some get annotated on in my sketchbook."
Link to Post:
http://altoonsultan.blogspot.com/2013/05/atmosphere-and-touch-paintings-of-john.html
Altoon Sultan blogs about the exhibition John Zurier: A spring a thousand years ago at Peter Blum Gallery, New York, on view through June 22 2013.
Sultan writes: "Within these minimally painted, sensitively brushed paintings there is a sense of boundless space, of light shimmering through thin veils of color... The paintings are paradoxically both rich and hardly there. I sense great care in the making of the work, and yet there's a feeling of freedom in its brushwork, freedom that comes from practice and from close attention... One of the things I admired about this show was the variety of approaches to making a painting; Zurier explores paint and surface, with each painting having a character of its own."
Link to Post:
http://blog.sfmoma.org/2013/05/what-we-do-is-secret-sydney-cohen/
Scott Hewicker interviews painter Sydney Cohen about her work on the occasion of the exhibtion Sydney Cohen: Some Other Need at Right Window Gallery, 992 Valencia St., San Francisco, on view through May 31, 2013.
Hewicker writes that Cohen's paintings are "small to medium-large brilliantly colorful layered abstractions of oblique lyrical structures and spaces; each one a mini-world of intuitive and playful decision-making. Both highly worked and loosely executed, reveling in a vivid liquidity of poured textures and buoyant shapes... Hers is the kind of beautifully messy painterly abstraction that I enjoy so much but see little of these days with many young abstract painters leaning towards a forced distance of restraint with barely-there gestures of thin paint and labored conceptualized emptiness. Sydney’s painting refreshingly loped and careened wildly through a complex network of bright shapes and unhesitating gestures, pouring on layer after layer of strange color combinations into burrowing organic forms."
