Link to Post:
http://abstractcritical.com/article/turner-monet-twombly-later-paintings-tate-liverpool/
Painter Gary Wragg records his impressions of the recent exhibition Turner, Monet, Twombly: Later Paintings at Tate Liverpool.
Wragg writes: "I am fascinated by Twombly’s compulsion, shared with many recent and current painters, for urgency, here-ness, enveloping near-ness, and close-ness, beyond composition. Concomitant with science’s understanding of the expanding evolution and nature of the universe, I find it interesting to see how the mark-making of Turner, Monet and Twombly evolved successively bigger, nearer and more emphatically tactile from one to the other over the span of three centuries. Twombly’s application of paint is more splashy, gungy and physical than Monet’s, whereas Monet’s is more systematically flattened and emphasised across the surface than Turner’s. Nowadays bonkers erratic in your face scribblings and splashings or heightened-colour-flatness stems from a very real need for possession, for being thrown out, in and around, and gripped by a simultaneously in out of kilter connectivity. The spectator becomes a magnet catching the memory of fleeting sensations of being in the studio and has an empathy with the artist working directly with painting. The overriding power of making and resolution seems to arise in spirit as much as in feeling, in the hand; it is central to the experience of most of the paintings in this exhibition, that seem of their time yet as timeless as the first handprint in pigment on a cave wall, made forty seven thousand years ago."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/59694/wayne-thiebaud-and-the-limits-of-gluttony/
John Yau reflects on the work and legacy of painter Wayne Thiebaud on the occasion of the exhibition Wayne Thiebaud: A Retrospective at Acquavella Galleries, New York, on view through November 30, 2012.
Yau writes: "At a point when everybody was squeezing space out of paintings, Thiebaud was putting it back in, while establishing a tension between surface and depth. The reason is that Thiebaud wants the viewer to be aware of his or her own body, and he recognizes that this is something that Pollock lost when he made his groundbreaking paintings. For all their materiality, Pollock’s allover paintings make it difficult for the viewer to orient his or her body to the painting — they take the ground we are standing on away. I suspect this is one reason why Thiebaud has never gained the favor of MoMA. He challenges their narrative, which claims this was the goal of painting."
Link to Post:
http://www.art21.org/videos/short-robert-mangold-town-country
In a new video, Robert Mangold is interviewed at his upstate New York studio.
Mangold discusses the influence of urban and rural landscape on his geometric paintings: "When I moved to New York City, I was very interested in this idea of pieces of architecture that were both solid and that were atmospheric, and the idea that a similar form one way could be a gap between a building, and in another way could be a building. So I made these walls and areas, and quite literally one was the color of red brick and the other was the color of yellow brick." He continues "Looking out across the hills, I would see the same idea of atmosphere and form, except they were mountains and sky.. what came out of that was the idea that if I didn't use an organic mountain curve, and instead used a compass curve for the bottom edge of these forms, it would become something totally different and interesting. So, I went back and I started doing parts of circles and curved areas."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/59615/the-poetic-grit-of-a-landscape-painter-and-an-outspoken-critic/
Stephen Knudsen writes about the work of Lois Dodd, on view in the recent retrospective exhibition Catching the Light at the Kemper Museum of Art, Kansas City (on view at the Portland Art Museum, Maine from January 17, 2013 - April 3, 2013).
Knusdsen writes: "Dodd is strongest when she comes closer to artist Fairfield Porter in a lineage that dates back to Edouard Vuillard. [Robert] Hughes wrote that Porter was 'lucid and gifted' as both a critic and painter. Dodd was a beneficiary of that gift in being reviewed with admiration by Porter and, as she said, through 'looking at his work.' Much of what Hughes wrote about Porter could be extended to Dodd, for example: 'Porter rejected the piety that the empirically painted figure or landscape was dead. It simply didn’t accord with his deepest convictions about how art relates to experience and conveys its 'density.' '"
Link to Post:
http://paintingperceptions.com/contemporary-realism/interview-with-christopher-gallego
Larry Groff interviews painter Christopher Gallego about his work and process.
Gallego remarks: "The game of painting is played on two levels. First there is the artist, making decisions, solving problems, doing the actual work. Then there is the other self that watches the artist at work, monitoring one’s own thoughts and emotions... I’ll pick up the energy any way I can, sometimes by deliberately making a mistake. That usually gets me going. I’m always trying to stay in that sweet spot of being patient but having a slight edge. If I’ve grasped something visually, I can get back anything I’ve lost; if I can’t get it back; then I never had it to begin with. Knowing this brings me a contentment or rather a trust in the process, and the end result is a look that is fresher and more elegant than would be achieved by trying to force things."
Link to Post:
http://beautifuldecay.com/2012/10/22/allison-gildersleeves-natural-impressionism/
Forrest Perrine blogs about paintings by Allison Gildersleeve.
Perrine writes that Gildersleeve's paintings "are all about the wild wild wilderness – its colors, life, fractal chaos – that we too easily overlook. From a distance, Allison’s work looks almost expressionist, but as you look more, you notice meticulously painted shapes that look more and more like trees and branches and realize what she really seems like she’s trying to express is the impression the awe of the natural world has on her."
A video studio visit with Gildersleeve is also available at Gorky's Granddaughter.
Link to Post:
http://www.art21.org/videos/short-rackstraw-downes-some-painters
In this video short, Rackstraw Downes discusses looking at old master paintings by Jacob van Ruysdael, J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, and Claude Lorrain.
Downes comments: "I don't have any sentimentality about those painters, I don't think. It's that they would seem useful to me and provocative to me. They were like challenges to me - can you do this that well? So I can't access those painters technically, but I can acces them through various things that their paintings do."
New paintings by Rackstraw Downes are on view at Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York, through November 24, 2012.
Submitted by Brett Baker on October 19, 2012
Bernard Chaet, Purple Hat, 1992, oil on canvas 14 in x 10 inches (courtesy of LewAllen Galleries)
Link to Post:
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/10/18/sea-and-fog-the-art-of-etel-adnan/
Nana Asfour writes about the paintings of poet Etel Adnan, on view at Callicoon Fine Arts, New York, through October 28, 2012.
Asfour notes: "Etel’s paintings have a different sensibility than her writing. Her prose suggests a world of brutality and chaos. Her art has a cheerful, sunny disposition. 'Her writing is as fiercely complex and political as her paintings are serenely spare and personal,' Kaelen wrote in Frieze. At the reading Kaelen repeated a quote Etel once said about her writing and art. 'I write what I see, I paint what I am.' To me, she wrote: 'My writing and my paintings do not have a direct connection in my mind. But I am sure they influence each other in the measure that everything we do is linked to whatever we are, which includes whatever we have done or are doing. But in general, my writing is involved with history as it is made (but not only) and my painting is very much a reflection of my immense love for the world, the happiness to just be, for nature, and the forces that shape a landscape.' "
Submitted by Brett Baker on October 18, 2012
The landscape has inspired painters from Courbet, Monet, and Cézanne to Jackson Pollock and Joan Mitchell, the immensity of nature acting as a catalyst for each of their highly individual visions.
Tenses of Landscape, on view at the University of Arkansas Fine Arts Center Gallery through November 4, 2012, takes a look at the influence of landscape in the work of nineteen contemporary painters: Ricky Allman, Julie Cifuentes, Mike East, Emily Gherard, Grant Hottle, Michael Kareken, Tim Kennedy, Carla Knopp, Michael Krueger, Mark Lewis, Kristin Musgnug, Joseph Noderer, Margaret Noel, Casey Roberts, Claire Sherman, Kimberly Trowbridge, Shane Walsh, Megan Williamson, and Jenn Wilson.
In the exhibition introduction, Sam King writes that the show “presents both broad and dynamic depictions of landscape revealed as motif. Moreover, each artist examines the terrain dictated by these approaches and in turn addresses the act of painting itself.”
In addition to publishing statements by the artists each Monday on their blog MW Capacity, exhibition co-curators Sam King and Christopher Lowrance agreed to share their thoughts on putting together the show with Painters’ Table.
