Milton Resnick: 3 Poems
Poems and Poetics
Jerome Rothenberg writes about Milton Resnick’s poetry and posts three unpublished poems by the painter. Rothenberg also writes that “Resnick was a very visible & dynamic artist when we met him in the early 1960s, but beyond that he was also a persistent practitioner of poetry, less in a public sense than as a release […]
Susanna Coffey: In Conversation
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 […]
Thin & Thick: Mario Naves & Brett Baker
Sharon Butler blogs about exhibitions by Mario Naves and Brett Baker at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York, on view through February 2, 2013. Butler writes that Naves' "buoyant compositional strategies recall those of his earlier collages, but the smoothly painted, unified surfaces and saturated color of his new work evoke the Indian and Persian miniatures […]
Hassel Smith: Free Spirit
John Seed blogs about the painter Hassel Smith (1915-2007) on the occasion of an exhibition of Smith's work at Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco and the publication of a new monograph on the artist edited by Petra Giloy-Hirtz. Seed writes: "Smith first gained notice as a representational painter in the 1940s: his works from that period […]
Sabine Tress: Interview
An extended conversation between painters Phillip J. Mellen and Sabine Tress. Asked about her approach to painting Tress comments: "I just start and the paintings, they evolve through the painting process. I think that's the exciting bit about painting for me, you just start somewhere and see where it takes you. And that freedom to decide […]
Elusive Geometries: Don Voisine & Ken Greenleaf
Carl Belz blogs about formal connections in the works of painters Don Voisine and Ken Greenleaf. Belz writes: "As surely as images precede words, just as surely are formal issues bound to content, to enabling its articulation and earning its credibility, to testing and stretching its reach while acknowledging its limits and thereby tethering it […]
Rosso Fiorentino: Unmerry Prankster
John Haber muses on the enduring "strangeness" of Rosso Fiorentino's Holy Family with the Young Saint John the Baptist on view in the exhibition Fantasy and Invention: Rosso Fiorentino and Sixteenth-Century Florentine Drawing at The Morgan Library, New York, through February 3, 2013. Haber writes: "On loan from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, the […]
Michael Andrews: Human Significance
Ilaria Rosselli Del Turco profiles painter Michael Andrews (1928‑1995). In the introduction to an exhibition of Andrews' work at the Tate in 2001, Paul Moorhouse and Ben Tufnell wrote: "From the beginning of his career in the early 1950s, Andrews’s work was characterised by intensity of observation and exacting technical virtuosity. He described painting as […]
David Paulson: Inheritance & Potential
Review of the recent exhibition David Paulson: Recent Works at Jonathan Burden LLC, New York. "Although their limbs and features are distorted, there is a lingering feeling that Paulson’s figures are somehow distant descendants of Michaelangelo’s Lacöon or perhaps a baroque lineage that includes Rubens’ Prometheus. Indeed, Paulson seems to start with such influences and […]
Painting’s Iconophilia
Mark Stone argues that the image and the being it communicates is missing in contemporary abstract painting. Stone writes: "In the 21st Century the subject of our painting, especially abstraction, is not directed at the lives we live, or more specifically, at the world that we see and experience. Rather we abstract painters have been […]
Michael Aitken: In Studio
#FFFFFF Walls
Jonathan Chapline and Lorraine Nam visit the studio of painter Michael Aitken. Asked about his process Aitken remarks that "a lot of the paintings are begun intuitively. I’d say by about one third of the way in, I’ll make a move that decides the direction of the piece, and from there I’ll pull in imagery […]
Barbara Friedman: Interview
Mira Gerard conducts an extensive interview with painter Barbara Friedman about her work, process, and career. Commenting on her recent work Friedman remarks: "Lately, I’ve been setting up my portable easel and painting in museums, making pieces based on the paintings or sculptures there. So far I’ve worked in several museums: the Metropolitan, The Hispanic […]
Veronese in America
Ann Landi reviews the exhibition Paolo Veronese: A Master and His Workshop in Renaissance Venice at the Ringling Museum, Sarasota, Florida, on view through April 14, 2013. Landi writes that the "number of Veronese’s drawings and paintings in American collections… allowed [curator Virginia Brilliant] and her chief collaborator, Frederick Ilchman… to assemble a show that […]
Candida Alvarez: Interview
Caroline Picard interviews painter Candida Alvarez on the occasion of the exhibition Candida Alvarez: mambomountain at the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, on view through March 24, 2013. Alvarez comments: "I see in shapes. Colors are the building blocks. I have an archive of pictures, drawings, photographs, postcards, letters, and art history books that I […]
Paul Resika: Walking in Your Own Landscape
Kim Sloane reviews two concurrent exhibitions of work by painter Paul Resika: 8 Paintings from 8 Decades at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects (through February 10) and Eight Recent Paintings at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York (through February 9). Sloane writes that Resika's "relationship with the world of appearances shifts, sometimes closer, sometimes attenuated […]
Eric Elliott: In Studio
Amanda Manitach visits the studio of painter Eric Elliott whose exhibition Pairings is on view at James Harris Gallery, Seattle through February 16, 2013. Manitach writes that in Elliott's work paint is "slowly and painstakingly built up in daubs, nearly curls off the canvas like calcified petals, resembling the flora with which he is obsessed. […]
Svenja Deininger: One Second Balance
Caleb De Jong reviews the exhibition Svenja Deininger: One Second Balance at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, on view through February 16, 2013. De Jong writes that " Deininger is an artist who has taken the relatively small, in her case diminutive canvases of bars of color, white and grey shapes attended by errant marks […]
Erin Lawlor: Interview
Valerie Brennan interviews painter Erin Lawlor about her work and process. Lawlor comments: "One painting very much leads to another. There's a certain amount of background work that goes on before I get down to the nitty-gritty, so that takes the pressure off the starting point, helps the warming-up process. It's not that these don't […]
Inventing Abstraction: Soil & Air
A blog post asserting a true commonality shared by the artists included in Inventing Abstraction: 1910 – 1925 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on view through April 15, 2013. The show's "biggest achievement is that it brings together the main narratives of early twentieth-century Modernism while also casting light onto lesser known […]
Australian Aboriginal Bark Painting
Altoon Sultan blogs about bark paintings on view in the exhibition Crossing Cultures: the Owen and Wagner Collection of Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Art at the Hood Museum of Art, on view through March 10, 2013. Sultan writes: "The bark paintings are made by the indigenous peoples of Northern Australia, using natural pigments for their paints. […]