Submitted by Brett Baker on July 5, 2011
Photo Credit: flickr.com/photos/kewing/5130015406/
Link to Post:
http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2010/11/tuesday-news-and-notes-2/
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/66851/painting-and-the-world-a-remembrance-of-denyse-thomasos/
Julian Kreimer remembers painter Denyse Thomasos (1964-2012).
Kreimer writes: "The question [Thomasos] faced throughout her career, the one that led her towards wall-works, is one that many artists grapple with, and is particularly acute for painters: how to reconcile her interest in politics with her calling as an artist. The vast scale of her major works, both on canvas and on walls, was a way to confront this. To be engulfed by the mixture of floorplans, architectural renderings, and illusionistic spaces that could be read as a twig hut or a spaceship was to feel oneself inside a whale. It is not that they captured the scale of the world, but they were of a scale just beyond one person’s ability to take in all the world, its joys and suffering."
Link to Post:
http://abstractcritical.com/note/william-perehudoff-1919-2013/
John McLean remembers painter William Perehudoff (1919 - 2013).
McLean writes: "John Golding’s book 'Paths to the Absolute' traces the numinous aspects of abstract painting from their beginnings in the works of Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian to the development of those qualities in the paintings of the Americans Pollock, Newman, Rothko and Still. Perehudoff’s work fits into the kind of epiphanic painting characterised by Golding. ... I cannot think of any other artist who rang so many changes on colour: light hues, dark hues, primary, secondary, tertiary, quaternary and so on… dissonances and harmonies, thick paint and thin, sometimes all on the same canvas, with an exquisite sense of placement. And all this without ever losing tension across the painting."
Link to Post:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/arts/design/will-barnet-painter-dies-at-101.html
Painter Will Barnet died Tuesday at the age of 101. In the New York Times obituary, Ken Johnson writes "In the prints and paintings that he produced from the mid-1960s on, Mr. Barnet ranged between a simplified form of realism and a poetic, visionary symbolism."
In 2011, the Times' Hilarie M. Sheets noted that Barnet who "taught artists including Cy Twombly, Tom Wesselmann, Eva Hesse, James Rosenquist, Mark Rothko and Donald Judd... always felt his figurative and abstract painting shared a unity in terms of structure and taking liberties with form." In a 2009 interview he told Pamela Koob: "My relationship with the art world was always tied up with history. What I was doing related to the past, but it was fresh in the sense that I had reinterpreted ideas in a more contemporary sense…. I wasn’t worried about what was going on in the art world; I was worried about getting a good painting. in many ways I was against the grain. I’m sorry to say it, I hate to do it — I would love to be part of everything, but that is what happens."
Submitted by Brett Baker on October 19, 2012
Bernard Chaet, Purple Hat, 1992, oil on canvas 14 in x 10 inches (courtesy of LewAllen Galleries)
Link to Post:
http://www.twocoatsofpaint.com/2012/10/influential-painter-raoul-de-keyser-is.html
On the occasion of Belgian painter Raoul de Keyser passing at age 82, Sharon Butler posts a video of de Keyser's March 2001 artist talk at the Renaissance Society in Chicago.
Writing about de Keyser's 1981 Hill Series, Barry Schwabsky notes that one painting "contains a single large five-sided shape in black ink, its edges nearly parallel with those of the sheet on which it has been drawn, except that one of its upper corners has been replaced by a diagonal line, like the slope of a hill. There is some bare white paper around all the sides of the resulting irregular pentagon, so that despite the reference to nature that the title insists on, it always remains a closed shape, never becoming a view of something larger. The trick--this short-circuiting of reference and abstraction--is simple but effective, so much so that it could easily have been irritating, except that the execution of it is so blunt and unpretentious that the quizzical feeling evoked by this play, not only between abstraction and image but between earnest concentration and triviality, evokes an almost childlike freshness of vision."
Link to Post:
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-karl-benjamin-20120727,0,7806947.story
Suzanne Muchnic reports on the death of painter Karl Benjamin, July 26 at the age of 86. Benjamin's work was recently on view in the exhibition Karl Benjamin and the Evolution of Abstraction, 1950-1980 at Louis Stern Fine Arts, Los Angeles.
Muchnic notes that "in a 1986 essay Benjamin wrote: 'I am an intuitive painter, despite the ordered appearance of my paintings, and am fascinated by the infinite range of expression inherent in color relationships.' Although he often set up a systematic structure based on numerical progressions, modular constructions or random sequences, he came up with surprising results."
Link to Post:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/may/23/bram-bogart
Belgian painter Bram Bogart died May 2, 2012 at the age of 90.
In The Guardian obituary, Michael McNay writes: "This sense in his work of the tangible, a coming together of his first job painting houses and his implacably wall-like landscapes, lasted throughout Bogart's lifetime, through to the overwhelming presence of his celebrated late paintings, glowing blocks constructed, quite literally, out of great globs of pigment mixed with cement. Abstract, yes; expressionist, yes; but not abstract expressionist. He was not interested in gestural painting, brushed or poured from cans, not in his mature work anyway. His concern was building paintings."
Link to Post:
http://www.artcritical.com/2012/03/06/peter-de-francia/
Merlin James remembers painter Peter de Francia (1921-2012).
James writes: "I knew of him as a socialist-expressionist figurative painter and draughtsman with first-hand connections to the Ecole de Paris and various Modernist figures... From the ‘80s onwards he had been mostly drawing. His earlier paintings on canvas had always been very graphic, like his major piece The Bombing of Sakiet (1959), a big canvas indicting French actions during the Algerian war of independence... The jagged, narrative charcoals Peter came to concentrate on were – and are – widely admired for their poignancy and expressive energy. They sometimes have mythological motifs, sometimes historical ones. I recall him in his studio bringing out one sheet with a tremulous tenderness that evidently reflected his feeling for the subject itself – the death in prison camp of Robert Desnos. At other times his drawings are more poetically unspecific – an old man with a flower, a woman with a bird."
