Link to Post:
http://www.wbur.org/2012/12/13/gregory-gillespie-naga
Greg Cook reviews the exhibition Gregory Gillespie: Transfixed at Gallery Naga, Boston, on view through December 15, 2012.
Cook writes that Gillespie was a Massachusetts artist whose "geographical proximity might suggest a stylistic kinship with Boston Expressionists from Hyman Bloom to Henry Schwartz. But his hyper-real self-portraits, squirming landscapes, odd symbolic scenes, and Eastern mandalas fits more easily into the visionary 'Abject Expressionism' that over the past century ran through the work of artists like German Expressionist Otto Dix, Chicagoan Ivan Albright and Los Angeles’ Llyn Foulkes... Gillespie’s best work is itchy and uncanny. He paints a reality that’s not necessarily our reality, but he depicts it so powerfully, so convincingly that his images seem, almost, to be alive."
Link to Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-seed/alan-feltus-lux-art-institute_b_2165409.html
John Seed blogs about the paintings of Alan Feltus, on view at the Lux Art Institute, Encinitas, CA through December 29, 2012.
Seed writes: "Feltus is a veteran representational artist known for his close-hued paintings of figures who carry an air of self-absorption tinged with melancholy. Remarkably, Feltus works without models and, for years, has used mirrors, referring to himself as the starting point for the faces and bodies of both his male and female figures. Seeing his works together is just a bit uncanny: it's a bit like attending a Feltus family reunion. The upstairs exhibition area at the Lux has 14 Feltus originals on display -- a dozen oils and two drawings -- where they emanate burnished quietude and a hint of august strangeness."
Submitted by Brett Baker on November 21, 2012
From Rome to Atlantic City, an exhibition of paintings by Margaret McCann, is currently on view at the University of Virginia’s Ruffin Gallery, through December 7. In works rich in both allusion and painterly craft, McCann merges careful observation, popular culture, and an encyclopedic knowledge of the tradition of painting. To view McCann's paintings is to understand that popular culture has long been a part of the language of painting. Each of McCann's works is an enigmatic parable inside a dynamic formal structure that is animated by a personal sense of touch and color.
McCann recently agreed to discuss her work with Painters' Table.
Margaret McCann, Lookout, 2008 (courtesy of the artist)
PT: I think we have to start by acknowledging that your Atlantic City series has an unanticipated additional reading after Hurricane Sandy. What We Worry? (2009) depicts the sea looming over a spiraling Piranesi-esque Atlantic City boardwalk. Lookout (2008) depicts the boardwalk being inundated by the sea. How do you feel about this unexpected, yet unavoidable new reading?
MM: During Irene “What We Worry?” and “Lookout” were in my show “Boardwalkers” at the Atlantic City Art Center on the Garden Pier, the front of which was washed away in a previous hurricane – you can still see the broken piers. When the nearby Revel was built, huge amounts of sand were added to the beach so the pier is now ‘sand-locked,’ but it used to extend over the water, so I had to temporarily remove all my work during the storm. On a barrier island the weather and water encircle you and the possibility of high water feels ever-present.
Their meaning is probably more journalistic than metaphysical now. At least I painted them before the tragedy (I’d be too self-conscious now), and the synchronicity supports painting’s power and reach - the kind that draws non-artists to painting. But floods are archetypal events, as Guston’s versions express. I was struck by how much my painting “Water Country” resembles the roller coaster washed offshore in Seaside Heights.
Link to Post:
http://newamericanpaintings.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/wayne-thiebaud-at-acquavella-galleries/
Michael Klein reviews the exhibition Wayne Thiebaud: A Retrospective at Acquavella Galleries, New York, on view through November 30, 2012.
Klein writes: "If Edward Hopper can be called the painter of the East coast certainly Wayne Thiebaud can be considered the painter of the West coast. What Thiebaud represents is post war America, what we’ve made, built, lived in and called our own. He champions a vocabulary of the commonplace and like his hero Morandi he makes monumental compositions from the simple and the ordinary; objects that you and I could find in our home on a shelf or in the garage. Not surprisingly Thiebaud can paint on a variety of scales and with a variety of materials as the works in this exhibition demonstrate. Nothing diminishes the impact of their character; one that is revelatory in color, light and execution."
Link to Post:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/arts/design/will-barnet-painter-dies-at-101.html
Painter Will Barnet died Tuesday at the age of 101. In the New York Times obituary, Ken Johnson writes "In the prints and paintings that he produced from the mid-1960s on, Mr. Barnet ranged between a simplified form of realism and a poetic, visionary symbolism."
In 2011, the Times' Hilarie M. Sheets noted that Barnet who "taught artists including Cy Twombly, Tom Wesselmann, Eva Hesse, James Rosenquist, Mark Rothko and Donald Judd... always felt his figurative and abstract painting shared a unity in terms of structure and taking liberties with form." In a 2009 interview he told Pamela Koob: "My relationship with the art world was always tied up with history. What I was doing related to the past, but it was fresh in the sense that I had reinterpreted ideas in a more contemporary sense…. I wasn’t worried about what was going on in the art world; I was worried about getting a good painting. in many ways I was against the grain. I’m sorry to say it, I hate to do it — I would love to be part of everything, but that is what happens."
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://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2012/10/the-modern-art-notes-podcast-manets-portraits/
On the occasion of the exhibition Manet: Portraying Life at the Toledo Museum, Ohio (on view from October 7, 2012–January 1, 2013), Tyler Green talks to exhibition co-curator Lawrence Nichols and Gary Tinterow, Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
The segments include a discussion of Manet's interest in portraiture, his subjects, his interest in Frans Hals, and "the Spanish influence on Manet’s portraiture, both Spanish pictures Manet saw in France in the 1850s and early 1860s and then the importance of Manet’s 1865 visit to Spain."
Link to Post:
http://notesonlooking.com/2012/09/thomas-butler-curates-the-figure-in-contemporary-art-at-cypress-college/
Geoff Tuck reviews the exhibition The Figure in Contemporary Art, Curated by Thomas Butler, at Cypress College, Cypress, CA, on view through November 1, 2012.
Tuck writes: "There is a freemasonry of painting among figurative painters – and I mean the term in the metaphoric sense of a secret club as well as the sense of a guild of highly developed craftsmen, for great skill is required to observe and render the body. And it is both, observation as well as drafting. Over a lifetime of close watching one learns how muscles move and pull and place our bones into postures, and the ways that our bodies and faces can reveal our thoughts; the long, slow, laborious practice of making marks to represent what one sees isn’t as direct as the same thing might be if one takes a photograph, the mark-making also conveys what one senses and feels. The hand is an interpreter, not a copiest. In my simplistic way, it seems to me that other arts can make statements about the human experience, while painting offers a breadth of interpretation that equals life."
The show includes works by Domenic Cretara, Jerome Witkin, Juliette Aristides, Kate Lehman, Odd Nerdrum, Paul Fenniak, Ruth Weisberg, Sharon Allicotti, Sigmund Abeles, Steven Assael, Thomas Stubbs, and Vito Leonardo Scarola.
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/56894/the-ambiguity-between-the-human-and-the-void/
Daniel Larkin reviews the exhibition Matthew Miller: Fools Are Those Who Lose Their Mirrors on view at Pocket Utopia and C.G. Boerner Gallery, New York, on view through October 14, 2012.
Larkin writes: "Most of the critiques of Miller’s work find fault in the destabilizing fissures in his work, like uneven shoulders, differing levels of detail, or the occasional crudely cut line. Others see these choices as a deliberate stylizations with their own advantages. These inconsistencies subvert the effect of realism. After centuries of harmonious proportioned paintings and the hyper-realism of the 20th century, it’s refreshing to see a work that undermines and casts a shadow on its own sense of realism that varies greatly from one work to another."
Link to Post:
http://www.artwrit.com/article/lynette-yiadom-boakye-at-jack-shainman-gallery-new-york/
Laura Leffler reviews the exhibition Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: All Manner of Needs at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, on view through October 13, 2012.
