KATE BECK :: ART NOTES

Poëma :: The Netherlands

2011-09-07T16:24:00.000-04:00

Opening September 25

Kunst-Element

Irenelaan 18 5583 AD Waalre, The Netherlands

www.kunst-element.nl

Kate Beck Essential Structure 121.9 x 226.1cm Poured Oil, Graphite on Aluminum, 2011

Kate Beck Modulations (s) 30.5 x 30.5cm Graphite on Paper on Aluminum, 2011

GRAPHITE :: ICON Contemporary Art

2011-08-07T03:34:00.002-04:00

MAINE DRAWING :: Ogunquit Museum of American Art

2011-06-28T18:58:00.000-04:00

July 1- August 21

The Question of Drawing
In the Sculpture and Long Galleries

The Question of Drawing examines the varied and adventurous definitions of what contemporary drawing can be. From paper to canvas to new media, the exhibition features artists who push the parameters of what is acceptable as a drawing, including:

Kate Beck Gideon Bok Lesley Dill Julie Featheringill William Kentridge Joyce Kozloff Sol LeWitt Julie Mehretu Cobi Moules Martin Ramirez Kiki Smith Andrea Sulzer

This exhibition is part of Where to Draw the Line: The Maine Drawing Project, a collaborative exhibition project of almost two dozen Maine museums and galleries.

Opening Reception Saturday July 2, 2011 5-7pm

Tuesday, July 26, at 7 pm

The Question of Drawing An illustrated lecture by artist Kate Beck.

Maine artist Kate Beck’s work is included in the OMAA exhibition “The Question of Drawing.” Her work reflects her interest in “(the) pure aesthetic of line as an element of both color and substance with a wide range of thought and feeling.” The artist will speak about her work in drawing and the significance of drawing in a contemporary art context. Widely exhibited, Kate has had recent solo exhibitions at the Pelavin Gallery in New York City, Icon Contemporary Art in Brunswick, Maine and Kunst-Element, Waalre, The Netherlands.

Ogunquit Museum of American Art, 543 Shore Road, Ogunquit, Maine 207-646-4909

Marked Differences :: Selections from the Kentler Flatfiles

2011-06-16T11:47:00.000-04:00

ARTISTS: David Ambrose, Kate Beck,
Hedwig Brouckaert, Catalina Chervin, Stephen Cox,
Ellen Driscoll, Elizabeth Duffy, Abby Goldstein,
Marietta Hoferer, Toine Horvers, Nene Humphrey,
Mary Judge, Elise Kaufman, Michael Kukla,
Robert Lansden, Dawn Lee, Peter Matthews,
Jim Napierala, Morgan O'Hara, Gary Petersen,
Sherae Rimpsey, Viviane Rombaldi Seppey,
Donna Ruff, Sepideh Salehi, Andra Samelson,
Claudia Sbrissa, Peter Schroth, Emna Zghal

June 3 - July 24, 2011
Open free to the public: Thursday - Sunday, 12 - 5pm

Morgan O'Hara

Join us for Roberta Waddell's Curator Talk
Saturday, June 18, 4pm

Roberta Waddell's selection of 49 works from the Kentler Flatfiles by 28 artists suggests the diversity of mark-making languages and media in drawing today.

Michael Kukla

Marietta Hoferer

"Artists of all stripes and practices in recent years have mixed and combined media--painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, digital processes, film and sculpture--in ways that defy easy categorization. Inherent in the autographic touch of a drawing, however, there is consistently an intimacy and freshness that encourage quiet study and close examination."

- Roberta Waddell

Mary Judge

The Kentler Flatfiles were founded in 1990 as an essential element of the gallery. The Flatfiles, a compendium of artworks by over 160 artists, have become an important resource for artists, collectors, curator and the general public by stressing the importance of drawing and work on paper in contemporary art today. The Flatfiles are located behind the gallery and are available for viewing by appointment.

Kate Beck

Roberta Waddell was Curator of Prints at the New York Public Library from 1985 until 2008 after serving as Curator of Prints at the Worcester Art Museum, and Curator of Graphic Arts at the Toledo Museum of Art.

A brochure with an essay by Roberta Waddell accompanies the exhibition.

KENTLER INTERNATIONAL DRAWING SPACE

353 Van Brunt Street(Red Hook) Brooklyn, NY 11231

718.875.2098 info@kentlergallery.org

www.kentlergallery.org

Open free to the public:
Thursday - Sunday, 12 - 5pm

Promoting drawing and works on paper since 1990

Field Guide to Getting Lost :: Pelavin Gallery, TriBeCa

2011-06-01T07:35:00.001-04:00

Kate Beck Canyon.White, II

Poured Oil, Graphite on Linen, 84 x 60 inches 2010

with Timothy Paul Myers, Mark Safan and Jean-Paul Cattin

Pelavin Gallery

13 Jay Street

New York, New York 10013

212.925.9424 voice 646-709.4781 mobile

www.pelavingallery.com

Continues through 3 September 2011

Field Guide to Getting Lost :: Opens May 26 Pelavin Gallery, TriBeCa

2011-05-16T09:04:00.000-04:00

Margaret Neill

Prospectus (Series) 5, Pencil on Paper, 23.5x38 inches, 2010

Fiona Robinson

Unstable Horizon 5, Oil, Charcoal, Graphite on Canvas, 30x40 inches, 2011

Cecilia Vissers

Gaoth, (four part) 84x77x1cm, each, Anodized Aluminum Panels, 2010

Kate Beck

Canyon,White,II, Poured Oil, Graphite on Linen, 84x60 inches, 2010

A Field Guide to Getting Lost :: May 26, TriBeCa

2011-05-06T08:05:00.000-04:00

Karl Klingbiel The Hunter's Sleeve

A FIELD GUIDE TO GETTING LOST: CURATED BY TODD MASTERS

Opening Reception Thursday 26 May, from 6 - 8 PM.
Continues through 3 September 2011

In commemoration of the institution’s thirty year anniversary, Pelavin Gallery is proud to announce a group exhibition of gallery artists based on the cultural historian Rebecca Solnit’s book of essays, A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Using Solnit’s meditation on the pleasures and terrors of getting lost as a premise, this show seeks to present a collection of works which entices “the wideness of the world” and the virtues of being open to new and transformative experiences. Curated by Todd Masters with the intent of celebrating the gallery’s new diverse program, a variety of media will be shown—installation, wall drawing, mixed-media, painting, photography, drawing, sculpture, collage—and a number of gallery artists represented, including: Kate Beck, Jean-Paul Cattin, Tara Fracalossi, Patricia Gaeta, Dima Gavrysh, Karl Klingbiel, Norman Mooney, Timothy Paul Myers, Margaret Neill, Fiona Robinson, Mark Safan and Cecilla Vissers.

The exhibition of A Field Guide to Getting Lost, like Solnit’s essays, advocates the importance, for any creative act, to allow the mind and body to wander. Throughout the show, the artists’ personal and professional wanderlust is showcased through the implementation of layering, repetition and unique use of materials. Viewers are presented with such assorted works as a thirteen foot installation of meticulously hand-cut graph paper by Patricia Gaeta; a multi-layered reductive painting of poured oil paint, graphite and mica on canvas by Kate Beck; a nine inch thick Lincoln Library filled cover-to-cover with daily ink drawings by Margaret Neill; and a plexiglass display case filled with a collection of hundreds of pages covered in hand typed dollar signs by Timothy Paul Myers.

Solnit’s writing is often abstract, constantly interlacing personal reflections and cultural histories. She informs us that the word “lost” derives from the Old Norse for disbanding an army and extrapolates from this the idea of striking “a truce with the wide world.” Alluding to the author’s literary methodology and references in the curation of this exhibition, Masters combines diverse styles and subjects by the twelve artists on display. One grouping of works ties together a Carbon Drawing by Norman Mooney created with the billowing smoke of a blowtorch; Dima Gavrysh’s Untitled night vision portrait of an American soldier in Afghanistan; Cecilia Vissers’ smooth and saturated anodized aluminum diptyich titled Gaoth; and Karl Klingbiel’s The Hunter’s Sleeve, an expressionistic oil and encaustic on board that showcases a depth of divergent palettes and textures.

Blue, in concept and color, is an important character in this exhibition as the idea of disorientation—“Blue is the color of longing for the distance you never arrive in.” The alternating chapter titles in Solnit’s book of essays, The Blue of Distance, is a point of reference for several works in the show. Fiona Robinson’s atmospherical Unstable Horizon displays layers of mirage-like lines of a shifting horizon, while Tara Fracalossi’s site specific installation of photographs—mounted to the walls of a narrow hallway in the gallery—presents the viewer with various sea and sky scapes from the artist’s daily documentation of her everyday life. Other works focus on the discussion of the distance and disembodiment of Blue—Mark Safan’s oil on canvas depiction of a torn cloudscape and Jean-Paul Cattin’s abstract c-print of Motel de Founex both play with ideas of nostalgia, longing and loss—illustrating Sonit’s conclusion that “to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty.”

For more information please contact the gallery at 212.925.9424 or gallery@pelavingallery.com

Pelavin Gallery 13 Jay Street New York NY 10013

Spacial Investigations :: Anne Lindberg

2011-02-25T13:25:00.000-05:00

Anne Lindberg’s raume yellow at Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas

" Everyone flocks to Anne Lindberg's raume yellow, even though it's nothing more than thread, staples, and o-hooks... this work shows how simple repetition of simple material is enough to send our vision trembling ecstatically. "

-Elizabeth Shurman, in Review, January 2011

Anne Lindberg, raume yellow, 2010. Egyptian cotton and staples. Installation view of Museum Interrupted at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: EG Schempf, 2010.

In her large scale drawing and sculpture, Anne Lindberg procures line as an element configuring real space, making it universally sensible, plausible -- as drawing is. Her large scale works are fields of marks developed as a system that slowly accumulate to create an abstract matrix of perception -- provoking emotional, visceral and perceptual response. Raume yellow is evidenced as an eloquently charged body, physical yet ephemeral. The repetitive release-and-stop of the threads existing in immediate relation with the architectonic structure of the space to which they adhere is ... poetic genius... and becomes the sustaining element of this work.

In her own eloquent articulations:

As Alexander Theroux says, yellow, for all its dramatic un-alterability, is a color with thousands of meanings - light and spirit to illness and bananas. Wallace Stevens said yellow was the “first color” while he also suggests its’ association to decay and dissolution, and an affirmation that it is the color of sun.

I found myself recently under a brilliant blue tent eating a juicy yellow/orange peach. When I returned back to my studio, I immediately decided to build a version of my ongoing graphite line drawings in space, in yellow. It only seemed to make sense. Luminosity was connected.

Neurologists have determined that the old brain holds the seat of our most primal understandings of the world. Goodwill, safety, fear, anxiety, self protection, gravity, sexuality and compulsive behaviors find their basic roots in this lower cerebral core.

Raume, from the original German word rumi, really does not have a satisfactory translation into English. It could be Chamber, a primary medium of architecture; Volume, a length, width and height set in a wide expansion; Space, physical space as a container of all things, Universe, a not rigidly limited physical expansion, or Area, a philosophical form of intuition. This raume yellow is both a volume of raume and passage through raume.

Using just a single material, Egyptian cotton thread, the other major elements in this work are staples and tension. With this taut horizontal passage of tens of thousands of lines, I am seeking a raw mysterious form that greets us as an abstraction - optical and immaterial.

The structure and body of raume yellow is really quite simple, yet its associations and visceral cues are complex. I am interested in an indeterminate state and therefore also an intangibility. In making this work, my curiosity gravitated toward conditions and phenomena of architecture, light, optics, body, tactility, textile, and space as well as the myriad associative symbolism of the color yellow. The internal structure of this form is difficult to comprehend and collect at any given moment or vantage point. I’m intrigued that the lines appear suspended, and difficult to grasp, as if drawn by light in an effortlessness that does not speak to the process. This work is indexical of my graphite drawings yet without the connection to hand-making. It’s almost as if it is a natural
phenomenon.

raume yellow is a drawing in space and a collection of marks & shadows on the wall. I frequently return, in all of my work, to the subtle distinction between drawing as noun and verb as a long held focus in my studio practice. This blurred distinction drives my fascination with an expanded definition of drawing languages and the resurgence of drawing in contemporary art. My collective body of work is an iteration of this language - a reassertion of the age-old desire to understand self in place.

- -Anne Lindberg, September 2010

Thank you, Anne

FLUXUS :: ensemble et al

2011-01-18T17:24:00.002-05:00

In a Crowded Room with Nothing to Think About

A melancholy, simple, meditative composition written by Ron Tucker

for his chamber percussion group,

ensemble, et al

In a Crowded Room with Nothing to Think About by waltertucker

Ron Tucker

with my painting, Anxieties + Alienations

and a nice shirt...

ensemble, et al. is a Brooklyn-based pseudo-classical percussion ensemble

performing their debut here at Pelavin Gallery

during my solo exhibition, Conditions of Existence, October 2010

I am so honored and pleased to share this with them

The group combines the structure and instrumentation of classicism and modernism with an

emotional aesthetic commonly heard in post-punk-indie rock.

melancholy... meditative... reflective... minimal...

...a perfect flow...

Inspired by artists such as amiina, Clogs and Rachel's and influenced by contemporary

composers like Arvo Part, Philip Glass and Steve Reich, ensemble, et al.'s music aspires to be

simple, intimate, elegant and delicately beautiful.

Thank you, Ron

FLUXUS :: deborah wing-sproul

2010-12-13T11:37:00.004-05:00

Deborah Wing-Sproul's Surface Tension

with my painting, Anxieties + Alienations

at Pelavin Gallery

December 9, 2010

SURFACE :: TENSION

2010-12-02T12:52:00.005-05:00

Please join us for a Closing Reception

Thursday 9 December 2010, 6 - 8 PM

for my show, Conditions of Existence

at Pelavin Gallery 13 Jay Street, TriBeCa

and the debut drawing performance of

Surface Tension

by celebrated performance artist Deborah Wing-Sproul.

Surface Tension is Deborah Wing-Sproul's direct response to my painting, Anxieties and Alienations, currently on display.

deborah wing-sproul

Surface Tension

a drawing performance by Deborah Wing-Sproul accompanying Kate Beck's solo exhibition, Conditions of Existence.

Deborah Wing-Sproul is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily in video and performance. Her performances (or "performative acts") permeate the genres of sculpture/installation, drawing, photography and printmaking. Beginning in the mid '70's she studied modern dance and later went on to choreograph. She has studied under Merce Cunningham and others, including Douglas Dunn, Dan Wagoner, Viola Farber Company members, and June Finch. Wing-Sproul has also studied with voice/movement composer/performer Meredith Monk and reperformed multiple works for Marina Abramović's retrospective, The Artist Is Present, MoMA, NYC, (March 14-May 31, 2010).

Kate Beck detail Anxieties + Alienations

Poured Oil, Enamel, Powdered Graphite on Aluminum Panel 89 x 185 inches 2010

on Surface Tension:

"I’m interested in sustained, repeated and incremental movements. I’m also interested in stillness. These aspects of restrained movement engage me in terms of physical gesture, presence, focus and discipline but also in terms of what they can suggest (i.e., humility, vulnerability) or what they can lead to (i.e., subtle shifts in state of mind).

In responding to Kate Beck’s painting, Anxieties and Alienations, I wanted to make visible the kinetic sensibility within her gesture. Surface Tension parallels Beck’s commitment to the seemingly effortless act of a single line, or series of articulated lines.

In Transparent Gestures (2005) I explored the limits of my physical reach to create large-scale prints that captured distinct repetitious movements. Surface Tension is part of a larger series of performance drawings that I have been developing to engage my body in actions of minimal sustained movement. My devices represent conceptual constraints on the drawing process, limiting (while also supporting) my repertoire of movement and mark making.

Kate Beck Anxieties + Alienations

Poured Oil, Enamel, Powdered Graphite on Aluminum Panel 89 x 185 inches 2010

The gravitational pull in Beck’s Anxieties and Alienations is visceral. In turn, I push (against) gravity instead of falling from it. I am referring to all of her lines, painted and drawn, through the use of a single stroke of graphite. Surface Tension echos Anxieties and Alienations not because I use paint or move in a fluid way but because I empathize with her focus, intent, voice and vulnerability. Our works begin and end in different places but we recognize in each others process a shared internal language.

“I’m not asking a poem to carry a lot of rocks in its pockets. Just being an ordinary observer and liver and feeler and letting the experience get through you onto the notebook with the pen, through the arm, out of the body, onto the page, without distortion.” —Sharon Olds

My thanks and gratitude to Kate Beck for inviting me to perform this work in the context of her solo exhibition, Conditions of Existence; and to Todd Masters for the opportunity to premiere this piece at Pelavin Gallery, December 9, 2010." -Deborah Wing-Sproul

Thank you, Deborah

Light in August

2010-08-26T09:23:00.002-04:00

"...Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders."
   -William Faulkner

Agnes Martin :: On Living, On Art

2010-06-26T23:25:00.006-04:00

The Tree 1964 6'x6' oil, pencil on canvas

Agnes Martin
with Chuck Smith, 1997

Morning 1965

A Conversation I Want to Have :: CASSIE JONES

2010-06-21T14:12:00.003-04:00

Cassie Jones When and Between 2010 Acrylic Felt Staples on Panel 12x10x5 inches

Cassie Jones makes flat paintings on plastic and low-relief paintings on upholstered panels within a vocabulary of line, shape, color and paradoxical tension. I want to call them all drawings.

Cassie Jones Figure 1a 2004, Alkyd on Acrylite 18x24 inches

Her work takes formal components and serves them up in a way that allows “...mutations, hybrids, and synthetic forms to take shape...”

Cassie Jones Receiver 2010 Acrylic Felt Staples on Panel 13x10x4 inches

Line becomes a kind of pictorial register of movement and action. Form becomes gesture. A dialogue emerges, tempered with a twist of spontaneity and off-the-grid humor. It is a conversation I want to have...

Cassie Jones Rook 2009, Acrylic on Duralar, 11x11 inches

Very complex emotions can be evoked from the simplest forms and gesture; the idea of recognizable colors and shapes pulsating amongst irrational thought and feeling.

Cassie Jones Spine 2005 Acrylic on Duralar 17x14 inches

When an artist transforms recognizable materials into artworks, human consciousness intrinsically pervades the viewer's mind. Eye sight is biased by all of the histories, thoughts, associations we may bring to the moment.

Cassie Jones Roll 2006, Acrylic on Duralar 17x14 inches

This is the nature of painting, the subliminal undercurrent that stokes action in the studio, and relinquishes our grasp upon release.

Cassie Jones Second Split 2009, Acrylic Felt Staples on Panel 12x10x3 inches

"..There are still lots of surprises along the way and the pieces always diverge from my initial imaginings, but the process of realizing the piece is very different from the spontaneity of the works on paper, " says Jones.

"....I knew I wanted the works on paper to be in dialogue with the larger, low-relief paintings," she said. "Because while they are disparate bodies of work in some ways, they both begin with intuitive responses to my materials and hopefully arrive at a place where the contradictions in the work are posed like questions, not to be resolved, but to be explored."

Cassie Jones Figure 2b 2004, Alkyd on Acrylite, 18x24 inches

Cassie Jones lives in Brunswick, Maine. She received her MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008 and her BA from Bowdoin College in 2001. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Space Gallery and Coleman Burke Gallery in New York, as well as group exhibitions at Art Chicago, Gallery 808 in Boston, the Portland Museum of Art, the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, and others. She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, the Vermont Studio Center, and the MacDowell Colony.

Cassie Jones at MacDowell, 2006

See Cassie's work in Maine this summer at:

INTERJECTIONS

New Work by Cassie Jones

June 4 - July 21, 2010

Artist Talk : Wednesday, July 21, 6pm, free

SPACE Gallery, 538 Congress Street, Portland, Maine, 0410

2010 CMCA Biennial Juried Exhibition

162 Russell Ave., Rockport, Maine 04846

May 29-July 17, 2010

AUCOCISCO Gallery

89 Exchange Street, Portland, Maine 04101

June 21 - August 28, 2010

Thanks, Cassie

S. S. MONUMENTAL :: KATHERINE BRADFORD

2010-05-19T14:12:00.005-04:00

Katherine Bradford Liner Pointed Paint on Plaster and Wood, 8 x 4 x 6 inches, 2010

"Human nature is like water
It takes the shape of its container." - Wallace Stevens

A vital resource, and a natural element, water is at once physical yet formless, transparent yet reflective. Katherine Bradford provides form to contain it, imposing shape, surface, and volume -- and metaphorically, soups it up.

A very small piece can control you.

Katherine Bradford Cropped Boat Paint on Plaster and Wood, 4 x 12 x 9 inches, 2009 - 2010

Bradford's water-based imagery jettisons forward a degree or two in her current show, Ocean Liners, at Aucocisco Gallery in Portland, Maine. The exhibit includes both large and small paintings, works on paper, a video and handmade objects.

"In my painting studio (at Skowhegan 2009) with chair painted by one of the participants."

In her own words:

“While at Skowhegan everything started to look like an Ocean Liner – the chips of Styrofoam used to test the fresco, the hunks of wood on the floor of the sculptors’ workshop and the pointed pencil holder I found stuck to the wall of an abandoned studio. I added paint and smoke stacks and eventually these objects became the props for a video about the story of the Titanic.

Katherine Bradford Liner Rose Monotype Unframed Monotype, 23 x 20 inches, 2009

"Since everyone knows the plot I felt I could be as playful as I wanted with how the story is told. The climatic scene, for example, takes place on a snowy sidewalk in Brooklyn; other scenes were shot in a tub of water filled with ice cubes. It seemed the best way to show the smallness of this great Ocean Liner that eventually proved to be so vulnerable in the open seas.”

Katherine Bradford Liner Orange Knobs Paint on Wood with Collage, 11x9 inches, 2010

It is a matter of tension and control. When we see objects constructed from familiar or found materials, we think we know what they are. Bradford fools us into believing her story. We sense familiarity when in fact we are "vulnerable in open seas". Much like the individual confronted by the immensity of the universe, or the existential lonliness of the long-distance dreamer perched on the edge of nothingness, we are transported into Bradford's fictitious and illusionist pictorial space.

Katherine Bradford   Ship with Red Sky Acrylic on Canvas, 10x14 inches, 2010

"....   We can’t figure out exactly what is going on. The longer we look, the more suggestive Bradford’s abraded brushstrokes, dabs, irregular patches and scumbling become. It’s as if we have entered a trance-like state that is similar to the one possessing the figures in her paintings. Bradford knows her medium well enough to trust it, and, more importantly, to let her marks become evocative without nudging them into an easily definable realm...."
   - John Yau, from Katherine Bradford by Life and Land, Recent Paintings, The Brooklyn Rail, June 2007

"Just before I gave the talk on my work, I am wearing the mike amplifier and a faux tux (Skowhegan, 2009)."

Katherine Bradford was born in New York City, graduated from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, and received an MFA from SUNY Purchase College in New York.

"My favorite time at Skowhegan was this dance around the bonfire. I am wearing a red cap because it was drizzling rain."

In the 70’s, Katherine Bradford was living year round in Maine and began to make paintings that were abstract and took their inspiration from nature. Gradually she introduced images and symbols into her work so that at present her paintings exist in the area between abstraction and representation.

"Sign made by one of the participants (Skowhegan 2009)."

Bradford teaches at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and Manhattan's Fashion Institute of Technology. She is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant award. Her work has been exhibited in galleries in New York, Chicago, Boston, and Maine, and is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the Portland Museum of Art.

Aucocisco Gallery, Katherine Bradford: Ocean Liner, through May 29, 89 Exchange St., Portland, 775-2222 or aucocisco.com.

Thanks, Kathy

Luminous :: José Heerkens

2010-04-22T09:35:00.152-04:00

José Heerkens Luminous Square XII, 2009 70x70 cm, oil on linen

José Heerkens lives and works in Zeeland, NB, a village in the southeast of The Netherlands. She is fascinated by space, by light, by rhythym and color. Her non-objective paintings and drawings are elegant explorations and discoveries, reflective of the environment.

José Heerkens April Studio 2010

"Today is a beautiful Sunday, silent and sunny. Spring has started very slowly this year. The photo shows the east side, the windows are on the northside. The total space is about 110 square meters."

José Heerkens Color Study, 2009 30x20 cm, colored pencil on paper

In her own words:

"I have a fascination for the endlessness of the space of the landscape (which) forms the basis of my work. As a child, I looked at the rhythym of the trees, the colors and forms of the ploughed fields, the water in the ditches and listened to how the people talked and saw how they built and worked. I think the need to understand life is the first step on the way to art.

José Heerkens Written Colours, II, 2010 150x200cm, oil on linen

"In my work line is always an important means to visualize space. Lines form and lead space toward rhythmic constructions. I search for the life and human on one side, and the geometry, the universal standard, on the other side; space as silence and emptiness on one side, and completeness and perfection on the other side. There is a constant dialogue between construction and intuition. I need them both in my effort to understand.

José Heerkens Passing Colours IV, 2009 30x30cm, oil on linen

"Colour is a whole world. Colour is light, space, energy, movement, and I strive towards a space where these qualities, in all clarity, meet.

José Heerkens Reality of Light, IV, 2010 120x120cm, oil on linen

"The painting becomes a place where light and space seek and form each other. In several series I leave the linen unpainted so the colour and the material of the pure linen is part of the painting.

José Heerkens Written Colours, I 2010 150x200cm, oil on linen

"I work on series at the same time so that they develop side by side, simultaneously. Sometimes a series goes on for years. Some of my newest work is titled, 'Written Colours'. These paintings show a new step in my work".

José Heerkens studied at Koninklijke Academie voor Kunst en Vormgeving, s-Hertogenbosch (Noord Brabant). She has also had educational travels in Iceland and the Westman Islands, Singapore, Norway, France, Germany, Italy, Australia, Greece, Malaysia and the United States.

José Heerkens Reality of Light III, 2009 120x120cm oil on linen

Formeel 2010, an exhibitoion with Cecilia Vissers, opens on May 21 in Museum Waterland in Pumerend (NH).

Thanks, José

Out of Neutral :: PENELOPE JONES, JOSHUA FERRY

2010-02-16T14:21:00.006-05:00

Joshua Ferry Friendship. 2009 Acrylic and Wax on Canvas. 14 X 18 inches.

"An inquiry into color can take you just about anywhere". So says David Batchelor in his book Chromophobia, his main premise being resistance to the argument that there exists in Western culture and intellectualism a fear of color relegating hue to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential, and the cosmetic.

I am not afraid. As an artist whose work exists primarily within the black and white extremes of the spectrum (...black being the achromatic color value of minimum lightness or maximum darkness, one extreme of the neutral gray series, the opposite being white...), that may sound a bit unconvincing. But remember the lessons from Color Theory 101: primary colors are necessary to create those neutrals. It's what makes the color wheel go round...

Penelope Jones Orange Gate 5x4.5 inches, Casein

Penelope Jones and Joshua Ferry create paintings with an emphasis on color, structure and materials, their highly worked surfaces imbuing a sense of both strength and immense sensitivity. They make works of passion, and purpose. They are not afraid.

JOSHUA FERRY

I saw Joshua Ferry's paintings at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art biennial exhibition in 2008. His dynamic use of simple imagery and color are understated, clear and powerful. Ferry creates his paintings with a focus on physical process and materials, sometimes laced with political reference, which leads him into his work.

Joshua Ferry I Will Follow. 2007 Acrylic on Canvas. 44 X 26 inches.

"This painting started as a list of words such as; walk, skip, jump, trip, stumble, etc... Words relating to basic body movements. Then I started erasing the words with blocks of color- ultimately becoming interested in the stack of colors. Seeming too rigid, I painted over a few of them free-hand."

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1971, and growing up in New Hampshire and Maine, Ferry is the youngest of four brothers. He has lived in New Jersey for over 12 years with his wife, Karen, and still returns to Maine during the summers. He holds an MFA from Rutgers University's Mason Gross School of the Arts and a BFA from the Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine where he studied with James Cambronne and Johnnie Winona Ross. He has been a resident at the Vermont Studio Center and the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida, and has worked as a studio assistant to both Donald Sultan and Bruce Robbins in New York.

Joshua Ferry Casket. 2004 Oil, Acrylic, Alkyd Resin and Wax on Canvas. 50 X 42 inches.

Ferry received an Honorable Mention for his work in the Center for Maine Contemporary Art’s 2008 Biennial and has also been exhibited at Coleman Burke Gallery, NYC , the Mercer Gallery in New York, the Allentown Art Museum in Pennsylvania, and in the Portland Museum of Art 2005 Biennial.

Joshua Ferry Pros and Cons, 2007 is 16 X 20 inches.

"This painting started as a grey grid. Then, I painted color crosses into each square. I was thinking about alter cloths, quilts, and religious banners. Later, I thought of the crosses as plus signs and responded by painting minus signs over them."

In his own words:

"My paintings are constructed with many layers of applied and sanded paint. Making use of words, maps, flags, and found Internet photos, the imagery is relatively simple, graphically bold, and sometimes political. In addition, my paintings are about paint and exploring the line between abstraction and representation. My best paintings force me to embark on an investigative journey rather than simply depict an idea. Ultimately, I like to be surprised by my work.

Joshua Ferry Delegates 2005, Oil, Acrylic, Alkyd Resin and Wax on Canvas, 60 X 36 inches.

"In 2005, I decided to make a painting of the Maine state flag after seeing an exhibit at the Maine State Museum that showcased old Maine flags from past wars. I was imagining what it would be like if my home state of Maine was a modern day war zone like Iraq or Afghanistan. When I finished the flag image, I decided to list the names of Maine artists that had influenced me during my formative years- A way to pay homage to my art upbringing in Maine. The numbers signify important dates in my life; 71 birth, 87 moved to Maine from New Hampshire, 97 left Maine for New Jersey, 05 is the date of the painting.

Joshua Ferry Cross. 2007 Acrylic on Canvas. 14 X 18 inches

"Most recently, I've been working on paintings that are composed of a grid of squares with crosses in them. Many layers and much sanding.

Joshua Ferry Basilica Study Orange 1 2010

"The first seed of this format was Pros and Cons from 2007. In the most recent paintings, the crosses are all the same color."

PENELOPE JONES

I met Penelope Jones in the 90's at Maine College of Art and we have been good friends for a long time. Her pure abstraction patterns emerge from the creative use of wide-ranging materials including casein, resin, clay, silk ribbon and printed paper. Jones' work, combining formalist interest in light, color, and surface with an attention to the evocative qualities of paint, reveals a process both disciplined and intimate. Her geometric abstractions are disarmingly personal.

Penelope Jones Collage #7 from Regenerations 12x11 inches, 2009

Born in Ithaca, NY in 1961, Jones holds a BFA from Maine College of Art and an MFA in painting from Cornell University. She has been a Lecturer in Art and Visual Culture at Bates College in Lewiston, ME for 12 years. She has exhibited her work nationally, including the New Hampshire Institute of Art, Manchester, NH; Woman Made Gallery, Chicago, IL and in Maine at Zero Station, Portland;The Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockport and the Portland Museum of Art. She is represented by Susan Maasch Fine Art in Portland. Jones resides with her husband, Paul Sarvis, and children in Portland, ME.

Penelope Jones Installation, Bates College Museum of Art

In her own words:

"When paint, I have a need to be both precise and spontaneous in my mark-making -- loving hard-edged lines and structures, while at the same time attracted to the playful and at times happy accidents that occur in moving paint around. Combining these two near opposite qualities, and finding the right balance between them often drives the work in unanticipated directions.

"My source material for form and content is varied. I am drawn to designs found in architectural details, decorative tiles, Renaissance paintings and ornamental designs from many cultures. In particular, I have been interested in designs from Islamic architecture and art. I find these designs beautiful and ingenius in their use of shape variation, geometry and repetition.

Penelope Jones Untitled, 15x 22 inches oil on paper

"Along with a unity of organization, color is extremely important to my work; my color decisions are often informed bty natural phenomena such as the play of light and color within cloud formations, or the eeffect of weather on the landscape.

Penelope Jones Collage #5, from Regenerations 12x11 inches, 2009

"Though painting and collage are quite different, the process of manipulating the surface becomes very much related and is the reason I am so attracted to both mediums.

"Last year I worked with collage to create my recent project titled Regenerations. The project was shown at the Susan Maasch Gallery in Portland last October. It comprised nine collage works on paper and was co-sponsored by a faculty grant from Bates College. For this project, I gave myself a challenge to work on a larger scale, and to dismantle finished paintings that I was attached to. As I started cutting these paintings—re-arranging and combining them in new order—I felt a sense of liberation and fully embraced the project. To let go of my attachment while reusing (honoring, in a sense) my history; to regenerate from what has come before.

Penelope Jones Collage #8, from Regenerations, 12x11 inches, 2009
"This project gave me a deeper appreciation for collage as a negotiation between desire and response to the limits and suggestions of the found material. With collage I enjoy the process of cutting, pasting and being able to make changes easily. I also like how found materials can inform the work in ways that cannot be anticipated.

Penelope Jones Untitled, 19x17 oil on paper

"Collage has rich history from the Cubists on. I have had longstanding interest in the work of such artists as Kurt Schwitters, Ann Ryan, and Robert Rauchenberg —important pioneers in collage history. Because my painting has been so preoccupied with the play between surface, depth, and geometric planes, it excites me to revisit collage with its embrace of the superimposed plane."

Thanks, Penelope.

Thanks Joshua.

ALEXANDER :: BECK

2010-01-27T09:11:00.012-05:00

In Houston, you can see Steven Alexander's elegant show:

Steven Alexander: Brooks Run to the Ocean....
at Gremillion & Co. Fine Art

Steven Alexander, Be-In #6, 2009, 42 x 60 inches, acrylic on canvas

You can find more installation shots here, and read my catalog essay for Steven Alexander: Brooks Run to the Ocean...

Steven Alexander Installation View, 2010, Gremillion & Co. Fine Art, Houston

And In New York, my work is at Metaphor Contemporary Art :

BLACK and WHITE
January 29 - March 6, 2010

OPENING PARTY:
Friday January 29, 6-9pm

David Atkin . Kate Beck . Mia Brownell . Yashua Klos
Marietta Hoferer . Michael Kukla . Margaret Neill
Karen Revis . Katherine McDowell Patterson . Amy Talluto

Metaphor celebrates a decade of innovative exhibitions of emerging and midcareer artists, with the first show of 2010; Black and White, featuring a diverse group of ten artists who utilize the spare means of only black and white to create works that range from subtle white on white to bold graphic statements. The exhibition will include several works by each artist; drawings in graphite and charcoal on paper by Margaret Neill, Amy Talluto, and Katherine McDowell Patterson, mixed media works by Karen Revis and Marietta Hoferer, paintings by Mia Brownell, Kate Beck and David Atkin, large scale prints by Yashua Klos, and sculpture by Michael Kukla.

Kate Beck, Canyon.Black Oil, Graphite, Mica on Canvas 46x46 inches 2008

Kate Beck Canyon.White, II Oil, Graphite, Mica on Canvas 80x64 inches 2010

METAPHOR Contemporary Art
382 Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn, NY http://www.metaphorcontemporaryart.com/

20 :: 10

2009-12-31T15:17:00.012-05:00

WhiteSpot Studio 2009

Best wishes for a happy, joyful and peaceful year! XO -Kate

Unified Field :: Verenigd Gebied

2009-12-15T17:18:00.069-05:00

Connie Goldman
Cecilia Vissers

Helmut Federle posits that there has never been a significant period in world history where art and society exist on the same level, that the solitary alienation of the artist within society is unavoidable. Federle suggests contemporary American art embodies a prescience of striving for base values; reasons to exist, and that the the toxic pall cast by our current financial debacle weighs in heavily as far as American art being produced today. By comparison, the European arena embraces the existence of art as art itself, without questioning the being or lack thereof of underlying creative desires and energies.

Connie Goldman Gray Scale RippleV 16x16x3 inches Oil on wood panel 2007

From this rather isolated pile of rocks in the Atlantic, I admit it is difficult to weigh in with much substance. One thing is for certain: as a contemporary artist working within a global field, it is extraordinary to be able to share and connect ideas and language with one another. I may lead a hermetic life, but my society, as I choose to define it, is vital.

Recently I've been introduced to two artists working within the same reductive aesthetic as myself, Connie Goldman from California, in the United States, and Cecilia Vissers from

Sint-Oedenrode, The Netherlands. We each embrace the importance of space, rhythm and structure within our work. As Cecilia has said to me,

Cecial Visser's Ateliar Sint-Oedenrode, The Netherlands, 2009

"...It is very important to find interesting spaces for reductive art, all over the world, as it is a very specific form of art. We go back to basics, sometimes it feels like living on a very small island. We need to cross borders and swim oceans, be strong and not get lost in 'artland'....".

Cecilia Vissers

Cecilia Vissers makes wall and floor sculptures in steel. She is interested in concepts of strength and power, minimal intervention, and isolation. For her, this uncompromising material is an essential and consistent factor. Vissers strives to create simple compositions of restricted color and primary shapes, responding deeply to the character of thick plates of warm-rolled steel, the specific surface texture and weight. The wall sculptures are pure, minimal in nature. The adage of modernist architects from the early 20th century, ‘less is more’, would be an excellent characterization.

Cecilia Vissers Needles and Pins

The work is driven by power, rhythm, repetition and pattern. Logic is regularly challenged in apparently inflexible materials and irrefutable forms. Her plate steel sculptures are executed in 8/15 mm steel, and weigh up to 200 kg, with one or perhaps several minimal saw cuts, only enough to produce a clear and concentrated form.

Cecilia Vissers

" I strive to find a clarity and concentration of form, line and color through minimal intervention enacted in a plate of steel."

The steel plates are immersed in four separate baths, a process of electrolysis referred to as anodization. The resulting patinas are bonded permanently to the surfaces, eliciting rich

Cecilia Vissers Studio, 2009

tones of hue to the steel plates. For Vissers, the steel plates, which are made in Germany, function as large sponges saturated with strength, power, life, death and history.

Cecila Vissers, Wald, Anodized Aluminum, 30 x 24.5 x 1.5 cm each, 2009 Elements Gallery, Waalre, The Netherlands

"... I am looking for simplicity in a raging world, a world that I am very happy to discover but also need to avoid every now and then."

Cecilia Vissers work can be seen at Elements Gallery in Waarle, The Netherlands. Her upcoming Paris exhibition, En Forme, with the artist Eric Cruikshank opens in 2010 at ParisCONCRET .

Connie Goldman

Connie Goldman creates wall sculptures of layered, shaped and painted wood. Her reductive constructions focus on the spaces created between layers of flat, modular planes. Her work begins as very loose sketches which are eventually translated into shaped wooden panels. The panels are meticulously painted and put together in layers. There is a harmony; balance within this meditative, beautiful work.

Connie Goldman Captive I Oil on Wood Panel, 53x43 inches 2006

In her own words:

"Using a minimalist vocabulary and a reductive aesthetic that emphasizes the importance of space, rhythm, structure, and relations, I make works of art that are concrete and essential approximations of my own emotional and intellectual experiences. The work reflects my interests in architecture, music, science, sculpture, and painting as well as the threads of commonality that run between them.

Connie Goldman Eddy

"The tendency or desire to gravitate toward unity and stability is in opposition to the urge toward independence, transition, and growth. My work evokes this same tension, the dynamic that underlies my own existence. I see each piece as being analogous to the rhythmic and contradictory forces of stasis and flux that propel my world toward both constancy and change".

Connie Goldman Current VIII

Goldman's lyrical compositions yield a variety of quiet shadows which broaden the spaces in between the flat but open modular constructions. The various planes become an interplay of light, space and form, giving each configuration a sophisticated elegance.

Connie Goldman Arena IV 12x11x2 inches Oil on Wood Panel 2008

Connie Goldman exhibits her artwork nationally and teaches at colleges and universities throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. She is represented by Peter Blake Gallery in Laguna Beach, CA. Her work is included in many public and private collections.

Thanks, Connie
Dank, Cecilia

On and of the Mesa :: Johnnie Winona Ross, Carole Sue Ross

2009-11-11T14:00:00.021-05:00

“Of all the memberships we identify ourselves by the one thing that is most forgotten, and that has the greatest potential... is place. We must learn to know, love, and join our place even more than we love our own ideas.”

-Wendell Berry

Snow Canyon, Utah

As artists, and writers, I think we do carry within ourselves a sense of place that uniquely defines us and grounds us to our lives; a point of reference, perhaps, that allows for meaning and the opportunity of personal being -- within the larger grasp of the more impersonal world. Perhaps 'place' is as simple as a response to a certain area or geographic region, or a more spiritual embodiment within our hearts and minds.

It may not always be easy to recognize our need to have a sense of place, to connect to it, or even to learn to trust our instinctive desire to seek it out. As artists, and writers, our course so often leads to no discernable plateau of worth, or even sensibility, when we pit ourselves against contemporary norms of material success. Surely, our strength lies within our hearts and souls.

Johnnie Winona Ross, Carole Sue Ross Southwestern Gothic Arroyo Seco, NM

It's impossible to talk about a sense of place in regard to contemporary art without thinking of my friends, Johnnie Winona Ross and his wife, Carole Sue Ross. Moving their lives and practices after many years in northern New England to the southwest United States, has allowed them to connect to a deeper sense of home, and work. They say they will never leave.

PocoCasa, Arroyo Seco, New Mexico

They built their house, PocoCasa, and workplace, Dry Creek Studios, in the austere landscape of northern New Mexico's high plain. They make non-objective art that is derivative of the nature that surrounds them, and rich in an essence of the cultural history of the native lands and people. 'Place' is visible in the choices they have made as life partners, as stewards of the fragile southwestern environs which they have come to love and as artists -- their life and their work, has everything to do with spirituality, and heart.

Dry Creek Studio “It’s like light in a cathedral…”

Set apart from their house, Dry Creek Studio is a sweeping, cantilevered structure with clerestory windows that open to all four directions, the largest facing north and south. The building is divided into two separate studios: Johnnie’s faces east, toward Taos Mountain, and Carole Sue’s faces west, toward Pedernal Mountain -- mountains often painted by Georgia O’Keeffe. Separate doorways and porches keep the spaces individual and private.

PocoCasa

Carole Sue Ross’s studio features shelves and tables to hold her hand-built, polished and smoked vessels which when finished, are mounted on a simple white shelf. “I want them to look contemporary but have an ancient feel”. Carole designs and nurtures PocoCasa’s beautiful gardens and plantings of fruit trees, sage, chamiso, juniper, aspen and pine. Flagstone walkways connect the buildings and wind around terraces and a ramada. Acacias border a seasonal pond where birds nest.

Johnnie Winona Ross at Dry Creek Studio
Johnnie Winona Ross
Johnnie Winona Ross is very interested in the nature of painting, and in process. His vocabulary is rich in paradoxical components that imbue his quiet, pristine surfaces with a tension of both chance and structure. I am very moved by this. They are strong, yet personal; formalistic, yet profoundly spiritual.

"....I look for the feeling that being in the landscape gives me, a feeling at the small of my back when I see something beautiful and consider it sacred. That's what I go for in my work, and I try to achieve that by keeping things minimal, almost meditative." -Johnnie Winona Ross

Johnnie Winona Ross Black Creek Seeps, 2009 acrylic burnished on linen, 36x34.5 inches

Indeed… Traces of viscous pigment flow vertically from top to bottom, scraped back layer upon layer, to be held eventually by luminously white horizontal bands. Ross’s paintings are firmly grounded, yet, they float between opaqueness and translucency.

The process of painting, scraping and repainting establishes a subliminal dynamic between counteractive elements --presence/absence, structure/freedom, resistance/release, richness/ austerity -- so that the painting itself becomes an elegant and sensuously integrated expression of oppositions. The viewer is quietly entranced by the purity of form, light and the suggestion of what lies beneath; the artists’ process, his hand.

"....Repeating the mark, or the drip, scraping, burnishing, builds a physical history within the painting …… when you see worn stone steps, whether at an Anasazi site, or the Met, it is interesting to consider the scores of people that have used or are using the steps in roughly the same way; or seeing the keys on an old piano, worn with use. You realize that you are just part of the stream of history, a large or small part, but you are only moving through.”
- Johnnie Winona Ross

Dry Creek Studio 2009

Ross is a consummate painter. His depth of experience is clear, from start to finish of each piece, as all aspects of his creative process bear the same touch. From his preferences for particular substrate materials, to the final, meticulous polishing of surface with a traditional burnishing stone of native Pueblo potters, Ross approaches all with the same integrity and sensitivity.

"... There is a beauty in that a craft, a care, are conscience decisions being made that maybe help one to be aware of the possibility…. that the overall effect of the painting somehow transcends the everyday physical world... (This) is a philosophical choice...."
-Johnnie Winona Ross

Johnnie Winona Ross James Kelly Contemporary, Santa Fe

Ross exhibits regularly in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, and throughout Northern New Mexico. He has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including a Gottlieb Foundation Support Grant. His work can be seen at The Stephen Haller Gallery, New York, James Kelly Contemporary, Santa Fe; Richard Levy Gallery, Albuquerque; Barry Whistler Galley, Dallas. He also works with Tamarind Prints and Santa Fe Editions, and has a beautiful book out, Johnnie Winona Ross, published by by Radius Books in Santa Fe, foreword by Douglas Dreishpoon and essay by Carter Ratcliff.

Dry Creek Studio

“Nature informs my work. I spent so many years working in a place that I didn't respond to, thinking it didn't really matter much. I lived in Maine; I was in NYC a lot. I found I was traveling to the Southwest every chance that I got. The light, the culture, the archeology, the desert, mountains. It was austere, real, exposed, but mysterious; it was not a casual place that you just were.

"It was spiritual to experience a rock art panel that was 2000-5000 years old, that is more affecting then any piece of art that I’ve ever seen. In 1994, I spent another year on grant at Roswell, my work really solidified, it wasn't like it really changed, it just became more powerful, it began to have that feeling of 'experiencing the rock art panel', or 'experiencing the desert', it became still, real, and a unique experience. My studio has 12' glass doors that face a 13,000' mountain, to one side of that is Taos Mountain, the sacred mountain. It is an unobstructed view. That view feeds me, every time that I look up.”

Carole Sue Ross Tilting Series 2008, Stoneware, Pit-Fired

Carole Sue Ross
Inspired by the exceptional quality of light and the open horizon of the land, Carole Sue Ross creates delicate smoke-fired ceramic vessels that rely on gravity, balance and weight. She molds the shallow clay pots by hand and fires them with eucalyptus wood or sage to color the surfaces. Her finished pieces are cohesive, visual groupings of these beautiful vessels, each taking into consideration the color, size, and direction of their respective tilting.

Carole Sue Ross Vessel detail

"I create work that relies on gravity, balance and weight which also contains similarities and contrasts. …The process involves a traditional way of forming the clay in direct sunlight. After the walls are manipulated to their thinnest state, I scrape and carve the exterior to form an organic-like open vessel. The clay pieces are created as sculpture, without a traditional foot which allows gravity to determine how each rests on the shelf.”

Carole Sue Ross at Cafe Loka

I am very attracted to the fluent color transition from within the vessels that radiates throughout the space that surrounds them. Color, for this reason, as well as the sensitive form, seems central in the luminous quality and consistency of these small, responsive pieces.

Carole Sue Ross Untitled Series 2008, Stoneware, Pit-fired

"After the initial forming, many layers of terra sigillata are applied. This mixture both seals and leaves the work with a satin smoothness and iridescent finish. The system of working is reminiscent of the process used by early Pueblo people going back to the eighth century.

“After bisquing, pieces are fired numerous times in a pit. Depending on the combustibles used -- eucalyptus, sage, seeds -- the resulting smoked areas ad patterns are both spontaneous and controlled."

Carole Sue Ross Tilting Series #5, 2008, Stoneware, Pit-fired
Carole Sue Ross’s work can be seen at Cervini Haas Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ. You may run into her work at Cafe Loka in Taos, New Mexico.

.... finally reuniting their hearts and being, Johnnie Winona Ross and Carole Sue Ross achieve work that has a glowing meditative presence, that reveals the austerity and subtlety of the desert landscape reduced to its experience; of mystical aura and natural formal beauty....

Must be the Land of Enchantment….

Thanks Johnnie,
Thanks Carole Sue

Sight Lines :: Fiona Robinson, Mary Judge

2009-09-12T22:31:00.002-04:00

Fiona Robinson There and Back, Acrylic, Oil, Charcoal on Canvas, 2006: 90x70cms

For me, the pairing of these two artists has been instinctive, yet also a bit unfocused. I discovered, though, that although their techniques and expression vary considerably, they embrace a manifestation of life commonly, through line and through the earth; a human grounding of time and memory; history in the most profound sense.

Fiona Robinson
Fiona Robinson is an artist living and working in Weymouth - Dorset, England -- a seaport village 140 miles southeast of London, and 140 miles northwest of Cornwall. Several years ago, we connected through the Drawing Research Network, an organization based in the UK, comprised of individuals and institutions who are in some way involved in the research of drawing. We began a professional dialogue across these many miles which has resulted in a deep, professional respect, but also developed into a wonderful friendship.

Fiona Robinson Circular Walk 6, from The Journey Sequence, Pencil on Paper, 2007: 70x50cms

"The Circular Walk series refers to a walk accompanying a fellow artist on a route of her choice across the moor land of West Penwith between the parishes of Morvah and Madron. We started near Bosullow, walked up and over Watch Croft, joined the footpath to Nine Maidens Stone Circle, more accurately, the Boskednan Stone Circle and back to the beginning. Walking around stone circles within a circular walk became a series of circles within circles. Between the beginning and the end there is only uncertainty, explores the idea that nothing repeated can ever be the same. Any journey, however great, however small, has two certainties, a beginning and an end; it is what happens in between that has potential."

Fiona's abstract drawing sequences are conceptual journeyings through chosen and intimately felt landscape; collective records of experience pertaining to time and space, physical meanderings and memory. Her soft tonal surfaces, on paper and canvas, are saturated with layer upon layer of spontaneous line -- traversing the plane in fits and stops of transition -- sometimes smooth, often broken, only to resume its pace again, renewed, perhaps, by possibilites of destination and of return.

Fiona Robinson Journey Sequence 2007 installation , New Greenham Arts, UK

In 2007, Fiona won the University of Bath Painting Prize, UK, and was a Prizewinner at the 4th International Drawing Biennale, Melbourne, Australia. She is also a recipient of the Proof Magazine Brabcombe Award, UK and the Indigo Arts Prize, Liverpool, UK. She has been an invited artist at the International Drawing Biennale in Kosovo 2008, and was selected for the the Vth International Drawing Biennale, Pilsen 2006, Czech Republic. Recent shows include Lineweight at TSU Art Gallery, Missouri USA; Drawing Room II, Royal West of England Academy, Bristol UK; Transition at Rougemont Castle Exeter, UK and the Oxo Tower, London, UK. She has been awarded residencies at Brisons Veor, Cape Cornwall, UK; The Cill Rialaig Project, Co.Kerry, Ireland; and is a 2010 Recipient of the Ballinglen Arts Foundation Fellowship Award, Co. Mayo, Ireland.

Fiona Robinson Opposite Ends of a Possible Path, Oil, Charcoal on Canvas, 2002: 122x154cms: University of Bath Collection

"Opposite Ends of a Possible Path became about possibilities. A record of the memory of a walk over the hills above Upwey near Weymouth, it had been done many times but the painting specifically acknowledges that each time it is different. The lines are infinite variations of the route taken, preserved in a film of paint. It is about how memory fades as time elapses. In the painting the physicality of the line pales becoming a distant echo of earlier layers. Because of the organisation of space within the painting the route appears to change as the viewers move from one position to another. The work embraces the idea of mutability and variation. In it’s combining of paint and charcoal it deliberately overlaps the techniques of painting and drawing."

Fiona's drawings have been referred to as "documentary movement within interpretive space", "investigative, emotional topography", and "collective geographical meanderings". To me, they are elegant renderings of a heartfelt life and brilliant mind. They are exquisitely sensitve and beautiful, attributes difficult to share in this venue, perhaps, but I attest to this personally as I am lucky enough to have one....

In her own words:

"My work is about journeys and memory; journeys through spaces, through time and through memory. They are rooted in place but often exist only in memory. My father was born in Cork in Ireland in 1913 and one of his earliest memories, probably before 1920, was being taken to Kerry on the back of a cart to a family wake. The journey took three days, some of it on unmade roads, through a landscape that was wild and inhospitable. In 2008 I travelled to Kerry, to take up a residency as part of the Cill Rialaig Project in the Ballinskelligs. The roads are better now but it is still a wild landscape. The restored buildings of Cill Rialaig were once home to the family of Séan Ó’Connail, an illiterate Irish-speaking storyteller who was part of the oral tradition. He never left this peninsular but in retelling the stories brought to him by other travellers he journeyed, in his imagination, further than many people do in reality.

Fiona Robinson A Love Affair with the Irish Landscape: From Ballinskelligs Beach to Bolus Head Triptych, Pencil on Paper, 200x340cms, 2009

A love affair with the Irish Landscape follows a remembered journey from the ruins of an ancient Abbey, sitting perilously close to the encroaching sea, on Ballinkelligs beach, along winding lanes, past Cill Rialaig up to the top of Bolus Head. From this vantage point you can see the Skelligs, two outcrops of rock eight miles out to sea, on one of which is the remains of a sixth century monastery. The monks who lived there then were living on the edge of the known world, looking out over the Atlantic they were staring into the abyss. Each retelling of a story, each repeated journey, each new layer of drawing is different. This work is part of a continuum connecting me to the memories of all those other journeys through these spaces."

Fiona Robinson Transition 3 (detail) Drawing 5. 180 x 120 cm pencil on paper 2009

"Curated jointly by Exeter Artspace and Rita Parente of submit2gravity London, this project is in response to the prison cells underneath Rougemont Castle in Exeter. My drawings were installed in the holding cells under the castle which measure 6′ x 3′ and are a response to the space, or lack of it, to the marking of time, the lack of natural light and the echoing sound."

"I walk in the hills, across moors and along the borders of the sea. I drive through the landscape, take train journeys through derelict backwaters and trudge the pavements of cities. I plot these journeys in my mind and in my daydreams remembering them as real things but drawing them with my mind’s eye."

Fiona Robinson Studio at Weymouth, Dorset, UK

"The works on paper, with the marks rubbed back and laid bare, have a quietness about them, imparted by the apparent fragility of the pencil line, but the line also has a tensile strength that is insistent. The images stay in the mind. The generosity of scale of the canvases allows the lines to flow within the layers of paint imbuing them with a lyricism that suggests reverie. The process involves adjusting the memory, adjusting the line, allowing the formal requirements of the piece to take over from the initial free mark making, and then redrawing the route. Finally some parts of the image achieve a greater significance whilst preserving the faintest marks so that they stay in the mind like an unrecalled memory. Each piece of work records the progress of the drawing as well as tracing the route of the original walk. They are a sequence of remembering and forgetting."

Mary Judge

I've been so fortunate to run into Mary Judge, and her seductively intimate drawings and sculpture. We met in New York in 2008 following the opening of a large exhibit I was in at OK Harris -- along with mutual friends Joanne Mattera, Julie Gross and Margaret Neill. Mary creates abstract drawings on paper, canvas, stone and poured concrete forms.

Mary Judge Trebisonda Spazio per l'Arte Contemporanea, Perugia Italy 2002

"This former school in Perugia Italy provided a completely neutral environment and I proposed a stark, open presentation of works. Here one can see two spolvero drawings made directly on the wall, and a concrete floor piece."

She uses the ancient Italian copying techinique of spolvero, or "dusting", to build line and hue with dry pigment, imparting an earthy, even primitive essence to her conceptual surfaces, and shapes.

Mary Judge Exotic Hex Series
"These were inspired by Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs. Here a single design form is rotated around the center point of a circle. Size of works: 36x36"

She has worked also with Wildwood Press, creating amazing relief and photo litho prints on handmade paper. I am continually moved by the depth and sensitivity of this beautiful work -- her mark, her materials, her process.

Mary Judge at Wildwood Press,

Mary is an Associate Professor of Art at Parson's School of Visual Arts, and she is represented by Gallery Joe in Philadelphia, Metaphor Contemporary Art in Brooklyn and Dieu Donne Papermill in New York.

She is the recipient of a Dieu Donne Papermill Workspace Grant; NEA Mid Atlantic Foundation for the Arts Grant Works on Paper; Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant; New Jersey Council on the Arts Individual Artist's Grant. She has also been awarded residencies at Concrete Laboratory Samsoe, Denmark; Valparaiso Foundation for the Art, Mojacar, Spain; Fondazione Marguerita Arp ; and Tel Aviv Artist's Studios . Her work is included in collections here and abroad including The Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; The British Museum, London, England; and the Neburger Bauman Collection.

Mary Judge at Wildwood Press

In her own words:
"The drawn image is a beginning - a first attempt that can be tentative and impulsive. The fragility of paper, the medium's usual support, and the visible tracks of the artist's hand combine to create a privileged space occupied by no other medium. More immediate and less controlled than in painting or sculpture, the artist's marks are fully exposed in drawing.

Mary Judge Spazio Dinamico, San Guilano Terme & Villa Undulna, Pisa Italy 2005
"Works displayed includes spolvero drawings on panel, canvas and Carrara marble chosen by the artist on site at a local quarry. The largest piece was trucked down and placed outside the gallery. I worked over the surfaces of the various pieces using a black powdered pigment with various stencils. The second part of the show took place at the Spa, Villa Undulna, where we placed several pieces outdoors and also hung a group of small drawings."

During the 1960s and 1970s, artists began to push these definitions, and for many, including Robert Morris, Dorothea Rockborne, Nancy Spero, and most notably Sol LeWitt, drawing became the medium within which many of their conceptual investigations materialized.

Mary Judge Metaphor Contemporary Art, New York NY 2005
"The high ceilings, great light and concrete floor inspired me to propose a large-scale cast concrete sculpture, my first made in the US, which was sold to a major collection. Also included were works on paper and canvas and panel. "

"Shifts in scale and new techniques also changed the environment for presentation and in turn helped elevate the status of the medium within the institutions of the art world.

Mary Judge Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield CT, June-Sept 2007
"Smaller cast concrete sculptures were placed throughout the space, both inside on two different levels and in the exterior. The interior gallery space included relief prints and spolvero drawings and outside this gallery I created a site specific spolvero drawing for the corridor wall, creating a dialogue between interior and exterior spaces and works."

" Proportion is something natural that the body feels: it is part of our survival mechanism. Every cell in the body feels it ... its sensing rightness and harmony that in the end is what beauty really is. I think everyone has this sense of natural proportion, which for an artist can be reinforced through drawing. Through the drawing process, specifically figure drawing, you develop a rhythm, things fall together, links are created, something between the body/eye and model and mind, like everything is connected ... the problem of expressing balance, the force of gravity, potential or arrested movements, and so forth. ....

Mary Judge at Wildwood Press

"....when I was very young, I began to actively draw on my own. Like so many young girls, I was always drawing horses; I was in love with horses. This desire manifested itself in countless drawings; the object of desire was the subject. I also learned from "how to draw" books, the kind where there are organic and geometric shapes that add one to another to make up an image. I think there's a connection with those geometric shapes and proportion.
Another part of understanding measure and proportion, other than direct contact with nature, is exposure to a wide range of "things" greatly made: cathedrals, temples, piazzas. In architectural structures proportion can be seen in a pure way. This exposure enters your body and becomes a part of what comes out. The Gothic cathedral at Cologne is a good example. It seems as if a great force is thrusting it up from underground, that it has emerged directly from the earth. There is a dazzling quality to the texture and repetition of the spires that grabs your attention and won't let it go. It resembles an exotic crystal formation: one can imagine those spires piercing the earth's crust on its journey from the underworld. This duality of expression of the upper and under worlds is a manifestation of the spiritual desires of those who built it. In a way, everything is encapsulated in it all at once: wonder, fear, and hope."

New Art TV Studio Visit with Mary Judge

http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:http://www.newarttv.com/Mary%2BJudge

Thanks, Mary and Fiona.

Color as it Happens :: Steven Alexander and Willy Bo Richardson

2009-08-10T21:06:00.005-04:00

Color as light and form. My own conclusions are manifested within a spectrum of black and white, and geometric shape -- an architecture which I find astonishingly complete. But in which viewers often suspect other color is lurking. This is not so: the repetitive striations of my drawings are strictly monochromatic. It is an illusion, and an example of how the color we see is very personal, defined by an accumulation of associations, thoughts and memory -- as well as wavelength.

Regardless of my own aesthetic choices, I am continually moved by the power of a full spectrum -- what actually happens between colors, and that transformation at the hands of a sensitive, skilled colorist. Here are two I know, both experienced, who use color deftly and in very different ways but within a shared language.

Steven Alexander installation, The World at Large, Gremillion & Co. Fine Art, Housto

STEVEN ALEXANDER
Running into Steven Alexander -- his eloquent work and words, and sensitive, generous nature -- has been very special. Steven makes abstract paintings characterized by luminous color, sensuous surfaces and simple geometric configurations. He is an Associate Professor of Art at Marywood University, and has been Artist in Residence at Studio Art Centers International in Florence, Italy and Visiting Artist/Professor of Art at Parsons School of Design in New York, Marywood University/France, Anjou & Paris, and Austin Community College, Austin, Texas. Steven is represented by Gremillion & Co. Fine Art, Houston, Denise Bibro Platform, New York City and Ruth Morpeth Gallery, Hopewell, NJ.

In his own words:

"Sometimes the studio can be a fairly raucous place. Sure, there is plenty of time spent sitting, staring at stuff in progress, waiting for the motivation, energy or clarity required to make the next move.

Steven Alexander The Primrose Path, , 2007, 48 x 36 inches, acrylic on canvas

But when things are in motion, it becomes a place where much happens at once, and where actions are often accompanied by a din of sound -- thick, layered and pulsating, moving in and out of focus -- symbiotic with the labor, the color and viscosity of the painting process. Recently addressed works in progress lay drying under large fans -- the more stuff to dry, the louder the dense hum of the fans. The louder the fans, the louder the music -- overtones of both combining and colliding to form disembodied drones. Often during a cycle of work, one piece of music will be played over and over for the entire duration -- the repetition seeming to deepen the focus -- the music sustaining a specific poetic relationship with the decisions being made.

Steven Alexander Vibrolux, 2009, 16" x 158", acrylic on 7 canvases

But then, at a certain point in the process of each painting, it is necessary to completely change the atmosphere. Guston once talked about the the whole laborious painting process leading up to the final fifteen minutes when everything comes together. Well, it may be more than fifteen minutes, but the final stage of each piece is indeed where it all happens -- the culmination, the payoff -- and it is the most relaxed and satisfying part of the process. That's when the music and the fans are turned off -- when a different, more acute focus kicks in. There is only the sound of the trowel sliding across the surface, the taps and clanks of tools and paint buckets on the table as they are chosen, discarded, shuffled around -- a subtle awareness of the sound and rhythm of my own breathing and the scuff of my shoeheels on the concrete floor. In this zone, several hours can pass in an instant -- and the expanse, the stillness, the silence that is the essence of painting becomes a physical presence in the room.

Steven Alexander Meteor Beach, 2008, 96 x 96 inches, acrylic on 4 canvases (Hines Collection, NYC )

My work is an exploration of relations that reside in the constant flux of pure sensory events. I am interested in the interaction between the painting and the viewer's imagination and experience; in the painting's catalytic potency - it's potential to generate unspecified mobile meaning.

Color operates in this work and in the world as a kind of pure energy, dynamic, capricious, evocative. The surfaces emphasize the sensual rather than analytical nature of the painting process, and attest to the pervasive presence of time. Within the structures of the work, archetypal relations of male/female, earth/sky, internal/external are inevitably implied; not as opposing forces, but as interdependent aspects of an animate whole. In this sense, the paintings might be regarded as open-ended cosmologies, or as chunks of raw reality, unencumbered.

Steven Alexander Shine Eye, 2009, 48" x 36", acrylic on canvas

I am trying to build, out of color and substance, a place for the viewer's consciousness - where unexpected associations and resonances may occur, where past and future merge with the present moment, and the stuff of life, love and desire has corporeal presence - states of being, embodied in paint. "

Steven Alexander 2009

Willy Bo Richardson

Willy Bo Richardson is an abstract painter living and working in Santa Fe, NM. His work can be seen at William Seigal Gallery in Santa Fe, Gallery Sakiko and Nohra Haime Gallery, NY, New York, and Fresh Paint Art Advisors, Los Angeles, CA. Several months ago, we were fortuitously connected by a gallery in Santa Fe because of notable similarities in our work. What a nice find... I have been moved by his translucent surfaces of veiled color, and sensitive use of scale. And by his articulate meanderings about his work:

Willy Bo Richardson Poseidon I, 114 x 53 inches, 2008

"Poseidon was painted under a tin roof on a hilltop with rain, lightning and thunder crashing down. I don't know if you've ever been under a tin roof with rain- but it's right there with it.

Willy Bo Richardson Poseidon, Oil on Canvas, 53 x 114 inches, 2008

"Natural surrounding is important. I have a love/like relationship with NM. I like the desert, and sometimes really crave it, but generally head for the mountains. Skiing is incredible in Taos. You can also hike up from the last chair to mountain peaks -- a snowy mountain with Tibetan prayer flags is actually up in Taos.

In the summer a good hike will be enough to look out to the distance, and that's where the desert, along side mountains is really lovely.

Willy Bo Richardson Three Stages, #1, Oil on Canvas, 29 x 31 inches, 2004

And that's where my paintings come in- spaciousness. I try to digest it and put it out for others. Paintings can be like doorways or at least windows to physical locations and more.

Willy Bo Richardson Bathers, Oil on Canvas, 2008

Of course, the paintings are not landscapes - strictly places.

Willy Bo Richardson Confluence, Oil on Canvas, 53 x 114 inches, 2001

The idea of painting is an adaptation. It’s something that our culture can relate to. It has a certain format. Within a frame, within a context. It’s a way of taking an abstract moment, a color, an experience and putting it into a culturally digestible format. 40,000 years ago, humans were painting on the walls of caves. The painting as we know it today is a recent invention, but it's purpose stems back to humans' earliest civilizations.

Willy Bo Richardson Schalako Wall, Oil on Canvas , 53 x 114 inches, 2006

When I was a child I remember being mesmerized by the blur of colors from the vantage point of a speeding car. Along with the blur and the speed was always a feeling of freedom. In this same way, whenever taking a flight, not only would I leave the earth physically, but on an emotional level gain distance on life.

My paintings give me the same experience. My painting brings perspective. In some ways it’s like creating a window. One can put this window anywhere. No need to move somewhere to get this view. But the window is not necessarily looking out on a beach scene, or a forest scene, or a mountain scene. It’s actually looking out on a “distance scene”, a scene where one has space from their personal life. "

Willy Bo Richardson, 2009

A single color is hardly ever unconnected or unrelated to other colors. Color exists as a matter of context, relating constantly to its changing environment. Light. Form.

Thanks Steve, and Willy

Kate Beck: Whitespot, Drawings

2009-06-25T07:06:00.001-04:00

Kate Beck: Whitespot, Drawings & Paintings, Icon Contemporary Art, Brunswick, ME

Posted using ShareThis

DON VOISINE :: Conversation

2009-06-04T08:32:00.018-04:00

with Ben La Rocco and Craig Olson
by Phong Bui

A week after the opening of his exhibit of a new group of paintings, which will be on view at McKenzie Fine Art Inc, located at 511 West 25th Street, till June 6, 2009, the painter Don Voisine visited the (Brooklyn)Rail’s Headquarters to talk with Assistant Art Editor Ben La Rocco, and contributing writer Craig Olson about his life and work.

Portrait of the artist. Pencil on paper by Phong Bui.

Ben La Rocco: Lets talk about your early life in Maine.

Don Voisine: I was born in Fort Kent, Maine in 1952. Fort Kent is a northern border town on the western-most edge of New Brunswick just 10 miles from the Quebec border. The majority of townspeople are of Acadian descent and speak French, the principal industry is potato farming and lumbering. My father died when I was three and my mother never remarried. She worked two jobs to support and raise three kids. From the time we were ten we also worked part time and after school.

Portrait of the artist. Pencil on paper by Phong Bui.

Ben La Rocco: Lets talk about your early life in Maine.

La Rocco: Are there any particular influences you remember from that time?

Voisine: While a senior in high school I played drums in a garage band called Mantra, hence my lifelong interest in music.

La Rocco: Do you really think Ike Turner is the greatest electric blues guitar player of all time?

Voisine: He was a phenomenal musician. At nineteen he was an A&R man for Sam Phillips and he brought people like B.B. King and Howlin’ Wolf to the studio for the first time.

Craig Olson: Right.

Voisine: And he played piano on some of those tracks. Then he started playing guitar. He had a great band in the mid-50s: The Kings of Rhythm. They recorded some terrific tracks on Federal Records out of Cincinnati. He’s the one who played guitar on all of those incredible Otis Rush Cobra singles.

Olson: Yeah, they’re so great.

Voisine: But I’m just not into virtuosity in guitar playing for it’s own sake. That’s like a white boy thing. It’s frantic.

Olson: Unless you’re Albert King.

Voisine: I went to see Buddy Guy in Central Park and it got totally boring because he was playing to the crowd, just going on and on with these extended guitar solos. I’d love to see him in a small club on the South Side of Chicago. That would be more the kind of music I’m interested in.

Olson: Yea, I hear you. I used to go down to Muddy Waters’s old club on the South Side, the Checkerboard Lounge, and there was this guy, Vance “Guitar” Kelly. And he could play, he could play all those licks, but he didn’t show off. But when he would play that way, as in this song called “Candy Licker”—you know that song? “I got me a candy licker, lick my candy all night long.” And he would make frat boys from the audience come up on stage and act it out. It was the most humiliating thing in the world. It was so funny. [Laughter.]

La Rocco: Don, what was your education like?

Voisine: I attended what was then the Portland School of Art; it’s now the Maine College of Art. I received an honorary BFA from the Maine College in 2000. The Portland School of Art, or PSA, was one of the last regional art schools in the country. Half the faculty did watercolors of the Maine seashore. We had lots of figure drawing classes and made many field trips to do plein air watercolors of nature. After 2 1/2 years of this, in 1973, I transferred to an alternative art school in Portland called Concept Center for Visual Studies. Concept was a short-lived program that broke away from the PSA. It was started by William Manning who, back in the 60s, was one of the few abstract painters in Maine, and a few others who disagreed with the PSA’s teaching philosophy. The faculty at Concept seemed more attuned to what was going on in New York and encouraged us to experiment. They did not have structured classes. You saw the faculty when you wanted to or had something to show them. As students we learned as much from each other as we did from the teachers. I met Kathy Bradford there. We, along with Maury Colton, had many intense and passionate discussions about art. This was my unofficial graduate school. Concept was located above a cosmetology school on Congress Street. The smell of hair products filled the corridors and mingled with the smell of paints. This has left me with an indelibly visceral memory of the place. I think one of the best ways to learn about art is to look and see what other artists have done. Learn how to look hard, seriously, and in an engaged critical manner, then use the same standards when considering your own work.

La Rocco: Is there a metaphorical intent to your paintings? Do the dark areas represent an absence or a void?

Voisine: Well, I do think of it as an absence, but it’s also full. It has weight, you know, a presence. It can be read both ways, a void, or something weightier.

Olson: And that’s important for you, that it’s read that way.

Voisine: Yes. In my work I like to get different readings. The white ground can be read as a negative or a positive, and it can vary from painting to painting, but generally I try to have things operate on a number of levels.

Olson: Yeah. So maybe even spatially, then, those areas flip back and forth.

Voisine: To me, that’s the air that activates the space of the paintings. That’s where the paintings breathe.

La Rocco: Despite all the black in the paintings, they never seem moody or maudlin, which is in contrast to a lot of other painters who use dark colors.

Voisine: Well, I’ve done some of those paintings, but I’ve also worked really hard to eliminate any sense of mourning from my work. I think a lot of art in the twentieth century, modernist work, has that sense of mourning to it.

La Rocco: How do you see your work in relationship to the Modernist tradition? I think of a lot of modernist work as having to do with negation or an abject condition.

Olson: I think they were also trying to neutralize space, and I don’t think you’re necessarily trying to do that, Don.

Voisine: I’m not trying to make a break from the past. I think I work in dialogue with it. But I’m also trying to make something that is relevant now, a different way of thinking about abstraction. One of those things is space. Like, Greenberg’s formalism is about flatness. I’ve always been trying to bring a kind of visual space into my work. Not something illusionistic, but a real visual space.

Olson: Would you consider that analogous to the way you experience space in your life? Where does it come from?

Voisine: I’ve made my living painting apartments. Usually, when you do that the room is empty, so you get a sense of that room when there’s no furniture in it. It’s a very different experience from when a space is lived in. I worked in theater for a while as a technical director with Ping Chong, and we were trying to create a space within a theatrical environment. Each show had a very different kind of space to it. He used a lot of films and projections and shadow plays in his work and that required a very shallow space. What I’ve experienced goes into the work, what I see goes into it.

La Rocco: Do you think of space as having an emotional quality?

Voisine: I use the color in my paintings to convey that, and this absolutely affects the space. My use of color is very subjective, very intuitive. It’s what sets the tone. The colors affect the interior blacks. But I don’t try to put in specific associations. I’m open to how people respond to the work and what they’ll see in it. I’m not trying to make something look like a landscape or something literal or literary.

La Rocco: One wants one’s work to evoke something familiar in a viewer. Do you want your painting to evoke sensation in a viewer? Or memory? Or feeling? Or should it be some kind of new experience?

Voisine: It could be all of the above. I don’t want to close off possibilities. But I don’t want to be heavy-handed about it. I don’t like it when artists say “Well, this piece is about this. This one is about that.”

La Rocco: It’s a little like an empty stage.

Olson: One thing I learned from your work early on was that you were engaged with that history of formalist abstraction. It wasn’t a critique of it. It was a different take on it. And, to me, as a young artist, it was very inspiring because you kept that dialogue alive. You actually offered new insight into something that we had all been told was over. And I think the kind of abstraction you do lends itself to those open readings.

Voisine: Well, how I work doesn’t derive from theory. It’s all about the visual. It’s all about creating a convincing object. I’m always looking at art, and sometimes some paintings I do are a response to that. A Malevich painting might inspire me, or it could be a Titian. Or, maybe the Cézanne I saw last week in Philadelphia. It’s all a big pool to draw from.

La Rocco: Is your painting targeted at a space outside of language?

Voisine: Yeah.

La Rocco: So that in some sense attempting to discuss what it’s about is contrary to its nature?

Don Voisine, “Wheel” (2008). Oil on wood. 25 × 20 inches. Courtesy McKenzie Fine Art, New York.

Voisine: It’s not as if you can’t talk about it. I’m not a storyteller, you know, and that’s one of the reasons I was drawn to working abstractly in the first place. I can express the essence of something without a narrative to it.

La Rocco: Did you come to that realization slowly? Or was it something you knew from the start?

Voisine: I think I knew it early on. When I decided I wanted to paint, it was my second year of art school and from that point on, I just worked abstractly. The first abstract art that I saw I didn’t understand, I had no idea what it was coming from, but there was something about it that I felt I could connect with.

Olson: I think that this is an interesting question, in terms of narrative or storytelling. They are very abstract things. This split between abstraction and narrative happened somewhere. Where do you see your work fitting into that? Do you plan each painting out before hand? Or is it from a more subjective place?

Voisine: It’s been a long, ongoing thing. It’s hard for me to remember what the decisions were that steered me in this direction in the first place. The structures or the black forms in the paintings are kind of figured out when I start. They’re laid out on the board I’m painting on. I don’t have drawings that I blow up to scale. If I do any drawings to figure out a structure it’s a little thumbnail thing.

Olson: Is there intuition involved in the work?

Voisine: Oh, totally. I figure out the proportions as I’m making the paintings. I’ll take center points, or an edge, and build something off of either. I’ll pivot an edge, a straight edge off from a point and then build the angles off of that. Sometimes I’ll draw a cross, and then I’ll move the measure, adjusting the thickness of it, and then do another line, keeping the original point. That creates a very different angle than if I’d measured everything out.

Olson: Yeah, it’s a strange take on single-point perspective. Lets talk about the surfaces you get in your paintings.

La Rocco: When I look at those surfaces it seems there’s almost always a central area, with different types of matte, different actual colors and sheens within the black. Then that’s bordered by a different color in each painting—a very wide variety of colors in the borders from painting to painting. Then there’s this incredible attention to edges, which never seems fussy in your paintings. The edges are always careful but they’re never tight, like they’re in motion.

Voisine: Well, they’re at the service of something. I need to get those edges taut to create the spatial tension in the painting. I use tape and there are bleeds and soft edges but if they don’t distract from the line that I want or create a slackness in the space, it’s fine. A painting doesn’t really snap into place until I’ve straightened out those lines.

La Rocco: So you’re waiting on a certain experience of the painting based on the types of edges to know when the painting is starting to work, but there’s a certain margin of error.

Voisine: Right, because paintings have optimum viewing distances. When you go to a gallery or show and walk up to a painting, you find yourself going back and forth, taking a couple steps back or coming forward until you kind of settle at what is the right viewing distance. For me if it looks fine at that distance then if you see bleeds up close, it’s not an issue. But if I’m at that distance and it’s working against what I’m after, then I touch it up. But it’s not about perfection. Agnes Martin said that’s an impossible task. And was it the Chinese Buddhist painters who would always make sure there was a mistake in the work somewhere?

Olson: What types of paint do you use to get that specific black matte that occurs in your work and that sheen that you get on the gloss surfaces? I was wondering if you could go into some technical details of how you actually come up with those passages. They’re pretty flawless and elegant. At the McKenzie exhibition I noticed you can see reflections of one painting in another as you move around the gallery. That creates this extra dimension in the darkness of the central area of each painting.

Voisine: There’re no secrets. There’s really nothing fancy in how I make the paintings. Everything is done in a very straight forward way. No fancy gels and mixtures. No flourishes. I use oil paint pretty much straight out of the tube. I mix the colors myself and I use Liquin to get the gloss. It takes a number of thin layers to get a smooth surface. It gets shinier with each layer. For the matte areas, I just let the paint dry as it normally does. Mars black dries pretty matte. It’s all very matter of fact. But then I try to get a painting to do as much as possible within these limitations.

Olson: In some of the recent work you have the black areas replaced by red. I was wondering if you could talk about that decision.

La Rocco: What kind of red?

Olson: Red red.

La Rocco: I was picturing a dark red.

Olson: No, it’s red red.

Voisine: I always think about having other colors in the center and I’ve done a few using cadmium red on Styrofoam. But on the whole the use of black has provided the clarity to what I’m doing.

Don Voisine, “Buzz” (2009). Oil on wood. 17 × 17 inches. Courtesy McKenzie Fine Art, New York.

La Rocco: Those are your R-Value paintings. They’re all done on Styrofoam. They seemed to mark a transitional point in your work. Prior to that you were working with squares and rectangles on square surfaces like those you exhibited in the Presentational Painting exhibition at Hunter in 2006. I thought the R-Value paintings opened things up after that. And now you’re working on rectangular surfaces of varying dimensions and incorporating diagonals on a much larger scale. Weren’t the R-Value paintings titled after race car drivers?

Voisine: Yes, whatever formats I’ve used before I feel like I can use again, I can quote myself. But as far as the titles for the R-Value paintings, they were shown in a converted garage space, Abaton Garage in Jersey City. I named them after race car drivers to maintain an automotive association. Each painting also has its R-Value rating, which is based on the thickness of the Styrofoam boards I use, if its 2 inch Styrofoam it has an R-Value of 10, but if it’s 3 inch its R-Value of 15. It’s one of the few things in my paintings that is quantifiable, as a natural measure of something. Any other attributes my paintings may have are more intangible. Painting on Styrofoam boards is an ongoing and interesting side project I began in 2006 when I was invited by Mark Dagley to exhibit at Abaton Garage. It began simply as a “what would happen…?” kind of thing. As you noted Ben, the use of diagonals in the central forms was, to a large extent, developed on this surface. Shortly thereafter I began painting these more dynamic shapes on the wood panels. Each approach has generated ideas for the other. For me one of the most interesting aspects of the R-Value paintings is how people perceive them. Viewer response has been quite different from my work on wood. Although I use the same imagery on both substrates the Styrofoam paintings maintain a funkier edge, with perhaps less gravitas, and convey a quality of humor not associated with rigorous geometric forms. The contrast of such formal imagery on a basically throwaway material seems to make the paintings very approachable, even viewer-friendly.

Olson: Many of your materials are used in construction—wood panels, Styrofoam, etc. Not materials associated with formal, abstract paintings, as defined by [Clement] Greenberg or [Michael] Fried. What is your relationship to those guys? Do you read them?

Voisine: No, I don’t read them now. In the early 70s I was reading a lot of Greenberg and seeing a lot of Color Field paintings. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston was showing a lot of the painters they championed, Larry Poons, Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland. I was trying to work in that vein. Once I moved to New York I saw there was a lot more that was going on, and the narrow perspective I’d come to know from Portland Maine needed to be broadened. I wanted to make work that was more my own. I started bringing in things from the outside world, and my life. I’ve never really been a purist; it’s a sullied sort of formalism. I like my formalism a little bit dirty. [Laughter.]

Olson: In some of the paintings in your current exhibition, the central black bands break the edge of the picture plane, extending beyond. In others, they’re contained within the borders and that changes how the picture is read.

Voisine: A few years ago most of the paintings had the perimeter or border color going all the way around. But I use that less and less now. I came to understand this idea of laterality through looking at Barnett Newman. If the color is at the top and bottom only, or just on the two sides, it allows for a more expansive spatial reading. It’s not as contained. In a way, that could be an expression of me as a person, where I am.

La Rocco: There’s the issue of scale also. In this most recent show there is a whole other level of intensity and ambition, and also expression. These are some of the largest paintings you’ve done.

Voisine: Yes, but I’ve done larger work before. When I was working on canvas and linen.

La Rocco: How long ago was that?

Voisine: Um…last century! [Laughter.] I’ve made some seven and eight-foot paintings. I started working on wood in 2000 and it opened up another possibility for expression in the work. In my current show “Inauguration” is a five-foot square, that’s the biggest I’ve done on wood and it’s about as big as I can handle. You know, they just get really heavy. But I think paintings can be big without size. I don’t feel like I have to make 8-foot paintings. That’s a lot of black! Also, a big difference in the work on wood is that it reads a lot faster. It seems to have more of a graphic impact. And then if you slow down and actually look at the painting you’ll find that there’s a lot of detail, too. It gets your attention and hopefully slows you down to look. The ones on canvas were slower and they seemed to absorb light more. They were more reticent.

Olson: How long you been involved with the American Abstract Artists?

Voisine: I was nominated and accepted into the organization in 1997 and elected President in 2004. I’m usually not a joiner of groups but this seemed more important. It’s a link to history. The American

Abstract Artists is an artist’s group that was founded as an exhibiting organization in 1936. From its inception the AAA played a pivotal role in the evolution of non-objective art in America. The group was born in response to the lack of professional respect accorded American Modernists in the 1930s. Among the original founding members were Ilya Bolotowsky, Balcomb and Gertrude Greene, Harry Holtzman and Alice Trumball Mason, just to name a few. Once the group was officially chartered and mounted its first exhibition new members included Josef Albers, Giorgio Cavallon, Carl Holty, Ray Kaiser, Ibram Lassaw, George L.K. Morris, and Esphyr Slobodkina. By 1940 Ad Reinhardt was writing and designing broadsides used to promote the group’s causes. During World War II many European artists came to the United States. Moholy-Nagy, Leger and Mondrian all became members during the war years. Mondrian’s work especially exerted a significant influence on the group. With the dominance of Abstract Expressionism the organization almost died out in the 50s but a revival of interest in geometric art and the new styles of the 60s such as minimalism helped revive interest. New artists joined, Brice Marden, Robert Ryman, Sol Lewitt, Dorothea Rockburne, even Robert Smithson. This helped maintain the AAA’s vital tradition. David Reed and Merrill Wagner led the group at one time in the 80s. The AAA has always included a significant number of woman artists, in contrast to the more male dominated movements that followed.

La Rocco: Now that abstraction is a more accepted part of the artistic landscape, how do you understand the AAA’s role in contemporary culture?

Voisine: Abstraction is certainly well accepted in the art world but can still be an issue for the general public. Artists still need a forum to present and discuss ideas. Most artist groups only last a few years, while the AAA is approaching its 75th anniversary. We continue to organize member exhibitions, produce member print portfolios and catalogs, distribute published materials internationally to cultural organizations, document member history in the Archives of American Art, publish a journal every few years, and host critical panels and symposiums. In 2007 Kat Griefen curated an exhibition from the membership titled “Material Matter”, which was presented at Sideshow Gallery here in Williamsburg. The show felt fresh and current. As to the American Abstract Artist’s mission today, all I can say is, it’s not over.

La Rocco: Yeah. How do you feel about dust?

Voisine: In my painting? [Laughs.] I can’t keep it off. Did you notice stuff embedded into the surface?

La Rocco: I once watched you take out a big brush and dust a dry painting. Those dark areas will show any speck on them. I thought it might have a particular interest for you. People have done a lot of work with dust in the past—Marcel Duchamp, Gabriel Orozco and Vik Muniz.

Voisine: No, I really don’t strive to make the paintings perfect, it’s not about that at all. It’s important to me that they have a trace of the hand in them, that they are not machine made.

La Rocco: Can you tell us on the record what abstraction is? [Laughter.]

Olson: There isn’t a forty-five or a seventy-eight? [Expressive.]

Voisine: After all these years, I don’t really know. Michael Zahn makes abstract paintings that are actually representations of something. The paintings he had at the show with Linda Francis, Joan Waltemath, and myself at Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, those were box-tops, but they were abstract paintings. Those aren’t realistic but they’re abstracted from something. In a way maybe Linda’s work was the most abstract but she also works from something that is observed. My painting in that show was a tall narrow vertical, called “Debutante Twist.” For a long time I was trying to figure out how to do a vertical painting and I didn’t want it to read like a figure or doorway. But I couldn’t get past it so I just said I’ll go with it and that’s how I was able to resolve the painting. I came up with that title because the shifting of the planes reminded me of a pose in figure drawing class, a contra-posto? And the blue reminded me of tulle. My geometric figure was all dressed up. But then I don’t want people to read the title and look at that painting and say, “oh, I get it.” I’m not an advocate of anything for stylistic reasons. My work isn’t geometric because I wanted to make geometric paintings. It’s where the work led me. It’s all painting whether it’s representational or abstract. A good painting is a good painting.

La Rocco: It’s a personal decision, you come to it. It’s not an ideological position.

Voisine: No, I don’t think I’m an ideologue. I realized how uncool I was in 1991 when everybody in the art world in New York was talking about going down to D.C. to see the Sigmar Polke show. At the same time the National Gallery had a Titian show. I was like “Oh, I have to see the Titian show!” I mean the Sigmar Polke show was coming to the Brooklyn Museum within a year anyway. The Titian show was just amazing. There was a late painting he did when he was in his seventies, “The Flaying of Marsyas”, which was in a room all by itself. I walked in and my jaw dropped. You get up close to that painting and you find everybody in there, Bacon, Turner, Whistler. It’s basically an emotional response. And in the Boston show now there’s a late Titian painting of, I forget the saint’s name, but everything was really softly painted except a bit of the features, his right arm is held back and the division between the light and dark, the shadow on his arm, is the vein going down his bicep, which is clearly delineated. And that’s what holds everything together in the painting, just makes it work. It’s amazing, those little details that make the painting.

La Rocco: I guess that’s where I fail to understand the distinction. Abstraction. Sometimes I think I grasp it. Where I fail to understand it is that basically it’s grounded in the painting of it and in your immediate emotional response to it. It doesn’t really matter if it’s a Rothko or a Titian, and that’s where I get bogged down.

Voisine: You don’t need to get bogged down, that’s language. You just do your work.

La Rocco: Don, what do you think of Harvey Quaytman in relation to your own work?

Voisine: People ask me all the time what I think of Quaytman and I do like his work. There certainly were similarities to what I was doing before all the diagonals. People say, “It would be great to see your work together, you know, what do you think of showing with Quaytman?” It’s not as clear-cut as people think, it’s a strange relationship. We share a common visual language but when I look at his work I can’t help but think of all the different decisions I would have made. For me that’s an interesting relationship in itself.

La Rocco: What do you think the relationship of the blues is to painting?

Olson: Do you find one at all, in your own experience?

Voisine: Well, the blues is about a good woman treating you bad. And paintings can treat you bad. Paintings mess with you all the time.

About the AuthorThis exhibition also occurs in conjunction with Chuck Close: Maquettes and Multi-Part Work (1966-2009), which will be on view from May 7 through June 6, 2009 at Pace/McGill, 32 East 57^th Street. The artist will also be the subject of an upcoming museum exhibition entitled Familiar Faces: Chuck Close in Ohio Collections at the Akron Art Museum, Ohio from September 5, 2009 through January 3, 2010.

Speak Line, Shape :: Brent Hallard

2009-03-20T11:46:00.144-04:00

060908# 'miyu', 8.27" x 11.69" card on Japanese cotton museum board mounted onto expanded PVC

For me, line is being. When I look at a beautiful drawing, my heart beats faster; I am seduced with the reckoning of space by artist and mark. I respond to line, to shape, to color; to order and to structure; the architectronics of space, both obvious and obscure. I believe drawings can be created as an intuitive response to material placed within a certain defined location, at a certain velocity, within a certain moment. In such processes, the resulting drawings are evidenced as the mechanics of time and structure evolve.

Pour faire simple - at ParisCONCRET. The exhibition marks the opening of a new establishment in Paris devoted to abstract and reductive art.

If you are familiar with my work, you know that I also believe drawing to be a form of visual intelligence; a record of thinking and re-thinking through repetitive attention to formal elements. Brent Hallard creates drawings within this dialogue. As he says, "The spin is in the story that the line and shape speak".

Brent grew up in Sydney Australia. He has lived in Germany and the UK, and currently in Tokyo, Japan. He runs a project space near the Jiyugaoka district called Bus-Dori. Brent keeps a studio blog, ConcretePhone, as well as Visual Discrepancies, where he interviews contemporary artists such as Kevin Finklea, Mel Prest, John Tallman, Doug Witmer, Linn Meyers, and
Shinsuke Aso.

Hallard Studio shot of small mock templates that are being turned in physical signs using corrugated plastic, sheet plastic (that resembles shoji), with Japanese acrylic resin for the color line

Brent's work is evidenced in vividly graphic, scaled segments of line and color positioned within varying spacial parameters. His drawings are a sort of metaphysical exploration of concrete space, implicit with tension arrived at via combined oppositional structures such as controlled line and vast expanse; noise and quietude; the grounded and the gravity-defying; the formalistic and the conceptual.

acrylic and pencil on cut and folded paper, 8.5 x 11.7 in., 2008

"...What I’m actually looking for are a set of lines that work well while keeping the interest in a visual flux. The template drawings are usually small. I use painted tape to clarify choices, but also to hunt out other viable ways of bringing the experience out. I work with very simple materials and employ simple rules that eventually get broken. In the end it’s in the monkey business that you get good rhyme, reason, and rhythm".

spare snippet

Visually spare, yet ephemeral, Brent's work embraces a reductive, perhaps Minimalist aesthetic. But with life. Line is an entrance to surface, and beyond, by sheer constructivist physicality. It moves fluidly, shifts into dimensional form, flattens and returns to quiet. Color, both as chroma and substance, clinches the deal: Japanese acrylic resin on plastic paper, colored tape, mounted board, walls, and layers of corrugated plastic. Simplicity, and beauty.

Spa-t_kiss -pink fb

".... Each of us have our special moment with art, and I have mine too. It's a moment defining a frame within a space, a moment that moves clock-wise, or, and then, anti-clockwise. It's a moment above and below the moment. It's a moment that floods and sinks. It's a moment that pours into every empty cabin-space. It's a moment that moves deeper into the moment. This moment eventually breaks into two, and is engulfed by the one, and as an ocean, drives us through".

TRANSformal at Pharmaka, LA, 2009

Yes, your line and shape do speak.

Thanks, Brent.

Beyond the Boundary :: Clytie Alexander

2009-03-05T14:08:00.053-05:00

Clytie Alexander NM 67 Blue, Ink on Glassine, 36 x 24, Courtesy of Betty Cunningham Gallery March, 2009

I have been captivated by Clytie Alexander's pristinely ordered painted planes on view in her exhibit, Diaphans, at Betty Cuningham Gallery in Chelsea. The work consists of minimal, elegantly constructed surfaces which embrace a sensitive and austere perception of light, color and space. In the foyer, framed ink drawings on translucent Glassine paper, hover beneath plexi panels and layers of the reflective, shimmery paper.

Clytie Alexander Diaphan 41 White/White, acrylic aluminum, 48 x 34, 2009 courtesy of Betty Cuningham Gallery

In the main gallery, her Diaphans hang by metal bars just away from the wall support. These are process oriented renderings constructed of paper-thin sheet metal, randomly punched through with holes, and painted on each side with tonal variations of acrylic paint.

Clytie Alexander Diaphans 48 x 34 inches, acrylic aluminum, 2006 Installation view courtesy Greenfield Sacks Gallery

The installation of the panels allows light to travel through and around the uniformly sized surfaces. With gentle fluctuations of color, light source and air flow, the essence of the work is continually and subtly in flux.

Clytie Alexander Diaphan 18 Blue/ Ultramarine 34 x 35 inches, 2007 Courtesy of Betty Cuningham Gallery

The effect is powerful: a muting of edge and therefore a questioning of the architecture of defined space, controlled by the presence or absent of light. Go see it.

Clytie Alexander, Diaphans

Betty Cuningham Gallery
Chelsea
541 West 25th Street
February 5 - March 14, 2009

ISP :: An Inside Story

2009-02-22T20:26:00.007-05:00

Fellow artist and blogger Pam Farrell has a very nice thing going on which she refers to as an 'interactive studio project'. She has posted on many cohorts -- including Diane McGregor, Joanne Mattera, John Tallman, Steven Alexander, Ken Weathersby -- and other interesting artists whose work I hadn't been as familiar with. Its a more intimate look into our work, and a nice way to see where our practices actually happen, and how we feel about all of that..... check it out!

Color :: Obscura

2009-02-15T17:44:00.049-05:00

Liz Doles Pinhole Camera image 4x5 inches Teotihuacan, Mexico

I recently heard from artist and friend, Liz Doles, who finds herself teaching in Nepal for the winter. Liz is a painter who also takes extraordinary photographs with a pinhole camera.

Liz Doles Digital Image Nepal, 2009

We met as fellow residents at the Vermont Studio Center last fall. I asked , "Why Nepal?", and she sent the following words and images*:

"While others may come to Asia to benefit from Ayurvedic healings, to give rein to unrestricted illegal drug use, to immerse themselves in esoteric Buddhist learning and Hindu spirituality, to shop, to ascend Earth’s highest peaks or drown in guilty sexual pleasures, I came for the color combinations.

Liz Doles Pinhole Camera image 4x5 inches Teotihuacan, Mexico

Crushing color in landscapes of fabulous filth. The extraordinarily brilliant dress of the most ordinary Indian and Nepali women.

　

Liz Doles Digital Image Nepal, 2009

When I walked into the classroom in the monastery and saw its robin’s egg blue walls and crimson doors awash in winter sunlight, the young monks, their lithe, adolescent male bodies draped in maroon, their brown Newari faces with chiseled cheeks and chins, their dewy eyes and plump little pillow lips, Hollywood white dentition and cropped black tonsures, seated erect at benches that extended in parallel rows to the back of the classroom, I fell in love."

Liz Doles Digital Image Nepal, 2009

A pinhole camera is very simple: it is a light-proof box with a small hole in one side, no lens and a single, tiny aperture. Light passes through this single point and projects an inverted image on the opposite side of the box. The camera's shutter is manually operated and consists of a flap of light-proof material to cover and uncover the pinhole. Typical exposures range from 5 seconds to hours and sometimes days.

Though slow shutter speed may make for a typically lesser defined image, there is nothing at all obscure about Liz' color. The opposing tension of richness of hue and subtlety of line is very intriguing.

Thanks, Liz.

* The pinhole camera images I have included are not from Nepal as Liz has not been able to travel to Beijing to have her film developed. She sent these more traditional Nepalese digitals of her experience, which when pared with the pinhole images from Mexico, illustrate well the impact the culture, and color, is making on her.

Down to Zero

2008-12-31T10:31:00.025-05:00

Kate Beck Digital Snow Cover January 2009
Does it remind you of Stengel at The Whitney?

I've been procrastinating for several weeks now. The election is over, world peace is a fallacy, we're not selling, they're not buying. I've been taking long, really cold walks with my dog just to numb it all. Then I picked up a book of selected writings of Ad Reinhardt, which took me back -- to my own Black Paintings, and to myself. This poem, by W. H. Auden, was sited.

Kate Beck Canyon.Black 46x46 inches Oil, Wax, Mica on Linen 2007

The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell;
But, on earth, indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all the stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look to an empty sky
And feel its total darkness sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

Kate Beck Untitled 12x12 inches Oil, Wax, Mica on Linen 2008

Indifference, indeed.
I guess it's the best I can do right now.

Take a Pencil :: Bienále kresby Plzeň 2008

2008-11-16T11:03:00.052-05:00

I am frequently awed by the broad European embrace of drawing as a complete aesthetic. Here are a few images from the International Biennial of Drawing Pilsen 2008:

Honored Guest artist, Adriena Šimotová

Jurying process University of Western Bohemia, Plzně , Czech Republic July 2008

Drawings are initially submitted in the raw: only pure mark on paper. Works of 112 artists representing 46 countries were selected this year.

Zdeněk Tománek Barrier III, Pencil, graphite, 100×70,0 cm, 2008 Czech Republic

Works of Adriena Šimotová at Galerie města Plzně

Paul Manfred Kaestner
From the Big Bell of Love, 29.01.2008, Combined technique, hand-made paper, 65,0×50,0 cm, 2008
Germany

Jaroslav Jebavý BP 5, Pencil, 100×70,0 cm, 2008 Czech Republic

Gallery at the University of Western Bohemia

John Jones Untitled VIII 55,0 × 72,0 cm Pencil, 2008 Ireland
The Prize of the Union of Visual Artists of the Czech Republic

A traveling exhibit is comprised of specifically chosen Biennial works that will eventually tour Italy, France, Norway and other countries as it leaves the city of Pilsen, including my own drawing:

Kate Beck Untitled, Graphite on Rives Paper, 22.5 x 30 inches 2008

"....Such a comprehensive show makes it apparent how the individual artists differ from each other in their diversity, how different worldviews they hold, how differently they express themselves. Some, for instance, tend towards the realistic approach, others towards the more abstract.
This, however, is not relevant. The important thing is the quality of the work, its message and the ability to capture the viewer’s attention. I believe that from this perspective, the Biennial is significant and inspirational – it shows the world on a small scale; practically on several tens square metres of exhibition area we have an opportunity to see it in all its complexity. Perhaps no field of human activity can express this better than art. The art of drawing in this case..."
-Werner Schaub, President of International Association of Art – Europe

Yes We Can

2008-11-05T00:31:00.000-05:00