Two Artists Posing

Here we are in the cafe of SFMoMA in early November looking rather serious. Photo is by Hylla Evans

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Chris, though we've been e-mail regularly and blogging sporadically, you and I have met in person exactly three times. The first was in Philly at Gallery Siano in 2005 before we began our blog--and, indeed, that meeting was probably the catalyst for it (you had work in Vince Romaniello's show). The second was last November when I was in San Francisco, and the third was earlier this month, also in San Francisco, when you talked about writing/blogging/art to a group of artists from up and down the West Coast that I'd taken on a gallery tour earlier in the day.

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We are, virtual buddies in Cyberspace, but I like to think that in real life we have become actual friends. Good to see you again!

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I'm heading into a heavy period of travel and writing. I leave for Miami on December 5 to spend five days looking, photographing and taking notes. When I return I'll do another opus on the fairs, though with 24 venues at last count, I'm going to have to do some serious picking and choosing. I think two fairs a day will be my limit. I'll post the lead-ins here, with links to my blog, where you'll find the full text.




For our art bloggers reading this, I've co-organized (with Sharon Butler of Two Coats of Paint) Art Blogger Miami Beach, an opportunity to meet up in real time and space. There's no agenda other than to put names and faces together and talk a little shop. We're meeting in the lobby of Flow Fair on Friday morning, December 7, from 10:00 to 11:00. I'll take pictures and post a brief report, and if all goes well, who know, maybe we'll have a little conference in March during the Armory Fair in New York.

More Thoughts on Joseph Cornell, aka The Universe with 90-degree Angles

I saw this show, Navigating the Imagination, at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., where it was installed all summer, and recently at SFMoMA within days of when you saw it. To make an institutional comparison, I’d say that I liked the PEM installation better. The vitrines were contained in a sequence of rooms, which made sense for the work—boxes with boxes, as it were, rather in the larger SF gallery spaces. The light was lower in Salem, which made the work harder to see, but which underlined the mystery of his work (though of course the low lights were for archival protection).

Some of the conventional ideas about Cornell still ring true for me: his obsessiveness, the idea of his looking to the stars while working in his mother’s basement. And, of course there’s the delicious coincidence that his extraordinary miniature universes were made on Utopia Parkway—doesn’t that sound like a road to the heavens, or a terrestrial version of The Milky Way? (Except that Utopia Parkway is a busy street in Queens, and the house was a modest one-family, and his basement studio, judging from the pictures in the show, was cluttered and cramped.) I loved your reference to the Scrovegni Chapel, but I'm thinking his own home was the more mundane version of the big box.

Harry Roseman, Back of Cornell, 1971, above right; below, the house on Utopia Blvd. in Queens

As I’ve learned more about him from the show, he was only reclusive when it came to women. Otherwise, he regularly went out and about, at least in New York (apparently he never traveled much past the boroughs). He had a job in Manhattan, and he went to openings. He was also an avid collector of books and objects. (I loved the photograph in the show of his boxes of stuff. Such an organized obsessive!) Cornell was not only aware of the Surrealists, he did a collaborative work with Duchamp, who was an admirer of his work. Untrained in art though he may have been, he was no naif but I do think his work has a kind of naïve poetry.

Image from the Peabody Essex Museum site, a promotional collage of Cornell's work (Don't you love that? A collage of Cornell's assemblages and collages)

As someone who works with the grid as an organizing principle, I love that part of his work—the compartments, the repetition, the everything-in-its-place compositions (like his boxes of stuff). I find these compostions infinitely more compelling than the dioramas and what look like miniature stage sets. I’d like to think his work was meditative, but it could equally have been fraught with obsession. One thing was surely obsessive, and it gives me the creeps: his focus on certain women, whether movie stars, divas or dancers. There was a little too much of the voyeur for me in his female figures. Nowadays it’s the stuff of Law and Order: SVU.

But just as I’m getting creeped out, I walk to another vitrine and find a little box with a dancer backed by a chorus line of little plastic lobsters, wearing tutus. Dancing lobsters! The piece was made in about 1945, long before Pop sensibility roared into the zeitgeist. I saw those klutzy terpsichorean crustaceans and laughed out loud. Then I thought of Dali’s big, floppy lobster telphone. So we’re back to Surrealism.

Zizi Jean Marie Lobster Ballet Box," 1949, by Joseph Cornell

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And then there are the pieces with watchsprings, lovely little spirals stretching out like miniatire galaxies, metaphors for space and time, and graphically just beautiful to look at. So we’re spiraling back into poetry.

The poetry is also there in the boxes with the soapbubble pipes, and the marbles and glass balls. Material, tangible objects suggesting the ephemeral. Because my studio is around the corner from the PEM, I visited the show half a dozen times, allowing myself to wander in the half light. That was probably the best part of the show for me, the repeated, extended viewing of the work, seeing it not objectively or reportorially, but emotionally—which is why this post is more stream of consciousness than what I normally write.

This sounds corny, but there is a magical quality to it the work. You get the sense that Cornell kind of disappeared into his little creations, like Alice down the rabbit hole. I imagine his mind as having little compartments, some lined in velvet, others stacked like drawers with little knobs, each filled with all kinds of marvelous or marvellously mundane things, or little stage sets with theatrical vignettes. Maybe there was another little door that opened onto the stars. Now that's a Surrealist image. Or maybe the universe was indeed in minature and existed inside a box in his head.

From Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York. This piece has a flat box that opens under the main diorama, the heavens contained just like those marbles in the little glasses

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OK, back to reality. One thing I found horrifying was the materials he used—an object lesson, if ever there was one, for artists unconcerned with archival issues. You saw the photograph of his materials. Yikes, kiddie art supplies! I guess this is where the naif part comes in. School paste, cheap tempera and brushes. In another vitrine there was a photograph of one of the boxes showing how it has once looked, with a brilliant an Yves-Klein-blue interior; the actual piece had faded to gray.

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The show was curated by PEM chief curator Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, who was the former director of the Joseph Cornell Study Center at the Smithsonian Institution, where the exhibition originated. It caps an extended reprise for Cornell, who died in 1972.

Pace Gallery (on 57th Street, before the "Wildenstein" was added) did a major show of his work in the mid 90s. Then this past May, just as the Cornell show opened at the PEM, Pavel Zoubok did a small but lovely show of the artist's work in his 23rd Street gallery . Considering that so few of Cornell's works must be for sale, Zoubok had a surprising number of very good works. And no doubt there have been other small Cornell shows in between.

Above and below: Joseph Cornell at the Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York City, in May

But back to Cornell. This Smithsonian-to-Salem-to-SFMoMA show is the big one, 35 years after his death. So in addition to poetry, magic, and dreams, this show is, in its way, about reincarnation.

Thoughts on Joseph Cornell

Hey Joanne- so, as we agreed while sitting in the SFMoMA cafe last Friday, we're going to talk about Joseph Cornell, since Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination is now there.

Here is an excerpt from a piece I just wrote, SFMoMA: Cornell, Wall, Eliasson, that is at my place, and is also now posted on the brand new group blog focusing on Bay Area art: Bay Area ArtQuake.

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Thoughts on Joseph Cornell
I thought I knew Cornell's work pretty well, the collages and boxes and films and drawers full of photographs and ephemera, but I was wrong.  Of course there is the myth about him as the obsessive naif, and I suppose I bought into that. But this exhibition shows him as an artist with extreme focus and clarity of vision, and the nerve and chops to realize his vision.

While Cornell's focus and vision might initially seem narrow, they were not simple; this work is complex in ways I don't think I can understand.  It's mysterious, and layered, and cinematic.  I think there is something in much of his images that is about capturing the feeling of singular moments in film- a moment or person of beauty, a certain juxtaposition, a movement, some kind of grandeur, something that happens in one moment in a film and then is gone; sitting in a dark theater watching moving images of projected light is thrilling, but certain moments in this medium can feel magical.  I think Cornell was after that magic.

That, and backyard astronomy, which is another kind of camera and cinematic experience. And celebrity worship, another kind of star gazing, And also the theater of the Peeping Tom or voyeur. And something that might look to us like nostalgia, but which was in Cornell's time the objects and images from his childhood, and from the generation just prior to him. These probably aren't original ideas on my part; they're probably in the literature, but Cornell's art definitely works in these many areas, as you can see for yourself.

Think of the Scrovegni Chapel, which is really one big box, and looking up at the ceiling, which is a deep cobalt blue above littered with gold stars, and substitute Lauren Bacall for Mary, and you're drifting towards Cornell.

It is a huge, impressive show, a bit of a landmark.  The biggest surprise for me was seeing the skill with with Cornell made things.  Components of some of the boxes are quite finely crafted, and there are collages that show genuine sophistication in terms of how color from different pieces are combined, how texture is laid next to another, how line and edge are used.  This formal kind of stuff is something I did not expect to be bowled over by. He knew what he was doing.

The low light in the galleries combined with the amount of work can tire the observer, so plan your visit: at first, you might quickly walk through the show; next walk back through and carefully see the first half the show; after that, take a break at a cafe; finally, go see the rest of the show.  Take your time-- it's worth it.

"The Geometry of Hope"

I'm alive and well, Chris, just trying to find daylight here under this pile of work. First, congratulations on your show at Root Division. The work looks fabulous and in the picture you posted you look--dare I say it?--pleased. I hope that's the case. We need to take full pleasure in the exhibitions we work so hard to create.
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One of my ongoing pleasures is discovering so much in the art world that I never learned in art school. Discovering Latin American art and artists has been one of those pleasures. I fully intend to write about The Geometry of Hope, Latin American Abstract Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection that's at NYU's Grey Gallery until December 8. This show is not news to you, as you posted an image on September 15--that of Juan Mele's prism-like shaped canvas, with a link to the Roberta Smith review in the New York Times.

Until I can put any serious thoughts down, let me post two images from the show:

Gego: Reticularea Cuadrada 71/11 (the catalog translates the title as "Square Reticularea"), 1971; metal, copper and stainless steel, app 80 x 55 x 22 inches

This piece, above, is a dimensional drawing of articulated metal and wire--you can call it sculpture if you wish--by the Venezuelan-by-way-of-Germany, Gego (aka Gertrud Goldschmidt), who was the subject of a fabulous solo show at the Drawing Center last June. The shadow, so integral to the work, brings full dimensionality to a relief hanging.

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Ideia Visivel (Visible Idea), 1956, acrylic on masonite, 23.5 x 23.5 inches

This image is of an easel-size paintingby the Brazilian painter Waldemar Cordeiro. The geometry is based on the Golden Rectangle, an element that shows up in other works as well.
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The gallery was extremely touch about photography. When I went to photograph, the student sitting the gallery all but seized my little camera. Something about the artists not wanting the images reproduced. Yet I notice they had no problem using the artists' work for cards and posters, plastering type all over the images. Hmmm.
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More on this show soon. Meanwhile, fresh from a tour of the Boneyard--er, the Chelsea Galleries--I posted a report on my blog about the preponderance of shows with skulls and bones. I've called it Skeleton Crew. Take a look.
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And one other thing: If you're wondering why I've been so infernally busy, I've become the director of the Second Annual Encaustic Conference, a national event (which I conceived last year) that takes place at Montserrat College of Art just north of Boston. I've been securing speakers and maintaining the blog. Again, if you have a moment, take a look.
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And there's that other thing I do. Um, um. Oh, yes, painting.

At Root Division

At Root Division opening, Saturday, September 8. Photo by Raymond Yee. See work in the show.

Good stuff at the Brooklyn Rail

I'm really heartened by three articles currently at the Brooklyn Rail that focus on artists who had their moment in the 70's, kept working, and now at this time are getting back into the spotlight- it's a little bit of history being rewritten, and also points to some possible shifts away from an emphasis on youth, gratuitously "adventurous" or "cutting edge" art, and the quick buck. Even though I am a generation or more behind these artists, I really identify with a lot of what's being talked about here- when I started as an art student this is work I saw in recently past issues of magazines, and this information has always been down inside of me, almost hibernating, but present. Some of the social/political things Whitten and Kass talk about are stuff I think about a lot in regards to my own development and outlook, and my art. I particularly like that these three articles all represent different groups- a black man, a woman, and an artist who left NY to make his work. Also, all three of these artists have or have had shows in NY right now. Finally, there is a look at Clyfford Still in Denver.

1. Interview with Jack Whitten
   

   Whitten: By 1970 I was seeing a lot of Henry Geldzahler, who was a great supporter of my work at that time. He would come to the studio and we would talk a lot about the grid; the grid being a kind of, as he put in a little essay he wrote for me once, “aspect of civilization.” In my own way, I was introduced to it by my afro-comb. That’s where it started.
   
   Rail: So that’s when you began to use your comb as a painting tool?
   
   Whitten: Yes. First I used the afro-comb with a couple of paintings, and then I began to recognize a pattern. That’s when I wanted more control, so I started making the device myself. The afro-comb became a big carpenter saw. In fact, MoMA has one from 1978.

Now showing at Alexander Gray.

2. THE SEVENTIES by Deborah Kass
   

   When I saw Elizabeth’s (Murray) show at Paula Cooper the earth moved, because a seismic change was occurring in my life as I stood there looking. I had been oblivious to feminism, I was entirely and erotically male identified. But looking at her paintings, I realized that for the first time the subject, which I previously and unconsciously assumed to be male, had changed. I recognized what was traditional in her painting—traditional as I had come to understand it through my sojourns to MoMA and at college, a New York School, Cezanne-through-Stella thinking. This painting was clearly coming from there, but with a different point of view and speaking in a different voice about something else altogether. The subject was female. And I mean subject as we defined it in the 80’s and 90’s. The speaking subject, the specific subject. The subject with agency.

   
   Now showing at Paul Kasmin.


3. TRACKS: Peter Young: An Unlikely Artist by Ben La Rocco
   

   If the “art star” status enjoyed by a few is the brass ring, it is a dangerous standard because of the unlikelihood of attaining it and because of its lack of correlation with the development of richer ideas in the arts.

   
   Young's PS1 show reviewed was reviewed a few weeks back in the NYT.


4. Also, more about Still in Denver by James Kalm, and his video tour below.

Juan Melé: Marco recortado n.º 2

I think this is fascinating:



Juan Melé
Marco recortado n.º 2 [Irregular Frame No. 2], 1946
Oil on masonite, 27 15/16 x 18 1/8 x 1 in.
Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, 1997.102

“The Geometry of Hope: Latin American Abstract Art From the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection,” at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University; reviewed by Robert Smith, NY Times:

Our notions of the origins of shaped paintings are readjusted by “Irregular Frame No. 2,” a distorted grid in shades of green, blue, rust and yellow made startlingly early, as these things go, by the Argentine artist Juan Melé in 1946. In this flamboyant little work geometry turns blunt, in advance of Minimalism, and cartoonishly savvy, in advance (and somewhat contradictorily) of the abstract painter Elizabeth Murray.

The Computer Ate my Blog

Chris,
You have been a model of conscientious posting on this blog. I have not. Well, not recently, anyway. (I hope my long piece on New York's Extended Minimal Moment last fall will keep me as a collaborating blogger in good standing.)

For here, let me note a couple of things that involve us singly or jointly:
.Congratulations on your show at Root Division in San Francisco. This has been a great summer of shows for you! I hope you'll post some installation pics here.
. This follows group shows you'be been in around the country, including Philadelphia and Atlanta. How did they go?
. Apropos of Atlanta, boo-hoo, the show that I curated that you're in, Luxe, Calme et Volupte, is now down. The gallery website still has the great online catalog of the show. And my blog account of the show will remain up for the forseeable future.
. The Richard Serra show is coming out your way soon. I hope we can dialog about that. I had quite a lot to say on my own blog--two posts worth.
. And, of course, a new season is just starting up. Things should be interesting in NY and elsewhere. I'll be in Chicago this weekend, so perhaps I'll have something to say from there. I trust you'll make your usual rounds in SF.
. I had a good spring, with solos in Scottsdale and New York --with two reviews in NY and sales all around. (That breeze you feel is me still exhaling.)

Now, about that title. The computer DID eat my blog. I'd been wanting to clean up the font mess on my pages--all those default pinks and blues (who chooses those colors, anyway?)--and streamline it. Not being even remotely conversant with HTML, I took advantage of Blogger's new features. I even saved the code for my blogroll--my one stab at cyber intelligence. Well, while the sidebar type and the font colors look quite snappy, if I say so myself, the leading between the lines of text was all mooshed together, as if it had been put under pressure. Clearly it was (and is) a code thing, but I'm at a loss to rectify it in any kind of conventional way.

So I spent today--Labor Day, appropriately--toiling paragraph by paragraph, to set things right. There were some good paragraphs. I found that if I imported them (and their embedded code) into posts with mooshed text and then introduced the mooshed text into it, somehow, miraculously, the leading between the lines would be restored. I've been at it all day. I think I should have it mostly fixed by tomorrow.

Then I should be more up for a real post here, one with pictures. And how was your Labor Day?

Matisse @ SFMoMA

One more post, while I'm on a roll: Ann and I were at SFMoMA on Saturday and saw Matisse: Painter as Sculptor for the second time. Boy, what a great show, in so many ways: focuses on the lesser-known side of a great one; a really strong selection of work; installed over several galleries with lots of room between clusters of work so there is a feeling of time, of breathing, of space; lots of little gems one would never have the chance to see.

Like the drawing below, about 8 x 10 inches, a quick ink drawing. I'm really taken with this: it's a head, a mountain, a crystal. In a few quick strokes, c. 1900, Matisse makes a captivating little world.

This terrible photo was taken quickly of a page in the catalog: in the little book shop adjacent to the exhibition, when no one was around, I opened the book, took out my camera, walked up to the register and said to the young hipster behind the counter, "If I took a picture of this page would you have to stop me?" He looked around nervously, and said, "Well, uh... I'll just walk over here," and went to straighten up gift cards or mugs or something. I took a couple of quick snaps, quickly put my camera away, and waved him a thanks. It's a lousy picture, but you get the idea:

Storr and Nozkowski & de Keyser

You said: "...did you notice that all the examples he (Storr) gave in the Brooklyn Rail interview (including Nauman and Baldassari, Ryman, and Angelo Filomeno) are of the male persuasion? One exception: Louise Bourgeois—and jeez, she had to work into her 70s before anyone took notice. I know, this is another topic, but it’s all connected, isn’t it?"

I say: Yeah, I kinda sorta noticed, but didn't pay it too much mind, which, you know, uh, is kinda sorta just the way, uh, well, male privilege, or something. I notice things like that, but they don't always snag me. Sometimes do, sometimes don't. The artists Storr talks about are a narrow slice of names in the Bienalle, and these particular names are artists who have been important to him for a long time, are ones that he personally relates to. Not defending, necessarily, just think it was the slice of conversation. I do know that the actual roster for the Biennale includes way more than a handful of women, though I can't make an accurate head count because there are many names about which I can't be certain if they are male or female.

Peter Schjeldahl wrote in The New Yorker, "He (Storr) rose to prominence in New York in the nineteen-eighties as a critic championing artists at eccentric or challenging angles to fashionable taste, many of them women—notably Louise Bourgeois, Nancy Spero, Susan Rothenberg, and Elizabeth Murray—along with Bruce Nauman, Robert Ryman, Gerhard Richter, and Ilya and Emilia Kabakov."

You said: "By the way, I appreciate Storr’s comments about Nozkowski and De Keyser. Nozkowski is one of my favorite painters."

I say: Ditto. I am a big fan of Nozkowski & de Keyser. Such a big fan that they both deserve to have images included here:

Top: Thomas Nozkowski, UNTITLED (8-67), 2005, oil on linen on panel, 22 x 28 inches Framed , 55.9 x 71.1 cm
Bottom: Raoul de Keyser, Retour 11, 1999, 43,0 x 60,0 cm, oil on canvas

Clyfford Still @ SFMoMA

Oh happy day! SFMoMA has finally rotated the paintings in the Clyfford Still gallery! The red one is a really interesting painting- it looks so fresh, and has a less rugged, knifey surface than a typical mid-50's Still. And the one on the right really works like a Newman, maybe even more Newman-y than Newman.

By the way, photography is forbidden at this museum, unless the guards aren't positioned properly.

Art & the Brain

Joanne, thanks for your answer about curating.

You talked about how curating uses another part of your brain, the more linear thinking part, the more rational, critical, perhaps even objective process. Though curating does involve an emotional side, as well, one does need to be able to step back and even justify one's reaction, significantly because, I think, as the curator you make choices for other viewers, and you want to support some theme, argument, narrative, etc. The personal investment is different- unlike your own work, you are external to the work of others, and know it less intimately. At the same time, as the curator there's all kinds of logistics to be aware of- deadlines, who's in and out, an essay, when it will hang, how it will hang.

I was curious to know if the curatorial work in any way enables you look at your own work with another eye, or does it do the opposite?

This somewhat reminds me: as you know, I've done a lot of writing about art, and I've done a fair amount of talking and writing about my own work, too, but I always find it so much easier to talk about the art of others. I carry this continual conversation and explanation in my head about my own art, but I've never wanted to reduce it to an elevator pitch, though I can see the benefits of doing so.

Just recently I had to talk about my work with a gallery director, and I went in with all of the words in my head ready to go. But strangely, once there, I found myself pretty inarticulate, as if I'd forgotten all of the things I wanted to say about my work. It wasn't nerves, and it wasn't because I wasn't prepared. There was a feeling of not wanting to explain and give my work away- I could describe it, describe the process, state the facts, but at the moment in the conversation where I was supposed to say, "My work is about..." my brain kind of shut down, I knew it was shutting down, and I felt myself resisting the idea of working to explain. I think I didn't want to give it away, I didn't want it encapsulated. Fortunately, the director already had a feel for the work, and was saying lots of what I might say- not all, but plenty. It was relief. And it had a happy ending. I'll be in a group show in San Francisco in September at Root Division.

A: Curating for a Painter is Like Cross Training

You ask: Has your recent curating experience prompted any ideas or feelings about your own art that reinforces or challenges what you're doing?

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The simple answer is that curating (as with writing) gives me an opportunity to think about art in ways that I don’t think about, or address, when I’m in the studio. It’s like sculpture—thinking and working three dimensionally instead of on a flat surface.

Does curating challenge what I’m doing in the studio? No, but it does challenge me to think about art using a different part of my brain.

When I’m painting initially, the work kind of flows out, and it’s only after the fact that I stand back and look at it and think about it in a critical way. Then there’s a conversation between the intuitive and the rational that continues—sort of a creative alternating current—as a work or works come to completion. (I often work on several paintings at the same time.)

In the studio, above: I don't get this rational until the right brain has run some miles and the work is underway

Curating, on the other hand, is a much more rational enterprise. I have to be moved in some intuitive, emotional, maybe visceral way by an artist’s work, but I do a lot more linear, left-brain thinking about how a particular work it fits into a curatorial theme.

In the gallery, above and below: I start out with the left brain in high gear. The work has to fit into, indeed expand, the theme--which in "Luxe, Calme et Volupte" is visual pleasure: beauty (of sumptuousness, order and sensuality). Above: Tim McFarlane, Rainer Gross, Robert Sagerman. Below: Julie Gross, you, Maureen Mullarkey. The marble sculptures on the floor are by Julia Venske and Gregor Spanle. Exhibition at the Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta (through August 25)

As an artist I paint primarily in encaustic. I love the medium, to the point that using feels as if it’s just flowing out of my hand. But I’m interested in other mediums and other modes of expression. And I’m interested in other artists’ work besides mine. Curating a show that’s not medium specific, but rather, about a theme—beauty, in the case of Luxe, Calme et Volupte—is a way to explore the ideas and artists whose work interests me.

So I guess curating, for me, is like cross training.

You also ask: Related to this, I'm wondering if there is other work you're messing around with in your studio? ... You recently mentioned getting a lot of nice heavy paper. What's cooking?

May I take a raincheck on this question? As you know, I had a very busy spring with the "Luxe, Calme et Volupte" show. And I also organized the first National Conference of Encaustic Painting at Montserrat College of Art. (Many people were involved in the conference, of course, but I conceived it and developed the panels and themes.) I hadn’t intended to take on two large projects at the same time, but life has a different sense of timing than my own. I also did some teaching and a lot of traveling (my blog is part travelog, part critical writing, part self promotion). Oh, and did I mention two solo shows?

So to be honest there’s not much in my studio at the moment. There is a lot of paper—gorgeous 300 lb, hot-press Fabriano that’s just waiting to become a series of gouache grids and another series of graphite grids (graphite powder suspended in alcohol that gets painted as if it were watercolor). But at the moment I’m recuperating from all that activity earlier in the year. I will answer this question visually as soon as I have some new work to show you—which will be soon.

Question for you: What's in your studio right now?

More on the Collector-Driven Market

Chris, I’m glad you brought up this topic here.

The Dow passed the 14000 mark today (though it closed slightly lower). There’s a lot of money out there right now. Sure, there are plenty of rich boors who are gobbling up anything they think will give them prestige, but there are many thoughtful collectors as well. Perhaps these latter aren’t driving the market, but they keep things chugging along as they acquire work from emerging and midlevel artists.

In my post on Edward Winkleman’s blog, I said that a rising tide raises all boats. Not everyone agreed with me—the usual assortment of whiners said, basically, that because it wasn't happening for them, it wasn’t happening— but I’ll say it again here: There are more collectors than ever before. Those collectors, at all levels, have created a market that accommodates more galleries than ever before, which in turn has paved the way for more artists to show and sell than ever before. Say what you will about the art fairs—and there’s plenty yet to be said (I just reserved my flight and room for Miami in December)—they have given mid level dealers and artists a way to have international exposure and sales. Tide, yo.

Money may trump knowledge in the category of paintings-for-over-50-million-Alex, but there's still a fair amount of intelligence and integrity down here on terra firma where most artists and dealers work. As a midcareer artist who earns a living from the sale of my art, I am living proof that a rising tide raises boats.

By the way, I appreciate Storr’s comments about Nozkowski and De Keyser. Nozkowski is one of my favorite painters. But did you notice that all the examples he gave in the Brooklyn Rail interview (including Nauman and Baldassari, Ryman, and Angelo Filomeno) are of the male persuasion? One exception: Louise Bourgeois—and jeez, she had to work into her 70s before anyone took notice. I know, this is another topic, but it’s all connected, isn’t it?

I am working on a response to your question, but I had to weigh in on this topic.

The problem with a collector-driven market/The kind of careers that kids think of now

Just posting, won't comment much now, except I think about this, the two sides of the coin that follow. Joanne, I know you saw the first quote because you commented elsewhere. I'll follow up the first quote with a second comment that struck me:

From the Art Newspaper: The problem with a collector-driven market, by Jane Kallir

For the past century or so, the art world has been supported by four principal pillars: artists, collectors, dealers and the art-historical establishment (critics, academics, and curators). From a wider historical perspective, the latter two entities are relative newcomers... Over the long term, art-historical value is determined by consensus among all four art-world pillars. When any one of the four entities assume disproportionate power, there is a danger that this entity’s personal preferences will cloud everyone’s short-term judgement. Put bluntly, the danger of a collector-driven art world is that money will trump knowledge.

From an interview of Robert Storr by Irving Sandler about the Venice Bienalle in the latest Brooklyn Rail:

I’ll tell you by the way, there are two artists in this show who I identify with quite a lot. One is Raoul De Keyser and the other is Tom Nozkowski. Both of them worked for very long periods of time, Tom as a magazine layout designer, Raoul as the educational official in a small Flemish-speaking town in Belgium. They just kept making their work, so they’re here in part as my idea of how another way of being an artist turns out. Raoul is 76, Tom is 60; they are real artists and they have never had the kind of careers that kids think of now. For that matter, neither did alot of the others. Bruce Nauman had a moment in the ‘60s and early ’70s, and then it went away and it was rough until the early 1980s. Richter had a moment in the ‘60s and then he was not doing so well. A lot of artists like John Baldassari that young artists look up to actually had very checkered careers.

Q for you

Q for you: Has your recent curating experience prompted any ideas or feelings about your own art that reinforces or challenges what you're doing?

Related to this, I'm wondering if there is other work you're messing around with in your studio that hasn't seen the light of day yet? You've shown a lot lately, your website is fairly current, but is there other work happening besides more recent series like Uttar, Vicolo, Mudra, and Silk Road? Last year you painted Quadrate 1, acrylic on canvas- that's a bit of a diversion from the encaustic work. You recently mentioned getting a lot of nice heavy paper. What's cooking?

A: an hour goes by really quickly!

You say, “You mentioned in an e-mail note that there were so many other things you wish you'd said in the interview but that the interview hour had run out. What are some of those things? Links and images welcome.”

The list of interviews is at The Art World Podcast, or download the mp3.

Thanks for asking, Joanne. Eva did her homework, and she asked lots of good questions. We had met in Portland, and she came to the opening and saw the show. We deliberately did not talk about my art in-person so that the interview would not sound like a kind of call and response retread. I was excited about doing the interview, but at the same time apprehensive, worrying that I wouldn’t represent myself well.

Some of the questions I had anticipated, some I hadn’t. There were some specific things I wanted to talk about in order to better get at what I think my work is about, but I was surprised at how quickly the hour went by, and by how I didn’t get around to these topics.

One of my concerns was that we not talk about the HTML work as a novelty medium. I wanted to talk about the images, the content behind the images, and the possible meanings of the more conceptual aspects of the work. I’d wanted to talk about the performance-like aspect of making and exhibiting an image daily, but didn’t. I’m afraid that we did not actually get around to discussing the images, although I did talk about how images are found, not just made. I’ve encountered this tendency in some to think that working on the computer is not actually a creative process (not that Eva thought that) and I wanted to be more clear about that. It was just one of many things that somehow I didn’t bring up because of the flow of conversation.

Eva did ask about influences of Malevich and Ellsworth Kelly. I kind of accepted the Malevich connection, but ultimately feel it’s a superficial comparison. And I quickly dismissed the Kelly connection, so much so that a friend of mine commented about it, thinking that I was maybe dismissing Kelly’s work, which was not my intention. Related to this, I also wanted to talk about how I don't think of this work, or any of my work, as geometric art.

I wanted to be more clear about why working in series is important to this work, and how when I show these images as objects (for example, Jukebox, shown both at Chambers and Marcia Wood) it is the collection of images that is the work, not the single images. I wanted to move the discussion towards this by discussing some other artists. Here is who I wanted to mention:

I wanted to talk about my visit to the Scrovegni Chapel in 1980 to see Giotto’s frescoes. I recently told a friend how it has been a turning point for me (and he said, well, it was a turning point for all of Western art) not only because of the frescoes themselves, which are magnificent in every sense of the word, but for the overall conception: the entire inside walls and ceilings of the chapel are covered in frescoes of scenes of the life of Christ and other decorative panels. Being in the chapel is to be inside a complete and total environment, a work of art working on many levels, from narrative to genre to design to decoration, with landscape, portrait, still life, trompe l’oeil, and fantasy. The form in the compositions is very architectural, and also very abstract. There is consistency and rhythm and rhyming among the images. It is incredibly ambitious and integrated. I have carried the memory of this visit with me for twenty seven years. Not that I have wanted to paint in the same way, but what I’ve wanted to make is a body of work that can have some kind of impact similar to the chapel. I wouldn’t compare my work to Giotto, but I think that the larger borders of my project—an image a day, everyday, in themes, for a particular environment, an attention to form and color, images with strong abstract quality sometimes bordering on representation, a sense of visual narrative—this may be as close as I’ve ever got in my own work to some of that ambition.

In a more modern vein, I wanted to mention Jacob Lawrence’s well known series of paintings The Migration Series, The Frederick Douglass Series, and Harriet Tubman Series of 1938-40. All of these are tempera on quite small panels (in the 12 x 18 inch range). Although he is painting representationally the abstract qualities of the images are inventive and strong. He takes on very specific subjects that are of interest to him because of his background, stories that are unlikely to be told in this format by anyone else- this is ambitious, like Giotto, and to see these series is to be immersed in his graphic, intimate world. I wanted to particularly mention Lawrence not only because he has influenced me, but also because in the world of abstract painting that you and I traffic in he is a very unlikely influence. Yet I didn’t give him his due in the interview, even though I wrote a note to myself to do so.

There are a few other specific works by artists that I wanted to mention to emphasis even more this idea of an artwork that is expanded into a series, or where many small units make a larger single artwork. These include:

Jennifer Bartlet’s Rhapsody, composed of 987 painted steel panels, each 12 x 12 inches, which occupies 153 running feet of wall space and “reads like a piece of music or poem in a carefully planned rhythm and repetition of images (ref) (ref).”

Thomas Nozkowski and Judy Linn ‘s An Autobiography, "a series of abstract paintings and photographs based on geographic regions along the Hudson River… the twenty works in An Autobiography reflect important experiences and memories in Nozkowski's life. Each painting is defined by a different five-mile increment of the valley. The artist recalls: ‘Everything that I hold important to my life has happened along a hundred-mile stretch of the Hudson River valley. For each painting I would try to find visual images from my memories and in the physical reality of the place.’
After finishing the series, Nozkowski invited Judy Linn to interpret the region in photography. Working without having seen the paintings, Linn's photographs are also defined by the same five-mile increments (ref).

I also would’ve talked about Sol Lewitt more, and mentioned Mary Heilmann and Raoul de Keyser. I wanted to talk about my own work, of course, but also to talk about these artists as a way of opening up a larger conversation about how images are used to make meaning, how the notion of a single painting or drawing or print as the work is limiting to me, and how I am really interested in visual narratives, a way that viewers create and tell themselves non-literate, non-linear stories or meanings in response to what they see. Some of that telling is even nonverbal- we do it through gesture, through the body, by recalled memory, by internal sound prompted by form, color, or movement. It’s a complicated thing, something I haven’t been able to adequately explain, and it was all too much to talk about in one hour.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Images top to bottom:

• Giotto frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, Italy
• Jacob Lawrence's Harriet Tubman series No. 10, 1939-40, Casein tempera on gessoed hardboard, Hampton University Art Museum, Hampton, Virginia (ref).
  
• Jennifer Bartlett's Rhapsody, 1975-76. Enamel on steel, 987 plates, Each plate 12 x 12" (30.4 x 30.4 cm); overall approximately 7' 6" x 153' (228.6 x 4663.4 cm). MoMA, New York. Gift of Edward R. Broida (ref).
• Thomas Nozkowski Untitled, 1994 (7-55). Oil on Linen on Panel, 16 x 20 inches, from An Autobiography (ref).

Q & A

Chris, I'm glad our conversation is picking up. I follow your shows on line and enjoyed the interview with Eva Lake. In the interests of actually conversing, I'm going to propose that we do a bit more back and forth online--like what we do in our e-mails--except somewhat more formal and focused.

So let me start with a question to you:

You mentioned in an e-mail note that there were so many other things you wish you'd said in the interview but that the interview hour had run out. What are some of those things? Links and images welcome.

And when you've finished responding, ax me anything.

Let's ease back in here...

After an unexpected hiatus of several months, let's ease back in here. This is the kind of thing that, if you let go for a bit, creeps up on you- a little bit of time goes by, and then a little more, and before you know it a bunch of little times has become a big chunk of time and you've got an abandoned house. So here we are, back to sweep out the cobwebs.

A lot has happened in the past six months. For me, art-wise, it went like this:

2007
• Jan: Across the Borderline at Univ. of Dayton with Douglas Witmer
• Feb: AltGeo, curated by Douglas at Green Line Art Projects in Philadelphia
• May: Five Pieces, a small solo show at Green Line, still hanging
• June: WYSIWYG, solo at Chambers Gallery, now hanging, Portland
• June: Luxe, Calme et Volupte at Marcia Wood, Atlanta, curated by you, still hanging

Not to forget my radio interview with Eva Lake.

And that's just the first half of the year.

Plus, I'm also beginning working with a new gallery in Ireland, Haydn Shaughnessy Gallery: "Artists who use new technology to create powerful, compelling and collectible new imagery."

And you, Joanne, have a whole ton of stuff that's happened so far this year, and that will be happening the rest of the year.

So we're busy, and even busier than just the list above appears, because making the work, and making the connections, and getting the work to the place it will be shown, and maybe traveling there too, well, there's a whole lot going on behind the scenes to make it all happen.

But so far, 2007 is not a bad year.

During the past six months I have been mostly preoccupied with figuring how I want to print and show the HTML images. I hit on a small solution for now- small prints hung in grids. That exploratory work isn't over- still a lot more to be done. It could get bigger, stronger, shinier, more finished, and more expensive. I'm not sure where it's going. I'm also trying to find my way back into painting after this period.

I'm a little stunned by the Shapiro turquoise piece you show in the last post- I use that color, the gradation, the pyramid motif- I thought it was my image for a bit. It's a little hard for me to believe that this painting was made in the sixties- the imagery and color seems so much a part of computer monitor, the flickering screen, the backlit luminosity, that I have to ask- where did this come from? Do you have any other info?

We've Got to Talk!

We’ve gone from Two Artists Not Talking to Two Artists Totally Out of Communcation. This has happened for the best of reasons—we’ve both been busy with shows—but I’d like to see if we can get the converstional ball rolling again. These pictures from Babe Shapiro may do it.

Babe and I showed together last November, with Nancy Manter, at DM Contemporary in Mill Neck, New York, and we’ve been in occasional e-contact since then. Babe has a veteran painter who has journeyed from hard-edge abstraction to a more organic imagery. When he saw images of your work in Luxe Calme et Volupte, he send a few images with this note: "Chris Ashley's inkjet prints remind me of the paintings I showed at the Stable Gallery in the 1960's and on. For the hell of it, I've attached a few jpegs of some of my work from that period. The images…are a hint of a body of work I spent about 15 years on."

I think you'll find them interesting, not only for Babe's imagery but for the connections between your geometry and his--over time, distance and mediums. I've also included a shot of your installation from Luxe, Calme et Volupte. I haven't edited the entire installation yet, but at least you get a peek at your work.

Babe Shapiro: Beg Your Pardon, 1977, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 48 inches, above; Abaxial, 1979, acrylic on canvas, 18 x 18 inches, below

Chris Ashley: Installation view of Jukebox 1-28, inkjet on paper, with CD views of 365 days of HTML drawings. Foreground: Julie Gross Two One Punch, oil on canvas (partial view) and a Smurf marble sculpture by Venske & Spanle

Back in the Conversation

Before Two Artists Talking becomes a dim memory, I’d like to pump some air into it. You did a wonderful job last time with your two posts, Chris—on the Miami art fairs and Gee’s Bend Quilts--and I've been too swamped to respond. But it is my turn, so let me crank up the compressor.

Both topics still have relevance for me.

Gee’s Bend Quilts
I saw that wonderful show at the Whitney several years ago. The first time I saw it was on a weekend, and there were too many people—a good thing that many people went to see the show, a bad thing that they were all standing in my line of sight—so I returned during the week to see the show at a less crowded time. The work is extraordinary. Unlike the precisely cut Amish quilts, whose quilt stitching often features marvelously intricate patterns—a subtle yet stunning counterpoint to the geometric abstraction of their design—the Gee’s Bend quilts are more rough hewn. For a formalist like myself who thinks about process and precision, these quilts took some getting used to. That is, I loved them viscerally the moment I saw them, but it took my brain a bit longer to embrace the imprecision.

This comment of yours struck me:
The quilts were intended to be part of everyday life. The quilters and their families are the primary, original audience, and the primary users. There seems to be no gap between the maker, the intended object and its use, and people who use it. This wholeness is also unique because these quilters defied tradition by not settling into historical patterns, but instead used their eyes to compose and make, working by hand and responding immediately to their materials, learning from and working in the company of each other, day after day over the years. It's remarkable to see how these objects, made for a specific use in a particular place, can now function as powerful art objects for a much larger, more diverse audience.

So true. This is true of jazz, the blues—well, all indigenous music pretty much anywhere—as well other indigenous forms of expression: storytelling, wood carving, “native” crafts such as weaving, pottery and basketmaking, isn’t it?

There’s a town in Alaska, Nunuvit—funny name; sounds like “none of it”—where something like 90% of the inhabitants earn their living as artists. They make carved stone figures of animals that sell for thousands of dollars to a worldwide clientele. And having just returned from the Southwest, there’s no end to the creative expression there.

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I’m not sure where “native”—or naïve—leaves off and a commercial intent takes over, or if one can remain native/naïve and commercial, but it will be interesting to see how success changes the Gee’s Bend quilters, because they are certainly meeting with success. Their work has begun appearing in high-end art galleries, see below. (Looking at Native American creative expression, I guess I’d say that there’s plenty made with integrity and tradition, and an equal amount made for the tourist trade.)

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From the Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle: Annie May Young, Bars, 2003, quilted fabric, 88 x 73 inches; $24,000

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Anyway, I am certain of this: had it not been for the way feminism stretched the boundaries of art (embracing traditional craft elements, for instance), we would not likely be seeing the Gee’s Bend quilts at the Whitney or at SFMoma. At the American Craft Museum, sure, but not at these other institutions.

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Feminism is on my mind because there are a number of shows in New York that are up right now, plus the big “WACK!” show in Los Angeles, all marking the 40th anniversary of Feminist Art. (I’m writing about some of them in my own blog. The F-Word , Part 1 and Part 2 are posted now, and I'm going back occasionally to add more as I get new information and find or receive additional pictures.)

Can we talk about the geometric abstraction issue? I disagree with you that the quilts and painting are two different issues. I think that’s an artificial division. True one comes out of life and the other out of art school, but the initial impulses spring from the same source.

The Art Fairs
Though you wrote your comments about the Miami fairs that took place the second week in December, the topic remains relevant as the fairs continue. I went to the Armory Fair on Pier 94 a few weeks ago, as well as the satellites that have sprung up around it: Scope (under a tent in Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park); Pulse (in the original Armory building on Lexington—site of the 1913 Nude-Descending-A-Staircase Armory show); Red Dot (a new Fair at the Park South Hotel around the corner from Pulse); and a few others.

Not all the art fairs are extravaganzas of size and price. At the Red Dot Fair in New York in February, each gallery had a room in the Park South Hotel. This is the room for Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Larchmont. My two small paintings are in the corner. It's hard work for the dealers, but for visitors like myself it's a great opportunity to see art from galleries around the world, meet friends and, often, get to meet the collector who acquires my work.

When some artists talk about the fairs they use works like “crass commercialism” and “stratospheric prices.” Well, yes, at one end of the spectrum this is true. But price and hype create interest in a market that can then expand to contain smaller galleries that show and sell the work of regular workaday studio artists—and ideally expand a bit more to include other artists seeking commercial representation. We tend to forget that galleries, like artists, come in all levels and degrees of financial success. So while the market may be overblown, that expansion has made room for many of as at far less stratospheric levels.

I appreciate your point about the “album” experience of listing to music, but art fairs are not meant to be albums. They’re not even meant to be an Ipod experience, which is essentially solitary. They’re a mixtape—a raucous jumble with everyone on the dance floor.

Miami-me-me-me

Joanne, all your writing about Miami over at your place got you some traffic, didn't it?

Over the past few weeks I've been in email dialog with several people about artfairism, and I feel a little out of gas about it now. A lot of the conversation was about is this good or bad. My feeling is that it is simply the inevitable movement of all things (everything, even church, school, and politics) towards entertainment and shopping- consumerism. It's a new kind of market and, if it lasts, will encourage and produce a different kind of artist, one aiming to either outright please or shock in a not too threatening way, who makes work that isn't too taxing intellectually or visually of the consumer, er, I mean, viewer. Meanwhile, I'll be back at the ranch here making horse shoes.

But there's this: despite my distaste of large crowds, ambivalence towards the dominance of beautiful people, and objection to siutations in which the art doesn't come first, if a gallery wanted to take my work to an art fair, could I say no, I don't believe in it?

We probably know the answer. And I like to think I'm a person of principles.

Here are a couple of other thoughts related to art fairs and bienalles and the tendency of art towards what I think is global entertainment:

In Alan Light's book review of Exile on Main Street: A Season in Hell With the Rolling Stones by Robert Greenfield, there's an idea in here about a modern medium that is disappearing which I think is worth considering in thinking about art's place and function:

The album is dying. As a format of recorded music, the album — LP, CD, record, disc, platter, licorice pizza, whatever — has been tossed aside by file sharing and the iPod. Tower Records, rest in peace. For better or worse, pop music has effectively returned to the days before the Beatles arrived, when everything was strictly one single at a time.

I value the album experience, perhaps sometimes more than I value the song. And then, in addition to that, I value the artist's series of albums, the corpus of the work. Analagously, I value the gallery or museum experience and art's place in it, the body of work, a context that art fairs take art out of. I like bodies of work exhibited together, and I like the history of an artist's work built up through exhibitions over the years, that becomes the artist's public corpus of work (and we typically only get a true view of the entire corpus when we have a chance later to see works that perhaps were never exhibited- I'm thinking of Picasso's sketchbooks; more recently, I'm thinking of a book I've been looking at of Twombly drawings spanning fifty years, works mostly in his own collection). Perhaps my tendency, towards bodies of work at specific times, and the overall corpus, is now old-fashioned, bricks-and-mortar thinking. Galleries considering not having exhibition space and being exclusively art fair galleries are shifting art out of the exhibition, body-of-work model towards something new and different. Whether or not I like it, it's happening. What does this mean for one's work, or how it is perceived?

Secondly, globalism and outsourcing and world markets are here and inevitable. Of course, this is not about leveling the playing field or equitably distributing wealth and resources; mostly it is about the bottom line, profit. For galleries, participation in art fairs seems to me more focus on the bottom line, not on the art. Also, what gets lost in globalism is regionalism and difference; the art world seems very happy to give this up. Sure, art from China, India, Argentina and Serbia might look different, but there is also a tendency towards sameness in terms of subjects, size, materials, and the ways it is handled and shown, whether in large bienalle halls or art fair stalls.

My inclination is towards regional albumism and corpusism. Towards the Gee's Bend model- make your work, learn from it, repeat, innovate, over time. If you're lucky, and with a little hard work, it will find its place and audience.

Gee's Bend Quilts

I hope that every artist who complains about their day job and how little time they have to make art saw the Gee's Bend quilts that have been travelling around the US the last three years. And then I hope that all those complaining artists just shut up. Like me. I've had my comeuppance.

Probably enough has been said about the quilts already, and anyone with half a finger on the pulse of the art world knows about it. The press release says, "Organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, with the Tinwood Alliance, Atlanta, the exhibition has been on a three-year, coast-to-coast, twelve-venue tour since its premiere in Houston in the fall of 2003." I saw the show at the de Young a few weeks ago. It closes today. I believe this the final venue. I have to thank Mel Prest for mentioning it to me several times.

Now, here are some people who I would think have good reason to complain about their day jobs. Farmers and fieldworkers, raising families in poverty, geographically cut off from opportunity and resources- who has time to be creative? And yet their faith in family, God, hard work, and consistent and continual making resulted in beautiful and very moving objects that have shifted from functional bedcovers to concrete, visual, transcendent objects that are innovative testaments to the handmade and communal.

I found this show tremendously moving, not only because of the circumstances in which they were made. For a museum exhibition, it's not enough to be moved by these circumstances. Certainly, art objects made in a difficult situation can tell us valuable things about the people and their times, but for the object to be aesthetically powerful requires something more. And it seems the women of Gee's Bend found that.

Of course, I was moved by the story of how these quilts were made, and I was especially moved that the quilts are made in spite of a day's work, often in the company of others. I found it especially interesting that a functional product- something so functional in the circumstances in which it was used that it could even barely be called craft- which implies hobby and decoration- could be elevated to art object. This is part of what I found both humbling and inspiring.

But there's more. These quilts are truly handmade- hand cut, handstitched- and while many utilize various traditional patterns, these often have little twists and interruptions in them, while many others eschew pattern and have a feel of improvised compostion, more modern collage than historical symmetric structure. Up close you can see the stitches, the fabric frayed by washing and use. But stand back, and they feel composed by a commanding and experienced eye capable of setting up rhythm and contrast, tension and surprise.

I often read press releases for exhibitions in which So-and-so's art plays with some crap notion of this assumption or that received idea or another that questions and challenges our assumptions about this or that miniscule thing that results in a paradigm shift to some other imagined nothing. Geez, they're pretentious and cliched at the same time.

But in the Gee's Bend show here are some genuine questions about where art comes from, how it's made and for whom, who makes it, art's origins and place in daily life. That's powerful stuff, and there is a real challenge to our assumptions. This show does it in broad daylight with no theoretical sleight of hand, and with a mimimum of contextual and historical knowledge required. It's just so plainly and visibly beautiful and bold. It makes me want to say lame predictable things like "celebration of the spirit," and "triumph over adversity."

It's too obvious a connection to talk about the quilts in relation to geometric abstraction- they're just different animals with a different purpose. In fact, I think it's a waste of time to make a competition between the quilts and painting. They are about different things, and anyone with a pair of eyes knows that immediately. I see these as closest to Korean wrapping cloths called bojagi, which are also made using fabric scraps.

The closest art connection I keep making is to Rauschenberg, and his reuse of materials, especially fabric. Compostionally, feeling-wise, there seems to be something shared in how things are arranged, a sensitivity to color and pattern, to the use of found materials. I'm thinking not only of Rauschbenerg's combines, but also his cardboard pieces.

But even still, this is a fruitless comparison. I really brought up Rauschenberg to make another point. There is his famous quote, "Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.)" I think that for the Gee's Bend quilters that gap doesn't exist at all. There is no split. The quilts and their making are part of a greater whole- the lives of their makers. This seems unusual to me these days. It is especially unusual for art, which often seems disconnected from life's dailyness. Partly, it is unique, I think, because of the medium itself- fabric and thread, which are ordinary and domestic materials that anyone is familiar with- and because these quilts are originally functional objects; most contemorary art does not have these origins. The quilts were intended to be part of everyday life. The quilters and their families are the primary, original audience, and the primary users. There seems to be no gap between the maker, the intended object and its use, and people who use it. This wholeness is also unique because these quilters defied tradition by not settling into historical patterns, but instead used their eyes to compose and make, working by hand and responding immediately to their materials, learning from and working in the company of each other, day after day over the years. It's remarkable to see how these objects, made for a specific use in a particular place, can now function as powerful art objects for a much larger, more diverse audience.

Miami: My Report, Your Musings

Chris, I look forward to your comments about the Gee's Bend Quilts, Ruth Asawa's sculpture and Joan Mitchell's painting, but given that there's been a lot of blog talk about the arts fairs in Miami last week--including your own perceptive observation on Edward Winkleman's site and an e-mail we shared last light--I wonder if you wouldn't mind detouring briefly to the fairs. Just to recap our conversation, you commented about the lack of critical coverage of the artwork in the fair, and you wondered about the long-term effect these fairs will have on artists' careers, as well as how the fairs affect an artist's day-to-day artmaking. These are interesting issues. Would you talk about them a bit for our blog?

One of the things that interested/scared/shocked me is that I heard several dealers say they were thinking about closing their galleries, or moving to much smaller quarters, and using the fairs as their primary art-selling venues. This presupposes they can get into the fairs they want to be in (there's a lot of competition for booths, and for every dealer who gets into the venue of her/his choice, there are probably two or three others who don't). Actually, a few dealers are already going this route. There's one Parisian dealer, Vanessa Suchar, who bills herself "la galleriste sans galerie"--the gallerist without a gallery--and there's a Washington dealer who works out of an office but who has strong visibility at the fairs. What does THAT mean for us as artists?

I've posted below an excerpt from the Miami coverage on my blog so that our readers can click on and get a sense of the event.

Imagine Costco on steroids and filled with art. Now throw in a carnival atmosphere, tradeshow commercialism, museum reverence, fashion attitude, and the frenzy of Filene’s Basement when the bridal gowns go on sale. Add sublimely beautiful contemporary paintings, modern masters from the secondary market (like Ad Reinhart from his pre-somber period in three booths), big-ass sculpture, inventive installations, cartoon imagery, and some rice and beans (I’m not kidding). And, hey, why not include the oversize figure of a man performing a physically impossible scatological function? Like the blind men describing an elephant, no one perception comes close to describing this event but together they create a pretty good picture of this behemoth of a show.

Lucia Madriz: Money Talks, floor installation of rice and beans, dimensions variable, at Jacob Karpio Galeria in Art Basel Miami Beach. Below: birdseye view of ABMB at the Convention Center.

And when you've had enough of this Miami talk, I'm all ears about Gee's Bend, Asawa and Mitchell. I won't bring up Miami again. Until next year.

Speaking in Tongues

Jeepers, Joanne, that last post was a doozy. Of course, I am looking forward with great anticipation to the Marden show coming to SFMoMA in February. I have the catalog, and when I look at the listing of pieces in the catalog certain works are specified as NY, SF, or Berlin only, and a large number of works will be in SF exclusively, so it looks like it will be larger show here. I hope there are lots of drawings, and I would prefer an installation that mixes the paintings and drawings rather than separating them, as the NY installation does.

I expect that the Marden show will be on the fourth floor, where we saw the Kiefer show together. Those galleries had some walls removed for the Matthew Barney show this past summer (pfft!), so there is wide open space and long walls, which serve the Kiefers currently there so well, and I presume will serve Marden well, too.

Thinking back to the Kiefer show, Heaven and Earth, I keep bouncing off of Twombly and Serra. Part of it is color (narrow), and part of it is size (large) and scale (large things feeling intimate, large things feeling human). With Serra the connection is very much about material and about the plane- Serra's flat weathered surfaces (real and natural) and actual physical spaces, and Kiefer's painted crumbling surfaces (representation and artifice) and depicted deep spaces- there is a similar operation of providing the viewer a space, locating the body, Serra like architecture, Kiefer as illusion.

With Twombly there is a color and material connection, but the most immediate is a use of history, story, narrative, and poetic language, and Kiefer connects with that. In each of these three artists there is a grandeur and ambition. The space they fill is cultural, social, political. It is interesting that Serra's corner splash of thrown lead was revealed in the company of Kiefer, and it's a shame the museum didn't take the opportunity to hang nearby the majestic, juvenile, rich, pre-literate, architectural, "speaking-in-tongues"1 blackboard-like surface with white-scrawled-loops Twombly that it acquired in 2000 and has not shown in two or three years2 (see a bad JPEG).

I also think that it is a terrible shame that SFMoMA has not made what I think is an obvious connection between the Kiefers and the many Clyfford Stills that it owns. The current directorship and curators seem to have no interest in the nearly thirty paintings that Still himself gave to the museum. It's a missed opportunity. There is an analogous ambition and poetic subject, though different pictorial and strategic approach, between these two artists. Both painters' surfaces make for a tactile, shallow painted space, but pictoriallly there is a deeper space. Still's geologic, landscapish images- wall faces, canyons, empty areas- engage the viewer in ways similar to Kiefer's images, by acknowledging the viewer outside the painting's plane and allowing a space for the viewer on either side of this inside/outside boundary, even though Still's images are unpopulated, and Kiefer relies on artifacts of humans- architecture, plowed fields, historical contextualiztion of the world through human-constructed systems. Anyway, history overlaps, and the museum snoozes, and it's a lost opportunity to draw connections between artists from different periods with different approaches, different images, and, at least outwardly, apparently different intentions.

I expected to feel oppressed by Kiefer's dense, knotty surfaces, very limited color, and the excessive use of single point perspective. Instead, I was wowed. This is a terrific show.

On this same fourth floor the wonderful Eva Hesse retrospective showed in 2002, and I think it has to have been one of the smartest, most moving, and surprising exhibitions at SFMoMA since its move to the new building. It was amazing to follow Hesse's innovations and development, to see how inventive she was in developing a unique language and use of materials, and how she redefined, clarified, and expanded the possiblities of sculpture. Amazingly, I think she was a rare combination of classic form (say, Henry Moore's biology and archaeology), process (Giacometti's construction and Arp's happenstance), and conceptual (Duchamp's notion of the found and decision). Her accomplishmnet is especially amazing when considering that she did it before dying in 1970 at age 34(!); the pace at which she worked, the development she accomplished, and the impact of her work, is akin to Van Gogh.

In the coming days I want to talk about three things I (Ann and I) saw at the de Young last Saturday: the Gee's Bend quilts, Ruth Asawa, and five Joan Mitchell paintings from her estate on loan hanging in the large open lobby. What an afternoon that was!

I titled this post "speaking in tongues" simply because I needed a title and in this entire post that might be the most unexpected bit in talking about art. But I also think there is an aspect of glossolalia to art that I welcome- it's exuberant and ecstatic, spontaneous and inspired, it doesn't or rarely makes sense although it does stand for or mean something, it's in reponse to something external made internal, it's unique and unplanned, it's in the moment, though it can occur again, and it happens within a tradition, history, or framework.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

[1] I say "speaking in tongues" because, as it's well known, of course, much of Twombly's line wobbles back and forth between writing and drawing, and many of the blackboard paintings with rows of white looping lines can be seen as pre-literate or emerging-reader writing, where the writer is using the conventions of writing- connected figures in uniform rows- but hasn't yet learned the alphabet and the symbol system of writing to represent words. Not that Twombly is pre-literate, but his "writing" is more connected to the pre-verbal, or non-verbal experience of full-on visual perception. The "speaking in tongues" reference is alluding to the question of what Twombly's "writing" might sound like. Looking at a row of loops in one of the classic Twombly's might read it literally as "oh oh oh oh oh...," or phonetically as "oooooooh," or physically as "ai yi yi yi yi," or "wow wow wow wow wow...," or "er er er er er...," or some other repetitive sound that is evoked in guttural response to the physical experience resulting from visually following the loops of Twombly's marks. The SFMoMA Twombly is full of dense, overlaid scrawls that make a different sound, perhaps one like white noise.

[2] From the San Francisco Chronicle, February 1, 2000:

Twombly's "Untitled, 1971" is the first work in SFMOMA's collection by this major American painter. It's one of the artist's classic ``blackboard'' paintings, composed of swirling white and gray scribbles and graffiti-like gestures on a field of black. The painting, which has a seven-figure price tag, was purchased from the artist's private collection with money from an anonymous Bay Area donor. Made with oil-based house paint, wax and crayon on canvas, the work is one the largest by Twombly, 72, who lives in Italy.

"The acquisition of this exceptional Cy Twombly painting fills a major gap in the museum's collection of postwar abstract art," said SFMOMA director David Ross.

New York's (Extended) Minimal Moment

Chris,
It seems we've both put "Two Artists Talking" on the back burner this past month. But finally--after much travel and a number of group shows, which you can read about in my own blog--I'm back. Before I jump into my topic, I want to say how much I enjoyed meeting up with you in San Francisco on November 9. Next time, one of us should take a camera to record the event, don't you think?

Manhattan is enjoying an extended minimal moment this fall. Although it’s been over half a century since reductive work made its first appearance, Minimalism’s "Greatest Hits" (and some current favorites) have been, and are, playing all over town. Is there something in the ether that has provoked a spate of related shows at the same time? Or, as in fashion, is it simply a cycle whose time has come round again? Whatever the reason, there has been a lot of Minimalism to see—and this is not an oxymoron.

Eva Hesse: Sculpture
Eva Hesse’s long-overdue retrospective, Eva Hesse: Sculpture, curated by Elizabeth Sussman and installed at the Jewish Museum this summer (May 12-September 17), seems to have been the catalyst.

Installation view of Eva Hesse: Sculpture at the Jewish Museum, New York City, May 12-September 17, 2006

The Jewish Museum, located on Fifth Avenue’s Museum Mile, is no MoMA—there’s just one large U-shaped gallery and the ceiling is too low. Still, this was the institution that made a commitment to showing Hesse’s oeuvre after the Whitney backed out a few years ago. I was grateful to see this work in one place. As an art student in the late sixties, I remember seeing Hesse’s work around town and periodically after that at MoMA until the work’s fragility required it to be archivally sequestered. Here, it’s everything I remember and more. (And by the way, this is the same museum that hosted the Joan Synder retrospective last spring. Kudos to this museum for looking beyond the Pale Penis People—apologies, Chris, no disrespect to you personally; I’m using Robert Hughes’s phrase).

Eva Hesse: Repetition Nineteen III, cast resin, 1968

Hesse, as you well know, used non-beautiful materials—modest conventional stuff like twine and rope; industrial stuff like fiberglass; and at-the-time archivally untried stuff, like latex and resins—to effect her reductive and repetitive, and largely translucent, forms. Hesse’s great works are here: the 19 cast fiberglass vessels of Repetition Nineteen III (1968) in curatorially organized disarray; the protuberant grid of Schema (1967-1968); the multiple box-like segments of Sans II (1968); the stuffed latex and canvas panels of Aught (1968); the wall-like curtain of Expanded Expansion (1968); the latex-dipped sheets of Contingent (1969) and more.

Eva Hesse: Aught, stuffed latex and canvas, 1968

Eva Hesse: Sans II, cast resin, shown in a segment, top, and in full installation, 1968; (segments have gone to various institutions and private collectors)

Eva Hesse: Schema, cast latex with movable elements,1967-1968. The hemispherical elements look as if they were cast from a handball. Their placement is ordered but not perfect, and each element rests unattached on the flat latex surface. This is a floor sculpture; you can see it in the tiny installation picture above

Eva Hesse: Contingent, 1969

Perhaps because she intentionally left the trace of her process, including imperfect shapes and the impression of her own fingertips, her sculpture is as maximal as Minimalism can be—formally reductive but still resonating with Hesse-ian energy. Am I anthropomorphizing her work? Maybe. But her process—the dipping, casting, rolling, stitching, knotting, repeating; low-tech construction and the evidence of her hand—is so much a part of her work that it’s impossible not to “see” her still in the work.

Many of her two dimensional works and some of her sculptures have a decided textile reference. Her four-part Aught--latex on the front, canvas on the back and stuffed with some kind of textural material--reads not only as sculpture but as blankets or quilts. The latex and fiberglass sheets in Contingent hang like, well, sheets, though Hesse herself said something like, "It’s really a painting hung in another material than a painting." Hesse worked early in her career as a textile designer, and that might account for the way she connected her particular dots—her use of thread, twine and rope; the sheets of latex--or it may be my own background (I am the granddaughter of tailors) that sees those connections.

One thing I can tell you for sure is that time has not been kind to the sculptures. Conceptually they are as strong as they always were, but structurally they are old before their time, the latex having become yellow and brittle with age. See the difference between Expanded Expansion when it was first made in 1968 and more recently. (The paintings and works on paper appear to have aged better.)

Hesse standing in front of Expanded Expansion in 1968 or sometime in the late 60s, above; a more recent shot of the work, which has yellowed (and become brittle) over time

While the work has aged, Hesse will always be pictured as a round-faced woman in her early 30s. The exhibition includes black-and-white--and voiceless--Super-8 footage from that time showing her working in her studio. Hesse never lived long enough to grow old. Born in 1936 in Hamburg, she died of a brain tumor in New York in 1970 at the age of 34. (It comes as of a shock to realize she would have been 70 this year.)

The show is over, but the museum has produced a catalog, Eva Hesse: Sculpture, and there are a number of additional good books on the artist.

Elemental Form

Working our way geographically down Fifth Avenue, we come to Elemental Form, an impressive survey from the Sixties and Seventies at L&M Arts, up through December 9. L&M Arts is located in a 19th century (I’m guessing) townhouse in the East Seventies. For this show it's a something of a "Dia: Upper East Side." Hesse is here, as is Agnes Martin, Jo Baer (three women out of the 22 artists), and the usual suspects: Andre, Judd, LeWitt, Mangold, Marden, Sandback, Serra, Stella, Ryman and others.

There are 38 works by these 22 artists installed on two floors. The work represents everything we have come to expect of Minimalism and of these artists, in particular a reference to the grid, reductive imagery, and the repetitive elements within it. Sandback's sculpture is reduced to the simplest of lines (in blue)—two straight, two curved--defining a volumetric arc in space.

To see reductive work in what was built as a home with attention to architectural detail is at once distracting and compelling. The arabesque banister of a curving staircase, visible behind a line of four small Agnes Martin grids, brings those grids into graphic regimentation—until you go up close and see her pencil measuring marks and a slight tremulousness of line. I liked those changing relationships; it’s something you don’t see in a conventional white-box gallery. And maybe it’s because of the reductiveness of the work, but I started to see echoes of those forms in the architectural details of the gallery. The pinstripes in Stella’s T-shirt-shaped painting (Luis Miguel Dominguin II, 1960; how else do I describe that shape?) followed the form of the canvas: the notch at the "neck," the extension of the "sleeve". The echo was in the cornice moulding around the large doorway between rooms. Did the curators see that when they were installing? It was distracting, but maybe I'm just making an obsessive connection, in which case, never mind. But this is kind of funny: the HVAC grills and registers, all grids and clean horizontal slits, have never looked so of a piece within any other installation I can recall.

There’s not a lot on the gallery’s website, but the PDF press release includes images by Brice Marden, Dan Flavin and Sol LeWitt. The PDF format didn’t allow me to cut and paste the images, so check them out for yourself at www.lmgallery.com

Better still, there’s a catalog, "Elemental Form," with an essay ("Sufficiency") by Robert Storr. Contact the gallery for price and mailing specifics. (mbray@lmgallery.com)

Minimalism: On and Off Paper

A few blocks farther downtown at Vivian Horan Fine Arts was another show, Minimalism: On and Off Paper, in another townhouse, with many of the same players. The focus here was on paper, in a salon-style installation, and there were four new artists included: Richard Tuttle, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Morris and Anne Truitt (yes, I’m counting; she’s only the fourth woman in a group of over two dozen). Truitt’s sculpture, Twilight Fold, a 72 by 12 by 12" column in light sage green, uninflected by any markings, was a welcome addition to the exhibition, not only because of the sex of its maker but because of the way it held the space, a sentinel of structure and dimensionality surrounded by the multitude of two-dimensional work.

As for the work on paper, I particularly liked a grouping of LeWitt, Hesse, Martin and Mangold hanging cheek by jowl. I’m at a loss to talk more about this work because of the lack of images to show you (there was no catalog, and the gallery has only an Artnet website, and work from this show was not on it). The show ran through November 17.

I can tell you that while there I ran into my friend Marietta Hoferer, a contemporary Minimalist, who makes coolly elegant white-on-white work with strapping tape on paper. Here, take a look.

Marietta Hoferer: White 7 (detail), white artists' tape, pencil on paper; full size is 38 by 38", 2004. Hoferer's show, Fieldwork, is at the Kentler International Drawing space in Brooklyn through December 16. For more information: www.kentlergallery.com

Brice Marden: A Retrospective of Paintings and Drawings

Now we take a leap 40 blocks farther down Fifth Avenue to arrive at the Museum of Modern Art and Brice Marden’s retrospective. You wouldn’t describe his recent work—those gloriously complex skeins and tangles—as minimal, but his early monochrome panels in oil and wax are as divinely reductive as an Om.

I’m going to focus on his early paintings, the monochrome wax paintings, because the later ones are not the focus of this entry. The wax-and-oil paintings are sublimely beautiful—subtle, chromatically deep—compelling you quietly but forcefully into the experience of seeing. Part of what makes them so compelling is their materiality. They are richly substantive, but the color is flat. Simultaneously you're seeing into them and looking at their surface. The tension of surface and depth keeps you traveling visually on and within the picture plane. (This is true of his later work as well, so although the image changes, the formal intent seems rather of a piece.)

For those of you who have a specific interest in encaustic, these paintings are not encaustic. Marden himself has said in a technical statement, "…oil remains the primary binder as opposed to encaustic where the wax is the binder." The early work was done in this combination of mediums because Marden wanted a uniform flatness. "That’s the reason I started using wax, to get a flat surface so you could read the colors specifically," he tells Michael Duffy, Moma’s Conservator, in Plane Image, the catalog to the show.

What I like about these paintings—the earthy dun of Nebraska, the sky-and-water referents in The Grove series, for instance—is that they are distilled to the essence of things. Again, I’m at a loss here, because I can’t access the MoMA website (does anyone else have this problem?) and so it’s pointless to talk about specific works without being able to show them. But I can show you one, which I gleaned from elsewhere (and which in reproduction is nowhere as beautifully blue/gray/green as the original):

Brice Marden: Grove Group IV, oil and beeswax on canvas; two panels, overall 72" by 9', 1976

As for the drippy edge at the bottom—which seems like such an honest way to deal with layers of paint on a surface (something I like in Marioni’s work, too)—I pulled this anecdote from a recent interview with Jeffrey Weiss (an art historian and head curator of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery of Art) in the October Brooklyn Rail, the complete text of which you can access here: http://brooklynrail.org/2006-10/art/brice-marden

"Jasper [Johns] had this penthouse/studio way up on the West Side. I remember asking him about the drips on the bottom of his paintings: ‘How come you do that?’ And he said, ‘Well, you know, you get near the bottom and you’re bending over, and you get a little tired and… It was a very Jasper kind of answer. I was very impressed by that so I, in my own way, try to allow the drips shown at the bottom of my paintings and they really were influenced by him."

Now that "they’re-not-encaustic" is out of the way, I will tell you what I gleaned from the audio tape in terms of his using wax to make these paintings--and if you go, get the tape, because you hear the artist talking about his work. (Also, you can get an artist’s annual membership for $25, a good deal considering that the one-time entry is $20. It’s not widely publicized, but if you show up with something to prove you’re an artist—an exhibition announcement or the like—you’ll get the lower-price membership.)

Marden used an old refrierator door as his palette, on which he had a hot plate with double boilers. In a coffee can he had a mixture of one part beeswax with four parts turpentine (I’m not advocating hot turpentine, just reporting). As he worked, he’d dip his brush into the molten wax mix and then into the paint and apply it to the canvas. Once the canvas was covered, he went back over it with a small cooking spatula "to basically erase he brush." He added, "It’s a very handmade surface."

Looking closeup, I can see that the wax-and-oil surface (which, unlike encaustic, was never particularly stable because it was neither wax-based nor oil-based, but an odd hybrid of the two) reveals its vulnerability and age in a couple of unsettling ways. There are scuffs and gouges, and a few instances it appears that an elbow or round-edge object has hit the canvas, creating concentric hairline cracks. But if you look at a Mondrian you'll see hairline cracks too. Perhaps, as with Hesse's work, we need to accept (within reason) the effects of time and handling.

Though I’m not talking here about the work that comes next, I urge you to see it. Those carefully meandering lines with their ghostly pentimenti—some markings smack up against the picture plane, others deep within it—merit deep looking of their own.

The newest work at the end of the show is a rather simplified version of these tangles: two six-part paintings, each about seven by twenty-four feet, that use the Roy G. Biv palette minus the "i." ("I don’t understand indigo, so I left it out," he said in the audio tape.) Rather than reductive, they just seemed simple.

My disappointment here was in direct counterpoint to my elation in seeing his work on paper installed on the third floor. Here, in graphite, charcoal and beeswax were individual and serial works with the darkest of grays, the subtlest of grids, the most nuanced of permutations from sheet to sheet. The work is controlled, meditative, formal. Themes are repeated, ideas circle around one another, planes are segmented according to the artist’s systems of order. Not to sound corny, but the work in total felt like an extended meditation.

Many of these works date from the Sixties when Marden was in graduate school at Yale. These works were contemporaneous with Eva Hesse’s. Seeing them completed my own viewing experience of the exhibitions I’ve noted here, bringing it full circle from past to present back to past. Thus it was a slightly odd sensation to walk back out onto 53rd Street 40 years later.

# # # #

Chris, as a postscript, Brice Marden: A Retrospective of Paintings and Drawings is coming to SFMoma, from February 17 to May 13, 2007, where it will be larger than it is in New York. I know you'll visit the show and I'm interested in your observations about it. And of course there's interesting reductive work in San Francisco--I'm thinking specifically about the work of John Zurier, who's based there and whom you know--so perhaps Mimimal's extended moment will extend longer still, at least between Two Artists Talking.

Far Back and Afield

Returning to an earlier conversation about looking back and afield:

I receive several emails a day from e-Flux, a subscription service that sends out press releases for exhibitions all over the world. I get many I don't care about, but it's a great service because it's astounding how many exhibits are going on all of the time all over the place, plus it's the best way to be alerted to things I do care about but didn't know was happening. It's also the best way to read some of the most astoundingly asinine curator's statements with tremendous convenience. And it's also the best way to see who is hot, at least among curators- when you see Liam Gillick's name in at least one press release a week over a few months, you kind of wonder if he's really that great, or whether he's really cute or a great partier. I have no idea. Anyway, at the very least perhaps it's the art version of staring at the cover of People and Us while standing in the checkout line at the grocery store.

Maybe almost a couple of months ago I received an announcement for a soon to open show called High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975. The press release says:

High Times, Hard Times not only captures a tumultuous period of political and social change, but also reflects the impact of the civil rights struggle, student and anti-war activism, and the beginnings of feminism in the art world. Painting is the one element usually left out of this complex narrative, remembered only as a regressive foil to the various new mediums. But this version of the story greatly oversimplifies the situation, effacing painting that earned a place among the most experimental work of the moment, very much in sympathy with the era’s radical aesthetics and politics...

Artists in Exhibition
Jo Baer, Lynda Benglis, Dan Christensen, Roy Colmer, Mary Corse, David Diao, Manny Farber, Louise Fishman, Guy Goodwin, Ron Gorchov, Harmony Hammond, Mary Heilmann, Ralph Humphrey, Jane Kaufman, Harriet Korman, Yayoi Kusama, Al Loving, Lee Lozano, Ree Morton, Elizabeth Murray, Joe Overstreet, Blinky Palermo, Cesar Paternosto, Howardena Pindell, Dorothea Rockburne, Carolee Schneemann, Alan Shields, Kenneth Showell, Joan Snyder, Lawrence Stafford, Pat Steir, Richard Tuttle, Richard Van Buren, Michael Venezia, Franz Erhard Walther, Jack Whitten and Peter Young.

I instantly ordered the catalog, and I'm glad I did.

In 1976 I was attending a local community college, trying to figure out if I was going to go into journalism or art. Or something else. The short story about that is that I just kept doing what interested me and I did the art thing. It was like it was never really a question. I just followed myself.



Dan Christensen: Pavo, 1968, Acrylic on canvas

I was a lousy student, and I still am, in the sense that I've never liked going to class, never liked the assignments, and have always learned best on my own, even if it takes my three times the amount of effort to learn something on my own. And I didn't want to learn about art by practicing perspective and making color charts. I liked drawing the figure, and I liked the studio classes because I could come late and leave early and do all of my work at home without anyone else around.

Once I discovered Abstract Expressionism, at age 18, and about twenty years too late, I found it hard to be engaged by much else except for the Bay Area figure painters like Diebenkorn and Park. But that's another story to tell, about how long it took me to not see art as a bunch of file drawers and a timeline, but rather as a large amoebic thing where painters from all eras have so much in common. And I had to figure that out on my own, too. But I did manage to figure out something about NY painting of the 60's and 70's, and it wasn't until I started thinking about High Times, Hard Times that I realize what an impact painting of that era had on me.

Somehow in that first year of college I figured out that the library had periodical stacks. I was already checking out books, but I didn't really know how to use a library and I didn't know anything about the treasure trove of material there. I can't recall how I figured it out, but I think I accidentally stumbled on the stacks while looking for one section in the library.



Source

I did what lots of art students did (do they still?): when I discovered the back issues of art magazines I started poring over them- Artforum, Art in America, Arts, Art News, Studio International, Kunst. There must have been others. And I started from the present day working backwards. And then I figured something else out- lots of books and articles in magazines have footnotes. If I was reading an article about Frank Stella in Artforum that referenced a Donald Judd review of Stella in Artforum five years earlier I could go read that. It was like reading a dialog. Amazing.

Beginning with 1976, I started working backwards through the magazine into the mid-sixties, reading articles and reviews. And when I saw the press release for High Times, Hard Times it just hit me- I know all of those artists, I like that work, and come to think of it, much of that stuff has been pretty important to me, even up until today. Steir, Gorchov, Tuttle, Benglis, Fishman, Young, Baer, Palermo- I think about that stuff. Work that might seem less relevant to me- Pindell, Loving, Lozano, Christensen, Schneeman- no, no, that stuff is great. All of that had a great imprint on me, and it comes out of a very interesting period that the catalog for the exhibition makes clear- political unrest, drugs, music, civil rights, assassinations- these events are part of the landscape of my adolescence. These events have had a significant impact in shaping how I see the world and what I expect of it, and the art of this period included in this exhibition, which has been somewhat forgotten or ignored, has also had a similar hand in this.

I'm really happy that this work is getting another look now. I think much of what it deals with is still tremendously relevant, and probably still not fully digested and understood. And I'm really happy that these artists, some of whom have not been much in the public eye for sometime, are getting a second chance.

There is much more to say about this topic, How Far Back and How Far Afield Do I Look?- this is just a taste.

I've made 265 drawings this year as of today

I'm not really the sketchbook type. I start a sketchbook with the intention that, this time, I'm going to really take it seriously, really use it as a place to record ideas, develop motifs, think and track my development. But I go a few pages, set it aside, and then typically don't get back to it. I have lots of half-full sketchbooks going back years. I'm just not that organized, I guess.

I really admire, and envy, artists that work out their ideas in sketchbooks of notebooks. Some just record impressions, jot down titles, or keep their hand limber by constantly drawing. Some track their work, or work through and iterate ideas in an almost academic way. I recently visited an artist who actively uses a notebook in a way that it becomes almost a visual and written record of his inner life as a painter. Recently, I've been reading Pia Gottschaller Palermo: Inside His Images, and she examines some sketchbooks Blinky used to develop the series of paintings on aluminum, the final large body of work he was working on in the last couple of years of his life. They are impressive.

I was in Mauai a couple of weeks back for a few days, and I took a sketchbook with me and three pens- black, blue, and red. Late at night I scrawled a bunch of drawings continuing the motif I'd been using for the Bojagi and Ornette paintings, and I did a bunch more on the flight home. I keep meaning to get back to these, but since I've been home I haven't used the sketchbook except to scan all of the drawings and post two a day on my weblog.

I have posted on my weblog everyday since around 2002 (I think I missed five days in 2005, and have a perfect record so far in 2006). The weblog is my real sketchbook and notebook, the place where I record things that I don't mind being public. It is the only thing like a sketchbook that I have used consistently in my entire life, and it's something I find easy to do. I like the archive aspect of it, and that it's searchable, and the fact that it is public holds me accountable, at least to myself and my policy of posting something everyday. I have known for a very long time how integral my weblog is to my art life, or really, to my life life.

If I set for myself the project of posting not only an HTML drawing but a scanned drawing to my weblog I'm sure I would use a sketchbook religiously. Scanning and uploading an image takes more time, and I suppose that's why I haven't committed myself to that project, yet, but it is something I'm thinking about. I had thought recently that 2006 has not be a very productive year for me in terms of art, but then I counted in my head and realized I've made seventeen paintings, and two of those consisted of four panels each. Not bad, really. But I have not completed any works on paper- finished drawings- this year, which surprises me since so much of what I made during 2005 were drawings. Perhaps I need that drawing-a-day project. I respond to the project model.

I have lamented out loud a few times that I am not getting much work done. One friends reminds me, well, but what about the HTML drawings- you're making a drawing everyday. And I realize, yeah, that's right, why am I not counting those? Today, October 22, 2006, is day 265 of this year. That means I've made 265 drawings this year as of today. That's pretty good.

In the Field

You ask how far afield I look, not just how far back.

Everyone has objects and images that resonate for them. These are some of the things that reverberate in the art I make (you won't see them in my art, but their vibrations are in there):
. Pieces of tile that I picked up on a beach on Ischia, worn smooth from the action of the waves. They've been on a small glass plate in my library for years, next to...
. an amateur postcard-size scene of the Faraglioni--the big rocks off the island of Capri that jut high up out of the water—which I picked up on my first trip to the island. An elderly grandmother was selling these little paintings, in oil on what looks like balsa wood, that were made by her grandson, an art student. Maybe that was a scam and I was a gullible tourist, but nonna or no, the woman had some resonant locals scenes to sell.
. That little scene is next to a small photograph I took of the interior of the Pantheon (the classic light-pouring-through-the-oculus image), which is next to a commedia dell'arte mask from Venice, from my first trip there in 1985 when the lira was so low in relation to the dollar that I, a poor painter, felt rich enough to buy objects to take home.

What these objects have in common, aside from being visually and tactilely interesting, is that I acquired them on my first trip to Italy in the early 80s. Every time I see them, which is almost every day, they remind me of the newness of the experience. It's easy to get jaded after living so many years and taking so many trips, and those little pieces remind me of the joy of seeing something for the first time, and by extension, the joy of seeing old things anew. And of course there's the sense memory of that time and place, so they're firing a lot of neurons for me.

(By the way, that light-pouring-through-the-oculus shot is very similar to the one on the cover of a new magazine, Culture and Travel, edited by Michael Boodro and directed by James Truman, both late of Conde Nast, and published in New York by the people who give us Modern Painters magazine. Have you seen it?)

I also have a collection of round vessels--pots and baskets from Mexico, South Africa and Thailand, on stands (set Brancusi-like, one interesting shape atop another) on carved Ghanian stands and tiny Chinese tables, and an American dovetailed oak box that probably held someone else's treasure. The interaction of each vessel on its stand, and the vessel/stand in relation to the others is endlessly interesting to me. When I see them, I also reconnect to a show of Brancusi sculpture I saw in Paris some 15 years ago at the Pompidou. You could get so close to the sculptures that your breath almost fell on them. Connecting to Brancusi always makes me think of how how this artist, wanting to be in Paris to make art but having no money for travel, walked there from Romania. Walked! And a little bit of that burning desire is kindled in me when I see my vessels on their stands.

Mostly, though, I don't own the things that reverberate. In my previous post I talked about quilts and baskets along with some specific paintings from other times and places. I don’t like to get too caught up in the high-low of esthetic expression, especially considering that the "low" is often work made by women.

What do I get out of it? Well, there's the cultural connectedness I feel to humanity--the same impulse that I have to smear pigmented goo on a prepared surface was felt by the cave painters right around the time of, oh, the discovery of fire.

And then there are purely sensory experiences make my life richer. When I go to another city on business, what I do is look at art, because that’s my business. When I go on vacation, I look at art beause that’s my pleasure. Indeed my business and my pleasure are so intertwined that there is no distinction between them, at least in terms of seeing. One thing I can say is that the act of seeing is surrounded by other equally strong sensory perceptions. When I’m walking to the Louvre, I might notice the light at the end of the day; or entering the Accademia in Venice, I might notice the humidity in the air. At the Museo Archeologico in Naples, one of my favorite museums, I enter looking for the statue I love most in the world, knowing I will sit quietly with it for a while, connecting with it in a spiritual way, and then go eat pizza—the authentic stuff— afterward in Spaccanapoli, the old part of town, and then sit in the quiet Cloister of Santa Chiara.

Diana of Ephesis (aka Ma Rhea, aka Diana the Hunter, aka Artemis) personification of strength, creation, life, who was worshipped in Asia Minor before the Christian era. She entered the Christian religion as Mary. She is life size, just under six feet tall, carved of pinkish alabaster, with a cast bronze head and hands. In the folds of her gown she carries animals. On her torso she is weighted down with multiple breasts, though her ethereal presence makes her appear as if she is levitating. Museo Archeologico, Napoli.

So aside from the pleasure of seeing, what I get out of looking at paintings, or art in general, is a general sense of sensory well being—emotion, spirituality, smell, taste, all tied up with what I have seen, where I have been, who I am. And, I don’t know if this is true for "civilian" tourists, but as an artist, the act of taking pictures, and seeing through the lens and recording what I have seen—and lately, Photoshopping what I have shot-- deepens the sensory experience.

Am I an artist because I am a sensory junkie? Isn't that why people get addicted to drugs--because the high is so great, and then their bodies become so dependent on the high that they need the drug just to stay normal? Or am I a sensory junkie because I'm an artist? Maybe we can talk about this topic more in a bit.

But in the meantime, talk to me more about seeing far and wide.

How far back do I look, or, How far afield do I look?

How far back do I look? Very. Now that I think about it, a few weeks later after asking you the question, Joanne, I'm wondering if a better question isn't, "How far to the side do you look? What's your field of vision? How good is your peripheral vision?"

A few stories. It's all about art.

One
I've kind of had it with pro sports. I haven't really been a sports nut anyway since I was about fourteen. But I do like sports. I especially like baseball. And once upon a time baseball really was a pastoral sport. For the spectator, at the game, the action was compact with spaces in between, and long breaks between innings. It's a game you give your attention to in little bits, and between pitches and innings you can comment to your companions, gaze over the crowd, look up at the sky (where instead now flies an airplane trailing a huge banner for a local auto dealer).

But now, and for some time, you go to a game and there is constant entertainment. It's loud all the time. You're never alone with your own thoughts. It's pop entertainment. You really are a spectator far removed from the action because of the artifice surrounding the game: it's harder to hear the crowd; the amounts of money involved are insane; the demographic of the players is far removed from the demographic of the fan. It's basically show biz, but less predictable- they really are playing, though it's not very playful.

Instead, I see much more of the game when I watch college or high school ball. My favorite is to watch women's college softball- intense, fast, high level playing. Even at the high school level the game is fun to watch- the game itself is more open, more porous, closer to an ideal of baseball. There's no money involved and less racket. The pace of the game is more natural because there are fewer distractions to assure me I'm getting my money's worth. But the players still want to do well- they want to win, they want the attention, there's always the dream that some scout is out there.

Somewhere in here is an idea about purity and purpose, about the potential to do something for itself, and for oneself, and for the team. Sometimes you watch a game and things flow- a double play, a player's swing, a beautiful duel between the pitcher and batter, or a moment of blind, intuitive movement of a body in space that turns out absolute, as in the picture of Willie Mays above making the famous over-the-shoulder catch.

Sometimes you see a painting and there are parts where you can see that the painter was in a groove, what Ron Gorchov called, "hallucinatory and difficult to explain." I like seeing that, and even more so, I like experiencing that. I am always looking for that, and it's possible to see it in all kinds of art, even in art that may not really be what one favors. That's the periphery I'm interested in. I am not opposed to, for example, the Leipzig painters, John Currin, Takashi Murakami, and so on... these are names that might go on some people's hit lists, we all have them. But I am not terribly interested in art that wants to act all big league, and tries to distract me with issues and entertainment.

Two
A few years ago I was in the optometrist's office waiting for an eye exam. There were a couple of large paintings on the walls, pastel colors, pictures of little blonde children out in nature, under trees. And they were kind of not so good, but they had enough going on where they were bumping up against being competent.

Rather than read Time or Sports Illustrated, I'd rather stare at paintings. And after a minute I noticed they were signed with the same last name as the optometrist. Turns out, his wife is the painter. And I kept looking.

I realized after a couple of more minutes of looking that these paintings were actually quite ambitious, at least compositionally, and the drawing was good enough not to interfere with the painting as a unit. They'd almost just about be passable at one of those wine and art festival things that the Chamber of Commerce likes to put on before Labor Day where women can wear their white dresses and men can wear their polo shirts and khakis and people can come out and see their friends and have a glass of chardonnay and feel cultured and civic minded. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

The wait at this particular office, to which I'd been a few times, can be a little long. That's part of why I don't go there anymore. This particular wait was close to half an hour. I just looked at those paintings, and gave them time, and got involved, and saw how the artist had to get involved, too. I saw her drawing problem, and got attuned to her palette, which although kind of predictable was also very consistent, and really got into her brushstrokes, and how she put on paint. And I could see that, despite the shortcomings of her subject, the predictable colors and the sentiment implied, that this artist was trying to seriously deal with these paintings. I realized that paintings which I wouldn't ordinarily give the time of day to still had a lot to offer if I'd just give them time. And I remember thinking, well, this is kind of like watching little league. The level of play isn't as high, but the game is still there, and I like the game.

Three
Go somewhere where there is a folk art tradition. You're a tourist, and you want to buy a sample. You're going to a central market where you're going to buy a piece of pottery. A painted plate. Let's say you're going to Mexico, to Puerto Vallarta, and you decide to buy a plate, something that you know kind of gets knocked out in production. And you know looking through stacks of these plastes that some of them are painted better than the others. There's a better touch, a nicer line, a little finesse at the end of the stroke, something a little more bold and confident, a feeling that the person who painted it really has a conceptual and physical grasp of the surface of this plate and how to decorate it. I like that.

Four
My grandmother was very supportive of my artistic inclinations. She bought me oil paints when I was eleven, the same day she took me to the Oakland Museum for the first time, during which three things happened.

A: The Oakland Museum has a typical Mel Ramos painting- a nude playmate type astride a brown bear. Certainly, for an eleven year old, I was curious about the nude. And my grandmother didn't want me looking at it. But I knew it was a painting, and that's what really interested me. I don't think she understood the difference, but I did, and I saw, besides his basically puerile subject, that there was some paint going on there. That was a moment.

B: I saw real abstract paintings for the first time. We're talking around 1968, so what I would've seen at this particular museum would've been SF Bay Area AbEx (Still, Corbett, Francis, Hassel Smith, maybe Lorser Feitelson) extending back through to California Surrealism (Helen Lundeberg, blanking on other names) and further back to a kind of late Cubism (Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Lucien Labaudt). And throw in a minimalist kind of thing, like John McLaughlin, a personal favorite. I dug it.

C: After the visit my grandmother took me to a paint store with an art section (RIP Standards Brands paint store) and bought me a set of oils and some canvas paper, and I made my first abstract painting at her house. She would've liked a nice still life, some flowers, but she didn't say so. I liked the paint; it was difficult, but it was a start.

When I paint, I often think back on A, B, and C, and all the other similar experiences and odds and ends in my periphery that have been about looking and paint.

I will write more about the question of how far back do I look, and what has been important to me.

Too Weaks (but I got Ornette!)

Huh? What happened? Did I fall asleep for two weeks? Am I Rip Van Winkle? Did aliens take me away, and then dump me off today, and now I don't know where I've been? Where did the time go? The last thing I know, I make a post "Stay tuned...", and the next thing, here it is two weeks later. Wha'happend?

Day job. I blame my day job. I work full time at a university. And not only do I have a full time day job, I have a new full time day job, with more responsibility. Lot's more. It's not that my days are that much longer, but instead it's the mental energy the job takes that has amped up, and I am woefully behind in all correspondence. I find I am simply not having extra brain power to be verbal all the time. I feel the need to shut off the verbal, which, for a visual artist, is a good thing to do.

So, I still have time to shut off the verbal. I manage to make an HTML drawing everyday at Look, See. And I have managed to make a small series of four paintings in the past week. They are each titled "Ornette", numbered I-IV. One of these, the orange one, is soon to make it's way across the Pacific to Tokyo for a little group show called Suitcase. More about that soon.


Ornette I-IV, 2006, acrylic and Rust-oleum aluminum on clear acrylic on linen with aluminum tacks, 12 x 10 inches each

"Ornette" refers to Ornette Coleman, who recently said, "Right now, I’m trying to play the instrument,” he said, “and I’m trying to write, without any restrictions of chord, keys, time, melody and harmony, but to resolve the idea eternally, where every person receives the same quality from it, without relating it to some person (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/22/arts/music/22cole.html)."

Stay tuned... and Ron Gorchov

Joanne- I am super busy (aren't we all?) and have not had time to have a clear mind to sit and think and write and respond. But I will.

In the meantime, consider Ron Gorchov with Robert Storr and Phong Bui in the Brooklyn Rail; it's good to see him getting a show at P. S. 1 and the attention he deserves. I remember first seeing a painting of his around 1978 or 1979; it was so good- loose and direct and almost simple, but looking unlike anything else, and feeling very much like a thing unto itself, complete.



Bui: You mean you don’t have a puritanical work ethic like most good Americans?

Gorchov: I hope not. My paintings are mostly made from reverie, and luck...

Storr: ...I wanted you to talk about what it is that makes letting go of a painting so hard, or that makes knowing where you are in the process so difficult to ascertain.

Gorchov: The biggest problem I had with letting paintings go was the feeling that there was an expense to getting a fresh canvas. And if I could make this painting as good as I could make it and keep going with it, however long it took. It’s not rational; I ruined painting after painting to get to a better one. Then I realized that I couldn’t make a painting incrementally better. If you could make it one percent better, maybe, but who cares? A painting has to evolve. With all respect to Myron Stout, I’m not that kind of an artist. Lately, I’m alone in my studio, after the preliminary marks indicate the limits of the elements, I only get one chance. I test the colors that I want, mix them, get the right brushes. I talk to myself—that form will be eight strokes; this form will be 3 strokes—and paint goes down. The next part is hallucinatory and difficult to explain. A decision will be made about adjustments later. Or it will be renovated. Or it feels perfect and can’t be changed.



RON GORCHOV
BATON, 1986
oil on linen
49-1/2 x 37 x 7-1/2"

Looking: How Far Back, At What, Why

Chris, you ask how far back I look, what I look at, and what I get out of it. The short answer to your first question is that once I leave the 20th and 21st centuries, I look as far back as there's art.

But the more specific answer is that I like Italian early Renaissance painting, particularly Sienese, not so much for the narrative--though

it's endlessly fascinating to see how flat pattern integrates with the beginning of perspective and how the stories are told with the drama of spareness punctuated by detail--but for the color. The particular luminous opacity of tempera on panel, the juxtaposition of colors, and the colors themselves--pink! coral! lime green!--and the veils of translucency, and the gilding.

Simone Martini: tempera and gold on panel, 1328. Sienese, just as Gothic is giving way to the Renaissance

Some of my favorite painters from that time and place are Sano di Pietro, Giovanni di Paolo, Sassetta, and the Master of the Osservanza. (Don't you love how that anonymous painter is not called "anonymous" but given an honorific for his talent and connected to the church where his work is located? He could easily be called the Master of the Coral Hue).

Above, Master of the Osservanza: St. Anthony Tempted by Gold, tempera and gold on panel, 1440. Below, Giovanni di Paolo: The Creation of the World and the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, 1445. Sienese.

Color aside, I guess I'm drawn to these two paintings in part because of their degree of abstraction--though I realize I'm looking at them with 21st century eyes. The di Paolo painting, in particular, rocks me to the core every time I visit it at the Met (at the spectacular Lehman Wing). Here, before Copernicus (b. 1473), before Columbus sailed off the edge of the earth and returned to tell about it, di Paolo conceived of a universe in abstract terms. I'm not a historian of art or anything else, but I think some planets had been identified by the mid fifteenth century, and that Dante had already put forth his idea of the Celestial Wheel, but here we see di Paolo's visual conception of the universe as one compact Big Bang.

I also love miniature painting from Mughal India and elsewhere in which that tradition was practiced. (I have visited the Morgan Library many times to see illuminated manuscripts, and I'm remembering a show at the Lorenzo di Medici library in Florence in which the manuscripts were encrusted with gems. Gilding the lily for sure.) Here, too, it's the color. But also the scale. Well, the relation of the colors within the scale, and in relation to the scale. These are things I think about in my own painting, too.

Portrait of a Woman, Mughal India; gouache on paper, Jahangir period, app 1605; 4" high

Farther back, I like to see the Fayum portraits. The Met has five beauties, of which Eutyches, below left, is one. The portraits, which are about life size, are the earliest surviving examples of encaustic painting. Even before I started working in wax, I used to stop by the case in which the portraits are housed. These are portraits of real people, people who looked the artist in the eye as they sat, knowing they would live again in the great Egyptian afterlife and in the meantime remain young forever in their likeness of wax on panel. The Fayums, named after a Nile Delta oasis near where many of the portraits were untombed, were painted in a roughly three-hundred-year period around the cusp between BC and AD, the product of Greco-Roman Egypt. After a sitter's death, the portrait was placed in the wrapped mummy above where the actual face would be, to look out into the world of the great beyond. Talk about multiculture: Greek colonists living in Roman-controlled Egypt, creating portraits to be placed on mummy casings for traditional Egyptian burial rites. I believe the Fayums are the earliest extant paintings made on a portable ground.

From left: Eutyches, at the Metropolitan museum of Art, New York; Isidora at the Getty, Los Angeles; Woman at the National Gallery, London

You realize I'm just scratching the surface here. I might also add Artemisia, not only as a strong painter but as a model of strength against adversity. Giotto, who with the Middle Ages at his back, opened the picture to more a dimensional space.

Changing centuries, I also like stuff we would call "ethnic" --Amish and African-American quilts (a la Gee's Bend); Navajo and Hopi textiles; the sculptures of Kuan Yin and mandalas from throughout the East, the Islamic Wing at the Met with its integration of textiles, pottery, caligraphy and architecture.

Clockwise from left: Vajrayana mandala, Mongolia, 19th century; Amish quilt, Lancaster, Pa., 1930's; Zulu telephone wire basket, contemporary; Lola Petway, Bars, 2004, Gee's Bend

Can we make a conceptual leap from di Paolo's universe to the one depicted by the mandala? And a visual one to the mandalas of the basket and Amish quilt? Can we connect the quilts to geometric abstraction from the Sixties to now?

I feel like those actors at the Academy Awards who have to name everyone who ever made a difference in their lives. My agent, my manager. I love you all.

So, what do I get out of all this? As an artist, I find it humbling that what I do, what artists in general do, is pretty much exactly what artists have done throughout history. We daub pigment onto a prepared surface, we handle clay, we stitch cloth, hammer metal, sculpt wood. I know there are 20th and 21st century mediums that don't have the same lineage, but the urge to express, to create, to make manifest is the same urge that the cave painters must have had. So, I guess it's connecting culturally to a world that is not just of this place and to a time that is not just of the present.

Shall we pursue this thread for a bit? Tell me more about what you like to look at.

How far back do you look?

Joanne, how far back do you look at paintings? Who/what is important to you? What do you get out of it?

You know, you'd think it would be safe to assume that painters like to look at all kinds of paintings from all eras and cultures. You'd think that painters are looking at the paint and the painter's moves, seeing into and beneath the surface, gliding across the surface, right there surfing along with the painter, really feeling along and reading the paint (but not necessarily mixing metaphors, as I just did). You'd think the painters are looking at all paintings as things to learn from, sure, but also looking at paintings, even something four hundred years old, as things that are now and alive.

Now, I don't mean to be judgmental, but I'm not convinced that all painters are as open as that. I may be wrong (there's a very good chance that I'm wrong) but it seems to me- and this is based on some observation, and hearing others talk- that lots of painters just don't suck everything they can out of paintings when they look at them. It seems that they don't feel part of a lineage that is right under their feet, that is a lifeblood that should move up into them and energize them. In particular, it seems to me that a lot of contemporary painters- contemporary artists- don't look very far back, and mostly look at work that is connected to their own. They have a narrow vision. And they tend to stay in the modern period, some even only the 20th century. I don't know- does that ring a bell?

But you and I have been talking for awhile now, and I think we both look at lots of stuff. I think we're pretty open, have a lot of influences, know a fair amount of history. I'd like to talk about this idea, about how I look at 400 year old Chinese painting and how much I get out of it. I'll do that in another post.

So I'm just wondering- how far back do you look? And besides painting, what else do you look at?

Above:
Incense burner with design of mountain retreat
by Ogata Kenzan (1663–1743; Chojiyamachi workshop)
Japan, Edo period, 1712–ca. 1731
Buff clay; cobalt pigment under transparent glaze; gold lacquer repairs
Gift of Charles Lang Freer F1898.440
http://www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/online/kenzan/scholardetail.htm

More Bad Cyber Things; Good Art Things

Sorry about your crash, Chris. Your advice is smart. Back up and mo' backup. I've taken to writing my blog in a word document and then cutting and pasting it into Two Artists Talking. That way, if I get the dreaded popup, "Windows has experienced a problem and needs to shut down," my copy will live to see another post.

In the "More Bad Cyber Things" category, I'd add this: beware security systems. I'd used Norton with no problem until I installed the 2006 update. Then, almost immediately, the walls came crashing down. Actually, the opposite happened: the barricades went up beyond all logic, shutting me out of my own files! There's no sense repeating my story here, as a full account of my problem is on the R&F Paints website: http://rfpaints.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=679#679 . I urge our readers to check it out.

With a security sytem like that, who needs viruses? And wouldn't you know: Norton billed me for the update, even after I removed it. Of course I didn't pay, and my credit card company backed me up.

In the "Good Art Things" category, I love the change of scale (albeit digitally manipulated) of one of your Bojagi paintings. This is a direction! I know you said, in your New Work post, "I'm liking the domestic, intimate, personal feel of what I'm doing- these are smaller issue paintings, intimate..." but seeing the work large gives it a huge presence.

Not that there's anything wrong with small. I also work small, and I like the scale. A strong small painting can hold the wall every bit as tenaciously as a big one. But punctuating small-scale works with a large scale one, or vice versa, is not only an exercise in expansion or restraint, it's an opportunity to put the work in perspective. However your work develops, it's interesting for me to see how you connect those intuitive dots.

Here's a tip

This is one artist talking to a million other artists for a moment:

Ever written a nice big fat detailed important email in your webmail and pushed send and found out that during the time you'd spent writing that email that your 24 hours login expired so that when you hit "Send" the email service said something like "Time's up, please login again" and your email was gone?

No, never happened to you? It will someday.

Ever had something similar happen when making a weblog post, like your browser froze and crashed because you had Photoshop and Excel and two different browsers and iTunes and Word and Thunderbird and five folders open at the same time?

No, never happened to you? It will someday.

Take it from someone who knows. You do more and more of your work on the web via a browser. Things happen. Get in this habit. Here's what you do:

Before hitting "Send" or "Publish" click inside the form window in which you've been typing your email or weblog post, Select All and Copy. In case your browser craps out you've still got it on the clipboard.

I always do that for anything more than four or five sentences. Except I didn't a minute ago and almost lost something huge. Fortunately, I didn't this time.

Now, if your system crashes while hitting Send or Publish, well, tough luck. If your computer is that fragile you've got other problems. You should have saved your writing to disk first. That's a little beyond the call of duty.

I have no idea

Joanne asks, "Where do you think your own work will go with Bojagi? A series?"

I have no idea. There are three so far. I didn't expect to make these three. They just sort of tumbled out. Of course now more are swimming around in my head, but I am finally learning to stop chasing the image in my head and to start finding them while painting.

Maybe that sounds flaky, but I'm serious.

Forever, I have chased after images in my head, being so sure if I just executed the thing in my head that everything would be OK. But the thing in my head is actually so ill defined. And that has resulted in a lot failures and frustration. Over the years. Many.

The translation from head to paint is not an automatic process. Which I think led to me taking a big break from painting and becoming an elementary school teacher and sending my life off on another trajectory for a long time. And being a teacher, working with young kids, with an emphasis on process and repetition and development, may have taught me, myself, eventually, and hopefully finally, that it is through the making that I will find. I have to follow the paint.

Painting, or good painting, is not the result of a concept or strategy or process. It comes out of the body. I don't mean that one can't be working on a planned image. But paint is not imagination. It's a material that we can't hold in our heads.

So I'm not sure. I'm not going to chase them. But I am going to find something.

Someone wants me to make big paintings.



And in the same post Joanne asks, "And we're about to start a new month. What direction will your HTML drawings take?"

I have no idea. I will tonight, I hope. I don't have a plan. I rarely have plans for these things. I start out making and it turns into something. At the most my thought is to make to non-photobased images with HTML, but I don't know more than that. At this precise moment I feel like making more of these doesn't have a future. I will have to work through that.

One more thing about Jasper John's crosshatch paintings- in the 1977 catalogue the connection of this motif is drawn to Munch (who I've been looking at a lot lately- I can say more later):



Edvard Munch: Self Portrait: Between Clock and Bed, 1940-42; Oil on canvas, 149.5 x 120.5 cm; Munch Museum, Oslo



Jasper Johns (American, born 1930: Usuyuki, 1979-1981, Color screenprint on buff handmade laid paper, 50/85, 27 5/8 x 45 7/16”, Purchase: Gaines Challenge Fund 1982.19.2

Joanne Mattera: Heat of the Moment

May I have the honor of announcing this here:



JOANNE MATTERA
"Heat of the Moment: New Paintings in Encaustic"
Arden Gallery, Boston, September 5~30
Reception: Friday, September 8, 5-7 pm
Gallery Talk: Saturday, September 9, 1pm

 

And Still Mo' Readas

Hey, Chris--

I've got a post in formation--one that makes yet more geometric connections--and I'll get to that later this week. (My Arden gallery show gets picked up on Friday, and I'm up to my eyelids in last-minute stuff, like running out for mo' D-rings so I can attach the hanging wire. Until then, life is fragmented into blocks of no time and just-a-second.)

But following your lead, let me note that we have at least two mo' readers--so we're now up to at least nine--Daniella Woolf (Santa Cruz) and Eileen Goldenberg (SF), who are themselves collaborating. You might call them "Two Artists Working." You can see their joint effort--Eileen's clay vessels, Daniella's painted surfaces--on Daniella's blog, www.encausticopolis.blogspot.com.

Anyway, it's good to know our blog has a following. I'm witchoo for now: no reader comments. But I'm more than happy to receive e-mails about it, and to keep the shade up on our conversation.

Mo' later.

Mo' Readas Mo' Betta

And now, a little tangent from the art talk, which is my fault since I started it yesterday.

Joanne- aha! More readers reveal themselves.

Via email, Karen Jacobs emerges as #6. Her recent work uses the word Bokusho in the title; bokusho is "the abstract form of sumi-e." My talk about "Bojagi" interested her because of her own gravitation towards Asian influences.

And an old friend, Ernie (website, weblog), writes to say he's been following along- #7.

Karen wonders why we don't have comments enabled. We decided as we began that for now this weblog is a dialog rather than an open forum. We may reassess that, but for now the name of this weblog, Two Artists Talking, is what the weblog is. Personally, I invite comments and input via email. But speaking for myself, for now I like the one-to-one.

All right, back to the art talk...

I just recalled that someone else mentioned following TAT in an email, an artist/weblogger "S". #8. I'm not sure of the wisdom of having started to count our readers.

OK, and now back to the art talk.

Back to Bojagi

You know I'm always looking for connections in visual art. Well, maybe I'm not actually looking for them, but they seem to show up. The painting below is so of a piece with the textile bojagi you show (http://twoartiststalking.blogspot.com/2006/08/bojagi.html) that I experienced a frisson of recognition when I saw it. See what I mean:

JM: Quadrate 2, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 inches, 2006

In my blog, I'll shortly be posting a piece on painting in acrylic As you know, my primary medium is encaustic. I'll update this post soon with a link.

But enough about moi. Where do you think your own work will go with Bojagi? A series? And we're about to start a new month. What direction will your HTML drawings take?

Knoebel & Casentini

Another reader of this conversation, a painter, (I'm not sure if people want to be outed as a reader without their permission), wrote to me about Imi Knoebel. This painter, first initial "K", is a different reader than the person, a non-painter, who wrote to me about Schur and Wilson. So we know we've got at least two readers.

And Vincent Romaniello, who said some nice things about both of us (let me just take this opportunity to say, "Hello Vince," and to put in a plug for everyone to go on over and look at Vince's paintings), is reading this. So we have at least three readers.

And there is a fourth person, another painter, first initial "J",who also let me me know s/he is a reader via email, so for now won't be identified. So we have four readers.

Oh, and there is also someone else, another art weblogger, a painter with the first initial "D". So there, we're up to at least five known readers. We're doing our market research here.

You, out there reading this. Send me an email. If you're really fast you can be our sixth known reader.

So anyway, back to Imi Knoebel. As far as I know, he's not reading our conversation here. But he should. His ears must be burning. I whisper, "Hier Imi... Imi, hergekommen... ja, ja, es ist gut, wir ist gerechte Unterhaltung. Du kannst unser 7. Leser sein "

Actually, I know very little about Imi Knoebel's work. Sure, I've seen reproductions, I know of the work, I know who he is, I know of his relationship to Blinky Palermo and Beuys, I know that he's widely exhibited, but I don't feel like I know his work in any depth so that I can talk about it. Our reader "K" does, has seen plenty of the work in Europe, and endorses it a great deal. I believe I've only seen one print in person. You can find plenty of images of recent work on the web, but I just don't know very much about it. And from reproductions I like the loose constructions from the 80's, like the one above, and the Messerschnitte collages.

Back in 2003 I was in touch with someone who had been an art handler in NY in the late 80's and who had seen Blinky Palermo's To the People of New York City (1976–77) when it was first installed at Dia. The art handler wrote to me about what he had heard about The Unexpected Death of Blinky Palermo in the Tropics, "He (Palermo) made great work and disappeared. Imi Knoebel is another favorite, and seems to invoke the life of Palermo as if he were making the works Blinky would make if he were still alive." I don't know if that's fair to say or not. (You can read more of what he wrote on my old weblog, but that weblog is going to disappear in a few weeks. Poof! Gone.)

You wrote in your Miami report, "At Nachst St. Stephan booth, Imi Knoebel’s supersize paintings of pure color on thin sheets of plywood—geometric abstraction, color field painting and relief sculpture all rolled (flattened, actually) into one." That sounds good. The color, geometry, and regular measurement of his work actually make me think of some of my own HTML stuff.

So I'm hoping that between you and Reader #2 "K", and perhaps some of my own research, I can learn a little more about what is interesting about Knoebel's art.

Top: Imi Knoebel, Großes Doppelkreuz, 1985, 345 x 242 cm, Acryl auf Holz, rückseitig signier (URL)

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

As for Casentini, I'll simply say that his 2004 show at Brian Gross in SF did not impress me. I'm refreshing my memory from an email I wrote to another artist dated April 13, 2004 (neat to have an archive to draw from):

"The lighting wasn't so great I thought in the gallery- kind of harsh, showed imperfections across some of the surfaces and at the edges that, given the way the paintings are made, seemed out of place. No way could I have known from pix on gallery web site that he was contrasting thin vs. built-up areas, and matte vs. shinier surfaces. That didn't work so well for me.

And I was trying to understand the purpose for planes to wrap around the sides of the canvas, as if the planes on the front that continued around to the side were portions of a 3-D block embedded in the canvas- do you know what I mean, that he was making the canvas an object but also some of the planes on the front of the canvas began to feel like 3-D rectangles because they wrapped around the edges to the side? That and the consistently close valued, muted colors just didn't come alive for me."

What I meant was that there was the attempt to make illusion that the paintings appear to be made up of blocks, somewhat like Carlos Estrada-Vega's blocks. But Casentini's didn't work. I hated the surfaces. I thought the matte/shiny contrasts were kind of cheezy. And in each painting he was working with a consistently closed-value, close-hue palette. I didn't like the work at all.

I used Casentini to further illustrate the difference between Wilson and Schur. Out of the three of those artists, I like Schur's work the most. I like the shaky improvisation of the paintings, the bleeding wacky edges, the intense and lush acrylic, the less predictable spaces, the way the blocks align but don't lock, and how these alignments shift in small fields allover the painting. He keeps the painting flat, has a good overall plane. Wilson is more dependent on a kind of regularity and measure. Casentini is more classically composing space.

Bojagi

Joanne, you wrote, "the edges (in the three Bojagi paintings) are straight and the angles sharp, but your geometry still has a biological feel to it. (On closer inspection, it appears that at least one of those "straight" lines has a slight curve. Am I correct on this?)"

Ahhhhhh. The hint of geo, and the biological/organic feel. That was my sort of somewhat kind of aimless intention. I think. And they're painterly. They're kind of rough. They look very fast, but they were made very slowly. Those things hung on the wall, and over several weeks I'd walked past them, take a pass at them, let them hang some more. They took a long time. I did not set out to make three paintings based on the same drawing. I've never done that before. Ever. You saw it here first- history! I tend to try to make every painting be different.

These are all painted quite differently. All are on mid-priced commercial canvases. For some kinds of painting I like that thin fine-weave canvas with the super slick commercial gesso ground. But the two smallest are actually not on the commerical side; these were unsuccessful paintings, so I pulled the canvas off the stretcher, flipped it over and restapled, and then gessoed it myself, so it's more coarse and absorbent. If you look on the backside you see a bad painting. That had never occured to me to do before, but John Zurier had mentioned to me that he did that, especially with linen, and I've now done that several times. The largest one is on the original store-bought ground, and I think the paint quality shows that.

All of the lines are meant to read straight, none curved, but they're a bit wobbly amyway. I use a small flat brush and a raised straight edged to guide my hand, but they have a hand-painted quality, especially as the pressure of my hand varies.

I think the word is pronounced BO-ja-gee. Emphasis on the first syllable, quick on the middle syllable, draw out the last syllable. I think. It's Korean, and is sometimes spelled "pogaji".

Bojagi (Pojagi), or wrapping cloths, are Korean textiles pieced together from small scraps of cloth. Bojagi have very old origins, but those still in existence date from the Choson dynasty (1392 – 1910). They are used for wrapping, carrying and storing objects, and as table coverings, altar cloths and special-occasion decorations. Bojagi are usually square and come in a range of sizes. Fabrics used in bojagi include silk, cotton, hemp and ramie. Ramie is a fiber made from the stalks of a woody shrub indigenous and unique to Korea. It can be woven into a very thin, even-textured and strong fabric that is extraordinarily long-lasting. There are many different types of bojagi including lined or unlined, embroidered, painted and gold-leafed (URL).

My younger brother's wife's parents are from Korea. So my two nephews are Korean-American. The SF Asian Art Museum has some bogaji on display. I've been carrying the idea around in my head for three months or so.

Your Jasper Johns comparison is just fine with me. I actually like those flagstone and cross hatch paintings from the 70's. I saw those paintings when his retrospective was at SFMoMA in 1978, and I still have the catalog with the long and excellent essay by Michael Crichton (who has lately said that the scientific evidence for global warming is weak). It's interesting to see John's reusing these motifs.

I saw Johns' show of new work at Matthew Marks in May 2005. It was a big event, and I happily anticipated seeing it. But I felt that the work was really cold and hermetic; there wasn't one mark out of place, everything seemed so planned, almost like a coloring book. It was a good show, but measuring against his reputation I was disappointed.

And in that photo you posted- is it just that shirt, or has John's become incredibly barrel-chested?

Bojagi, Jasper, Marco, Imi

I was just about to respond to your post about Casentini, Schur and Wilson and then there was another post from you. You are cooking!

I like what you’re doing with Bojagi—three separate elements, each with the relatively same composition but worked differently. Everything you noted about Casentini, Schur and Wilson applies in some degree to those three paintings of yours: the differences in size (if not actual scale); the various ways you have handled the paint and the brushwork—overlays, tints and tones, so that in some the color hovers, and in others it squeezes assertively into its particular space—and the ways those shapes fit together. Funny, the edges are straight and the angles sharp, but your geometry still has a biological feel to it. (On closer inspection, it appears that at least one of those "straight" lines has a slight curve. Am I correct on this?)

My initial response to seeing your shapes, and your fitting-pieces-together composition led me to think of paintings by Jasper Johns. His Seventies/Eighties works are composed of his famous staccato hatchmarks within each larger shape, of which Scent is an example—he did numerous prints on the theme as well--but a recent photograph of him in his studio shows work with a biomorphic geometry.

By the way, how do you pronounce Bojagi?

Jasper Johns in his Connecticut Studio, 2005; below: Scent, oil and encaustic on canvas, 72 x 126 inches, 1973-74

Re Marco Casentini, I first saw his work at the Armory Show in New York last March. I liked it, and said so in "Back For More: The Art Fairs in New York," a report I posted on my website. He was at the booth of the Richard Levy Gallery, an Albuquerque gallery whose program of geometric, reductive, abstract painters and sculptors is strong and well edited. I’m glad you included Casentini's website so that I can see more, because I didn’t see him on the Levy Gallery site. Do you know him?

Apropos of the art fairs, at last December’s Art Basel Miami, I loved the work of the German artist Imi Knobel. He makes low-relief constructions in painted aluminum that read like paintings. Paintings? Sculptures? Tomato, tomahto.

Imi Knoebel, Illia, acrylic/aluminum, 119 x 118 x 4 inches, 2002

I mentioned Knoebel on my "Joanne Goes to Miami" report. It was a brief note, the context of which was the Art Basel/Miami fair. You can see more images of his work if you click onto this link: Imi Knoebel

Chris, I have to tell you: This dialog is more compelling, more fruitful and certainly more frequent than I’d imagined it would be!

New work

All titled Bojagi, 2006, oil on canvas, L: 18 x 14", M: 20 x 16", R: 16 x 12"

I posted a bunch of new stuff on my weblog today. In response to an email from Douglas Witmer, I wrote, expanded and edited a bit for here:

I have a lot of stuff in progress. I'm really just painting kind of whatever I want- I'm feeling very loose, and I'm very open to all kinds of imagery. What I'm doing is rolling right out of what I've been doing since around fall 2004, and getting a whole lot more comfortable with oil and all of the different ways it can be handled. I like that my approach, and the variety of the work, still feels to me part of a single overall approach, and I like that I don't feel locked into a certain way of painting. I like being able to work in bursts and smaller series, to shift gears, to have some works that belong together but are separate from another group of work. I'm liking the domestic, intimate, personal feel of what I'm doing- these are smaller issue paintings, intimate, but also painting in a way that is critical of painting and its history and possiblities, all while staying within the tradition- oil, on canvas, over stretchers, on the wall. Nothing radical? I feel that this kind of low tech approach, in the face of so many things that are depersonalizing, in a time of the absence of the original, next to so much art that is not about the unique handmade object, that this little domestic approach has the possilibity of being very radical. I'm thinking of this idea of a domestic kind of art as acoustic, like playing acoustic guitar rather than big plugged-in electric, but acoustic with a bigger idea in mind- playing acoustic guitar and recording it with iTunes to be used in a larger context than one's porch or backyard. Just thinking, just wondering what this is and where it goes. Also, I think, actually, that this approach is realistic. I have a day job. I have a small place to work. I'm very busy. I don't have hours on end in the studio. I don't think my ambition is to make ten foot paintings. I'm trying to be realistic about how painting is part of my life. I'm in it for something other....

In Painting, Small Differences Matter Big

  

Left: Richard Schur, three sounds: sparring - a brother's tongue, 2004, acrylic on cotton, 120 x 100 cm, Guangdong Art Museum, Guangzhou, China
Center: Helen Miranda Wilson, Tumble, 2006, oil on panel, 14" x 11"
Right: Marco Casentini, Every Sunday Afternoon #2, 2005, acrylic on canvas, 170 x 150 cm., 67" x 59"

Joanne, you mentioned Helen Miranda Wilson in your previous post, and one of our readers asked me via email about the difference between her work and Richard Schur's. I replied that I think there is a superficial similarity- bright colors, grid, right angles, stacks- but I think that ultimately they are as similar as Alex Katz and Philip Pearlstein. In other words, there are details that make their work quite far apart and about very different subjects.

While thinking about this over the weekend, I thought of other painters who paint in colored grids. You featured some in your post, and I thought of Marco Casentini, a new example of whose work I'd recently seen. My initial reaction was that it resembled Schur's work.

If one goes back and look at these three images one sees that these artists are constructing very different kinds of spaces.

First thing, though, is that these paintings are very different in size from each other. That difference can't really be conveyed here. I could scale the pictures to each other so one could see that Wilson's painting is the size of a sheet of writing paper, that Schur's painting is the size of a flag, and that Casentini's is the size of table top. But can't be conveyed here is the scale of the brushwork in relation to the size of each painting, and the depth of the stretcher, and various other things that make the experience of looking at each painting wildly different from each other. Still, I'm going to compare them anyway, right? Because that's what we do here on weblogs- we write!

Wilson's structure is more about patterning. Her grid contains more even and regular alignment. She is closer to a checkerboard. Her work feels more hand-painted, like she is using smaller brushes and filling-in the rectangles. Her oil palette uses mixed color; it seems more like traditional painting- more atmospheric, softer, more picture-like. The edges are soft. Her work is slower. I think this makes the work flatter. It feels more introverted. The space feels divided into several clusters of checkboards that hold together, rather than a cobbling together of a bunch of different rectangles.

Richard's work is more pop-like, more extroverted- the way things are stacked and layered, there is a kind of building up and falling down feeling. Unlike Wilson, his rectangles feel more cobbled together, less unitary. Things feel shaky. Partly this is because the rectangles are never exactly square, rarely perfectly laid out. He tapes, and he allows the paint to bleed under the tape. The edge and structure in Schur's work has the tremor of a slight earthquake, whereas in Wilson's work things feel knitted or collaged together. Schur does not pattern- his structure is less regular. The quality of acrylic and the brilliance of the color create the feeling of something that "happened now", intuitively. They are painted quickly, the paint is opaque, large brushes are used. Wilson's work seems more planned, like it's drawn and filled in, and that the painting happened more over time.

Casentini is sort of a hybrid between Wilson and Schur. The colored areas feel more painted-in, like Wilson, but while having more regular verticals and horizontals don't share her tendency to pattern. His planes of color have fewer vertical and horizontal alignments compared to Schur, but the space feels a little deeper and more layered. Casentini's colored planes float and hover. Wilson's are placed as partof a greater whole. Schur's irregular shapes are jammed up against each other. Each of these paintings is about an entirely different kind of space.

Even though them may seem to share some qualities of color intensity I think the light in each painting is of a very different kind. Schur's light is urban and more artificial. Wilson's light feels closer to the natural world, to the color of a lush outdoors. Casentini's light feels like the more harsh sunlight of a southern state, like the desert.

It's amazing the difference one can discover, and the different meanings possible, if one just take some time to look several times at an image, notice details, and apply fingertips to the keyboard.

Playing with Blocks

Success. I'm logging in from my laptop and pictures are loading. This is fun again!
I’m in the home stretch for my show at Arden Gallery, which opens on September 8, but I took a few days of much needed R&R –well, really R&V (research and viewing)--in Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Are you familiar with P-town? It’s an unlikely mix of Portuguese fishing village, artists' colony (summer home of Hans Hoffman and others in their heyday in the Fifties), and gay resort—a model, actually, of how the rest of the world could get along.

My timing was good, as there was a small show of small paintings by Helen Miranda Wilson at the Albert Merola Gallery. Wilson used to paint in a more lyrical botanical/landscape way, and then a few years ago turned her attention to compositions with blocks of color, as if she’d distilled her world and organized it into neat little swatches. Wilson’s oil paintings in this show are small—8 x10 to 20 x 16 inches—with squares or rectangles organized into grids in which the uniformity of shape is broken by occasional feathering as one color leaches tentatively into another, or a skew of size or out-of-step placement. Green predominates. Or is it red? Or umber? There’s a lot of give and take there, but the work remains lyrical to my eyes.

Helen Miranda Wilson, Grasshopper, oil on panel, 8 x 10 inches, 2006

Down the street at the Ernden Gallery another artist whose work I like is represented: Carlos Estrada-Vega. He’s also working with blocks, and his scale is also modest. But whereas Wilson’s paintings are flat and relatively uninflected, Estrada-Vega’s are physically dimensional. Each painting is a relief composed of hundreds of individual canvas-covered blocks that he colors with wax paint (something he calls oleopasto) that are adhered onto a metal plate by means of tiny magnets embedded in each block. The work is called painting, but it’s also relief sculpture as the individual units vary by height. There’s so much going on—the topography, the colors in quiet or spirited conversation, and textures modulating the exchange.

Carlos Estrada-Vega, Walt, oleopasto on canvas, 10 x 10 inches, 2005


I also saw the work of Boston-based Reese Inman at a terrific new gallery called Kobalt (no website yet, but the gallery info lists the URLas www.kobaltgallery.com, so presumably it’s coming). Kobalt took over the space that had been occupied by other galleries in past seasons. Director Francine D’Olympio has a keen eye and a strong program, and with gallery doors that open onto a brick patio that merges into the sidewalk, the space is not only visually inviting but physically beckoning as well.

Inman works with the grid, but she defines each square with a dot. Specifically, she paints dots that have been arranged in logarithmically patterned formats. Working on a large-scale printout that she adheres to her painting surface, Inman builds up her surface dot by dot, color over color, often returning to sand away parts of those dots to reveal the edges of the color beneath. At the same time that the work feels twenty-first-century current, the sanding gives it a distinct archeological sensibility. Reese’s new series is called Maps, and the work suggests both the means to a destination and the destination itself. You can see more on her website. She’s also represented by Gallery Naga in Boston.

By the way, both Inman and Estrada-Vega are on the Geoform site.

Reese Inman, Map 1, acrylic on panel, 24 x 24", 2006

Since I’ve been working blocks and bands for some years, I’m always interested to see how these and other other artists organize their geometry and how their palette integrates with the geometry. Indeed, "blocks of color" is a simple description, but the expression of the concept is infinitely varied and vast. And of course you are composing your HTML drawings with rows and blocks of color. (I love that the cut-and-paste mechanics of their making leads to to also think of them as collage.)

I'llI close with these few images of blocks from other other artists and cultures. Chris, feel free to add to the mix if you are so inclined.

Left: Paul Klee, Ancient Sound, 1925; and a painting, above, from 1935

Below: Mensie Lee Petway, Strips, pieced quilt, 2003

Left: Peruvian tapestry fragment

Right: Young monks in a Bhutan monastery facing a painted or tiled wall. The block pattern is very much like the the 1930s Amish quilt from Lancaster County, Pa., below

Below: Mondrian, Contexture, oil on canvas, 1930s; above: another 1930s Amish quilt. Do I need to comment on all the visual connections?

Drawing Center

Nice post, Chris. And I really like the HTML drawing you showed with it. There are so many reasons to like that work: the luminous color, the grid-based format with its play of vertical and horizontal in counterpoint to the horizontal and vertical, the richness within the overall sense of reductiveness. Drawing, painting. Tomato, potato.

Have you considered showing this series to the Drawing Center next time you come East? They have a one-on-one viewing program ,http://www.drawingcenter.org/artreg_viewingprog.cfm, for artists who are not affiliated with a New York gallery. You make an appointment. Then you bring a selection of work to the Center for a free consult with a curator. It’s hit or miss in terms of the feedback and the results. I did it some years back, and I didn’t feel I got much out of the dialog, and absolutely nothing came of it curatorially. But other artist friends have felt hugely helped by the dialog, and several were invited to participate in group shows there.

I'd written a much longer post, with images, but I've been having trouble with the Blogspot post and I lost everything--pictures, text and all. This is a great picture-posting system when it works, but when it doesn't, it reall sucks. More later. I hope.

HTML as drawing

 

When I Met You (Pacific), 20060720, HTML, 300 x 400 pixels

Joanne, in your last post you talk about how you see my sensibility as a painter come out in the HTML drawings, and I'm glad to hear that. A few people have commented on that, and I suppose that's why people naturally call them paintings. In fact, it's very gratifying that you recognize that, because it is something I really work on, and I draw from my experience as a painter when making the images.

To be honest, when I see a lot of digital work by others I can see the lack of experience and the eye in the work, and this lack goes in one of two directions, both rooted in the inability to handle old-fashioned color, form, and composition.

The first direction is work that looks too digital, too blocky, to formless, without a good sense of color. The second direction is work that overcompensates by relying too much on the neat digital tools at one's exposure. I find the simplicity of HTML tables really freeing, and it gives me limits to push against. One of the ways to push against it is by using painterly knowledge about color, form, light. There's a way that HTML might force all of the daily work to look alike, but I think I've been able to get a kind of variety out of something that most people would've given up on long ago.

I think someone else who is really good at working against the seduction of digital work by working within some very narrow parameters is Tom Moody, and in particular his work on paper.

I call them drawings because it just seems to me historically drawing is a more flexible term, especially in post-Minimal times. For me a painting needs paint- painting is a specific medium. The meaning of drawing has for me more possiblities- it comes from disegno, design, and seems closer to idea and process and planning. There are issues of degrees of finish between drawing and painting. Drawing means all kinds of things: pencil on paper, collage or watercolor, a typewritten page, a stick moved over wet sand at a beach, a shadow on a wall, a finger on a frosted window pane. Picasso moved a flashlight in front of a camera during a time-exposure. Tom Marioni made drawings by rubbing paper with drummer's brushes. Hansel and Gretel's breadcrumb trail is a drawing. Brice Marden made drawings with wax and postcards. On and on.

And the feel of making these using Dreamweaver is closer to drawing for me than painting. I select areas, apply color in rows or columns, copy and paste sections- it feels in some way more that collage, but drawing is what it really is.

Does it matter if they're called painting or drawing? Not really- people will continue to call them paintings and I'll continue to call them drawings. Just don't call them late for supper.

More in another post.

You, Me, Geometry, Agnes, Ellsworth, Julie, Eva

Two posts from you. I’ve got some catching up to do!

You talked about my Lush Minimalism, which I’ll respond to momentarily. But since we’re connecting dots and crossreferencing, I want to talk about the luminous geometry of your HTML drawings and the organic geometry of your paintings.

Of course I realize your HTML drawings are not paintings. There’s that issue of the lack of paint, as you point out. But your organization, your palette, your sensibility is that of a painter, not of a printmaker (though you can print the images) or a graphic designer (though they are designed on a computer the way, I’m guessing, a graphic designer might organize elements). So I see and think of them "paintings" even though you call them "drawings" --hey, there's no pencil involved, either. There’s a broad definition of "painting" and "drawing" these days, so whatever you call your work, it is the work of a painter. And I love the parallels between the luminosity of your pixels on a monitor and my paintings on panel, because in both instances the work is illuminated. Yours are actually illuminated from the inside out; mine are illuminated from light that penetrates and then illuminates as it reflects from the inside out. (Very astronomical, sun and moon, this light thing.)

Apropos of illumination, I'm posting a new painting of mine. Can you post one of your HTML drawings? I can't lift it from your site.

Joanne Mattera: Uttar 298, 24" x 24", encaustic on panel, 2006

As for your actual paintings, they are geometric and organic. The color appears quite luminous. The paint is not thick but is sensuous nonetheless. I want to describe them with words like "organic geometry" or "biological geometry." Your organizing principle and your materials are compatibly opposite. In your work, as in Anne Truitt’s, whom you mention, the opposites invigorate the work. (Judd I never could warm up to. All the color in the world can’t warm up his work for me. )

Chris Ashley: Untitled 1, 2005

Chris Ashley: Untitled 2, 2005

While the grid appears to be your organizing principle, and certainly your mode of installation, I see your work and think "life." There’s the suggestions of cells, ribcages, lungs, leaves, trees, landscape. Your color, though, is less about earth and the body than it is about a painter's palette. The scale is both micro and macro. And then there’s your work that is overtly landscape, though reductively so, such as your Six Paintings for a Room in Berkeley.

I think that compatible complementariness is what makes your work strong--and what connects our work as well. You mention Agnes Martin. Subtle tough her work is, it’s the complementariness of the handmade line, often with visible pencil dots to mark the measurements, and the visible brushmarks that give such power to her rigorously simple horizontals.

Agnes Martin: Untitled (taken from the web; no specifics given)

By contrast, I never warmed up to Ellsworth Kelly’s paintings, because they’re too flat, to non-hand for me. (His sculptures, though are a revelation. The substantiveness of the materials against the simplicity of the construction. Ah!)

Ellsworth Kelly: Sculpture for a Large Wall, 1957. You can see additional at: www.artseensoho.com/Art/MARKS/kelly98/kelly5.html

As I talk about your work, I realize I’m revealing my own biases. So, you want to provoke me: what is geometry in my work? How do I use it? And how not? Where does "lush minimalism" come from? What experience, what place? Let me see if I can do this in a loquacious version of 25-words-or-less.

In my interview with Julie Karebenick I tell her that geometry is secondary to color. Stripes, blocks, bands: they’re all ways to get color onto/into a painting. One of my earliest visual color memories is the wall with spools of thread in my aunt Lena’s workroom. (I spent many hours in her home from the time I was an infant.) Lena was a dressmaker who worked at home--limited options for Italian- American women, any women, in the 30s and 40s--and her spools were set onto pegs in the Roy G. Biv array. Imagine my surprise as a kindergartner when I found out that the rainbow was set up exactly the same way as Auntie Lena’s spools!

So the "minimal" part of "lush minimalism" is the repetition of one element—block or stripe—that carries the color. And even slight variations in the geometric arrangements let me explore the color and composition in different ways. The "lush" is the medium: wax. Wax, in the form of encaustic paint, is the binder for my pigment. It’s the same pigment used in oil and acrylic paintings, but wax has such substance and luminosity that I let it guide me. Of course I impose my will by scraping and digging into the surface, or simply by layering colors, but there’s a finely tuned push-pull between the painter and the paint.

The geometry in my work is simply the most straightforward means of working with color. Most of my color is highly saturated, so I’m interested in its transparent, translucent and opaque versions. Most of my color mixing takes place in layers, or by proximity, so the viewer’s eye has to do a lot of the work.

I was introduced to wax in a painting materials class in college. My response to it was immediate and visceral. I have to say that when I approach a painting, when I’m painting, I’m fairly right brained about the why and the how. I’m fortunate that I can slip into the zone—that place where brain, eye, hand, brush, paint and painting coalese into an entity with an energy of its own. Of course I can step back and think about the work, but it’s like realizing, after you've driven for 20 miles, that you've been in another place. You've made rational decisions about speeding up and slowing down, switching lanes, watching out for trafic, but you were simultaneously elsewhere. Fortunately in the studio, I don't have to worry about the other driver. And I'm safe at any speed.

If you have more to say about your work, I'd love to hear it. I feel I'm talked out about mine (for now, anyway). These are some of the the things I’d like to look at/ think about/ talk about over the next few weeks:

. Helen Miranda Wilson at the Albert Merola Gallery in Provincetown, Mass. (I’ll see her show next week when I go to the beach there for a few days of much-needed R&R). Click here to see a couple of images: http://www.albertmerolagallery.com/2006%20WEBSITE/Artists/WILSON/Helen%20Miranda%20Wilson.html

. Eva Hesse’s show at the Jewish Museum in New York (saw it last month, have been perusing my books of her work). There’s that combination of grid and looseness in her work, specifically in the "craftness" of her materials, the variety of her individual elements. Click here for more info: http://www.jewishmuseum.org/site/pages/onlinex.php?id=132&PHPSESSID=832a95eb4d33fb48579722683ac3ca86

. My own upcoming show at the Arden Gallery in Boston. No links yet. I'm finishing up the Photoshopping and working on a statement.

. In a non-blog e-mail you asked about my interest in painting with acrylic, and how that differs from painting in encaustic. I’m about to learn about acrylic gels—specifically the ones that give the work a wax-like luminosity and substance—so I’ll be writing about it, probably for my own blog, but I can share.

What topics are on your mind?

Lush Minimalism

I think your term, "lush minimalism", is very descriptive of and apt for your work. The grid is a fairly constant structure in your work, as you talk about in your interview with Julie, yet you do things by throwing the gird off-center, or not completing it, or using a fragment of a grid. And Julie, says, "And you obviously revel in color; no minimalist sensibility here."

Interestingly, Tyler Green wrote today about Anne Truitt. He mentions Judd's early 60's critique of Truitt's work, saying, "The work looks serious without being so," in particular referring to her color and the divisions on her boxes and planks, and yet there he was in the 80's using lush color, too, with colored Plexiglas.

Green also talks about where Truitt was from, in Eastern Maryland, and the low elevation and the flat, far distances one can see. Her work seems about place, color, light. My friend, George Lawson, said when Truitt died that she should have the same recognition that, for example, Agnes Martin has (and I add, perhaps she didn't because she raised a family, never lived in New York, and didn't have a mythology surrounding her art such as, for example, Martin's break from painting and living in the desert, or Judd's scale of activities as a critic, 101 Spring St., and Chinati in Marfa, TX).

These are all artists using the grid, or right angles, or box-like forms.

Your work seems to be working somewhere in this same territory as far as form and a kind of interiorization of place, but of course, it is way more lush. I also wonder whether the fact that you primarily paint on panels is a contributing factor, since it gives your work a more solid body than if it were on canvas, and so there is this feeling of solidity to the paint that is like a frozen liquid.

Jerry Cullum wrote in a review in Art in America, March 2000, "These pictures display formal rigor exquisitely combined with the imprecision inherent in Mattera's medium." You never have precise, hard edges- there is always a flow, the mark of the brush, depth, bits of crust or small pockmarks. Your work, like my HTML drawings, seems to be working against a kind of rigid, almost static geometry.

All of this above just a beginning way to poke at you- what is geometry in your work? How do you use it, and how not? Where does this "lush minimalism" come from, what experience, what place?

Gee-oh-my-tree!

I'm going to skip the apologies and explanations for taking more days than I expected to write here. You've heard them all before. I'm cutting myself some slack and excusing myself for now because I think we're still figuring out how this dialogue will work and how to fit it into our busy lives. And that may just be the way it's going to be for awhile until we establish a rhythm.

I want to go back to your first post in which, while referring to some things we have in common, you wrote, "The second is our own individual work. Specifically, I’m thinking about our recent shows—your HTML drawings at the 1708 Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, and my paintings in encaustic at the Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta—because our work shares a geometric sensibility and, despite our extremely different mediums, a similar kind of luminosity."

The geometric question is a tough one for me to address immediately. I don't know the answers off the top of my head. I like to work out ideas through either writing or conversation, and of those two modes writing gets me closer because of the pace and possibility through revision of greater precision. I recently had to confront this when writing a statement for Geoform.net, which I was recently invited join. Not everything I wrote made it into the final statement, but in reading the first draft Julie Karabenick, one of the editors of Geoform, picked up on what she thought was a hint of perhaps the accidental or ambivalence (not her words) on my part about geometry; something having to do with my use of HTML for making drawings as kind of an acquiescence to the medium; in other words, I didn't choose geometry, but I chose to use it because the medium itself, HTML, is necessarily geometric. I didn't say this outright in the statement, but she picked up on it in a few things I said, which was perceptive, and it made me think about this issue.

The HTML drawings are one aspect of my overall body of work. Some drawings (on paper) I make have ruled lines or brush strokes, so they appear geomtric. But generally, my paintings are not geometric in the sense of Geometric Art. Sure, I may use the occasional straight- usually hand-painted, as I rarely use tape or anything to make a precise edge- but my paintings are more... what? I'm trying to avoid a whole bunch of words like loose, open, organic, biomorphic, naturalistic. All of this language, detached from an image, can prove so misleading. I will just say that my paintings are often about landscape or architectural spaces and the place of the figure in them or, the idea and/or feeling of the viewer as that figure, either through a visual, physical, or memory experience. More importantly, though, is that they're paintings, and they share in the gestalt of what a painting is through history: support, form, line, surface, mark, paint, color, image, object.

(BTW, the HTML drawings are not paintings, because they don't completely share the painting gestalt. They have: support (monitor), form (cells), line (barely, and often tied to form), color (plenty), and image. The surface of the HTML drawing is the monitor, so it's constant and without variation, so it doesn't count for me. The remainder of what's missing are mark, paint, and object.)

I have always had an attraction to minimal, geometric or hard-edged painting. I'm a big fan of John McLaughlin (for those of you who don't know who he is, perhaps you can read this or that or here and look at these or those). There are all kinds of names we throw around: Constructivists and Suprematist, de Stijl, Conrete, Mondrian, Newman, etc. And I've written plenty about minimalist or geometric-family artists, plus all the interviews I've done for Minus Space.

But the thing is, I have never myself been able to make work that I would call geometric. I just don't want to do it. I'm not neat and tidy. I'm not a taper. I don't make work that goes to all the edges, that is even and uniform. I have a very strong case of approach/avoidance regarding craft. I use the grid a lot, and I might start a painting with some kind of system or order to it, but I always break it down. I want to make an image that is, and feels to me, composed and built, rather than found, and if I use the grid too much, or other kinds of constructed forms it feels "found" to me. So I skirt around architectural form a lot in painting.

Maybe the best thing to do is to quote my Geoform.net statement, because I think it says much about how this use of geomtric imagery came to be in the HTML drawings. I will add that much of what I wrote below, and much of what I'm writing here in general, is not something I knew going into the work; instead, it is what I learned about what I am doing over time, looking back, writing about it at various opportunties.

I use HTML to make tables with colored cells that are rendered by a web browser as an image. I make one drawing every day to show on my weblog. The images are not made to be printed, and they are not plans for “real” paintings. They are simply what they are, meant to be seen on a monitor, framed by the browser, within the window of an operating system, in the serial, chronological, hyperlinked context of a weblog. Each drawing is typically one in a series, and is also meant as an individual, stand-alone image.

HTML is a simple medium with many limitations. It is inherently and inescapably geometric. It consists of right angles, straight edges, smooth and even surfaces. The range of color is confined to the possibilities of the monitor, which ensures a uniform intensity. However, I find a great deal of freedom working within this medium, and despite these limitations, since the HTML drawings exist on the Web, they are extremely portable and easy to disseminate, brilliantly backlit by the monitor, and instantly viewable and linkable. Since 2000 my weblog has been a studio wall, a gallery, and an archive.

Each series of HTML drawings has a subject (topical, historical, personal), explores one or more formal problems (color, shape, line, format, visual effect), and provides a technical challenge (making an HTML table do things it wasn’t intended to do). A series may last ten, fifteen, or twenty-five days, but recently each series has lasted exactly one calendar month.

The idea of making HTML drawings occurred to me as a way to integrate images into a weblog without needing an additional graphic file. Computer icons comprising a small grid of pixels were an early inspiration, and the earliest drawings resembled enlarged, blockier icons. The HTML table allowed me to follow my natural attraction to the grid and abstraction. Over time, as I have pushed the medium, the images have become more dynamic, complex, and expressive. In recent HTML drawings I have used animated GIFS and JPEG backgrounds.

Even when using geometric form there is still the impulse to make an image that is surprising, dynamic, and expressive. In a medium where it's easy to make perfectly measured grids the challenge is to go beyond the expectation of given order and structure. My goal is to make an image that the viewer relates to as something beyond a bunch of rectangles. I want to make images that encourage associations to nature, the body, place, thought, sound, language, social relations, and history.

So, I am often working against and trying to break down the resistant rigidity of the HTML table, and there are little things I do to distract the viewer away from the geometry: gradation, shadow, overlap and looping line, shifts in alignment, associations to forms that makes one think of something other (a door! a building! a space! a figure!) than geometry (a vertical rectangle! a taller rectangle! a square! a spiral!). Sometimes I think it works.

I titled this "Gee-oh-my-tree!" when I originally started this post several days ago and didn't get too far. This was probably just some stalling disguised as phonetic wordplay on my part, buying time to think how to write about this. But I actually think the title means something to me. One obvious thing is that my need to break down the word is part of my need to breakdown assumptions about an art that appears to be something that one might label geometric. But also, I think the feeling I get from breaking down the word "geometry" into the sentence, "Gee, oh my tree," tells something about how I look for and take from geometric structure in nature. This is where a lot of the images- on canvas, paper, and in HTML- come from.

I agree that we have luminosity in common, but also each are quite different: mine are more luminescent from a distant, and yours up close. I'd have to comfirm this by looking at one of your paintings again, but I think the kind of depth and luminousness in your paintings becomes much richer up close; not that they don't have it from a distance, but even more so up close when one see the layers and is closer to the light reflected from the depths of those layers. For me, one of the best ways to get the full effect of the HTML drawings is from a distance, say five or six feet; the light off the monitor needs to travel a bit. When one's eyes are too close to the monitor, within a couple of feet, which is the routine distance, I think we just don't see the light in the same way. In my paintings I'm usually after a more naturalistic light, and a more pictorial kind of light rather than an intentionally physical, experiential kind of light.

Monday Evening: Coming From Many Places Myself

Hey, Chris--
My Monday evening is following your Saturday evening by a week and two days. I guess this blog is going to chug along in fits and starts.

Actually, life has just gotten a tad easier, so I expect to be more communicative. My two summer workshops (at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Mass., and at Maine College of Art in Portland) are over, and the painting for my September solo at Arden Gallery in Boston, http://www.ardengallery.com/next_exhibition.htm, is complete. There’s still plenty of post-painting work to do, but the standing-over-the-hotplates part is done--and not a moment too soon, with the heatwave here in the Northeast. You don't have to deal with 95-degree heat in Oakland, but it's part of the dog-day experience here.

Here’s an image from the upcoming show. It’s part of my ongoing Uttar series, but its foursquare geometry dovetails with the reductive color fields of the newer Silk Road series. By the way, I was so taken with a phrase you used in writing about Silk Road in your blog, http://www.chrisashley.net/weblog/archives/week_2006_04_16.html#001365 , that I snatched it up for the title of my show: "Heat of the Moment."

Joanne Mattera: Uttar 294, encaustic on panel, 36 x 36 inches, 2006

I wanted to respond to your essay and comments about Mel Prest’s work. Top notch, both the writing and the painting. I first saw her paintings last year at Gregory Lind in San Francisco. So simple they are: line after line of color. But so complex is the result, deep of space and luminous of color. Of all the work I saw, her paintings stood out. So for you to choose to write about her work, well, I know we’re doing the right thing with this blog. I particularly liked your description of the visual energy of her work as "a kind of force that seems to lift the painting off the wall."

More generally with regard to your writing I like your concept of language as carving, as sculpture. Certainly well-shaped writing takes us into a dimensional space conceptually. As an artist I’m appreciative of the continuum of creative effort. It’s not a continuum that exists linearly so much as it exists sequentially and simultaneously in two and three dimensional space. An idea that exists in my brain is expressed by my hand and given substance by my materials; it continues into the universe as a tangible object where it is seen by others in person, or as a conceptual object on a printed page or as pixels of light in a cyber screen. Seeing the object or the image dimensionalizes the work in another person’s mind. Written commentary about the work creates another point in that conceptually dimensional universe from which to perceive the work. And of course each person’s perceptions of the work, and of the writing about a work, create additional dimensions in which the work exists.

I think I’ve just described holographic nesting dolls projected in a hall of mirrors as seen on a webcam, but you get my point, right? Or maybe I’m just punchy. I’ve been traveling.

I gave a workshop in Portland on Saturday, at the Maine College of Art (MECA), "Getting to the Next Step in Your Career: Ten Things You never Learned in Art School." Don't get me started about the failing of art schools to prepare their students for a life in the art world. It's better now; kids are learning what they need to know to launch their careers, but many artists at midcareer are struggling because they never got the information in school and haven't figured it out. If you went to art school in the 60s and 70s, there was this idea that art and commerce weren't compatible. Uh, like what's paying the studio rent, drawings? (Actually quite a few artists at midcareer have traded paintings or other artwork for dental work, legal help, and probably rent. My attorney has one of my paintings in his office on Worth Street. But bartering takes one only so far.) Anyway, I'm glad to share what I've learned and to be paid in the process.

Man, Portland is a nice city. Small, clean. Sweltering the day I was there, but normally quite pleasant. Given the art college, there’s a strong creative community manifested by some good galleries: The Aucocisco Gallery, http://www.aucocisco.com/ and June Fitzpatrick, www.junefitzpatrickgallery.com; the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA, http://www.meca.edu/GalleriesExhibitions/ICA/Overview.aspx , and a raft of artists' studios that open their doors to the public on First Fridays. I’ll be back up in the fall to do another workshop and will take pictures then.

The drive up 95 was my first trip with a GPS. If you think Mapquest is convenient, wait until you have a map with a route taking shape before your eyes, numbers to tell you how far away the next turn is, and a voice to tell you when to take it. My EZ-Pass doesn’t work so well when the GPS is on, though. I guess technology has its limits.

When you have a moment, talk to me about geometry.
Over and out for now.

Saturday night: art comes from many places

This weblog moves our email conversation to the web and makes it public. We have made a commitment to each other to some kind of regularity, and to exploring some issues about our art and art in general. This moves our conversation to a more self-conscious, intentional, and definitley public level. It's exciting.

Joanne, I will confess that I've spent the past few days watching more World Cup and Tour de France than I have painting or writing. I'm not really a sports nut at all, but besides the occasional baseball game I do really enjoy following the Tour every July, and the World Cup is particulary exciting, partly because it is an international event, but especially because of the spectacular play. Typically, I sit on the couch playing guitar while watching the coverage, and I feel very content. Tonight, as I write, my notebook is on my lap and the TV is on to coverage of today's time trials, so between typing I peek up to see what's happening; right at this moment Robbie McEwen has just launched down the ramp to begin his leg.

I went to an opening of a group show at the Richmond Art Center this afternoon called Microcosm. The curator's statement specifies that this show includes Artists who take inspiration from patterns of the natural world) (and I suspect that that link will eventually expire, since it isn't specific to the show, but it's okay for now). The reason I went is because Mel Prest is in the show, and I recently wrote an essay about her solo show this past April at Gregory Lind in San Franciso. It was the first time I'd met her, though we've emailed back and forth a several times the last few months. Openings are not good for really looking at the work, so it's a little unfair perhaps for me to say that the show was a little uneven, but it was good to see some of the work, to see Mel's paintings again, and to finally meet her.

Not that I'm a total slacker- since I have a commitment to making an HTML drawing everyday for my weblog, of course I'm drawing regularly; that commitment is a very good thing for me- something visual everyday. I can count on this. I have to make an image to show everyday. I have to enter and work within that certain mentality, that certain spatial psychology, a place beyond language, to make something that is only about looking, that comes out of the organic process of making an image.

Mel asked me something about writing about art, whether it's words or visuals first. For me it is absolutely the visual first, and language second. Language is the reification of seeing (although, seeing can be enough, and really need not be extended to the body of language). Seeing is the primary process, and language is the place of conscious cognition. Seeing is a visceral, emotional understanding, and language is a highly conscious, structured, intellectual kind of understanding. Seeing as an intelligence is underrated. Sometimes I think that language as an intelligence is overrated. Writing is hard work; it is a kind of carving, a shared forming of understanding.

I described to Mel writing as sculptural- that's why I use the word carving. Hacking and hewing, finding the right words, the right phrases, the right order of things for explication. Writing, using language is spatial; there is building an argument or an explanation, there is order, there is shape.

To talk as language as a kind of sculpture is for me the third case of referring to sculpture this week. I think shaping is on my mind. We have a plum tree in our front yard that is a little out of control. The previous owners didn't prune the tree well, so it hangs over the fence, is too tall, has too many thin branches hanging with plums filling the middle of the tree. For the past year I've been looking at that tree and telling myself that it has to be dealt with. Finally, I bought one of those pruning and sawing tools that extends up to about eighteen feet, and I've begun very carefully pruning away. I told my neighbor that it's a slow process, like sculpture; it's more than simply cutting and topping off branches. I want to carefully remove branches here and there so that in the end we have a tree with a better shape, a better system of branches and fruit, and something that will be easier to maintain in the future.

I was also talking with a co-worker about watching the World Cup games, and about understanding the play as a series of spatial strategies. Players shift and position themselves around the field, the ball is a focal point, and if one takes each series of plays moving the ball up and down the field there are little performances that seem something like sculpture to me. Watching the replay of a shot on goal, for example, there is a setup, a series of moves, a certain kind of form and beauty. That sequence of movements is just brief enough to mentally capture, and it's possible to see the shape of that play, almost like calligraphy. Likewise, in the Tour, in certain legs there are times when teams work to move a rider into position, and the beauty of this is how the riders work together and strategize to block other riders and move one rider into position. There is form to that, a sequence of shapes, a goal, and a very physical, emotional movement with its own intelligence.

So although I may not have painted much this past week, through writing, pruning a tree, and watching the Tour and the World Cup I am still exercising my visual muscles, thinking about form and compostion, shape and line and color. I truly do think of writing, of everyday life, of other media as informing my art. I like to think of it as all one thing, a very organic experience of life that informs my art. Art can be a career, but it is also a way of life. What does that mean? What is the place of art in life? What does the practice of art mean to the artist's inner life, and what is the place of one's inner life in art that is made for others to see? This is something I want to think more about, and if possible hear about from you.

In response to your last post: the collaboration you mention is with Douglas Witmer, an excellent painter from Philadelphia. I wrote an exhibition proposal to the University of Dayton, Ohio called Across the Borderline outlining a plan for Douglas and I to do a collaborative drawing installation. The proposal was approved and we are on for January 2007. Exactly what we will make will be worked out this summer. We will make separate drawings, draw on each other drawings, and install these across nearly sixty feet of wall space. The drawings will be regular drawings on paper, digital drawings, and combinations of the two.

Vaguely, what I have in mind are two individual drawing installations that move across the wall to merge into a larger joint collection of collaborative drawings. The title, Across the Borderline, has to do with our two different approaches, our geographical distance, and a kind of merging of two approaches and sensibilities in the middle, our work having literally and figuratively spanned some kind of distance. I am really looking forward to this because I like Douglas and I like his work, and there is nothing like a commitment to get the juices flowing.

We have a weblog for the project that has the proposal, the floorplan, and some beginnging thoughts, and we plan to build this weblog over time as documentation to our process, the work and the exhibit. Consider this post the offical announcement of our successful application and the weblog: Across the Borderline.

I'm going to end this post here, but I want to respond later to your mention in your previous post about our "shared geometric sensbility." I had a recent realization about my use of geometry: incidental or intentional? More to come.

Commonalities

So, Chris, finally we’re Two Artists blogging! July 4 is as good a time as any to begin. When else can we get fireworks to accompany the launch?

I’m thinking about two issues that interest me.

. The first is the idea of collaboration. You are about to begin a drawing project with an East Coast artist. I collaborated with a painter about a decade ago. Mine was a summer project that resulted in a small body of work, twelve 12x12" paintings. While it was great fun, a welcome change from the isolation of the studio, the project opened up my own work in unexpected ways. I’ll tell you more about mine, if you tell me more about yours.

. The second is our own individual work. Specifically, I’m thinking about our recent shows—your HTML drawings at the 1708 Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, and my paintings in encaustic at the Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta—because our work shares a geometric sensibility and, despite our extremely different mediums, a similar kind of luminosity.

365, 2006, 365 inkjet prints of HTML drawings, 11 x 8.5 inches each, installed at 1708 Gallery, Richmond, VA, May 2006. Photo Pete Baldes, 2006

Installation from Silk Road, each painting 12x12 inches and (Uttar

292), 48 x 67 inches, at rear, installed at the Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta, Aprl-May, 2006

(For anyone looking in, we’re Chris Ashley from Oakland, California, and Joanne Mattera from New York City. We met in October 2005 at a gallery in Philadelphia where Chris was showing five small paintings, just a few days after Chris had seen nine of my small paintings in a San Francisco gallery. We chatted briefly, and after following up with some "nice to meet you" e-mails found we shared some points of view and began a more regular e-mail conversation. That led to JM’s idea to do a joint blog and CA’s idea to call it Two Artists Talking.)

.

Berkeley Painting: Panoramic

Chris Ashley, Panoramic (Berkeley Painting), 2006, oil and aluminum Rust-oleum on clear acrylic on linen, 23 x 17 inches