Looking south from Cordova NM The view from Carson NM I’m back from five days in New Mexico. Born in the desert and more at home in that landscape than anywhere else, I have been in a deep need for that stark horizontality, for the vistas that read both minimally and maximally, for the understated […]
painting
Art and Meaning
John Perreault’s popular blog, Artopia, has a recent posting that brings together a disparate variety of themes. Braided into Perreault’s personal ruminations is reference to “Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya”, the aboriginal art show at Grey Gallery (NYU), the “Mandala” show at the Rubin Museum, as well as a discussion of […]
Moses in Motion
Ed Moses, Untitled, 1987 (Photo: Sylvia White Gallery) Moses is a member of that increasingly interesting group of California artists that constellated around the Ferus Gallery scene (along with Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, John Altoon, Larry Bell, Ed Ruscha et al) back in the 60s. He has a new show at the Sylvia White […]
Icons of the Desert
Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi’s “Mystery Sand Mosaic”, 1974 (Photo: Grey Gallery) Ken Johnson of the New York Times recently wrote a review of the show, “Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings From Papunya” currently on view at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University. I haven’t seen the show yet but will be down […]
Adieu Michael Mazur
Photo: Cape Cod Times/Ron Schloerb I offer a moment of silent respect for the passing of Michael Mazur, a larger than life presence in the Boston art scene for years. Printmaker, painter and professional art advocate, Mazur’s absence creates a void of a very particular nature. Fall Mountains for Kuo Shi Bowdoin College Museum of […]
Kirkeby: Beyond Classifcation
(Photo: Tate © The artist) Robert Storr, dean of the School of Art at Yale and commissioner of the 2007 Venice Biennale, has written about the Per Kirkeby exhibit at the Tate Modern. The first paragraph of Storr’s commentary is actually one of the most succinct and accurate descriptions I’ve read of the current “exercises […]
Lasse Antonsen: The Layers of Meaning
(Photo courtesy of Lasse Antonsen) Painter extraordinaire and friend Marcia Cannistraro (to whom I will always be indebted for giving me her studio when she moved out of Boston) stopped by this weekend and introduced me to Lasse Antonsen. Lasse’s exhibit, The Continuous Translation, was completing its run at the Artist’s Foundation Gallery at the […]
Only at Funerals, Weddings and Other Disasters: Maggi Hambling
(Photograph: Alicia Canter) Maggi Hambling, another sassy candidate for “ladette” along with Tracey Emin, is an English artist whose work I follow and whose approach to art and life is refreshingly direct. Here’s her kind of epigrammatic wit from a piece in the Guardian: Are you healthy? Early every morning, at least. I do a […]
Per Kirkeby
“Mild Winter II” (Photo: Galerie Michael Werner) This weekend I found Laura Cumming’s review in the Guardian of the new Per Kirkeby show at the Tate Modern. (It is also posted on Slow Painting.) Well known in his homeland of Denmark, he’s a painter whose work does not get as much visibility (IMHO) everywhere else […]
Seeing is an Inside Job
Rothko Chapel, Houston The truly great ones are fresh continuously, repeatedly. Like a painting you can sit in front of for hours and never fully grasp. When I was just beginning to study art, I asked my professor about Mark Rothko. He and de Kooning were the giants of the generation of artists who inspired […]