Judd Williams Wood Pieces at Mercer Gallery in Rochester, New York
Judd Williams, former painting, printmaking, sculpture and figure drawing teacher at Rochester Institute of Technology is having fun in retirement. I can tell. Just look at his current show at the Mercer Gallery which opened on Thursday evening.
On first glance it looks like things just come together, like he might find a piece of steel wool in his studio and an old can. Why not put them together? This piece of wood looks like a palette. Done. Almost anything works. He says, ” In my work with found objects, the pieces are inspired by the materials themselves, it’s like the object is a piece of language.”
But look again. This is the work of a master. Just as often he carefully constructs pieces to fit together in his Assemblages and sculptures He paints them and joins them in effortless and playful assemblages and sculptures. My favorite were these two wood pieces.
Steve Piper abstract drawing at Little Theater Café in Rochester, New York
It’s snowing and it is beautiful. Who cares if it is April? The “Sights & Sounds” opening is over and it’s still daylight. All is right with the world. My sister was there and a couple of cousins from farm country so I spent quite a bit of time talking about family rather that art. There was plenty of arts speak though and music this time because the five artists showing are also musicians. Thus the theme of the show.
There was very little surprise in the music but Steve Piper’s drawings were a revelation to me. He’s known for and has made a living with his photos but but his drawings are each little worlds unto themselves. I hope you can get down there this month to see them.
Ten Models from Crime Page paintings by Paul Dodd mounted as one piece for Little Theater Café show
So far, Peggi and I have managed to live our whole adult lives with only one automobile. It doesn’t usually present a problem but tomorrow we have a yoga class and I need to be downtown at the same time to drop off the artwork above. We will manage.
WXXI’s Evan Dawson is a real pro. He does his homework before the day’s interviews so he is completely comfortable with his subject and able to both deliver and roll with the punches. I have no idea what this show sounded like but it was a pleasure being there talking about art with some good friends. There is a podcast but I’d rather trust the memory.
For some reason Evan picked up on the sentence in my bio that says I take daily walks in the woods, mentioning it when we were introduced and then working it into the show as we discussed creating. I loved how he got around to the Robert Frost poem and the real point, that one road wasn’t better exactly, that both hold promise.
Evan moved around the table seamlessly weaving the five artists/musicians into the wide ranging conversation. For a moment the whole thing seemed to go off the rails when Jaffe, former member of the Fugs, Monk enthusiast and longtime keyboard player for Colorblind James experience, talked about someone giving him some white powder to drink back in sixties. It was a turning point of sorts for him as he stayed up for two weeks and almost died. Both Evan’s and the engineer’s eyes lit up and their mouths were wide open. It was brilliant live radio.
The tintype portraits at Genesee Libby Photography in the Hungerford Building looks like the ticket for tonight’s First Friday romp.
Sights & Sounds 3 poster for Little Theatre Café show 2016
I’m hoping this will be fun. The five of us, or whoever shows up, will be doing an interview on Evan Dawson’s WXXI radio show tomorrow, Friday, at one o’clock. The art opening is Sunday April 3, 1:30-4:30 at the Little Theater Café Art Gallery
Five artists/musicians. In alphabetical order – Paul Dodd, Charles Jaffe, Peter Monacelli, Steve Piper and Scott Regan. The exhibit runs April 2 thru April 29. I have some new “Models From Crime Page” in the show.
I’m back to painting again. So many obstacles, of course, most of my own making. I got side-tracked with a lot of family business. Not complaining, just retesting the argument I make these days. It needs defending. That you don’t have to paint to get better at painting. The principles you use, the disciple you apply get a constant workout in the day to day. I have a deadline too and that certainly is a motivator.
We ran into Bill Keyser at Pete Monacelli’s opening last week. Bill was in Fred Lipp’s painting class with me. The first words out of his mouth the other night were, “I miss Fred.” Of course you do. We all do. We are on our own. Fred left his tool kit behind and plenty of instructions. “There are no rules,” he use to say, except for one, “Trust your eye.” Something I do everyday now.
Catherine Opie “John Baldasari Portrait” at Hammer Museum in Los Angeles
New York has been the art capital of the world for so long. California artists are always getting the short end of the stick. Hockney may have been the most famous but he is English. Diebenkorn is probably the best painter. Robert Irwin is probably the best artist. Ed Ruscha is mostly engaging. The “Pacific Standard Time” show at the Getty in 2011 opened my eyes to the left coast sensibility. And lately I have held some fascination for John Baldessari.
He has been creeping up on me. When we were in New York a few months back we ran into him at the front desk of the David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea. There were two shows there, Donald Judd downstairs and Georgio Morandi upstairs. Downstairs left me cold and I remember praying Baldessari was there for Morandi. We found this recent portrait of him at the Hammer Museum last week and then in San Francisco I found a NYT article about Baldessari’s upcoming show at the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York. Second paragraph in discusses his purchase of one of the paintings from that Morandi show. At 84 he claims it is the first painting he ever bought! So he was at the the David Zwirner desk negotiating a deal for a Morandi when we spotted him. Up another notch. I ordered “More Than You Wanted To Know About John Baldesaari” from Angel‘s couch and it arrived the day we got back.
I have funny connections to artists. I used to like Alex Katz and we were at a Whitney Biennial years ago where someone had a drum set inside a small enclosure in a big room of the museum. Visitors were welcome to play. I sat down for a minute or two and came out face to face with a smiling Alex Katz. He was wearing brown bucks. I was struggling to see an Alice Neel painting at the Modern and some guy in a wheel chair with an assistant behind the chair was planted in front of the painting for ten minutes or so. The assistant spun him around and it was Chuck Close. Years later we were wandering around Chelsea as it was getting dark. A gallery there had just installed a new Chuck Close show, a room full of his daguerreotypes and a room full of his big paintings. Two people in the gallery and one was Chuck. I took his photo and talked for a bit. He wheeled his chair to the door, propped it open a crack and lit a cigarette. We drove down to my brother’s place in New Jersey in 2009 and spent the night. We left for Manhattan the next morning and checked out his paper before getting on the train. David McKee Gallery had reunited Philip Guston’s small panels from 1969, the breakthrough series that was shown at the Marlborough Gallery that year. We went directly there. Some things are meant to be.
Snow on bridge grate in Durand Eastman Park in Rochester, New York
Is there a Tinsel Town in every city? Ours is on Buffalo Road, about half way to Buffalo in Gates. Tonight, for one night only, they were showing “Florence and the Uffizi Gallery.” Their Renaissance masterpieces include Michelangelo’s David, Leonardo’s Annunciation, Birth of Venus by Botticelli and the Shield of Medusa by Caravaggio so we had to go.
The good parts, the long closeups of the paintings and sculptures were sensational. The bad parts, well, “Quince Jam”s” YouTube review says it better than I can. “The music is appalling, suitable only for a Hollywood panshot around the Grand Canyon. Totally inappropriate for this film and FAR too loud and overblown. And the dreadful actor playing the ridiculous concept of being one of the Medici. Only go with earplugs and prepare to shut your eyes while he hams it up as an ACTOR in his leather trousers.”
It sometimes takes a giant interruption to crystallize your thinking. Prolonged concentration is hardly ever productive. Margaret Explosion often has its best nights when we are either exhausted or completely overwhelmed with life’s complications. You can’t force possibilities. You can only open yourself up to them.
So here I am in my studio for the first time in months. The mattress my brother slept on when he was in town is still sprawled out on the floor. A series of paintings, half of them unfinished, line the walls. A short stack of them sits on the floor. The still life of old bottles that I shot to show my father is still staged theatricly on a piece of white panel board. I could paint them for the rest of my life the way Georgio Morandi did. On my work table I have about twenty sheets of purple, hand-made paper that Roy Sowers gave me. I forget what I was going do with them.
There’s a newspaper clipping of Vladimir Putan shaking Bashar al Assad’s hand, two distinctly different body types and postures in an animated pose. There’s a small notebook with scattered thoughts, overheard snippets of conversion and abstract sketches. A good starting point for something. And of course the most recent Crimestoppers page is waiting for me. A package of black construction paper sits next to a bowl of pink ribbons that we found on trees in the woods. It occurs to me that those two things could work together. There’s the big charcoal drawing on my easel. Can I pick up where I left off? And then I’m looking at this weathered wooden end to an old lobster trap that I found along the coast in Maine. The nail holes in the barn shaped board are surrounded by rust. It’s beautiful just the way it is.
Mary Heilmann Table and China at the 303 Gallery in Chelsea
Art, viewing or making, can be easy or difficult. Mary Heilmann makes both look easy. This table and china set is part of an installation in the back room of her current show at the 303 Gallery in Chelsea.
Not sure if it is a good thing or a bad thing, playing on Thanksgiving eve. It used to be a great night when we were in a rock ‘n roll band. Margaret Explosion has been playing at the Little Theater for thirteen years or so and this night can get too loud to hear ourselves play. Ken’s standup bass has no amplification other than from the ingenious design of the instrument itself.
We use a Zoom recorder and it sits between the guitar and the sax. The bass and drums set up in the corner behind those two. If Peggi stands in just the right spot the Zoom recorder gets a nice mix or her natural sax sound the reverb from her amp. Of course the damn drums don’t need any amplification. I work my ass off trying to play quietly. The mic positioning captures a perfect crowd mix. The Little has a row of lights for the performers and one dimmer controls them all. If we keep that thing in the off position the sound pretty much comes together.
We took the F train uptown on Sunday to see the Picasso sculpture show at MoMA. Picasso hung on to most of his sculptures during lifetime and I suspect he did so because they were his tangible representations of form. They were inspirational building blocks he could live with and use in his work. I think he inspired himself with these. He pushed boundaries in and out of cubism and celebrated the human form above all. My favorite was this hand.
We cut through Rockefeller Center on our way to the museum and I was surprised to see the tree had not been decorated yet. There was a giant wooden scaffold built around the tree and police with high powered rifles and dogs surrounded the structure, an apocalyptic post Paris holiday scene.
Back in Duane’s apartment I spent some quality time with Robert Frank’s “Storylines” photo book. I found this quote in there, a quote that started at the bottom of one page and continued on the next. The continuation was pertinent but the first part knocked me out.
“There comes a point when it is no longer a question of an art that is over here, in a pristine volume, or Out There, on a pristine wall, in a secure category or genre; but an art that has become part of how you see
… turn the page if you must
the world. You no longer merely look (up, out) at it; it is inside you like a lamp, which illuminates all the details spread out below in what might otherwise be unmitigated darkness. You are no longer you without its memory.”
“Young Attorney” lithograph by William Gropper at Warren Philips Gallery in Rochester, New York
William Gropper studied with Robert Henri and George Bellows in NYC and he was influenced by the graphic work of the greats, Goya and Daumier. All this is apparent when you see Gropper’s work. And there is a litho, “Young Attorney,” for sale in Warren Philips gallery right now for somewhere near 500 bucks. I love how animated the four characters are, how distinct their expressions are. I love the cop’s pose and the lumpy defendant. This thing is a steal.
While you’re there you can take in the Rochester Print Club’s annual Member’s Show. It was our favorite stop on last night’s First Friday run.
Janet Lipp, an artist and teacher like her father, invited Fred Lipp to talk to her class a few times over the years. In 2014 she videoed the presentation he gave to her MCC art class. I studied with Fred’s for many years and he hardly ever talked about his own work. So it is a joy to hear him do so here. He used the same thought process that he taught and it is especially powerful to see him pull it all off. I am so thankful he was willing to share what he loved.
The Creative Workshop had a celebration of Fred’s work tonight, a gathering of former students in conjunction with a show of their work in the Lucy Byrne Gallery. They were showing this movie in a separate room and in the building next door the Memorial Art Gallery had a painting of Fred’s that they bought in 1972, a big abstract called “Sculptural Fetish.” Fred would have loved it.
Way blue sky over Fall colors in Durand Eastman Park, Rochester, New York
“Red,”John Logan’s play about Mark Rothko, currently at Geva Theatre, is a particularly meaty discourse about art and art-making. I was totally engrossed but the guy sitting in front of us dozed off. It probably isn’t for everyone. The play as written may even be too good for the two actors but I warmed up to them and was eventually carried away by their performance.
Abstract Expressionism out intellectualized the physicality of Cubism and then the “Barbarians at the Gate” assault of Pop Art, just as Rothko was getting successful, took down the Ab Exers. Architect, Philip Johnson, asked Rothko to create murals for a new restaurant in his Seagrams Building in Midtown Manhattan and this is the time frame for this play. A studio assistant, hired by Rothko, takes on the old man. Not by out painting him but by challenging the master to be true to his own game. Rothko eventually turns down the distasteful commission down and he sets his assistant free to carve out his own life. It is a story for the ages.
Main Street Arts in Clifton Springs screened the Alice Neel documentary tonight and it was a perfect evening for the 45 minute drive. Clear blue skies, very low humidity and a generous touch of color in the trees. In other places a 45 minute drive is nothing. Here it is time enough for deep conversation and Alice Neel’s paintings provided the fuel. Louise rode out with us and we had dinner at Warfield’s, across the street from the gallery. Painters, Jim and Gail Thomas, were having dinner at a nearby table.
A woman in the crowd, who lived in New York for many years, told a story before the movie about how she organized a show in the city and rounded up paintings from artists she liked. Alice Neel gave her one for the show but said he would not be around to pick up the painting when the show came down. The woman took the painting home and hung it on her apartment wall for a month or so. Marlene Dumas is in the movie, as well she should be. Alice is the master. Chuck Close is in there too and he tells a funny story about meeting Alice on the street. He told his name and she said, “Oh, I hate Chuck Close paintings.” He said, “I love yours.” And she said, “Well, I’ll have to give yours another look.” I was trying to get a good look at an Alice Neel painting in New York, somewhere in the nineties, and there was a guy in a wheelchair sitting in front of the painting along with a big guy behind the chair. They stayed planted there for an almost rude amount of time and when they finally moved on and the wheelchair spun around I saw it was Chuck Close.
Alice Neel is one of my favorite painters so I was in heaven watching her draw with color as she hung onto the end of her brush. Her portraits look just like the people she paints but they are much more demonstrative. She did the painting above when she was 80 years old and this self portrait when she was 84. She got better and better her whole life and her work remains as an inspiration. Louise said my painting look polite by comparison or something to that effect. I very much agree and plan to do something about it.
Ford Torino in front of Home Depot in Rochester, New York
My cousin tries to organize a yearly “family reunion.” This year I suggested she just call it a “family picnic” because one year is not long enough for a reunion. Well see how much sway i have when the email invite comes next year. I have about fifty cousins and of course they all have children so we have to wear name tags. My aunt used to bring a giant percolator for coffee but she has passed on so this year we had Wegman’s Expresso. At the coffee table I found myself between two teachers, cousins of mine, and those conversations always go in one direction with two enemies. Overbearing parents and state and federal curriculums. Common Core and No Child Left Behind carnage.
My painting teacher started his career teaching elementary school students and he discovered that kids have an innate sense of color and design. When he switched to teaching adults he had to start undoing the grade school damage. He was my mentor as well as a friend and I miss him. Without his actual voice I rely on his abstracted voice. Instead of hearing him tell me to trust my eyes I am learning to trust my eyes.
The Creative Workshop is offering an open studio in Fred Lipp’s former classroom. Tonight would have been the first night of a new session with Fred. He died near the end of the last round and the idea of showing up here to paint without him and his incisive guidance is absurd. You can pay by the session so we decided to give it a whirl.
I brought in some paintings that I was working on during that last session. I had been looking at them all summer and I knew pretty much what I needed to do. Mostly small things, Annoyances that kept drawing my attention. But still, questioning a painting, determining that something is wrong and then making that correction feels like big decisions without Fred.
Rochester Contemporary gets submissions from all corners of he world for their annual 6×6 show. Its their biggest fundraiser so why should they quit it? Not to mention that no one has come up with a better idea. We heard director, Bleu Cease, on the radio talking up the celebrity entrants and the mad scramble to purchase their work on opening day. We had a soccer game to watch that night we missed the affair but we did have a chance to preview the work.
If everybody knows that Philip Glass has something in the show, as he does every year, wouldn’t you think someone would be doing fake Philip Glass’s and submitting them? I mean the real Philip Glass’s only bring twenty bucks like every other piece. Supposedly the authorship is kept anonymous but some artists work is so distinctive you pick it out in a sea of thousands. And in my father’s case he signed his “Hot Dog Row” homage on the front. Would Philip Glass really submit a piece on section of musical score paper with the words “Einstein on the Beach” on it? His most famous piece? I’ve tried some different things over the years and went minimal/maximal this year. Next year I plan to do forgeries. As a fundraiser.
Bleu trapped us on the way out and solicited video responses to three questions. One was what was you favorite piece in the show? I tried to describe this fuzzy, furry, three dimensional piece (above). I can’t wait to hear/see that rambling reply.
Fred Lipp sculpture entitled Omnipresent 1983 in the Marion M. Whitbeck Garden at Rochester General Hospital
Fred (Fritz) Lipp passed away on Sunday morning. A tremendous loss for his family, his students and Rochester. I’ve written quite a bit here about him. His longtime students, our fellow painters, could find no reason to leave the advanced painting class once they found Fred. He had an amazing ability to always be there to take it up a notch. There was no end because as he often told us, he learned from the best. He conversed with Matisse, Van Gogh, El Greco and Guston when he stood in front of their paintings. “They talk to me,” he would say. And Fred loved to share what he learned. We were so lucky to have know him.
Every year the Creative Workshop would have a faculty show and Fred would show a new piece, something to blow your mind, but otherwise he was very quiet about his work. He was commissioned to create the sculpture shown above (please click on it for full photo) for Rochester General Hospital. Entitled “Omnipresent,” it was paid for by a wealthy donor and it originally sat in a courtyard where you could walk around the piece and experience the sculpture in space. The hospital expanded. The sculpture was moved to the Marion M. Whitbeck Garden, in a courtyard near the old entrance. The light that was inside the piece no longer shines. In fact it is not even wired as it was in its original location.
As fate would have it Fred spent some of his last days in this hospital and he visited his sculpture. He talked about the piece in our last conversation and we promised him we would do all we could to get the hospital to run an electric line to the sculpture. Maybe someday we will again see the light as it seeps out the artfully constructed openings.
Our friend, Alice, who was in the class when I first joined, emailed us this. “His words still ring around in my brain… when I paint or just in life… the wisdom applies to both life and art.” I’m quoting her because I feel exactly the same. It is our duty to duty to carry on with this wisdom.
We gathered today in our usual painting room at the Creative Workshop of the MAG. Most of us are long-time students of Fred Lipp’s and our week revolves around Tuesday’s class. A good percentage of the day class were there and our night class had a respectable showing but our teacher wasn’t there. He’s quite sick and we were meeting for two reasons: to discuss a tribute show in his honor and secondly, to determine how to carry on. I specifically did not say “carry on without him” because the gifts he gave us are ours to use.
As the group dispersed a few us were standing around taking about Fred’s teaching method. Bill Keyser was telling my father how he would have a list of things he was about to do and Fred would come by and say, “Forget about your plan. Look at your painting right now.” This in fact may be Fred’s most important point. Always stay open to what is on the page right now. “Painting is not a destination. It is an adventure.” Step back and look at the work. “Always address the worst first.” When the “worsts” are gone, your painting may be done.
I’ve searched my past posts and collected some of the lessons I am still learning from him. I find these truisms apply to most disciplines, certainly music.
The class was not about Fred’s work. In fact he rarely showed. The first thing I saw by him was a sculpture/installation in a Finger Lakes show, ripped open pieces of re-tread tires spewing at you from the corner of the gallery. It was sensational and it went on to the statewide exhibit in Albany. His class is called “Advanced Painting” and students work in collage, watercolor, acrylic, oil, drawing or sculpture. His methods are the same for all mediums.
There are no assignments. He rotates around the room addressing individual students as they work and pretty much says the same thing to each. He does not want you to talk first when he gets to you. “Don’t talk it. Show me.”
His stock of grey paper is his primary teaching tool. With this neutral grey he would cover parts of your work to show you what currently works. He’ll sometimes cover three fourths of your painting and tell you, “There’s your painting.
Many of Fred’s students say “he taught me how to see.” More importantly, I think he teaches us to trust our eyes. We already know how to see but we don’t trust it. If you have doubts about something in your painting that would be your eye talking. “If the question comes up, the answer is yes.”
Fred can be brutal. In many sessions the first class was the last we would see of a new student. He was brutal because he was honest and painters who did not want to learn left.
We visited Fred in the hospital last week and I asked him if any of his students had brought their paintings up to his room. He got a good laugh out of that one. A painting was never done until Fred pronounced it “done.” And it was just as often sooner rather than later than you expected.
Learning is a lifelong process. I’ve pulled these thoughts from my posts over the years. This link will take you to a page with all the posts on Fred.
There is no replacing Fred Lipp. He is one of a kind. He has been a mentor in every sense of the word and I am not alone. He packed the lecture hall at the MAG last summer with his presentation on spacial constructs, a comparison of three paintings from the MAG’s collection by Hans Hoffmann, Josef Albers and John Koch.
His daughter wrote that Fred is “the essence of art.” His ideals will live forever.
Matisse painting, “The Piano Lesson,”at the Museum of Modern Art
Yoko Ono had so many good ideas her show was almost exhausting. She is a heavy hitter in conceptual art like her friend, the man they call “JC,” John Cage. She certainly didn’t dim John Lennon’s career but he may have hampered hers. She was really on a roll before they met.
MoMA has two sensational Giacometti paintings on display next to one of his figures on a two wheeled cart. A love his paintings. They are as playful, spatially speaking, as his sculptures and the two look so good together it was hard to move along.
There is also a fun show of Gilbert & George’s early work, mostly large drawings accompanied by this quote. “They weren’t Good Drawers. They weren’t Bad Drawers. But My God, they were Drawers.”
The reassembled Jacob Lawrence “Migration” series was graphic and moving. At the end of number 60 they funneled you into a room with film footage of Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit” and it packed an extreme punch.
Matisse’s “Swimming Pool.” is still up and next to it a whole room of choice Matisse paintings. The nearby Van Gogh “Starry Night” makes this the gravitational center of Manhattan.
We came down gently with Matisse’s back reliefs on the wall of the sculpture garden.
