Link to Post:
http://studiocritical.blogspot.com/2012/12/mary-addison-hackett.html
Valerie Brennan interviews painter Mary Addison Hackett about her work and process.
Hackett notes: "It can begin with a memory, an object, an observation, something I read. Anything, really. When I was working abstractly, I would mentally store all of this information and approach a canvas using process as my starting point. Now that I'm working more representationally the hardest part is choosing what to paint. After that gets decided, I'm freer to navigate off course, but I still like having a tangible thing nearby as a reference. I vary my approach to painting and don't think too much about how I'm going to paint something. The paintings are as much about the physical process of painting and the inherent possibilities within that process to generate meaning, as they are about what's depicted on the canvas. Much of my process involves trying to get something right and yet in the end I'm not concerned with correctness. Sometimes I think I've willed a painting into being."
Link to Post:
http://ayearofpositivethinking.com/2012/12/05/three-days-more-to-see-toxic-beauty/
Mira Schor reviews the exhibition Toxic Beauty: The Art of Frank Moore at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery and Fales Library, New York, on view through December 8, 2012.
Schor writes that "instead of accepting the narrative of the death of painting, [Moore] turned from performance/video to painting when the subject turned from life to death... Many of [Moore's] paintings have ambitious narrative programs, addressing complex and highly emotionally charged subjects, in particular the countless painful and dramatic aspects of the personal, cultural and medical struggle to deal with AIDS before the development of relatively successful drug protocols. The paintings are executed mostly in a mixed technique of oil and silkscreen on linen or canvas, mounted on wood or some sort of board, very carefully painted, with extremely smooth surfaces, fine lines, and a great attention to detail. The craft of the execution is essential to point out because it is so important to see these works in person, they yield only a fraction of their impact or meaning when they are experienced only as images."
Schor continues, vividly describing paintings such as Easter: "Blood seeps out of two slices into a loaf of bread and into the middle of a puddle of spilled heavy cream which has oozed out from an overturned cartoon. The red paint has been dropped into the pool of white paint to create a very careful Jackson Pollock in the shape of a Crown of Thorns. The Christ reference and the art reference are at the center of a still-life painting with an almost folk art sensibility: the dusting of flour on the loaf of bread is created with a kind of spray effect which is completely different in technical feel than the loaf, or the cream and blood spill. It’s a folk Zurbaran of the AIDS era."
Link to Post:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/30/arts/design/matisse-exhibition-at-the-metropolitan-museum-of-art.html
Roberta Smith previews the exhibition Matisse: In Search of True Painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on view from December 4, 2012 - March 17, 2013.
Smith writes that Matisse "communed with artists of the distant or not-so-distant past, from Giotto to Cézanne, and periodically brushed shoulders with Cubism and the work of his chief rival, Picasso. But his main desire was, as he put it, to 'push further and deeper into true painting.' This project was in every sense an excavation, and he achieved it partly by digging into his own work, revisiting certain scenes and subjects again and again and at times also making superficially similar if drastically divergent copies of his paintings. His rigorous yet unfettered evolution is the subject of [the exhibition], one of the most thrillingly instructive exhibitions about this painter, or painting in general, that you may ever see."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/60858/from-life-a-group-exhibition-organized-with-marshall-price-steven-harvey-fine-art-projects/
John Yau reviews the exhibition From Life at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, organized with Marshall Price, on view through December 23, 2012.
Yau writes that the show presents "11 paintings by artists committed to working from observation. Chronologically, the artists span five decades (or generations), with Lois Dodd and Lennart Anderson, born respectively in 1927 and 1928, being the oldest. The youngest include Gideon Bok, Anna Hostvedt, Sangram Majumdar and Cindy Tower, with Bok and Tower born in the 1960s, and Hostevedt and Majumdar born in the 1970s. The other artists are Susanna Coffey, Rackstraw Downes, Stanley Lewis, Catherine Murphy, and Sylvia Plimack Mangold, who were born between 1938 and 1949. Together, these artists — a number of whom have been influential teachers — suggest that observational painting is a vigorous, various, and imaginative enterprise that continues to fly under the radar."
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://paintingperceptions.com/point-of-view/giorgio-morandis-dust-new-documentary
Larry Groff posts trailers for a new film about Giorgio Morandi. La polvere di Morandi is directed by Mario Chemello, produced by Imago Orbis in association with the Museum of Modern Art of Bologna.
Morandi's Dust, which takes it's name from the artist's insistence that the bottles and jars he painted never be dusted, "focuses on the three most crucial locations of his art, to show us the secret places of his secluded life: his home-studio in via Fondazza (Bologna), recently restored and brought back to its original essence and finally open to the public; his monastic summer retreat on the hills of Grizzana (near Bologna) and ‘Museum‘ as an abstract space where his life becomes art."
Link to Post:
http://mwcapacity.wordpress.com/2012/11/10/color-country/
Christopher Lowrance posts about the exhibition Color Country featuring work by Tom Gregg, Daniel Reneau, and Anne Thompson at the University of Central Missouri's Gallery 115, on view through December 7, 2012.
Lowrance writes: "All three make work that considers the perception of color, and also the desire to define color, make it mean something certain and constant. The problem is, and this is what makes these three artists approach to color so interesting, is that it’s as impossible to define color, to make it mean something simple and absolute, as it is to look at color as optically constant. The problem becomes almost existential."
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://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.' '"
