Link to Post:
http://www.paintinginla.com/2013/05/one-painting-review-llyn-foulkes-pop.html
Lucy Chinen muses on Llyn Foulkes' painting Pop (1985-90) on view in the Llyn Foulkes retrospective at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles though May 19, 2013.
Chinen writes: "The expression of disgust towards American capitalism and immersive pop culture is not a particularly unique perspective in contemporary art, which is why it is rare when a work is able to communicate this feeling without being trite. Foulkes' stance does not come off as trite because it does not adhere to the currency of unique ideas within contemporary art. Foulkes adopts a narrative of tired resignation, illustrating himself with an intoxicated look in his eyes, a facial expression of vacant submission. The music emanating from the painting is darkly patriotic and carnivalesque. The domestic setting for an American dystopia is perfectly preserved in the diorama-like painting. Various styles converge in the work which plays with an exaggeratedly banal King of the Hill caricature, the grotesque thickness of a Phillip Guston painting, and the illusionistic qualities of Magritte."
Link to Post:
http://artjournal.collegeart.org/?p=3542
A new essay by Josephine Halvorson examines how sometimes a seemingly ideal subject resists the artist's efforts to capture it, receding into memory before it can be, or should be, realized in paint.
Halvorson tells the story of her "attempt to make a painting of a large diesel compressor next to a mine shaft on a ridge along the California-Nevada border. Its base showed the recent shine of a grinder, as if its ankles had been gnawed, its tendons sliced. It had been pushed on its side, an effort requiring considerable force, revealing the concrete foundation on which it had been secured for decades. Thousands of dried black insect carapaces were exposed in a dense layer. Looking at the machine askew, it was suddenly a severed head, its facade transformed into a face: a bolted plate resembled a shut eye, a dark recess became an open mouth, and a heavy steel shaft protruded, suggesting Pinocchio’s telescoping nose. On its rusted side, in white spray paint, someone had written 'Shame.'"
Link to Post:
http://wowhuh.com/archives/1135
Ezra Tessler reflects on Blinky Palermo's Grey Disk (1970).
Tessler writes: "Once Grey Disk made its way into my mind I had a hard time not seeing it everywhere. Turn Grey Disk on its side and walk through the Met: there it is in the rounded-faces of the lifelike Roman funerary portraits painted in encaustic on wood, in the hand-carved cameos of the late nineteenth-century, and so on down the halls. Or leave it horizontal and think of nearly any painting. It mimics the golden orb of the kneecap at the center of Caravaggio’s Narcissus, the shape of Braque’s Violin and Music Score, the dark cutout oval in Picasso’s guitar sculptures, the black elliptical sphere in Dana Schutz’s Guitar Girl, the biomorphic shapes in Ron Gorchov’s pieces, and the swollen lumps of elephant dung in Chris Ofili’s work. It’s the bowl of fruit in every still life from Claesz to Matisse, the muted and dusty grey saucer in Morandi’s Natura Morta II, the skulls in seventeenth-century vanitas paintings, the ominous cloud covering Gerhard Richter’s Table and the carnal orifice of his Mouth. Cloud, face, saucer, saddle, stage, shield, palette – how can one begin to capture everything that it invokes?"
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/66980/single-point-perspective-the-future-of-henri-matisse/
Thomas Micchelli blogs about Matisse's 1948 painting Interior with Egyptian Curtain (Phillips Collection) currently on view in the exhibition Matisse: In Search of True Painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on view through March 17, 2013.
Micchelli writes: "Matisse has painted not one picture but three abutted together: the window, the curtain and the still life. While each competes for your attention in its own dazzling way — the window in an explosion of short strokes, the curtain with an interlocking pattern of abstracted shapes, and the still life with a simple but blazing interaction of yellow, pink, black and white — to the postmodern eye the combination of components seem to betray a loss of faith in the ability of a single image to express the fullness of an artist’s vision." Micchelli continues, noting that "the jangling, jazzy profusion of images deny the painting a conventional center of interest. The images, however, do not direct the eye to all four quadrants of the canvas, as Matisse does in his other interiors; instead they compact a heightened level of interest in three discreet sections. To again take the work from a postmodern perspective, Matisse’s “Interior with an Egyptian Curtain” can be viewed as more overt in its deconstruction of pictorial integrity than something like Willem de Kooning’s black-and-white 'Painting,' which was done the same year."
Link to Post:
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2012/09/artseen/jean-baptiste-simon-chardin-chardins-visor
John Elderfield considers the true meaning of Cézanne's interest in the painting Self Portrait or Portrait of Chardin Wearing an Eyeshade, 1775 by Jean-Siméon Chardin.
Elderfield writes: "we cannot dismiss the possibility that the unclear sentence in Cézanne’s unquestionably authentic letter on Chardin’s self-portrait is not, in fact, about a physical attribute of the pastel: the plane of light that carries across the bridge of the nose and allows the work’s range of tonal values better to be seen. It could well be about the practical purpose of the shade-creating visor depicted in the pastel..."
Link to Post:
http://bombsite.com/articles/6754
Kaitlin Pomerantz visits the Brooklyn studio of artist Simon Dinnerstein.
Pomerantz writes: "As he lead me through the marks and methods of the Triptych that day, Dinnerstein spoke with a peculiar detachment, as if the work was so great, so interwoven and dense, that it existed entirely on its own, beyond him. This first encounter with Dinnerstein left me wanting to know more about this man whose creation seemed almost to eclipse his entire being - where does an artist go from here?"
Link to Post:
http://sameoldart.tumblr.com/post/29412836222/a-portrait-by-gerald-brockhurst
Thoughts on an unexpected encounter with a portrait by painter Gerald Leslie Brockhurst on view at Tate Britain.
"You know when you have come across an interesting painting. It will make you stop and look twice. An interesting painting tends to hold your attention while making it difficult to arrive at any particular conclusion. First I thought Brockhurst’s painting was old-fashioned and fairly traditional. Yes, it is painted well, but that alone is never satisfactory - at least to me. What about it then?... I think what continues to hold my attention in this painting is its lack of painterly excess... Sometimes an old painting can outwit a new one and surprise you..."
Link to Post:
http://aeqai.com/main/2012/07/george-inness-at-the-cincinnati-art-museum/
Kevin Muente reflects on George Inness' painting Near The Village, October in the collection of the Cincinnati Art Museum.
Muente writes: "Tonal shapes read harmoniously throughout. Grass plains flow and mysteriously turn into a stand of trees. Buildings in the village Inness handled in a similar fashion to an overturned log in the foreground. The trees taunt their color to the clouds, but otherwise share the same DNA, identical in size and shape as well as retaining the softness of their edges. The tree trunks divide and subdivide the picture plane in interesting variations. A lone tree illuminated by light on the right hand side resides at equal distances to the furthest yellow tree to the right and the tree against which our mysterious man leans in the middle of the painting.... On the far left side a swatch of sky, cloud bank and stand of trees are all about the same height, and completely interchangeable... Inness binds everything together. Cohesion is a constant in Inness's version of an October afternoon. Soft edges meld and wed forms. At times it is impossible to assess where one object ends and another begins."
Link to Post:
http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2012/07/revisiting-pollocks-mural/
Tyler Green revisits a two part interview with Pepe Karmel co-curator of the 1998 MoMA Jackson Pollock Retrospective, about Pollock's monumental, breakthrough painting Mural, which is currently undergoing a well publicized conservation.
In part one Karmel notes that "It's an important painting for Jackson Pollock because it's the moment that announces his future as a painter of large, mural-scale paintings that become environments, and furthermore paintings that are in this distinct, all-over style that changes people's idea of what a painting might be."
In part two Karmel remarks that at the time "I don't think it had the kind of impact the later paintings had. It was a bit of a one-off, after which he went back to making smaller paintings. It probably didn't make that much sense to people. They may have been impressed by it, but by itself it didn’t announce a new style. Aesthetically, looking back, we go, 'Aha, this is it. This is when he gets there, even prematurely, and then goes away from it.' I’m guessing other people, including artists, who saw it didn't understand its implications for some time."
Link to Post:
http://text.chrisrusak.com/2012/05/25/clyfford-still-untitled/
Looking at Untitled, 1951, a largely monochromatic canvas by Clyfford Still, Chris Rusak finds clues to the contradiction between Clyfford Still's caustic rhetoric and the obvious "joy" he took in his work.
Rusak writes: "when an artist decides to introduce a proportionally diminutive amount of color into an otherwise achromatic composition, the power of each magnifies. Still's proportions of chromatic and achromatic space in Untitled serve to illuminate the canvas as a whole, to intensify the textures that build space and create dynamism, to voice the joy of his gestural process, and ultimately to challenge historical conventions about the interaction between viewer and art." Rusak also compares Still's near-monchrome to the painting Grau, 1976 by Gerhard Richter.
