Submitted by Brett Baker on July 5, 2011
Photo Credit: flickr.com/photos/kewing/5130015406/
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://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."
