These Two Pages of My Sketchbook Are Haunted

by the artist known as '14'

Much amusement can be derived from flipping through the pages of high society magazines and checking out the photos of wealthy people posing at various balls and charity fundraising events. Many appear stiff and taut with freakish cosmetic surgery, overly flashy with blinding white teeth, shiny couture and sparkling jewels - I just love it.  Palm Springs Life is probably the best publication on the newsstand to view these glamourous spectacles and while flipping through it a few months ago, I came upon a photo of Tom Bosley and his lovely wife holding a white fluffy little dog. They seemed so happy and yet both their hands were twisted and knotty with arthritis. There was something so beautiful and scary about the image, that I started a rough sketch right there in the bookstore and later came home to finish it up. While working on it, I heard that Tom Bosley had passed (RIP) and I suddenly got the creeps. Later, a friend sent me a society photo from a hoity-toity event in Houston. There was something creepy about the people posing in it, as though they had recently emerged from an long sleep in the cold dark basement of their drafty cavernous castle and flew to the party inside a swarm of shrieking vampire bats as thunderstorms raged through the night.  I'm sure they're nice people, but it's fun to let the imagination run wild. That being said, I formally declare these two pages of my sketchbook to be haunted.  Medium: graphite, ink, marker and ectoplasm.

Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942, Oil on canvas, 30x60 inches. Art Institute of Chicago

Robert J. Hughes, writer living in New York and Paris


Even the everyday, of course, can be monumental. At the Art Institute of Chicago hangs the almost-mythic Nighthawks. This is Edward Hopper's iconic and immense painting of three patrons and a counterman seen in artificial yellow light in a diner in the shadowed emptiness of a summery New York night. I did not know from reproductions how large this painting was, but on seeing it for the first time in person, I was struck by its immensity and how fresh and awe-inspiring the original would be.

t’s a rare painting that conjures stillness – Monet's water lily paintings, perhaps, manage it as well – though for Hopper, the color of stillness was somehow an essential part of his palette.

Where the sculptors of the Laocoön captured the doom of man somehow offending the gods – don't mess with destiny – and rendered the mythic palpably human (if heroic in scale), Hopper portrayed the silent figures of daily life, yet somehow imbued them with the dignity, the grace, even, of something mythic in our nature. They may not have to worry about the wrath of gods, and perhaps must contend instead with the wayward distances of others, but they sit and chat as if they were somehow noble still, seated far from Olympus and yet, because of Hopper, nevertheless near to eternity.

Teresita Fernandez at Galerie Almine Rech

19 rue Saintonge, Paris, France
through December 18th


by Robert J. Hughes

How light plays upon the world, upon the landscape, how the weather plays upon our vision are all preoccupations for the painter. As Monet said to Sacha Guitry when the great painter was very old and the great playwright very young, "Without sun, there is no Monet."

Sculptors, too, consider the fall of light and shadow on forms in space. Teresita Fernàndez, an American artist known for her almost environmental sculptures, which use light and shapes – enclosed circles, open stairs – to promote a sense of looking at the world from different angles and perspectives, offers the environment of the darkened seaside in a series of new works.

In her first exhibition at Almine Rech Gallery in Paris, Fernàndez combines the three-dimensional sculptural with the flat plane of the pictorial. Most of the works here are beautiful, shadowy depictions of water after dark. It is difficult to depict the shimmering evanescence of water at any time of day, but Fernàndez gives the viewer a view of the expansive horizon under a starlight sky, the stipples of rippling moonbeams creating a ghostly reverie of nighttime waters.

"Nocturnal (Horizon Line)," graphite on panel, shows the sweep of black sea stretching outward, invitingly. Moving closer in, a viewer can see the sculptural ridges of the graphite, the "pour" of the waves and reflected light. The graphite provides a real sense of water, even in the very near distance, and you can stand before even a small panel and get a sense of the wide eternal sea, with all of its unruly cinematic power.

Other works use small cut cubes of mirrored glass, arranged in sprays, to give a sense of energy in the very air – looking as an act of exultation. Fernàndez also uses polished precision-cut steel to similar effect, crafting representations of nature with machined metals, as in "Mirror – Terllis," which looks like an arbor frozen mid-growth, but still, because of its reflective surfaces, alive to the gleaming day.

What Fernàndez has done here is something new: she's created sculptural landscapes that broaden the canvas, the plane of the wall, into three-dimensional space. Others have done this before, of course, such as Frank Stella. But Fernàndez has created still-life sculptures of vegetation of cold steel and glass that are at once sculpture and painting; you don't feel fooled – these aren't the very representations of nature of a trompe l'oeil, but reflections of reality, a mirror of what our mind might remember about a moonlight ocean, a trellis of leaves, a spray of dappled leaves, a memory etched in graphite, steel or glass of what we believed we saw.

Samuel Richardot at Balice Hertling Gallery

47 rue Ramponeau, 75020 Paris, France
October 29 - December 10, 2010

by Robert J. Hughes

The act of looking at art involves not only concentration but release.

At a new show of paintings by Samuel Richardot at Balice Hertling in Paris, the squiggles, the abstract or the organic shapes on the canvases are like guideposts to perception as an act of meditative abandon.

In a large untitled painting that takes up almost an entire wall, the white canvas holds four sorts of reference points that are outlines of everyday objects – two circles in green that could be the ghost of a protractor, two red zygotes that could be the afterimage of calla lilies, a blackish sausage-like shape that suggests the twisted anthropomorphic shape of a balloon animal. But they're also mere shapes themselves. The point is that when you look at the painting, as you try to resolve the forms into something familiar, you begin to let go of the reality associated with that form and allow observing itself to take over; you are in the moment, rather than the interpretation of that moment.

Smaller paintings that ring the other walls of the space use those random elements of organic forms – triangles, circles, lines that could be everyday items or body parts – to draw you closer, then to push you back. The pleasure of Richardot's paintings isn't in their detail – though you do find yourself moving in to see how the paint saturates the canvas, or where a bit of something that seems extraneous, like a snippet of tape, adheres to the work – but in determining that details aren't essential to comprehension. And that comprehension isn't essential to understanding. That is, you don't ask, "what does it mean," but rather, "what am I not seeing," which is more about your own sense of reality rather than whatever real or unreal world a painting creates.

This is refreshing in an age of agitprop art, where once you get the point – usually a sarcasm or easy irony – the work itself holds little interest. Grand statements tend to dilute quickly in the swirling waters of contemporary communication. But with Richardot's paintings, you settle into a meditative calm. Several of the works have the contemplative allure of Agnes Martin paintings, with their repetition of soft pencil lines over a white background, like a visual koan that asks the viewer to understand through intuition. Others evoke, however glancingly, such different abstract artists as Kenneth Noland – whose paintings vibrated with brilliantly colored geometric forms – or even some of Piet Mondrian's quieter theosophical explorations of the meaning of life through his paintings' rectilinear distillation of the everyday.

Richardot's paintings give you the freedom to observe, to wonder, even. They hold back and beckon, they promise intimacy and calm, while so many other contemporary paintings are screaming "look at me."

Art, artifacts and excess collide in a combustible energy exhibit at Denver's MCA

by Kyle MacMillan

Denver Post

August 6, 2010

With words and phrases like "sustainability," "environmentally conscious" and "carbon-neutral" all the buzz these days, most exhibitions that have anything do with energy inevitably deal with the themes of conservation and new technologies.

But an intriguing, provocative and potentially controversial show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver takes a decidedly different tack — "Energy Effects: Art and Artifacts From the Landscape of Glorious Excess."

As its evocative title suggests, it explores and, in some ways, celebrates excess energy in an array of guises, from the enthusiasm of a rock-concert mosh pit to the destructive power in a nuclear bomb.

"For millennia, civilizations have been defined by their use of this excess, uses that span a spectrum from war to art," writes co-curator Paul Andersen.  "Our civilization also receives more energy than we need . . . and like those civilizations before us, our identity is more closely linked to how we choose to spend that energy than how we save it."

While probing these issues, "Energy Effects" also raises fascinating questions about the nature of contemporary art, the function of art exhibitions and the role of art museums in the 21st century.

Many of the objects in this exhibition are artworks by almost any conventional definition of the term, even if they stretch the boundaries of traditional forms.  A good example is "Reg," an imposing 6-by-9-by-8-foot block of knotted climbing rope by New York artist Orly Genger. Set at an angle so that it blocks a wide corridor, it challenges viewer perceptions of space and scale.

But what are we to make of "Chaussures" (1991-present), a display of more than 125 pairs of sandals crafted and worn by Denver artist Viviane Le Courtois over nearly two decades — the history of each carefully documented?

As unexpected as it is to see these shoes hung along the exterior walls of the museum's second floor, there is nothing especially aesthetic about them. This undertaking is as much anthropological as artistic.

And as the exhibit's title makes clear, several of the show's offerings are artifacts and not art, however visually compelling they might be. Most notable are a Titan IV Stage II rocket engine and two B61 thermonuclear bomb casings on loan from the Wings Over the Rockies Air & Space Museum.

Art-museum exhibitions of the past were artist-driven, focused primarily on movements, influences and styles. But in today's art world, concept trumps all, and that is certainly true at the MCA Denver.  Since becoming director of the institution in March 2009, Adam Lerner has made ideas — in this case, the notion of excess energy — the driving force of the museum's offerings, with artworks, artifacts and whatever else playing a supporting role. 

It's not surprising, then, that "Energy Effects" would not be at all out of place at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science or a similar organization.

An unvoiced but certainly evident theme of this exhibition is obsessive-compulsiveness, one of the extremes that drives many human pursuits, especially art. How else to explain the undersized and oversized work of Willard Wigan of London and Jim Sanborn of Washington, D.C.?

Wigan invests an enormous amount of energy to create his quirky micro-sculptures. His "Statue of Liberty in the Eye of a Needle" is so tiny that it has to be viewed through a microscope.

In "Terrestial Physics," Sanborn spent three years meticulously re-creating the first particle accelerator to split uranium atoms in 1939 — a room-size group of oddly old-fashioned machines that are at once alluring and disturbing.

Whatever else can be said about "Energy Effects," it is the most thematically and visually cohesive exhibition to be presented at the MCA Denver since the 2007 opening of its first permanent home in the Central Platte Valley.

The building was designed with five discrete main galleries that were intended to function essentially autonomously — a concept that never made much sense.  Lerner has urgently sought to make the building work as an integral whole, and this exhibition fulfills that goal for the first time, with pieces in the atrium and corridors that tie everything together and achieve a continuous flow.

You Can't Fall Off the Floor

Linda Warren Gallery

1052 W. Fulton Market St., Chicago, IL 60607

June 25, 2010 - August 21, 2010

by Mia DiMeo, August 16, 2010

“Sit down, this may take a while,” warns a small string of words on YOU CAN'T FALL OFF THE FLOOR, a 14-foot long installation work that lends its title to Lora Fosberg’s third solo show at the Linda Warren Gallery.

It can be difficult to “read” art in a gallery for more than few minutes, too many words with too much content can drown the visual impact of a piece of art. But Fosberg’s text-heavy collage pieces are an exception. More organized than chaotic, they maintain a powerful aesthetic effect that keeps me reading. True, it might take a while, but I can’t get enough of Fosberg’s collection of quips and musings, where the text is part of the visual impact. 

Laura Fosberg. YOU CAN'T FALL OFF THE FLOOR. 2010. Gouache and paper mounted directly on the wall.  Image used by permission of Linda Warren Gallery.

YOU CAN'T FALL OFF THE FLOOR takes the form of a monumental temple frieze of amassed phrases with a sprinkling of images, the lines plucked from life and deftly scripted in gouache on handmade paper. Fosberg individually applies each small strip of paper to the wall, changing the composition and adding new phrases with each installation. In fact, when she remakes the piece for Grand Rapid’s ARTPRIZE competition in September, it will double in size.

Cliché, proverbial, tongue-in-cheek, pessimistic, optimistic, matter-of-fact, ironic, romantic, broken-hearted; Fosberg regurgitates phrases from the omnipresent media, as well as notes from random life experiences. She told me when I spoke with her last year that her text works are a portrait “from the air of now… a snippet of time through the lens of me.”

Personal as that may sound, I think her work is attractive to a wide audience because of its emotional universality and reoccurring self-deprecating humor.  Like a nudge from a friend at a bar, I’m reminded of a simple truth in large blue letters, “Desperate is not a sexual preference.” Sure, it’s laughable, but realizations like this one, in a world of information overload, are what form the core of Fosberg’s work.

The freshest of Fosberg’s work are three collaborative pieces with Liza Berkoff; black and white photos of quiet urban landscapes that could be nowhere or anywhere, sharply interrupted by Fosberg’s paper and gouache bands of color. InYes Can Be Such a Surprise a rainbow searchlight seems to explode from the head of a slouched homeless man.DARE TO FAIL, is another altered city scene, where billboards are replaced with Fosberg’s painted slogans—what strikes me as campy inspirational phrases like “Believe in Believing,” that read as if they are pulled from posters in a high school guidance office.  Not that this is a bad thing—it’s good to see some sweet mixed in with all of Fosberg’s tartness.

In fact, the artist loves the environment as much as she loves phrases. The show includes a body of linocuts that are about destruction of nature, bulldozers mauling forests; destruction by nature, a giant cyclone full of cartoonish trees, furniture, and people; and a general celebration of nature, cutesy summer camp-like scenes in the woods, and a lone figure in a canoe. They have an activist bend with the irony that Fosberg excels at, but stay far away from becoming preachy hippy art.

Before I leave the gallery I stop in front of prints of tall tree trunks that dominate the wall, as close to life-sized as Fosberg can get in the space.  Charming with their individual knots and grain, each “tree” is printed and collaged on earthtoned canvas to create a small environment in the gallery, showing Fosberg’s skill as a printmaker and her knack for powerful presentation. The roots coming out of the ground look a bit like legs, and a certain melancholy falls over  me when I read the title, Right Before No More. Fosberg doesn’t do coy, not even with a simple image of a row of tree trunks, and it consistently works for her.

From a Whisper to a Scream: Following Yoko Ono’s Instructions

by Jason Persse,  INSIDE/OUT a MOMA/PS1 blog
July 14, 2010

I first heard about Yoko Ono’s so-called “instruction pieces” as a high school student, when a friend told me the (possibly apocryphal, certainly embellished) story of Ono’s first meeting with John Lennon. History according to the poorly fact-checked lunchtime ramblings of rock ‘n’ roll–obsessed seventeen-year-olds: During a visit to London’s Indica Gallery in 1966, Lennon encountered Ono’s Ceiling Painting. Climbing to the top of a tall, white ladder, he used a magnifying glass dangling from a thread to read a message printed in tiny letters on the ceiling: “YES.” Profoundly moved by the work’s unalloyed positivity, he demanded to meet the artist right away.

That story probably rates a 40% score on the Historical Accuracy Meter, but the (surprisingly spot-on) description of Ceiling Painting captured my imagination. I was captivated by Ono’s notional art—especially her “instruction pieces,” which she describes as “paintings to be constructed in your head”—because it placed the onus of creation squarely on the “spectator.” So when I heard that some of Ono’s participatory pieces would be included in MoMA’s Contemporary Art from the Collection exhibition, I got ready to shoulder the spectator’s burden and help create some art.

I started in the Sculpture Garden with Wish Tree for MoMA. “Make a wish. Write it down on a piece of paper. Fold it and tie it around a branch of the wish tree. Ask your friend to do the same. Keep wishing.” No sweat! I added my wish to the hundreds of cards already hanging from the tree. (I would tell you what I wished for, but then I’d have to kill you.)

Next up was Whisper Piece, a series of sixteen instructions (like “Breathe heavily,” or “Smell the summer”) and affirmations (“You are beautiful,” for example) that Ono scrawled on the walls—and, in one case, the floor—of the second-floor Contemporary Galleries. (At one point a little girl asked me what I was doing squinting into a corner of the gallery, so I told her she had to find and follow the instructions, too. You can imagine my relief when I reached the exit without encountering instructions to steal a painting.) Following what few explicit instructions there were was no problem, and being told repeatedly that I was beautiful and loved did wonders for my self-esteem. The hard part was locating all sixteen tiny whispers.

Finally I returned to the Museum’s grand Marron Atrium, which currently contains Ono’s 1961 “instruction painting” Voice Piece for Soprano—”Scream. 1. against the wind 2. against the wall 3. against the sky”—along with a microphone and a pair of very loud speakers. I stared at the microphone for a while as a perfectly reasonable voice in my head informed me that I would not, under any circumstances, make a loud noise in a museum. Fifteen long minutes later, after watching several brave souls roar their hearts out in defiance of all propriety, I stepped up to the mic and let out a trio of wavering screams, each slightly less pathetic than the last.

And then it was over. Yoko and I had done it! Together we’d created a work of exhilarating, defiant, liberating art that turned heads, startled passersby, and covered me in a fine sheen of flop sweat. Besides, who hasn’t always wanted to let out a good scream at the office?

Almost Eden - David Hinske at Art Under a Hot Tin Roof, Memphis, TN

by Carol Knowles

by Carol Knowles

David Hinske is after something rarified almost ineffable in “transcendental vocabulary” at Art Under a Hot Tin Roof in this exhibition of nonsensically titled luminous abstractions.  Hinske asks us to let go of visual and verbal associations, to play in fields of free-flowing color shot through with light.

Barely visible thumb-sized smudges in several of the paintings conjure up the first bits of matter coalescing and the first artist making his/her signature mark with a chunk of charcoal in a Paleolithic cave.  The rest of Hinske's boundless and effervescent surfaces bring to mind cotton candy and Technicolor amoebas.  Like Beth Edwards' surprisingly powerful rubber duck portrait of bliss, Hinske's melted-popsicle pools of radiance are also a joy to behold.

RIP Dennis

Dennis and I had few words between us.  I hung parts of an exhibition he curated last year.  He accepted some of my suggestions and ignored others.  On the other hand, he loved women.  My lovely bride was no exception. RIP.

Christopher St. John at Harrington-Brown, Memphis, TN

(What follows is Carol Knowles review of Chris St. John's show in Memphis.  Chris is formerly of Taos and showed at the late, great Sagefarm Contemporary.)

Beautiful Creatures

Christopher St. John's passionately painted, endlessly inventive exhibition "Icarus Transformed" at Harrington Brown re-envisions the Greek myth in which a boy fails to heed his father's warning, flies too close to the sun, melts his wax-and-feather wings, falls into the sea, and drowns. Instead of being doomed by hubris, St. John's protagonists — feminine versions of Icarus — defy their limitations, spread their wings/arms/fins/paws, and attempt to soar again and again and again.

Many of St. John's creatures, as in A Strange Angel, survive the fall but have not quite worked out all the kinks. This bald, baby-faced angel with one white and one red wing, bright-pink genitalia, and a huge left arm (sprouting blue fur and industrial-grade fingernails) looks out at us with an ecstatic or perhaps maniacal smile.

In what looks like natural selection at warp speed, St. John's oils on panel and more than 300 drawings mix and match seemingly endless permutations of species that stretch like pulled taffy in Melt the Wax, swell to the point of bursting in Severing Point, and flow like founts of blood in The Filter.

Naked except for lush pubic hair and with heads that look like lampshades joined at the cheek, two Icaruses sing in unison in Paper Dolls Sing Your Praise. Their wings have morphed into multiple and very full teets. Their foreheads sprout horns like a unicorn, another mythic creature noted for its beauty, purity, and faithfulness. Unashamed, uncensored, unabashedly inventive and alive, Paper Dolls, like all St. John's creatures, suggest the most fatal flaw (and surest prescription for defeat), instead of hubris, is failure of the imagination.

- Carol Knowles, Memphis Flyer, April 29, 2010

Natalie Edgar: From Above

Woodward Gallery, 133 Eldridge Street, NYC

Natalie Edgar demonstrates the continuing vitality of the New York School of painting. The sensibilities of color, space and rhythm are her métier. About the current exhibition, Judd Tully observes in his catalog essay that the painting as a whole is a fusion of many sources, “There’s no correct way to read a painting. No matter how long you look, either abstract or figurative. You can imagine or believe you see a head emerging from that tangle of explosive marks, a veiled reference to a Picasso head or perhaps a Pisano apostle, or a summit of a mountain.” Space is the hidden black matter in the imagery. Gerard McCarthy had noticed, “Her images may or may not suggest figures, but effectively evoke a vertiginous sensation.” (Art in America) It is this odd feeling of altitude in her space that prompted the title “From Above” for the exhibition.

John Bonath blurs the edges at Camera Obscura, Denver, CO

Hal Gould just turned ninety, and not only is he by far the oldest gallery director around, but his photo gallery, Camera Obscura (1309 Bannock Street, 303-623-4059, www.cameraobscuragallery.com), which he runs with Loretta Young-Gautier, is one of the oldest in the country. That said, there's nothing old-fashioned about the place, as amply demonstrated by Blurring the Edges: John Bonath 1996 to 2010, a show of digital photo-based works that fills Camera Obscura to capacity with eye-popping images.

The solo — with an accompanying book — isn't quite a retrospective, since Bonath has been taking photos for nearly forty years; instead, it focuses on several bodies of work that use computer programs for their creation. There's a lot more to it than that, however, as Bonath's methods are very complex. He creates the settings, either landscapes or still-life scenes, using real materials that he finds and gathers up. He makes up his models and sometimes dresses them in costumes — or undresses them — before combining various shots of the background and the figures to create a single image. And, as if that wasn't enough, he also paints some of them after they've been printed.


The show has not been hung in chronological order, and none of the pieces have been dated, so viewers have no idea how they fit together. The reason Bonath decided to do it this way reflects how he works: All of the various series are open-ended, with one being done simultaneously as he works on others.

Though male and female figures are obviously favorite subjects for Bonath, as seen in the outrageous "The Whisper" (pictured), he's also interested in plants and insects. His compositions range from simple and straightforward to elaborate and obtuse; they are connected, he says, by the shared idea of the primordial.


I've long been a fan of Bonath's work, which is known for both its technical perfection and its intriguing pictorial quality. This show stays up through April 17 at Camera Obscura. Don't miss it.

- Michael Paglia, Denver Westworld

Greely Myatt - David Lusk Gallery and Various Other Memphis Locations

by Carol Knowles

(note: an edited version of this review appears in the December 2009 ARTnews.  This is the full copy courtesy of Ms. Knowles.)

Greely Myatt, a Mississippi-born, post-modern sculptor and University of Memphis professor makes art out of cast-off materials that he laces together with sly humor and down-home wisdom. In one of his signature installations, “A Brief History of Sculpture,” real soap bubbles spill over the top and down the sides of a worn wooden plinth as Myatt spoofs his own title, takes sculpture off its pedestal, and suggests that art, rather than being concise or categorical, is effervescent and ever-changing.


In September nine exhibitions, collectively titled “Greely Myatt: and Exactly Twenty Years,” featured Myatt’s most memorable works in venues as varied as Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, The Art Museum of the University of Memphis, Memphis City Hall, P & H Café, and David Lusk, the gallery that gives Memphians a good dose of Myatt’s wit and wisdom every couple of years. 

The partially-opened zipper embedded in an otherwise pristine-white wall at David Lusk suggested a still deeper glimpse into the structure of art which Myatt achieved with a body of recent work that included four large Southern-style quilts made out of salvaged street signs, two installations carved from wood and loaded with innuendo, and twelve lighted marquees constructed out of reclaimed plastic, wood and metal.

Unlike Jenny Holzer’s sardonic takes on “truisms” spotlighted with pulsing LED’s, Myatt’s marquees embodied the wonder and curiosity of a child at play. Catch-phrases that had also served as titles of previous shows -- “Not in This House,” “Not Sold in Stores,” “A Fool w/ an Idea or Two” – were softly backlit by florescent bulbs and spelled with letters that came in every size, shape, degree of transparency and color of the rainbow.

Part child, part son-of-the-South, part Buddha -- Myatt is drawn to paradoxes that challenge and enlarge our perceptions. “Like a Lighthouse,” a beam of hardwood carved into a body-less and freestanding pair of trousers, mounted at the center of a large table, struck this viewer as a wry, viscerally compelling sexual icon that also served as poignant metaphor for the emptiness and isolation we sometimes feel in spite of the constant stimuli in our wired-up, plugged-in and cyber-spaced world.

Robert Parker: New Works

The Taos Inn, December 5th - April 3rd

“These new compositions are a suc­cessful departure from Parker’s previ­ous work, and consort oddly with the more recognizable crisp and linear pragmatism of his distinctly modernist abstractions,” says Jina Brenneman, curator at the Harwood Museum of Art.  "The 'Parallel Realities series',” she says, is presented “as blurs of color, the shapes quirky and mysterious; these works - the ‘idea’ of an interior or a landscape - are barely restrained from being an almost per­versely visceral and voyeuristic viewing experience."

Brenneman continues, "The additional drawings in the Taos Inn Library can be seen as a testament to the artist's predilection for clarity and calm as each cozy sketch, marked with great delicacy, exhibits a deep recognition of beauty and a studious attempt to gain understanding of the natural landscape."

Leya Evelyn - There Is No Hidden Meaning Here

Nov. 6 - Nov. 27, Secord Gallery, Halifax, Nova Scotia

So what is it about Taos that I have a hard time finding great painters and shows like this one and the one below?  There are times when I regret not keeping Sagefarm Fine Art open.  But then Marti at J Fine Art reminds me of the things I don't miss about owning a gallery and I realize I'm fine just painting and letting her (and thankfully a few other gallerists) do the hard work.

Anyway.  Leya Evelyn's paintings are chock full of passion for form and color.  The swing back and forth between thoughtful composition and wild abandon is very compelling.  She clearly gives a lot of attention and effort into the application of paint and other materials on the canvas and on top of other paint and yet the pieces don't come off as overly studied, perhaps due to the scrumbling and the fast stroked oil stick on the eventual surface.

This one is 'Do You Have Another Idea? No. 1', 42" square, mixed media and collage on canvas

Dave Hickey informs us that lacking specific and obvious reasons we like certain paintings, we make them up.  Evelyn's title for this exhibit (as well as it being the title of a short series of a few of her paintings) would want the viewer to believe that her work is all about design and no deep thoughts.  Keeping Hickey's comment in mind, I still have an emotional response to Evelyn's work and the magic of  her palate.  Her work makes me believe there is the chance of hope and peace and new possibilites ahead without forgeting the history we've lived in order to get to this place.  More can be seen here:

http://www.secordgallery.com/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=album07

Of course, with abstract art, the viewer brings his or her baggage to the table.  And so, that's mine.  I'm interested if you select and few readers feel the same about Evelyn's paintings?  Go see art and make up your own mind.

------------

Leya Evelyn responds: “The title means both stop thinking and also, it’s a little the opposite: there’s lots of meaning, but only if you stop thinking.”  She continues, "Because of the many layers of collage, words, drawing and paint in my paintings, there is, naturally, hidden aspects–meanings, it you care to put it that way. Interpretation is very personal. What you see is, usually, relative to your experience. What I want is for the painting to be able to transport the viewer beyond that relative knowledge, the everyday experience, to discover what is without reference. Forget words and meaning: just experience what you see."

Elizabeth Neel at Monica De Cardenas Galleria (Milan)

Love the frenetic application of the oil paint and surprising combinations of colors.  Neel pulls and pushes at the edge of representation in this show and in most of her paintings in a way that never steps over the line into annoying.  By abstracting from the subject's form and shape, her paintings observe the emotional and psychic energy around the object.

And isn't it nice to have an abstract artist that appears to be generally happy?  She comes into her talent via grandma. 

Shown here is 'Raised Ranch', 2009, oil on canvas, 211x244 cm  More can be seen at
http://www.monicadecardenas.com/current.php?mz=m

Go see art and make up your own mind.

Four Painters

Taos Land Trust Benefit – Stables Gallery, August 21 – 23, 2009

By the time you very select and few readers read this, the opportunity to purchase some good art from local luminaries in the Taos art world and in turn, help the Taos Land Trust in their life-affirming quest to perpetually endow all of us citizens with nature’s art, will be gone. Too bad, too, as there was some great art on display in this modestly attended event over this past weekend. I went this morning (Sunday, August 23rd) and as of my visit, no red dots. Which is truly unfortunate. If you are a fan of this genre, these are some of the top painters around here and for such a good cause…well, humph.

Okay – first off, I didn’t see a clunker in the entire bunch. Not that I was enamored of every single piece of about forty or so, but the curator, Jan Mellor, persuaded the cream of local Taos regional painters to hang pieces. Ms. Mellor, as we all know, is Taos’s hardest working art displayer. Not that her gallery has the best art in town, but she works the hell out of it and that counts for something. It does, right? Right?

Anyway. I was struck in particular by four specific landscape painters and how their art starts with striking similarities and then through the force of their disparate personalities, diverts into painting styles and compositions that are worthy of comparison.

Let’s get the guessing out of the way. The four artists I want to talk about are: Alyce Frank, Inger Jirby, Mary Ann Warner, and Leigh Gusterson. Let me say this upfront, which may surprise some of you: I like all of these painters’ work.

As some of you Taos art fans know, Frank and Barbara Zaring painted side-by-side for a quarter century beginning in the 1970’s. Frank is beloved and for good reason and we’ll get to that. Inger Jirby, with her long lived gallery on LeDoux Street is also a local icon. I will venture to say that these two artists may not have the same fans. To which I will reply, too bad and take another look.

Each of these artists deliberately start a canvas by completely filling it with a solid color that later will peek through at otherwise unpainted spots and serves to unify the final painting with a palate theme of color that, appropriate to the technique, seems to emanates from within. This is something that Frank and Zaring staked successful careers on and almost always through those years, preparing their canvases with bright rose, reds, and pink oranges that added that bit of majesty and vibrant life to their dark purply black and grey mountains, lush green valleys and bright blue skies. Zaring went on to give painting classes and, in fact, Gusterson was, at one time, a participant.

Mary Ann Warner, 'On the Road to the Monestary', 16" square

What separates Leigh Gusterson and Mary Ann Warner from the scores of regional plein aire painters is their timing. Warner’s timing, which is likely illusory, relates to the compositional positioning of fauna in her paintings. The grazing cows are just so. The horses in the corral are posed so their legs are hit with a setting sun in just the right way. Of all four of the women examined here, Warner is by far the draughtswoman – just witness her signature. Her brushstrokes are keenly observational, straight and precise, thoughtfully executed and bring beautiful mellow contrasts of light and shadow into her work. She mixes her paints more muted than the other women, but sparks her pieces with bits of unexpected colors.

Leigh Gusterson, '5 in Couse Field', 24"x36"

Gusterson is next down the tight-to-loose paint handling scale. Her timing relates more to time of day. Her best works are those paintings that capture the sliver of glazing light that slides off the back of her ubiquitous horses at sunset. I am struck how over the years Gusterson has improved her eye for disarmingly simpler compositions allowing the long shadows of day’s end to tell her story. She has the paint handling skills but has churned out acres of very similar paintings. With this exhibit, it appears she is stretching her work beyond the canvases of which we are overly familiar and I like them very much.

Both Warner and Gusterson also use a painter’s technique to good advantage where they bring paint up just short of particular objects in the frame allowing bits of backpainted color to edge the object. Both clearly revere this place where we live. One feels, while observing their paintings, that any sudden movement by the viewer would interrupt the scene.

Inger Jirby, 'Sopyn's Peach Orchard'


Inger Jirby also backpaints her canvases frequently in a deep, dark pink and then builds up her pastoral scenes with thickly brushed oil. She dips her brush into more than one color at a time and allows the paint to mix in a thready way as she outlines the objects in her compositions perhaps unconsciously mimicking Van Gogh’s way of doing the very same. Jirby’s painting is the loosest among these four, but close observation by the viewer reveals that she is very careful and very intentional with her palate as she picks up the paint, although the end painting has a wonderfully casual final look. Not as studious about the play of light across her objects, Jirby instead chooses to bring exuberance to her work by deliberately avoiding the painterly techniques of Gusterson and Warner, resulting in fresh paintings full of movement and joy.

Alyce Frank, 'The Transparent Hondo River', oil on linen, 34" square

Alyce Frank is a brilliant painter. She does all of the technical things mentioned above and moreover, things of her own that I don’t begin to understand. And does them all without particularly drawing attention to these things as ‘technique’. And does them apparently without exuding any effort to do them. One way to appreciate her paintings is to get up close – within inches - to her paintings and look at how unbelievably and perfectly simple the placement of pigment is on the surface. And then take about seven long steps backward and see how that sublime effort completely disappears. At a distance, we find ourselves delightfully relieved of the detail and instead consumed with pleasure in the play of light over her running water or over her mountains full of grace or her Alaskan expanses of ice or almost anything she paints. Frank is masterful about disguising her draughting via a disarming ‘folk’ look. Whether this signature style was developed intentionally over her career or not is irrelevant. And that’s the point with Frank. Her genius is spectacularly revealed through her fearless and uncompromised ability to paint. She just paints like the way some people just are able to sing. She doesn’t paint as though she’s having to think about it. She paints as though it is as natural as breathing.

So, go see art and make up your own mind.

East Meets West

Stables Gallery, Taos, NM July 31 - August 3, 2009

One thing led to another and this collection of artists from Raton, NM and Taos, NM ended up putting on a group show at the Stables. As someone near to me remarked Thursday, "My uncle has a barn, let's put on a show!" But 'East Meets West'? Seriously? You really want to call it that?

Anyway - let's put that minor quibble aside, shall we, and see what we have here.

Pots with bones integrated as though buttoning up the clay. Kinda interesting. Pardon my very ingracious slight for not noting the artist. A departure from unadorned vessels that made me reflect on us humans and our many millenium of clayworking. In this case, our bones being literally part of the effort.

Greg Benge exhibits seven digitally enlarged and ink jet (boldly righteous of him not to call it 'giclee') reproduced Polaroid transfer prints. This technique, which will be obsolete once all artists' stock of Polaroid film runs out, adds a layer of grit and a dirty tone to the pieces. It is as though the viewer came upon them in one of those empty, windowless houses you speed by on the interstate and wonder about the people that used to live there. While it is debatable if this enhancement is appropriate for all of the imagery Benge puts behind it, it is particularly effective in a triptych of the White House.

Lenny Foster, 'Grandma Jean' 35mm color print

Lenny Foster revives several of his 'hand' photos for this show. I think I've seen most of these prints previously and recently, but that is not a complaint. His reverent tone, subject matter, cropping, coloration - well, I'm a fan. The text accompanying his work is perfect and underscores the gentleness of this fine artist.

The remainder of the exhibition is pedestrian and typical of the art one sees in group shows of this nature. Namely, technically fair but commonplace landscapes in various media.

Not much else of note with the exception of TAO's own Whitehawk and her 'mystical' art. Whitehawk unintentionally reveals her personal deep sadness and pain in this set of paintings. It must be genuinely horrible to be her and it shows. This is some of the worst art I've seen shown anywhere. It would be sublime if it turned out this body of work is thoughtfully ironic - and I so, so want that, but in the end, it's just truly bad. Her elemental composition, painful palate choices, childish (and not in a good way) application of paint and underpainted elements, and her wildly laughable accompanying text is agonizingly bad and stunningly stupifying. In fact, her art is so bad that it dominates the exhibit and takes one's attention away from the artists involved that do deserve thoughtful consideration.

So, go see art and make up your own mind.

Ghosts

In the early 1970's, give or take a few years, Dennis Hopper, Larry Bell, Kenneth Price, Ron Cooper, Ronald Davis, and Robert Dean Stockwell all made thier way to Taos, New Mexico and have, for the most part, remained there to live and work. In the beginning, it was mostly fun and chemicals in the shadow of the sixties, but gradually things settled down. Today, the most interesting attribute of these artists' transmigration from the West Coast is that it was part of a larger diaspora of American artists who left New York and Los Angeles during this period. Among the artists of my acquaintence, Bob Rauschenberg, Jim Rosenquist, and John Chamberlain all moved to Florida. Ellsworth Kelly moved to Spencertown, New York. Donald Judd moved to Marfa, Bruce Nauman to Galisteo, New Mexico, John McCracken to the Sangre de Cristos. Jim Turrell to southern Arizona, Ed Kienholz to Idaho, and Michael Heizer to the Nevada desert. Peter Saul moved to Paris and Don Van Vliet to Brussels. (Cy Twombly had escaped to Rome a decade earlier.) Billy Al Bengston sailed off to Hawaii. Craig Kauffman decamped to the Philippines. Ed Ruscha stayed in Los Angeles, but he built a house in the high Mohave and never moved to New York. Doug Wheeler and Terry Allen moved to Santa Fe, Luis Jimenez left Manhattan for Hondo, New Mexico.

This evacuation seed strange at the time, even catastrophic, but it was less exotic than it seemed. In the long view, it has become obvious that the European village culture established in downtown Manhattan, by New York School painters and their post painterly inheritors, was more the exception than the rule. American artists have always, in one sense or another, lived off the land: Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, and Martin Johnson Heade, on the Hudson River; George Caleb Bingham on the Mississippi; Remington Russell, Bierstadt on the Great Plains; Charles Birchfield, Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and John Steuart Curry in the Midwest; along with photographers like Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and William Eggleston who took quotidian distances of ordinary America as their palatte.

The Seventies Diaspora was different, however. All previous diaspora created distinct styles; their artists embraced distinct subject matter that could be read as a rejection of cosmopolitan life in favor of a more regional and place-centered culture milieu. The Seventies Diaspora, on the other hand, constituted a willful extension of cosmopolitan life into the far reaches of the American landscape. As such, it may be taken as marking the death of regionalism as one of art's religions. All of the artists who participated in the Seventies Diaspora - and all of the artists in Dennis Hopper's exhibition particularly - abandoned the metropolitan art-world with mature, cosmopolitan styles firmly in place. Unlike earlier artistic Quixotes in the American outback, none of the artists in Dennis Hopper's exhibition arrived in search of their own art, and unlike so much artwork in artistic colonies, their work never stoops to the celebration and rationalization of the local lifestyle; it never takes the tourist attractions of the region as a crutch.

For these artists, the lure of place was of an entirely different order, something more like an imperial colonization, a voluntary banishment from the tumult of the marketplace upon which they all continue to depend - and exile make possible by technological innovations in travel and communication. (I myself, tucked away in Las Vegas, have been the beneficiary of these same innovations.) As a result, I have participated in dinner table conversation in Taos, Santa Fe, Aspen, and Marfa that might just as easily have transpired in Rome, or in Roman North Africa during the heyday of the Empire. The ability of this frontier cosmopolitanism to sustain the life and work of artists in their voluntary retreats, however, also speaks to a stylistic peculiarity of American art in the nineteen sixties:

To grasp this peculiarity, you have to put yourself back in the swirl of the paradigm-shift, into a moment when the future seemed unlikely, the past seemed irrelevant, and American hegemony seemed assured. For those of us who lived through that moment, it felt like the beginning of the end, like The Last Movie in which anything might happen. It was presumed that nothing much came before and nothing much would come after. These conditions created a triumphant, a-historical Augustan art, designed for the moment and for eternity and nothing much between. So, today we look in vain for historical precedents or consequences. Pop and Minimalism seem to have blossomed up from the moment of their creation. Today, they continue as occasional practices that draw from their own resources. No news is required, no scene, no tumult of shifting styles. One looks in vain for historical commentary or artistic development in the work of Ken Price, or Donald Judd, or Ronald Davis, or Ellsworth Kelly, or Larry Bell. All of this work is self-creating; it is shaped by the occasion for which the work is made. Some artists have different styles but they are never 'early' or 'late' styles. Today, yesterday, tomorrow, it don't matter. In the history of Western Art, this work stands as a place set aside practiced today in places set aside.

The local causes of the Seventies Diaspora were obvious: the bloody tang of the Vietnam War, the negative charisma of Richard Nixon, the mauve dusk of sixties ebullience, the deteriorating conditions of life in New York and Los Angeles, the shift of patronage to the public sector, the escalating fashion for ephemeral and conceptual art, and the consequent devaluation of the artists for whome the physical world is indispensable. All these played a part, not for their actual consequence, but for what they meant. They meant that the idea of America a sthe city on the hill, as a forgiving, joyous, civilization was not to be. This peaceful kingdom, unfortunately, was the world for which all this work was made.

Even so, places might be found, where the work itself might continue to be created under chastened circumstances, and in my experience, Taos is one of the most beautiful and chastening places in the world. It has an encouraging history of harboring fugitive, killing priests, and assassinating governors. In the twentieth century, it has probably produced more serious art and literature than any other non-metropolitan area in the United States, and, throughout this century, Taos' virtues have remained more amenable to producers of art than to its consumers. It has resisted gentrification because, for all its beauty, Taos is not a cozy place. There is not much that architecture or landscaping can do to mitigate the daunting hegemony of the sky, the sweep of the flat, the looming scale of the distant mountains, and the perpetual inference of Lawrence's ghosts. Day in day out, year-round. Taos is hardly even a human place. It is the Top of the World, more the Wild West than the Southwest - more Tibet, in fact than Palm Springs. So if you want a beautiful place to work that bears with it the perpetual reminder that all you do will be broken, buried, blasted, and blown away - a place that makes you brave and serious, Taos is the place for you.

Dave Hickey
March 2009