Kimber Smith @ James Graham
Martin Bromirski blogs installation views of Kimber Smith: Paintings and Works on Paper on view at James Graham & Sons, New York through June 30, 2011. The gallery press release notes: "Smith was ahead of his time in his ability to consider the whole canvas with every brushstroke and his early use of large simple […]
Japanese Woodblock Prints
As rich as any painting: beautiful images of Japanese Woodblock prints from The Barry Rosensteel Japanese Print Collection at the University of Pittsburgh.
Late Spring: Leon Kossoff
Franklin Einspruch reviews the exhibition Leon Kossoff at Mitchell-Innes & Nash on view through June 18, 2011. Einspruch writes that Kossoff "[continues] to work in portraiture and landscape, with a brush loaded with oils as if they were tar, favoring a palette based on a sooty, British gray… [but]… one can see a brightening… a […]
Jasmine Justice
Interview with Istanbul-based painter Jasmine Justice. "I start with one color and intuitively disperse it onto the canvas or linen. These initial pigment accumulations are all different and usually very exciting to me, so I have started making laser jet print installation pieces out of photographs of them. But after I have shot them, the […]
Michael Voss: Interview
Aldrin Valdez interviews painter Michael Voss. Voss says of his work: "One key thing that I’m interested in is some form of simplicity… Simplicity is something that you approach, that’s fleeting, that moves. I’m very drawn to the moment when actually something simple starts to become complicated… I sometimes think of [my paintings], too, as […]
Joan Waltemath: Contingencies
Michelle Heinz reviews Joan Waltemath: Contingencies at Peregrine Program in Chicago which was on view from April 16 – May 15, 2011. Heinz writes: "While artistic experimentation has been a kind of tour-de-force, somewhere outside of painting, Waltemath has aggressively insisted that paint is still a frontier." In works from 2003-present Waltemath employs a wide […]
The New Casualists
Sharon Butler posts about "the open proposition in contemporary abstraction." She writes: "There is a studied, passive-aggressive incompleteness to much of the most interesting abstract work that painters are making today. But the subversion of closure isn't their only priority. They also harbor a broader concern with multiple forms of imperfection… The painters take a […]
Two Ways of Seeing
Considering the work of Edward Hopper and Fairfield Porter, Philip Koch looks at "…the difference between two of the main ways of seeing in painting- one can either move one's eye across the surface or plunge into the painting's depth."
Painted Places & Patronage
Transcript of painter David Novros' remarks at the Rothko Chapel, Houston, Texas on February 12, 2011. Novros' discusses the scarcity of place-specific painting and the necessary (and uncommon) patronage that brings places of painting into being. "John and Dominique [de Menil] created the circumstances and Rothko invented a magnificent painted place… Rothko (and his contemporaries, […]
Gustave Caillebotte: A Changing Paris
Susan Stamberg reports on painter Gustave Caillebotte's paintings of Napoleon III's 'modern' Paris. Unlike his contemporaries Stamberg reports that Caillebotte's paintings mourn the loss of the old Paris and the rise of the modern city. She also discusses Caillebotte's important role as a patron of impressionist painters including Monet and Renoir. His "art collection became […]
Shared Space
Eric Sutphin reviews the exhibitions Shared Space: Monique Ford and Susan Ross and Emily Berger: New Work at The Painting Center, New York on view through June 18, 2011. Of Ford's and Ross' paintings Sutphin writes that "an essential painterly impulse exists under the surface of each artist's work…" tying together Ross' geometry and Ford's […]
The New Organic: Ken Kelly
Joey Veltkamp profiles Seattle-based painter Ken Kelly. Kelly comments that the evocative potential in his newer work, constructed from discrete marks that cross the picture plane, interests him: "That, to me, is the point: the way in which basic, universal configurations of simple units can end up constructing, in a viewers mind, an incredible range […]
Jan Frank: Abstract Erotics
Adrian Dannatt reviews Jan Frank: Seven Months on view at Paul Kasmin Gallery until June 18, 2011. Dannatt writes: "Frank's 'line,' however serendipitous and inspired by the chance operations we know from John Cage, has an ease, an absolute rightness to it… These drawings are inspired by sessions with six different life models, and one […]
Fairfield Porter: Mystery & Reality
Larry Groff posts great links, images, and books related to painter/critic Fairfield Porter. Groff includes many quotes from Porter including: "When I paint, I think that what would satisfy me is to express what Bonnard said Renoir told him: make everything more beautiful. This partly means that a painting should contain a mystery, but not […]
Zhan Rui’s Abstraction
David Moxon posts about the exhibition Zhan Rui: The Stock Exchange, Weather, and Sex on view at Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing until June 19, 2011. Moxon notes that Rui's works initially appear related to the minimal spirituality of Ad Reinhardt (or perhpas Agnes Martin). However, as he quotes critic Sun Dongdong, "[Rui's paintings] do not belong […]
Erin O’Brien
Christopher Joy and Zachary Keeting video interview with painter Erin O'Brien. O'Brien discusses her painting process and the latent presence of narrative in her paintings.
Interview: Phoebe Unwin
Laura Bushell interviews painter Phoebe Unwin about her work, including a discussion (and images) of Unwin's sketchbooks. Unwin says: "They're somewhere where I start to work out particular combinations of form, colour, mark… very much a reference tool in that it's somewhere to refer to that feels really close to first instinct. But it's a […]
The Art of Simon Dinnerstein
Fantastic essay by Guy Davenport on the art of Simon Dinnerstein. Davenport writes: "Simon Dinnerstein’s Fulbright Triptych is so symmetrically a harmony and so richly a composite of genres (family portrait, still life, landscape, and a collage that amounts to a complex poem)…" Davenport continues, describing the transition from the northern european influenced works like […]
Among the Breakage: Providence
A preview of work in the exhibition Among the Breakage: New Painting from Providence which opens June 11, 2011 at the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University and continues through July 10, 2011. "Work in this exhibition ranges from hard-edged abstraction to hybrid figurative landscapes and techniques that stretch the very definition of painting." […]
Edith Park Truesdell
John Seed tells the little known story of Edith Park Truesdell (1888-1986) "a painter, a teacher, a writer and a poet." Truesdell, a contemporary of Georgia O'Keeffe, studied with Frank Weston Benson and Edmund C. Tarbell at the Boston Museum School in 1906. Her lifelong devotion to painting was an inspiration to her nephew San […]