Link to Post:
http://aeqai.com/main/2013/03/small-really-is-big/
Marlene Steele reviews the exhibition Small is Big at Manifest Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio, on view through April 5, 2013. The show features paintings by Catherine Kehoe, Tim Kennedy, Ken Kewley, Eve Mansdorf, and EM Saniga.
Steele writes: "Any artist who undertakes the assignment of smaller works realizes immediately that every mark counts in an informational sense. Power is derived as much from what is left out as what is included. The character and design of mark-making as well as the assignment of real estate in a reduced format are all part of the ‘game’. Scale of execution is both intimate and magnified in the small format. Several of these pieces illustrate that the artist chose ‘constructing’ as opposed to rendering while working through the painting process."
Submitted by Brett Baker on December 18, 2012
Brett Baker, Scarbo, 2009 -2011, oil on canvas, 5 x 4 inches
I want to thank all Painters’ Table readers for making this blog a success over the past two years and also to cordially invite everyone to the opening reception for an exhibition of my paintings at Elizabeth Harris Gallery in New York on Friday, January 4, 2013 from 6 - 8 pm. The exhibition will run through February 2, 2013. A catalogue with an essay by Jennifer Samet will be available from the gallery.
Submitted by Brett Baker on October 9, 2012
Curating Contemporary is an online exhibition project created by painter Brian Edmonds. The site hosts monthly artist-curated virtual exhibitions. I am pleased to have curated the current show, Focused Field, featuring small paintings by seven artists, Sarah McNulty, Kazimira Rachfal, Dan Roach, Henry Samelson, Altoon Sultan, Ken Weathersby, and Brett Baker. The exhibition essay, available at Curated Contemporary, is also posted below. Click on each artist's names in the text for a link to their works in the show.
Ken Weathersby, Time Is the Diamond, 2011, wood, linen, acrylic, paper collage, small works on wood shelves, from 2.5 to 8 inches tall (courtesy of the artist)
Expanding the visual field is one of the essential innovations of the New York School. This innovation redefined scale in painting so decisively that subsequent movements including Color Field, Pop, Minimalism, and even installation art all adopted it without question. Yet, while nearly every other aspect of abstract painting has been exhaustively investigated and re-imagined, examples of focusing the field to a small scale have been isolated and few. Miniature abstract paintings are almost non-existent.
My first encounters with Abstract Expressionism’s signature expansiveness, in works by de Kooning and Rothko, made me want to be an abstract painter and convinced me that scale was a crucial component of the language of abstract painting. For a over a decade, I painted almost exclusively on a large scale, until circumstances forced me to radically scale down my work.
I moved from a large studio upstate to a small Manhattan apartment that functioned as both a studio and a home for my family. The change was fortuitous, though, for it opened my eyes to new painting problems. Instead of rehashing the problem of creating an intimate experience from immense scale, I concerned myself with preserving that immensity on an intimate scale. At first, a two foot square painting felt like a postage stamp to me, an impossibly small area. Ten years later, many of my works measure only 4 x 5 inches.
Recently, it’s been a pleasure to discover other painters - Sarah McNulty, Kazimira Rachfal, Dan Roach, Henry Samelson, Altoon Sultan, and Ken Weathersby - equally invested in small, even miniature scale abstraction. Though sharing a similar format, each artist challenges and extends the language of abstract painting in a different way. These painters use scale not as a commentary, but rather to push the boundaries of gestural abstraction, site-specific painting, materials, and process while forging fresh connections with painting’s past.
Link to Post:
http://www.thoughtsthatcureradically.com/2012/08/ruth-abrams-microcosms-yeshiva.html
Caleb De Jong reviews the exhibition Ruth Abrams: Microcosms at Yeshiva University Museum, on view through January 6, 2012.
De Jong writes: "Sometimes measuring only a square inch on either side, these paintings, if such a big word can be used to describe these objects, conger corners of landscapes, moons and mountains. Whereas her larger paintings appear muddled in their intention and of their moment, the smaller paintings on paper achieve what Abrams discusses in her video, ‘The Paradox of the Big’ in which the smaller a paintings becomes the more space and infinitude it can contain."
Link to Post:
http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2012/08/asian-miniatures.html
Pecay photo blogs a beautiful selection if images from a "small, unnamed ~18th century album of pencil and watercolour sketches [from] the digitised collection at Bibliothèque nationale de France."
Link to Post:
http://studiocritical.blogspot.com/2012/04/henry-samelson.html
Valerie Brennan interviews painter Henry Samelson about his work and process.
Samelson notes: "Drawing is important to my painting. But there is reciprocity between them with ideas/influence flowing back and forth. I work on a lot of paintings at the same time with dialogue between them as well. Everything plays off of everything else... Departures happen as a result of accident, frustration, ineptitude, and the difficulty of translating the muscle movements involved in drawing into the act of painting... I always reach a point of anger and disgust in a work which I think is an essential part of my process."
Link to Post:
http://www.gorkysgranddaughter.com/2012/03/brett-baker-march-2012.html
Thanks to Zachary Keeting and Christopher Joy for meeting me at East River State Park, Williamsburg to discuss my work for their incredible video blog Gorky's Granddaughter.
Link to Post:
http://tartuffesfolly.posterous.com/the-visconti-tarot-portraiture-in-miniature
Mark Dylan Sieber posts a gallery of Renaissance tarot cards "hand-painted... with gold and silver gilt, as well as miniature Renaissance portraiture. Originally commissioned by the Viscontis, a Milanese family that dominated the cultural life of Northern Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries, the deck is one of the oldest sets in existence. The cards are attributed to Italian fresco painter Bonifacio Bembo, who finally completed the images in 1445.
Link to Post:
http://aeqai.com/main/2011/10/epic-miniatures-contemporary-pakistani-miniaturist-techniques/
Maria Seda-Reeder reviews Realms of Intimacy: Miniaturist Practice from Pakistan at the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, on view through January 22, 2012.
Seda-Reeder writes that "the traditional practice of miniature creation is applied to contemporary non-miniature works. And as demonstrated by artists like Ambreen Butt in Realms of Intimacy, the effect can be equal parts begging for close inspection and stepping back for the gestalt."
Link to Post:
http://looksee.chrisashley.net/?p=6659
Chris Ashley writes about the work of Ken Weathersby on the occasion of the exhibition Time is the Diamond at Some Walls, Oakland, CA.
Ashley writes that " ...painters like Ken Weathersby have shown that painting appears to continue living a healthy life long after its reported demise. Paintings do things and are about things that other mediums can't match. While much art continues on a seemingly rapid path towards newer technologies and entertainment, encouraging fast looking and sound bite-like understanding, the technology of most painting, handmade and viewed slowly, at a finely granular level, might gradually be seen as anti-technology, or rather, as a kind of antidote to quicker, bigger, and shinier art."
