Link to Post:
http://bombsite.com/issues/1000/articles/6968
Samuel Jablon talks with painter Chuck Webster about his work and process.
Webster remarks: "I think the idea and the picture need to be one total experience for the viewer. Pictures have to be an embodiment of the idea while still remaining clear. Ideas for me come from the activity, from the evidence of putting down marks and removing them. I have to work my way through a number of ideas before the painting reveals itself to me. I believe in the transformation that happens there, with the materials and on the picture. My concept of making resides in that miracle, the awareness that starts to happen when something is made from raw material through time. Those things are one and the same: a picture is the concept. As it starts to transform, it creates new energy in the world and therefore its own version of form and narrative."
Link to Post:
http://www.twocoatsofpaint.com/2012/11/artists-as-curators-stephen-truax.html
Sharon Butler blogs about the exhibition Love curated by Stephen Truax and presented by Art Blog Art Blog, on view at One River Gallery, Englewood, NJ, through December 21, 2012.
Love, featuring work by a diverse group of Brooklyn painters, celebrates the emotional attachment both painters and conceptual artists have for the medium, a 'love' that has returned painting to the "forefront of innovation in visual art." Butler writes that curator "Truax says the artists he has selected have 'a romantic and emotional engagement with painting and its history,' At the end of his essay, he even suggests that Conceptual artists are adopting painting as a strategy, too... Believing that all painting, no matter how seemingly intuitive, has conceptual underpinnings, Truax makes a case that the old saw "dumb like a painter" no longer applies."
The exhibition is accompanied by an online catalogue.
Link to Post:
http://www.gorkysgranddaughter.com/2012/08/chuck-webster-august-2012.html
Zachary Keeting and Christopher Joy visit the studio of painter Chuck Webster.
Webster's work will be on view at Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston from September 6 - October 13, 2012.
In 2011 Carol Diehl wrote of Webster's work: "At first glance, the quirky, cartoonlike quality of Webster's semiabstractions may seem more trendy than profound. With a little scrutiny, however, this impression is mitigated by the ambiguity of the subject matter—which, like all good abstraction, seems to be filled with meaning while actually signifying no specific thing. Points of reference are also ambiguous: often biomorphic, other times jagged, these emblematic symbols could just as easily be co-opted from early tribal paintings as could represent signals channeled from a simpler, postapocalyptic future."
Link to Post:
http://www.artwrit.com/article/interview-chuck-webster-at-ziehersmith-new-york/
Sam Jablon interviews painter Chuck Webster about the work from his recent show of new paintings at ZieherSmith Gallery, New York.
Webster comments: "I get a lot of the forms from the world - from an old piece of glass, a detail of Mantegna, the shape of a muffin or an old Roman helmet. They come from a huge store pile of things I see and make drawings of. Lately, I have been making drawings that remind me of Kachina dolls, old Mexican churches, pointy things and A.R. Penck. I use color by instinct... Color makes a narrative atmosphere for the paintings and gives them oomph."
Link to Post:
http://elisabethcondon.blogspot.com/2012/05/thick-and-thin-in-chelsea.html
Elisabeth Condon photoblogs a visit to several painting shows currently on view in Chelsea including: Dana Schutz: Piano in the Rain at Friedrich Petzel, Five by Five: Tom Burckhardt, Carrie Moyer, Kanishka Raja, Jane South, and Sarah Walker (Curated by Barbara Takenaga) at DC Moore Gallery, Jutta Koether at Bortolami, Chuck Webster at ZieherSmith, and Jan Müller at Lori Bookstein.
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/51416/chuck-webster-ziehersmith/
John Yau reviews the exhibition Chuck Webster: Paintings at ZieherSmith, New York, on view through May 25, 2012.
Yau writes: "The structure that Webster is here exploring is a stepped form that owes something to Navaho blankets. He uses a thick line to make the form’s border, appendages and interior lines. The thickness of the line confers gravity, as well as a sense of slow forcefulness... For all of its weight, the forms seem animated, as if they might pick up and move elsewhere. By focusing on one form, which he never repeats exactly, I got the sense that the artist is trying to consolidate what he knows and attempting to learn something else at the same time. Webster certainly knows how to make an interesting and often mysterious form, but he has seldom put it somewhere believable. Now it seems that he wants to expand the premise of his work, to go beyond the realm of mysterious things and make places where such things might exist."
Link to Post:
http://www.braskart.com/?p=29070
Photoblog studio visit with painter Chuck Webster, showing works in progress related to the current exhibition Chuck Webster: Paintings at ZieherSmith, on view through May 25, 2012.
The gallery notes that Webster's new paintings "Further deviating from previous paintings which were each an idiosyncratic image often on a smaller panel, the final surface on this body of work is a skittering, plangent line, with a consistent language throughout the group of mostly large scale paintings. Lending immediacy to the lush texture of the under painting's countless layers, these looser, brushy contours alternately resemble the ancient footprints of excavated villages and a contemporary cartoon aesthetic reminiscent of Phillip Guston, Carroll Dunham or Jonathan Lasker."
Link to Post:
http://glasstire.com/2011/10/17/forrest-bess-100-years-at-kirk-hopper/
Lucia Simek reviews the exhibition Forrest Bess 100Years: Paintings by Forrest and His Friends at Kirk Hopper Fine Art, Dallas, on view through October 23, 2011. The show includes paintings by Bess, Chuck Webster, Andrew Masullo, and Chris Martin.
Simek writes: "Bess's work is powerful in its preciousness - aching with an intensity and fervor of ideas that, even for its size, challenges the monolithic works by his AB EX contemporaries at the mid-century,when most of his works on view here were made. Certainly, because of their scale, and the crude handmade frames, Bess's work immediately reads in an intimate, spiritually-leaded way."
Link to Post:
http://progress-report.org/2041750/Chuck-Webster-Studio-Visit
Kris Chatterson visits fellow painter Chuck Webster in his Bushwick, Brooklyn studio.
Chatterson writes: "The paintings lay about and get knocked around as they are made. This allows for ideas and decisions to slowly work their way in... I don't know many painters working in this way. These are not hip nor cool. They are not paintings trying to distill a contemporary experience. They work outside of such trappings. They work on the internal human experience."
Submitted by Brett Baker on February 23, 2011
"If, when the eye is impressed with visionary images that last for a while, we look on colored surfaces, an intermixture also takes place; the spectrum is determined to a new colour..." Goethe, Theory of Colours
In New York, in February 2011, the diverse possibilities of painting are alive and filling the galleries and museums.
