Link to Post:
http://arthopper.org/the-pleasure-of-seeing/
Lane Cooper reviews the exhibition Hold the Wall: A Painting Exhibition, curated by Dan Tranberg, at Cleveland State University, on view through June 22, 2013. The show features paintings by Timothy Callaghan, Matthew Childers, Seth Chwas, Harris Johnson, Julie Langsam, Adam Markanovik, Mike Meier, Erik Neff, Dana Oldfather, George Schroeder, C. M. Sikon, Sarah Sutton, Molly Walker, Royden Watson, Tommy White, and Nikki Woods.
Cooper writes that "All of these artists have ties to the area and represent a snapshot of Cleveland’s 'Painting Dialogue.' Their work highlights those interests which drive the current Cleveland / world Painting scene. These works play with slippages between first assumptions and real seeing. Each piece demands extended viewing time to fully 'get it.' None of them offer immediate consumption."
Link to Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-seed/thomas-williams-art_b_3405525.html
John Seed interviews Thomas Williams on the occasion of the exhibition The Bay Area School Painters at Thomas Williams Fine Art, London, on view through June 22, 2013. The show includes works by Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, David Park, Ernest Briggs, John Grillo, Joan Brown, Frank Lobdell, Nathan Oliveira, Manuel Neri, and Paul Wonner.
Link to Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-seed/grant-drumheller_b_3393938.html
John Seed interviews painter Grant Drumheller on the occasion of the exhibition Grant Drumheller: New Paintings at Prince Street Gallery, New York, on view through June 15, 2013.
Asked about the aerial viewpoint in many of his paintings, Drumheller responds: "I find that the curve of my vision is often something I want to convey and not just the 'crushed' space that one is familiar with from telephoto lens photography. So the dynamic of perspective and foreshortening the figures plays some part in the way I construct the paintings , also the geometry of the reserve -- what's behind and around -- and how it interacts with the verticals of the figures is an issue. I move the elements around a lot before things settle into place."
Link to Post:
http://galleristny.com/2013/06/albert-york-a-loan-exhibition-at-davis-langdale-company-inc/
Andrew Russeth reviews Albert York: A Loan Exhibition at Davis & Langdale Company Inc., New York, on view through June 21, 2013.
Russeth writes: "While only one work here is larger than a sheet of typing paper, they all deliver enormous visual feasts—made of seemingly simple, halting brushstrokes on board that form powerful, intimate still lifes and landscapes that harbor profound psychological mysteries. With just a few hard-won marks, Mr. York could render uncanny impressions of the most quotidian subjects: a brown cow in a field, pink flowers in a tin container, a potted plant, a cut lemon that may make your lips pucker. Even up close, there’s no telling how he does it. Those idiosyncratic brushstrokes betray an unmatched willingness to look deeply and continuously and to set aside conventional notions of how objects are supposed to exist in the world."
Link to Post:
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2013/06/artseen/mark-greenwold-murdering-the-world-paintings-and-drawings-20072013
Phong Bui reviews the exhibition Mark Greenwold: Murdering the World, Paintings and Drawings 2007-2013 at Sperone Westwater, New York, on view though June 28, 2013.
Intrigued by the multiple complexities in Greenwold's paintings, Bui writes: "With their repeated penetration of lines, Greenwold’s new paintings and drawings evoke Giacometti’s existential angst, while the calibration of scale among figures, objects, interiors, and landscapes conjures Balthus’s magnified psychological space. It’s notable that Greenwold achieves this synthesis despite his reliance on photographic sources, as opposed to Balthus’s and Giacometti’s use of direct observation. Greenwold gathers material for each painting by selecting fragmented reproductions of objects or interiors from design or architecture magazines for the backgrounds, and his own photos for the figures. While reflecting on this issue of searching for an ideal environment, which is constructed from other fragments of places and times, I remembered how Kafka seemed to imagine his characters and places in his mind’s eye rather than in specific locales; in Amerika, Karl Rossmann imagines the U.S. as a land of infinite possibility where everyone succeeds beyond his or her own dreams and fails beyond their wildest horrors. The novel ostensibly ends with Rossmann on the train heading out to work for the Nature Theater of Oklahoma. Greenwold, too, has created his own theater of the absurd, though anti-nature and with a bent of humor and optimism."
Link to Post:
http://hkjbny.blogspot.com/2013/05/genius-of-love-brian-morris.html
Osamu Kobayashi posts a photo blog of images from the exhibition Genius of Love, curated by Jason Stopa, at Brian Morris Gallery, New York, on view through June 23, 2013.
The show features paintings by EJ Hauser, Jaqueline Cedar, Andrea Belag, Shara Huges, Rick Briggs, Farrell Brickhouse, and Emily Noelle Lambert.
Link to Post:
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2013/06/art/joyce-pensato-with-phong-bui
Phong Bui interviews painter Joyce Pensato about her work and career.
Asked about her first Batman paintings Pensato remarks: "I thought of them as still lifes. I finally got what all the teachers were talking about. They all said, 'Oh, don’t forget the space in the middle.' Once there was a life-size Batman cut out on the floor with a chair on top of it. They were all telling me to make it energized as space, and I did... I started out drawing first with charcoal, because charcoal was the number one thing at the Studio School. Then when I tried painting with color I would just lose all the graphic elements. I couldn’t get the same clarity of forms in space as I could with my drawing. It took me until 1990 to realize the color was not working for me. I remember asking Christopher [Wool] what paint he was using, and he said 1Shot enamel paint. It was a paint I didn’t know anything about, so I thought I couldn’t screw it up... Eventually black and white enamel became my medium and language."
Submitted by Brett Baker on May 31, 2013
Certain Densities is on view at the George Caleb Bingham Gallery, University of Missouri from June 3 - August 19, 2013. The exhibition features paintings by Matthew Ballou, Barry Gealt, David Gracie, Melanie Johnson, Ken Kewley, Rachael McHan, Rachael Pease, Emil Robinson, and Megan Shaffer. Below, in an essay written to accompany the show, Matthew Ballou argues that "a perceptual approach to painting is not synonymous with rote observation."
Certain Densities, Uncertain Visions
Two Asides Regarding Perceptual Painting
By Matthew Ballou
1
"Appearances reach us through the eye, and the eye—whether we speak with the psychologist or the embryologist—is part of the brain and therefore inextricably involved in mysterious cerebral operations. Thus nature presents every generation ... with a unique and unrepeated facet of appearance. The encroaching archaism of old photographs is only the latest instance of an endless succession in which every new mode of natural representation eventually resigns its claim to co-identity with natural appearance. And if appearances are thus unstable in the human eye, their representation in art is not a matter of mechanical reproduction but of progressive revelation."
- Leo Steinberg i
Although quite varied in manner and approach, a number of the works in this exhibition evidence a determined sensitivity to the painted surface as an aesthetic and formal reality. This embrace of surface is necessary, as all paintings come down to the particular arrangement of pigments on a (usually) two-dimensional plane. Painted surfaces are always progressively revealed; they always manifest over some period of time and through some process of engagement. Surface could be defined as a zone of incidence where nuanced sight and kinesthetic touch come together. The artist’s apprehension of space, light, form, and movement presents itself as a haptic environment in the painted object. This arena is of huge significance to perceptually-minded painters.
Barry Gealt, Waterfall II, oil on panel, 12 x 9.75 inches (courtesy of the artist)
Creating an illusion of things is of only partial importance when it comes to the fact of the painted surface. Subjectivity, shifting focus, and temporality are also vital as indicators of life, sensation, and thought in the artwork. These ephemeral aspects of creative effort become embedded, and they shape the painting’s meaning just as surely as any material or formal fact might. Therefore the densities of this exhibition’s title refer not only to paint but also to lived experience.
Link to Post:
http://thisrecording.com/today/2013/5/29/in-which-we-view-elena-sisto-with-curiosity.html
Eleanor Ray reflects on the recent exhibition Between Silver Light and Orange Shadow: Paintings by Elena Sisto at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York.
Ray writes: "After making images of young painters for several years, Sisto seems able in her newest work to remain conscious of the experience of the new painter, looking with fresh eyes, while also making use of decades of experience in painting. Just as the newest work represents a shift from an intellectual consideration of young painters to a physical identification with them, as Sisto suggests in a recent interview with Art in America, it also represents a further step away from painting about a particular idea. In the closely cropped images, ideas are not separable from the images’ expression in paint. This concrete state of being recalls Sartre’s dictum that 'existence precedes essence' – a person can only be defined by her actions, rather than by her aspirations."
Submitted by Brett Baker on May 28, 2013
Palaemon, A Survey of Paintings by Jon Imber, curated by Elizabeth Hoy, is on view at the Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Queens College, New York through June 15, 2013. Below William Corbett celebrates Imber's painterly freedom in an essay from the exhibition catalogue.
Jon Imber: Younger Than That Now
By William Corbett
When I met Jon Imber over thirty-five years ago,the two modern American artists in his pantheon were Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston, his professor at Boston University. Jon’s painting life has been shaped by his response to the work of these two giants.
Jon’s paintings from the late 1970s through the 1980s took their inspiration from the monumental, sculptural qualities, the grounded weight of late Guston paintings. Jon worked from observation and memory to bring this force to real people, his parents and lovers, his distant relative Naftali Herz Imber (author of the Israeli national anthem, Hatikva), and with singular success to Guston. Jon’s portrait of Guston rises up the canvas; you must look up to him as you do to a hero, more in admiration and respect than in trembling awe. Jon’s Guston is a debt paid: a command, a salute, but a move forward—the lineage continues.
Jon Imber, The Nap, 1997, oil on canvas, 51 x 102 inches (courtesy of the artist)
During those years Jon lived and worked on the first floor of a two-story square brick building off Somerville’s Davis Square. The basement of his building had been a screw factory and on the corner of Jon’s street stood Ray’s, a store that sold cigarettes, milk, and sneakers. I remember the studio as having no natural light. In that cave-like studio, Jon photographed Guston, myself, and my wife Beverly on Guston’s last visit to Boston in 1980.
Jon Imber, Upside Down Guy (Falling Painter), 1979, oil on canvas, 63 x 56 inches (courtesy of the artist)
Jon Imber is the one artist I know who married into his art. The freedom implicit in his landscape and flower paintings, brush stroke and image, begins to take hold in Maine, Jill’s home, and the home of Jon’s heart. He did not embrace this freedom at once. His paintings of hawsers, lobster buoys, anchor chains and boat gear now look like a farewell nod to Guston, late Guston in which the master piled natural forms—cherries in a nod to Chardin’s strawberries—and geometric shapes arranged with a startling muscular logic.
