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.art21.org/newyorkcloseup/films/josephine-halvorson-is-on-the-clock/
A new video documents painter Josephine Halvorson painting on site in Connecticut.
Halvorson comments: "I love stuff that shows you how it's made. I love being able to understand its construction just by experiencing it. And I've never liked in painting… the idea of deception or the idea of covering up something. For me, I haven't found a way to paint in successive days on the same surface that doesn't feel like concealment… I think in painting you have to own every move you make because it's all there on the surface. You can't deny anything you do, or don't do."
Link to Post:
http://www.artcritical.com/2013/03/07/margaret-grimes/
Jennifer Samet reviews the exhibition Margaret Grimes, A Retrospective, at Western Connecticut State University, on view through March 14, 2013.
Samet writes: "Margaret Grimes’s paintings are about vastness, not just the all-encompassing kind, but also vastness at the molecular or cellular level. She paints the individual leaf and the entire screen of the forest." Samet concludes that Grimes' works "have a powerful, surprising, and sometimes overwhelming scale, all the more impressive since she works from direct observation. But it is not just about the paintings’ size. Rather it is in their insistence and the explosiveness that comes out of recursive patterning–patterning that we know, intuitively, exists on both a universal and microscopic level."
Link to Post:
http://paintingperceptions.com/landscape-painting/interview-with-john-david-wissler
Larry Groff interviews painter John David Wissler about his work and plein-air painting.
Wissler comments: "I believe painting from life will always take me down unexpected roads, both literally and figuratively. Nature is full of surprise and change, it is never the same. I hope I never impose my habits on it. “Getting it right” That is not at all about recording it (the motif) but using it as inspiration. Sure I want a sense of place; I want believable space and atmosphere. Corot found his muse in Italy, his light, and spent his life painting. He used this muse (his observed invention) it to create beautiful works that take us on unexpected journeys. It never became a crutch or the easy way out, but a pursuit that took him his whole life."
Link to Post:
http://www.twocoatsofpaint.com/2012/08/rooted-in-nostalgia-karen-marston-at.html
Sharon Butler blogs about the exhibition Karen Marston: New Paintings at Storefront Bushwick, Brooklyn, on view through September 16, 2012
Butler writes: "Influenced by 19th-century landscape masters such as George Inness, Thomas Cole, and Frederic Edwin Church, Marston appears to suggest that our emotional connection with nature is overly mediated and rooted in nostalgia. Also included in the show are several lovely en plein air paintings, which are less dramatic, but more emotionally direct."
Link to Post:
http://www.art21.org/newyorkcloseup/films/close-encounters-with-josephine-halvorson/
Video interview with painter Josephine Halvorson.
Halvorson discusses her process of working on location in a single session. She notes: "I can feel with my brushstrokes what it's like to be that surface or that object. So say it's steel, when I make that color and I paint it down, it feels like steel when it is becoming the thing, when there's a sythesis between my painting and the object and myself. When we're all the same thing at the same moment. That is the closest I can get to that object."
Halvorson's paintings were recently on view in the exhibition What Looks Back at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.
Link to Post:
http://www.thethreetomatoes.com/bascove.html
Bascove looks at the work of Valeri Larko whose paintings are on view in the exhibition Keeping it Real at J. Cacciola Gallery, New York through July 28, 2012.
Bascove writes: "This exhibit particularly reflects the rich material Larko has explored in the Bronx. 'Bronx Drawbridge' is a powerful example of an image that evokes in the viewer the history of hard labor. Again, Larko uses a series of diagonals, from the worn machinery, to the broken lines of a parking lot, a fence topped with razor wire, and broken steps, to reinvigorate the original dynamic energy of the site. She shows how it's now been transformed into a rusted canvas for the younger [graffiti] artists of the area."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/42135/occupy-wall-street-a-painters-view/
Painter Karen Kaapcke writes about her experiences painting the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park.
Kaapcke writes: "I needed to go paint at Zuccotti Park, to grant it the seriousness, the respect and the statement of importance that was, I felt, lacking. There was a certain element of fear, or of risk involved on the days I went. And then, I thought about those down there and the risks they were taking and realized that my fears potentially paled in comparison... I don't usually paint among others, let alone in such an active crowd. I didn’t know how I was going to proceed, I just went."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/30713/an-implied-critique-of-sound-bite-society/
Harry Swartz-Turfle writes about the unique dedication to looking at the core of Rackstraw Downes' painting practice: "... when you think about how much of modern and contemporary art relies on juxtaposition or exaggeration for effects, Downes' approach begins to seem downright revolutionary."
Swartz-Turfle also notes that "[Downes] wanted the discipline of reality's variation instead of the suppositions that come with ideas about reality. It's a kind of meta-conceptualism that makes Rackstraw Downes a postmodern plein air painter."
