Link to Post:
http://bombsite.com/articles/7189
Alexander Nemser writes an appreciation of Jon Imber's recent paintings on the occasion of the exhibition Palaemon, A Survey of Paintings by Jon Imber, on view at the Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Queens College, New York through June 15, 2013.
Nemser writes: "In the last ten years, Jon Imber’s paintings have taken on a new dynamism, a freshness, and a remarkable proliferation of color. To see paintings like Lantern in the Snow, Stonington Harbor, and Spring Totems together is to witness the thrill of a master rising to a challenge, letting it open and change him. These paintings display the selflessness of mastery: the cultivated willingness to step out of the way and hold an image as it develops, joyfully and calmly... One secret is the clarity and crispness of sight. The paintings are rooted in earth and shell from Imber’s long apprenticeship to the Stonington shore, but infused with the singular vibrancy of his viewpoint. The whorls, shards, and petals are wilder than ever, the colors in shocking relation, but the sight is tightened, reined in, and the paintings are grounded in utterly faithful revelations of the truth of his eye."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/71393/beer-with-a-painter-john-walker/
Jennifer Samet interviews painter John Walker about his work and career.
Walker recounts a formative experience: "As a young man, I had gone to Amsterdam to look at Van Gogh, actually. I saw the Rembrandts, including the painting that is still the most important painting to me — 'The Jewish Bride.' It just touched me so. It is truly one of the great romantic paintings in the world. I came out from the Rembrandt painting, and then I went to the Stedelijk. I’d been trained at that point just in figurative art. For the four years previously, I’d been in a life room. And I saw this painting, a white square on a white square. I didn’t know what it was, but I got the same emotional take that I got from the Rembrandt. It blew me away, took me off balance. I turned away, came back. I had no way of dealing with it intellectually. I’d never been faced with avant-garde art. I didn’t do anything about it. But several years later, I read that Malevich, when asked what his ambition was for painting, said it was to imbue the square with feeling. Well, that’s what Rembrandt did. So the connection was immediate. Then I didn’t have this problem of why I liked Rembrandt and why I liked certain contemporary art, why I grew to like Jackson Pollock. That is what they were doing: they were imbuing the square with feeling. I’d never read that, never heard of that, but it seemed to be right on."
Link to Post:
http://paintingperceptions.com/interiors/painting-panoramas-interview-with-matthew-lopas
Larry Groff interviews Matthew Lopas about his panoramic paintings on the occasion of an exhibition of his work at Narthex Gallery at Saint Peter’s Church, New York, on view from May 17 - June 19, 2013.
Asked about painting panoramic views Lopas answers: "The conventional viewfinder produces wonderful compositions, but it is always at a distance from the viewer. I find its frame limiting and alienating. In fact, our field of vision is much wider than the perspectival conventions originating in the Renaissance. My images are truer to the actual experience of what it is like to be in the world rather than to look at the world. A radically expanded field of view enables a profound intimacy with the real act of looking and creates an unmediated gaze of empathic seeing."
Link to Post:
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater-art/2013/05/11/with-painter-jon-imber-nimble-shifts-capture-life-all-its-forms/y9ih3FLUTbIa9QBZx6A7IM/story.html
Sebastian Smee reviews a retrospective exhibition of paintings by Jon Imber at the Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Queens College, New York, on view through June 15, 2013.
Smee writes that Imber's paintings "have an unusually insistent pull — you feel something vital at stake...Imber has wrestled with different influences, different styles, and different subject matter all his life. The shifts, in his case, have felt less tectonic than nimble, supple, full of yearning and mischief. Life, in Imber’s paintings, unfurls with wayward force, like a thick, flicked rope. It takes on vital cadences. It laughs at itself, too."
Submitted by Brett Baker on May 13, 2013
Nicolas de Staël at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 1018 Madison Avenue, New York, on view from May 2 - 31, 2013.
In the United States, an eerie silence surrounds the work of Russian painter Nicolas de Staël. His name is rarely, if ever, recommended to or cited as an influence on an American painter. The first reason for his relative absence from the American consciousness is simply bad timing. As Eliza Rathbone explained in 1997: "The very fact that [de Staël] began to achieve fame and recognition during the same years as the New York School was establishing its reputation on native soil, made a challenging environment for the work of an artist steeped in artistic culture and traditions of France." 1 The romantic image of the New York School remains powerful today. Struggling inwardly in a studio on 10th Street continues to capture the imagination of young American painters more than painting light and heat on a beach in Antibes.
Nicolas de Staël, Paysage Méditerranée 1954, oil on canvas, 23 5/8 by 31 7/8 inches (courtesy of Mitchell-Innes and Nash)
Perhaps the main reason de Staël’s reputation has languished in recent decades, though, is the inaccessibility of his work. The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. has been the only reliable venue to see de Staël’s paintings in the last half century. After regular showings in the 1950s, only four other shows of de Staël’s paintings - in 1963, 1965, 1990, and 1997 - precede the small, but well-selected show of his works now on view at Mitchell-Innes & Nash’s Madison Avenue space.
Link to Post:
http://abstractcritical.com/article/proserpina-and-amnesiacs-exhibitions-of-work-by-ann-marie-james-and-annie-lapin/
John Holland reviews two painting exhibitions on view in London: Annie Lapin: Amnesiacs at Josh Lilley (through May 16) and Ann-Marie James: Proserpina at Karsten Scubert (through May 10).
Holland writes that both Lapin and James are artists who "make ostensibly abstract paintings, but who use the art of the past in a self-consciously Post-Modern sort of way. They quote it, in other words, deconstruct it, 'employ it', to use James’ utilitarian terminology, 'as a tactic.' ... both artist use the language of strategies, of doing things like reconfiguring our notions of art history and referring, as is more or less obligatory now, to Deleuze..." "Intriguing paintings" happen, Holland argues, when these strategies fail.
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://paintingperceptions.com/landscape-painting/interview-with-frank-hobbs
Larry Groff interviews painter Frank Hobbs about his work and career.
Asked about the excitement of plein air painting, Hobbs remarks: "On site, the first things that I respond to are space and light. I really am an abstract painter, I think; or a frustrated musician. Rhythm is more important to me than the particular inventory of things. I love to discover how things connect visually; to find the 'liasons' between things, to borrow Lennart Anderson’s term. A searching attitude is important because it allows for the emergence of something new, a transformation of the familiar fragmented reality into something that’s greater than the sum of its parts. A great painting is not just a picture, it’s really a model of how the universe is put together: one energy differentiated into all these seemingly disparate, yet dependent, parts. You see it in Morandi’s table top games, in Corot’s oil studies, and especially in Vuillard’s interiors from the 1890s. Could anything be more thrilling than to make a 14 x 18-inch model of the universe?"
Link to Post:
http://www.aubreylevinthal.blogspot.com/2013/04/sunday-pick-eleanor-ray.html
Aubrey Levinthal conducts a short interview with painter Eleanor Ray. Ray's work is currently on view in the exhibition dooroomwindow at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York, through May 26, 2013. The exhibition features the work of Jane Dickson, Bill Rice, Kurt Knobelsdorf, Gideon Bok, Eleanor Ray and Stephanie Pierce.
Ray comments: "Painting a familiar place becomes easier for me when it appears unfamiliar, usually because I am seeing something more basic -- its abstract qualities -- rather than my particular associations with the place. I find that I can see places more clearly when I'm a bit removed from them -- if I'm returning after a long absence, for example, or if I'm simply seeing the place in a new kind of weather, out of the corner of my eye, or through a window. I often become more interested in painting the places I've lived after moving away from them."
Link to Post:
http://www.nysun.com/arts/freilicher-and-friends/88283/
Xico Greenwald reviews the exhibition Jane Freilicher: Painter Among Poets at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, on view through June 14, 2013.
Greenwald writes: "The offhanded, intimate approach adopted by Freilicher and some of her fellow painters belies the critically important contributions these artists made to the canon of twentieth century art. One of the works in the show, Pierrot and Peonies, 2007, pays tribute to French Rococo painter Antoine Watteau. Watteau’s friendships with players from commedia dell'arte informed his work, with troupe members posing in costume for paintings depicting human dramas. In Freilicher’s work, too, the artist has gone outside the art world for a creative exchange. Her friendships with New York School poets have deepened her relationship to her surroundings and the paintings here are richer for it."
