Painters' Table - Contemporary Art Magazine: Daily Painting Links on Artist Blogs, Painting Blogs and Art Websites

Jon Imber: The Spiral & the Source

Brett Baker — Sat, 18 May 2013 22:33:23 +0000

Alexander Nemser writes an appreciation of Jon Imber's recent paintings on the occasion of the exhibition Palaemon, A Survey of Paintings by Jon Imber, on view at the Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Queens College, New York through June 15, 2013.

Nemser writes: "In the last ten years, Jon Imber’s paintings have taken on a new dynamism, a freshness, and a remarkable proliferation of color. To see paintings like Lantern in the Snow, Stonington Harbor, and Spring Totems together is to witness the thrill of a master rising to a challenge, letting it open and change him. These paintings display the selflessness of mastery: the cultivated willingness to step out of the way and hold an image as it develops, joyfully and calmly... One secret is the clarity and crispness of sight. The paintings are rooted in earth and shell from Imber’s long apprenticeship to the Stonington shore, but infused with the singular vibrancy of his viewpoint. The whorls, shards, and petals are wilder than ever, the colors in shocking relation, but the sight is tightened, reined in, and the paintings are grounded in utterly faithful revelations of the truth of his eye."

Painting Expanded

Brett Baker — Sat, 18 May 2013 19:27:10 +0000

Leigh Markopoulos recaps Painting Expanded a symposium on the contemporary painting practice at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, April 13, 2013. Speakers and guests included Tom La Duke, Mary Weatherford, Keltie Ferris, Dushko Petrovich, John Zurier, and Mary Heilmann among others.

Markopoulos writes that the participants "addressed neither the specter of Rosalind Krauss invoked by the title of the day’s proceedings nor the legitimation of painting after the advent of conceptualism, paving the way instead for an exemplary range of perspectives linking painting to both life and art... the multiplicity of perspectives and practices presented argued that painting can participate in a broader discussion about art while expanding its discipline-specific history and repertoire. Acknowledging certain nagging doubts and situating them within a bigger artistic project does add up to something and can create a space—somewhere between canvas and viewer—that affords specific experiences and encounters. A painter’s agency, then, could lie in inhabiting these doubts, in multiplying and amplifying them to productive ends. It would seem also that surrendering to a process, a series of marks, or a technical exploration can constitute a valid artistic practice, one that takes a long-term approach, comprises repetition and variation, develops gradually, and aims at a greater embedment in the world through materials and work. What emerged ultimately was an exciting, richly hued portrait of a field open to possibility."

John Walker: In Conversation

Brett Baker — Sat, 18 May 2013 16:00:27 +0000

Jennifer Samet interviews painter John Walker about his work and career.

Walker recounts a formative experience: "As a young man, I had gone to Amsterdam to look at Van Gogh, actually. I saw the Rembrandts, including the painting that is still the most important painting to me — 'The Jewish Bride.' It just touched me so. It is truly one of the great romantic paintings in the world. I came out from the Rembrandt painting, and then I went to the Stedelijk. I’d been trained at that point just in figurative art. For the four years previously, I’d been in a life room. And I saw this painting, a white square on a white square. I didn’t know what it was, but I got the same emotional take that I got from the Rembrandt. It blew me away, took me off balance. I turned away, came back. I had no way of dealing with it intellectually. I’d never been faced with avant-garde art. I didn’t do anything about it. But several years later, I read that Malevich, when asked what his ambition was for painting, said it was to imbue the square with feeling. Well, that’s what Rembrandt did. So the connection was immediate. Then I didn’t have this problem of why I liked Rembrandt and why I liked certain contemporary art, why I grew to like Jackson Pollock. That is what they were doing: they were imbuing the square with feeling. I’d never read that, never heard of that, but it seemed to be right on."

Matthew Lopas: Painting Panoramas

Brett Baker — Fri, 17 May 2013 20:53:44 +0000

Larry Groff interviews Matthew Lopas about his panoramic paintings on the occasion of an exhibition of his work at Narthex Gallery at Saint Peter’s Church, New York, on view from May 17 - June 19, 2013.

Asked about painting panoramic views Lopas answers: "The conventional viewfinder produces wonderful compositions, but it is always at a distance from the viewer. I find its frame limiting and alienating. In fact, our field of vision is much wider than the perspectival conventions originating in the Renaissance. My images are truer to the actual experience of what it is like to be in the world rather than to look at the world. A radically expanded field of view enables a profound intimacy with the real act of looking and creates an unmediated gaze of empathic seeing."

Tamara Gonzales: Studio Visit

Brett Baker — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:55:33 +0000

Zachary Keeting and Christopher Joy visit the studio of painter Tamara Gonzales.

Gonzales generously discusses her process which involves lace and spray paint. She shares an interesting perspective on the physically demanding nature of spray painting in relation to traditional oil painting, as well as other differences and advantages the technique offers including speed and a uniform surface. "Even though it's a real additive process," Gonzales remarks, "you don't feel it… they have a certain ease."

Vonn Sumner: Somewhere Else

Brett Baker — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:39:29 +0000

John Seed interviews painter Vonn Sumner on the occasion of the exhition Vonn Sumner: Somewhere Else at Merry Karnowsky Gallery, Los Angeles, on view May 18 - June 15, 2013.

Seed writes that Sumner's work "features a suite of paintings that form a kind of personal Commedia dell'Arte, whose main actor has a tragic, muted air. Sumner is wise enough to know how to engage you in his theater and also smart enough to stand back and let you react on your own terms. The paintings are generous, funny and just a bit opaque."

Sumner comments: "For me, the decisions in making a painting are largely intuitive. There is no literal idea or narrative I am trying to execute or illustrate. I can say generally that I work with materials and imagery that feel "right," and that I work toward an image that resonates with me at the time. I'm also interested in breathing new life into old conventions, like portraiture. With 'Reliquary' in particular, it felt both ridiculous/absurd and also somehow melancholic or mournful."

Franceso Clemente: Interview

Brett Baker — Fri, 17 May 2013 02:31:21 +0000

Alex Bacon interviews painter Franceso Clemente on the occasion of the exhibition Clemente > Brazil > Yale, at the Yale School of Art, on view through June 2, 2013.

Clemente comments: "every single moment of the unfolding experience of the work is just a pretext to move on, to move forward from that moment. It’s never supposed to be a beginning or an ending, it’s supposed to be a transition. I know that images cannot stand alone, and they’re not supposed to, they’re just supposed to appear and disappear, and the kind of substance I want to give them is a transitional one. I don’t want them to be rigid, I don’t want them to be static, I don’t want them to be dogmatic; they’re just moments, that’s it, no more and no less. And I emphasize the 'no less,' because how many chances do we have to live a moment right now, that is not mediated, that is not imposed, that is not taken for granted?"

George Bellows: Modern American Life

Brett Baker — Thu, 16 May 2013 18:29:55 +0000

Ben Wiedel-Kaufmann reviews the exhibition George Bellows at the Royal Academy of Art, London, on view through June 2013.

Wiedel-Kaufmann writes: "where Hogarth, Goya or Dickens proved at least as critical of the hypocrisy of the higher classes as the depravity of the lower, as we move around the exhibition we realise that Bellows’ brush was not just adept at the fleshy distortions and brutalising carnality but equally capable of genteel delicacy. Be they roamers in central park or the members of his family - the middle class scenes are invariably portrayed with a soft focus and refined elegance that is altogether absent in the downtown scenes (Men of the Docks, 1912 providing a possible exception). All this gives weight to Marianne Doezema’s judgement that it was Bellows’ ability to "combine a 'revolutionary' style with an ingratiating message" that enabled him "to chart a delicate course between resistance and accommodation”, and rather undermines the attempts to claim him as a social realist."

Poured Painting

Brett Baker — Thu, 16 May 2013 13:51:25 +0000

John Haber reviews the two part exhibition Pour at Asya Geisberg Gallery and Lesley Heller Workspace, New York, on view through May 24, 2013. The shows, curated by Elisabeth Condon and Carol Prusa, feature works by Ingrid Calame, Kris Chatterson, Roland Flexner, Angelina Gualdoni, Carrie Moyer, Carolanna Parlato, David Reed, Jackie Saccoccio, and Carrie Yamaoka.

Haber writes that "the nine artists in 'Pour,' ... do that and more... Most of all, though, this is a revisiting of the pour. For these artists, pour it on becomes as much metaphor as medium. It is that eternal dance between presence and absence and then some—that trace of a trace of a trace."

Hilary Harkness: Relentless Yet Dispassionate

Brett Baker — Wed, 15 May 2013 23:47:11 +0000

David Cohen reviews an exhibition of paintings by Hilary Harkness on view at the FLAG Art Foundation, New York, through May 18, 2013.

Cohen writes that Harkness' "newer work dispenses with the assured absurdist humor of her trademark strategy and puts her in uncharted water in which human foible takes over from inhuman gesture. Meanwhile, the display of her cutaways of battleships, mansions, and even an auction house with their stylized, weirdly good-humored depravity confirmed to this now hardened fan (note the skepticism in the earlier reviews reposted below) her unexpected capacity to build distinct mood within each work despite the seeming ubiquity of her aesthetic and moral world view."

Jon Imber at Queens College

Brett Baker — Wed, 15 May 2013 15:54:50 +0000

Sebastian Smee reviews a retrospective exhibition of paintings by Jon Imber at the Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Queens College, New York, on view through June 15, 2013.

Smee writes that Imber's paintings "have an unusually insistent pull — you feel something vital at stake...Imber has wrestled with different influences, different styles, and different subject matter all his life. The shifts, in his case, have felt less tectonic than nimble, supple, full of yearning and mischief. Life, in Imber’s paintings, unfurls with wayward force, like a thick, flicked rope. It takes on vital cadences. It laughs at itself, too."

Judy Glantzman: In Conversation

Brett Baker — Wed, 15 May 2013 13:16:56 +0000

Arthur Peña talks to painter Judy Glantzman about the work in her recent exhibition at Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York.

Glantzman comments: " I am looking for 'shorthand' symbols that speak of war. The large collages are very physical, so the intuitive process has a lot to do with tearing and layering. Chance plays a big part in the collages. I want the work to 'show me' so I often glue things together that happened to fall together on the floor. I think of the collages like a haiku, where the 'right' combination creates a perpetual dynamic. My definition of art is that the artist (me) creates a paradoxical dynamic that, like the yin and yang, perpetually goes back and forth. A space is made; like the white line that is made when you combine complementary colors or when opposite magnets resist each other... I want to build a back and forth that creates a feeling, and then I stop."

Jay DeFeo: Romance of the Rose

Brett Baker — Tue, 14 May 2013 20:54:45 +0000

Yevgeniya Traps reviews the exhibition Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art, New York, on view through June 2, 2013.

Traps writes: "In some ways, [DeFeo's] work echoed the Beats: The Rose, in its making, is one continuous poem, bound up with the artist’s body no less than Ginsberg’s long poem, which takes the writer’s breath as the singular measure of its lines." Traps adds that the "triumphantly speaks to [DeFeo's] prolific imagination, her abundance of technique. The Rose, with its built-in mythology, its gargantuan ambition and stunning payoff, hogs the limelight, but other, smaller works also shine."

Andrew Seto: Lazy Reader

Brett Baker — Tue, 14 May 2013 18:59:58 +0000

Paul Behnke photo blogs installation images from the exhibition Andrew Seto, Lazy Reader at Theodore:Art, Bushwick, Brooklyn, on view through June 16, 2013.

The unusually poetic press release for the show reads: "Paradox / contradiction / fleeting / memory / dark / draw / love / loss / look / celebration / confession / poems / sight / songs / marks / wander / wonder / history / quickly / experience / reflection / color / now / breath / old / slowly / knowledge / new territories / mystery / perfection / mundane / paint / sense / balance / fallible / light / system / order / mess / super / imperfection / joy."

Alan Uglow & Ted Stamm

Brett Baker — Tue, 14 May 2013 13:27:32 +0000

Saul Ostrow reviews recent exhibitions of "two 'minimalist' painters, who lie outside the canon": Alan Uglow at David Zwirner and Ted Stamm at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York.

Ostrow notes: "Though under-acknowledged, Uglow and Stamm might best be considered artists whose primary audience are other artists and art world aficionados. Both had noted careers; exhibiting extensively in Europe as well as the States, yet neither were big names. Why their stature in the community of artists does not translate into economic and institutional success is too complex a question to go into here; suffice to say that in the critical environment of the 70s their work just could not be understood, yet interest in it persisted as representing a minority report on what best typifies abstract painting’s alternatives in the period of its supposed demise."