Link to Post:
http://artnewengland.com/blogs/william-matthew-prior-thats-how-the-light-gets-in/
Monroe Denton reviews the exhibition Artist and Visionary: William Matthew Prior Revealed at the American Folk Art Museum, New York, on view through May 26, 2013.
Denton writes that: "Prior’s works, which will be returned to various museums throughout New England this summer, raise questions about art in general, the idea of progress in art, the folk/high art distinction. When one looks at the museums holding the material, it is obvious that they are usually seen in isolation, as evidence of material culture (folk and historical societies), rather than esthetic achievement. ...In folk art, traditionally, we are accustomed to search for traces of the artist’s inner life; in high art, we believe we read the personalities of the sitters. The reversal of these priorities might be one reason folk painting suggests itself so well to modernism and post-modernism—the idea of the artist’s glyphic authority to express himself or herself as of greater interest than reading the substrata of the image."
Link to Post:
http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/896095/video-the-phantasmatical-self-portraits-of-anne-harris
In a new video, painter Anne Harris discusses her approach to painting and the works in her current exhibition Phantasmatical: Self Portraits at Alexandre Gallery, New York, on view through May 11, 2013.
Harris remarks: "These paintings, these particular paintings, came out of both something that was happening in the drawing that I worked on, and also something that I was experiencing. The experience of going from being a child and I think being oblivious, to being watched. But also you get older, you're not as ripe, you're not looked at. I thought it would be interesting to try and paint somehow that experience of both you're really exposed but you're not looked at." She continues: "These are paintings. I'm a starting point, but all the complexity that I have about my feelings about myself and how I interact with the world - I hope that's in the painting."
Link to Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-seed/anne-harris-new-paintings_b_2985056.html
John Seed interviews painter Anne Harris on the occasion of her exhibition of new paintings at Alexandre Gallery, New York, on view from April 6 through May 11, 2013.
Seed writes: "The gradual evanescence of Harris's imagery is occurring as a feature of what she acknowledges is a 'long standing evolution.' She confides that 'over the years I have become more and more interested in the the idea that I am painting a slice of air.'... Emotionally, technically and stylistically Harris is walking a tightrope, and she seems genuinely thrilled to be there. Describing one of the 'invisibles' to me on the phone, she tells me that, 'the figure might have less weight than the air: I love trying to paint dense air. The entire painting becomes the body. It is exciting to me that everything is skin and air.'"
Link to Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-seed/dominic-cretara_b_2951266.html
John Seed interviews painter Domenic Cretara, whose work is on view at the Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara, CA through April 14, 2013.
Seed writes that Cretara is a "narrative painter who comes from the heart, Cretara's work fuses the personal with the theatrical, and channels emotions ranging from nostalgia to tenderness to indignation." Asked about his experience as a young painter traveling to Italy on a Fulbright, Cretara comments: "Confronting the work in person I felt that I was communicating directly with the artists, especially with Andrea del Sarto and Pontormo. There was no sense of childhood nostalgia at all. The formal, technical and content ideas were so interwoven, especially in their drawings, that all I could think of was, "I want to work with that level of complexity too." I analyzed, studied and asked the works questions unceasingly."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/64173/riffing-off-symmetry-a-conversation-with-susanna-coffey/
Jennifer Samet interviews painter Susanna Coffey.
Asked about the variety of subject matter in her work Coffey comments: "I am just moving through the range of genres – still life, figuration, and landscape... Most artists follow their work wherever it leads. They follow their muse or their duende... I’m like the most traditional person in the world, and I am really interested in the genres! I like that connection to the past that the traditional genres provide. People are moving away from tradition and the weight of history, and I’d rather bear that weight and feel it. Even though everything has been done, it hasn’t been done by me. And particularly for women artists, it is not a very long tradition. The culture in the United States is also not that old. So I don’t want to throw it off; I want to get engaged with history, and fight with it, and compete with it."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/63350/the-last-of-the-true-believers/
Thomas Micchelli writes about Paul Resika on the occasion of two concurrent shows: Resika: 8 + 8, 8 Paintings from 8 Decades at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects (through Feb 10) and Resika: 8 + 8, Eight Recent Works at Lori Bookstein Fine Art (through Feb 9).
Micchelli recals that as a student Resika taught him that "it is better to think of [past masters], from whatever century or continent, as tribal ancestors who may or may not approve of what you’re doing, but who would understand your struggles and failures because their experiences mirrored yours... Resika was trying to tell us: that familiarity would break down our preconceptions and cultivate a fertile relationship with the history of our art form... [He] is among the last of the true believers. He committed himself to painting before the idea of making a picture became clouded by irony, distancing and recycling. He had nothing but his talent and his passion, which he followed with an extreme single-mindedness, brooking no doubt about painting’s purpose and efficacy."
Link to Post:
http://gregcookland.com/journal/2013/01/04/bernard-chaets-far-horizon/
Greg Cook reviews the recent exhibition Bernard Chaet: A Life in Art at Alpha Gallery, Boston.
Cook writes that Chaet's "impasto buildup of paint recalls the cement-like clouds of Marsden Hartley’s raw, roughhewn late style, which he pioneered during summers at Gloucester in the 1930s. Chaet also seems to be channeling the vivid meaty textures of Boston Expressionist Hyman Bloom’s corpse paintings of the 1940s—work which influenced him when he was a young student in Boston. But Chaet’s colors are now filled with emotion, and effervescent."
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://elisabethcondon.blogspot.com/2012/08/susanna-coffey-studio-preview-alpha.html
Elisabeth Condon visits the studio of painter Susanna Coffey and blogs a photo preview of Coffey's paintings for an upcoming exhibition at Alpha Gallery in Boston.
Condon writes that Coffey's "paintings have changed radically, while retaining salient characteristics such as cropped portrait size, large scale seen close-to, subtle, but exciting color transitions and a 'knit-painting' mark that is a cross between a horizontal dab and flick of the brush. The paintings are on cradled panel, but the overall effect of the facture is a soft density, built layer upon layer to achieve a rich earthiness."
Link to Post:
http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2012/08/the-modern-art-notes-podcast-smee-auping/
Sabastian Smee and Michael Auping discuss artist Lucian Freud with Tyler Green.
Asked how American's might relate to Freud's work, Auping comments: "Freud doesn't follow a modernist narrative. American art really was the great tail end of the modernist narrative… Freud doesn't fit that narrative at all. He's working in a genre that's the most ancient genre, portraiture, and the Egyptians did portraits. So when Williem de Kooning is painting his Woman I and then moving from Woman I into abstract landscapes, Freud is looking at a book of Egyptian face paintings and carvings and then he's beginning to make these very realistic portraits of heads that partly come out of his interest in Egyptian portraiture, but also an intense interest in Durer, and Durer's sense of detail… So there's this odd combination of minimalism and intense realism..."
Lucian Freud: Portraits is on view at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas through October 28, 2012.
