Link to Post:
http://youtu.be/vLzRSZqwqXU
James Kalm visits an exhibition of paintings by Peter Acheson at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York, on view through May 26, 2013.
Kalm notes "Peter has promoted a serious commitment to painting despite the recent predominance of New Media Art. Since leaving the city and moving up-state to raise his family, Peter has acquired a cult like following among some of New York's most cognizant young painters. This program features a brief walkthrough tour of his Project Room show at the Steven Harvey Gallery, and a discussion of his practice and history within the creative community of Williamsburg Brooklyn."
Link to Post:
http://contemporarydrawingsalon.blogspot.fr/2013/05/what-i-like-about-you-organized-by.html
Yifat Gat posts an interview with painter Julie Torres, curator of What I Like About You at Parallel Art Space. The exhibition which opens during Bushwick Open Studios weekend features a work by 19 international artists who have each selected an artist from Brooklyn to participate in the show.
Torres comments that "it never hurts to surround yourself with inspiring artists...... and LOTS of them. When a big group of wonderful people get together, the energy is palpable and the possibilities seem limitless. I think it makes my own work braver, less timid, and more joyful. It definitely gets me out of my own head. It's exhilarating. [The stylistic groupings] happened pretty organically... I naturally gravitate toward other painters, specifically those who radiate in a very human, very raw exuberant way. Since those are the artists I follow online, those are the folks I invited. Not everyone I invited could come, but it's a very exciting group. And because they are each selecting a Brooklyn artist to showcase, it will expand further from there."
The must-see exhibition includes work by Julie Alexander, Jamie Powell, Karl Bielik, Henry Samelson Valerie Brennan, Rodney Dickson, Brian Cypher, Michael Voss, Jack Davidson, Frank Holliday, Brian Edmonds, Patricia Satterlee, Justine Frischmann, Clinton King, Erin Lawlor, Lael Marshall, David T Miller, Brooke Moyse, Lucy Mink, Chris Moss, Sean Montgomery, Yadir Quintana, Melanie Parke, EJ Hauser, Julia Schwartz, Sharon Butler, Peter Shear, Katherine Bradford, Wilma Vissers, Tatiana Berg, Ian White Williams, Paul Behnke, Douglas Witmer, Alex Paik, Pier Wright, Lipke, Stephen Wright, Ky Anderson, Liz Ainslie, Lauren Collings, and Saira Mclaren.
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.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://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."
Link to Post:
http://bombsite.com/articles/7189
Alexander Nemser writes an appreciation of Jon Imber's recent paintings on the occasion of the exhibition Palaemon, A Survey of Paintings by Jon Imber, on view at the Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Queens College, New York through June 15, 2013.
Nemser writes: "In the last ten years, Jon Imber’s paintings have taken on a new dynamism, a freshness, and a remarkable proliferation of color. To see paintings like Lantern in the Snow, Stonington Harbor, and Spring Totems together is to witness the thrill of a master rising to a challenge, letting it open and change him. These paintings display the selflessness of mastery: the cultivated willingness to step out of the way and hold an image as it develops, joyfully and calmly... One secret is the clarity and crispness of sight. The paintings are rooted in earth and shell from Imber’s long apprenticeship to the Stonington shore, but infused with the singular vibrancy of his viewpoint. The whorls, shards, and petals are wilder than ever, the colors in shocking relation, but the sight is tightened, reined in, and the paintings are grounded in utterly faithful revelations of the truth of his eye."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/71393/beer-with-a-painter-john-walker/
Jennifer Samet interviews painter John Walker about his work and career.
Walker recounts a formative experience: "As a young man, I had gone to Amsterdam to look at Van Gogh, actually. I saw the Rembrandts, including the painting that is still the most important painting to me — 'The Jewish Bride.' It just touched me so. It is truly one of the great romantic paintings in the world. I came out from the Rembrandt painting, and then I went to the Stedelijk. I’d been trained at that point just in figurative art. For the four years previously, I’d been in a life room. And I saw this painting, a white square on a white square. I didn’t know what it was, but I got the same emotional take that I got from the Rembrandt. It blew me away, took me off balance. I turned away, came back. I had no way of dealing with it intellectually. I’d never been faced with avant-garde art. I didn’t do anything about it. But several years later, I read that Malevich, when asked what his ambition was for painting, said it was to imbue the square with feeling. Well, that’s what Rembrandt did. So the connection was immediate. Then I didn’t have this problem of why I liked Rembrandt and why I liked certain contemporary art, why I grew to like Jackson Pollock. That is what they were doing: they were imbuing the square with feeling. I’d never read that, never heard of that, but it seemed to be right on."
Link to Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-seed/vonn-sumner-interview-somewhere-else_b_3275897.html
John Seed interviews painter Vonn Sumner on the occasion of the exhition Vonn Sumner: Somewhere Else at Merry Karnowsky Gallery, Los Angeles, on view May 18 - June 15, 2013.
Seed writes that Sumner's work "features a suite of paintings that form a kind of personal Commedia dell'Arte, whose main actor has a tragic, muted air. Sumner is wise enough to know how to engage you in his theater and also smart enough to stand back and let you react on your own terms. The paintings are generous, funny and just a bit opaque."
Sumner comments: "For me, the decisions in making a painting are largely intuitive. There is no literal idea or narrative I am trying to execute or illustrate. I can say generally that I work with materials and imagery that feel "right," and that I work toward an image that resonates with me at the time. I'm also interested in breathing new life into old conventions, like portraiture. With 'Reliquary' in particular, it felt both ridiculous/absurd and also somehow melancholic or mournful."
