Coke vs. Pepsi ~ that sort of thing.
Talking A Good Game Is Easier Than Painting
When panting class is in session the whole week revolves around that night. We were there a half hour early for our three hour class and it still flew by. We are already starting another revolution. To be continually challenged, it doesn’t get any better than that.
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Sergiy Lebedynskyy is not an old school photographer but he went old school when the situation called for it – photographing the mineral/mud springs of Arabat Spit in his native Ukraine. His photos, on display now at Lumiere, were taken with a Horizon camera, a Russian film panoramic camera, and he printed them on a Russian photographic paper that was discontinued in 1990. The results, yellowed and unpredictable, fit the subject matter and paint an exotic picture of people caught between the Soviet era and an uncertain future.
Abba’s “Dancing Queen” was echoing through downtown as we walked over to RoCo to see the annual Member’s Show without the crowds. The sound was surely coming from the ice skating rink at Manhattan Square Park. I would like to have been on the ice for that one. This RoCo show is always one of my favorites but you have to work a little harder this year to outdo the efforts of Director, Bleu Cease to boost membership. We took our time and found plenty of gems.
First Friday Fanatics that we are, we pushed onward and climbed the four flights of stairs in the Hungerford building to find the Rochester Art Club doors closed. A woman in the hall told us, “They’re pretty good at getting out of here on time.”
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If Picasso is a monster of art Matisse is the master. Like anyone, Matisse made mistakes. He worked on life size models of his wall mural for the Barnes Museum for years before discovering he had the wrong dimensions. But unlike most people he learned from his mistakes and he got better and better up to the end. “Jazz,” the greatest illustrated book of all time, is aptly titled even though most of the pages depict circus scenes. It is the visual equivalent of jazz.
The flatly painted, cut paper that Matisse worked with during the last decade of his life is impossibly vibrant and three dimensional when cut by the master. The scale, the visible cuts and layering, the tactileness of the cut-outs needs to be seen in person. You most go now to MoMa.
MoMa’s “Matisse:The Cut-Outs” recreated the swimming pool from the walls of Matisse’s dining room. The “Blue Nudes,” which masterfully depict human form in 2D, are are my pick for best room in the show but I made that choice before we experienced the last two rooms where each wall had a knockout large scale piece. The Parakeet and the Mermaid, The Sheaf, Acanthuses and the Snail are all mind blowing. And then we walked bcak through the show in reverse chronological order and determined the Jazz book from the beginning of the show was our favorite. It is all killer. No filler.
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We came to New York for two reasons. “Matisse: The Cut Outs” and “Egon Scheile: Portraits.” Sunday was reserved for Egon who died at 28 of the Spanish Flu but left a rich body of work. I love the German Expressionists and Egon Scheile is my favorite.
The four rooms on the third floor of the Neue Gallery were full of his portraits, sometimes three high, a layout that borrows from design principles popular in Austria during the early twentieth century. You could just stand in one place and take in an eyeful of the most expressive, gorgeous depictions of of the human body imaginable.
No photos were allowed but I was able to snag this one of a copy of Egon’s death mask which was in the small room with his prison drawings. He was in prison on pornography charges and while there he titled his pictures provacatively like this one. “Art Cannot Be Modern; Art is Primordially Eternal” 1912.
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We took the train back to Chelsea on Saturday with no real agenda other than seeing the rest of the Picasso show at Pace and gorging on more art. We fortified ourselves at a cafe on the corner of 23rd and Ninth and walked a block west where we ran into Boo Poulin from Rochester. She said this meeting was inevitable. It was also fortuitous because she recommended a few shows that were just spectacular.
The David Zwirner gallery on 20th, with its wood grain, concrete walls and gorgeous wood doors, was featuring Richard Serra’s “Vertical and Hoizontal Reversals,” minimal, thickly applied, black and creamy white paintings of black on white and white on black rectangles. Purely seductive and meditative.
And a bit further down the same street, as impossible as it sounds, another gigantic Picasso show, this time at Gagosian. The hallucinatory, 30 collotypes with Andre Villers from 1962, 15 studies for the 1957 Unesco mural and at least a hundred powerful paintings. “Boom, boom, boom. Like being pistol whipped,” is how Duane described the show. Picasso is so good you just want to see him show off.
Francesco Clemente created two tents with painted canvas in the front room of Rochester’s Mary Boone Gallery and beautiful small watercolors in the back room. He then hired a miniature painter to paint the backgrounds. Rochester’s Nathan Lyons has a great show of new work at Bruce Silverstein on 24th.
We did ourselves in at the second Picasso show in the Pace Gallery. I should say Picasso did us in. The guy is a monster. We stopped in Chinatown at a Lo Mein noodle shop called New Wong Rest. Inc. and had three dinners and tea for a total of $19.
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Even though we had stayed up way too late two nights in a row with Pete and Shelley we arrived at Penn Station ready to roll on Friday afternoon. It was a beautiful day for train travel and we had seats on the Hudson side. Travel by train is so civilized, you feel well rested rather than exhausted we you arrive.
We walked downtown into Chelsea and headed west on 26th Street where we spotted a gallery with a Sigmar Polke show or drawings and photos and just a little further down a great show of Robert Motherwell works on paper. Across the street we spotted a really garish painting of dancers holding hands in a circle ala Matisse. I said something like “That’s probably not worth crossing the street for” but we did. It was a David Hockney show of recent paintings. Really quite wonderful. I loved his portraits.
Same block of the same street, a killer Picasso show at Pace, “Picasso & Jacqueline.” An artist and his model painting from the Albright Know was here. This stuff is way too meaty for the contemporary, free galleries in Chelsea. We couldn’t do the show justice before having to leave for dinner.
I had tried finding a Spanish restaurant to make reservations at while we were still in Rochester. We wanted to hook up with Duane when he finished work and both places I picked were booked so I let OpenTable suggest a place, “Txikito,” a Basque restaurant with pinxtos (small portions). What a crazy language. How would a guy from Rochester pronounce the name of the joint?
We started with a bottle of Marques de Vitoria Rioja and in succession split Pimientos de Padron, olives, Endives with walnuts and blue cheese, Cod Pil Pil, cheese and porcini mushrooms, and Pulpo con limon y paprika.
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The bottom right portion of this painting came back after being scrubbed out and over painted in white. I was unhappy with the way I had painted the neck in the first place and then unhappy with the buildup left under the white when I painted it out. So I’m circling the wagons. Fred Lipp says I “paint the neck like I don’t care about it.” Unless I can rise to this challenge this basketball player looks better without it. So I just took it out again.
The kids’ show, up now at the Creative Workshop, has a series of still life’s by students of Johnny Lee Smith that really pack a wallop. They are joy to look at. Kids are guided by their innate sense. A good teacher keeps the focus where it belongs.
Pear by James P, a student in Johnny Lee Smith’s “drawing Better” class
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Somewhere I picked up a 1957 yearbook for Mynderse Academy, a small private school in Seneca Falls. The cover of the Myndersian looked like a Sun Ra album. The page devoted to the basketball team only showed six players. One sub. The head on the page read, “Team Faced Tough Competition.” I painted the six guys about twenty years ago. They were my first oil paintings.
I decided to revisit them and stated with charcoal on canvas. I kinda like the drawing and and I’m pausing to figure out why it is I want to paint them.
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I worked on part of a painting for quite a while this morning and then ran out to the post office. When I got back I scraped off what I had painted. This is progress.
It is a good thing that I recognized the bad in the painting. The fresh take on the painting allowed me to see it. Why I painted it that way is complicated. I didn’t get any better while standing in line at the post office. I know what I did wrong. I stopped seeing my painting. I got bogged down in the process of making parts of it look right. I isolated the offending parts from the rest of the painting and labored to get those damn things right. The parts were badly painted in the first place and they needed work but I got in trouble when I repainted those parts without considering the whole. If I could only learn this lesson I think it would easier to paint.
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I’m thinking of painting landscapes of Maine or maybe abstracting the landscapes, seascapes actually, in paint but I probably won’t ever get around to it. I’ve got to finish the basketball players I’m working on.
I spent the better part of the last few days sorting the photos I took in Maine. I understand why so many artists live there, work there. The natural surroundings are drop-dead gorgeous and light is forever changing. The sound of the surf swallows you up. We barely escaped its spell.
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I met Alice in Fred Lipp’s Advanced Painting class where she would often be working on abstracted versions of Maine landscapes. She’s living in one of those landscapes now and when we visited our conversation often turned to art and Fred’s class. She told us that one of the things she misses is overhearing Fred’s advice to another painter, someone working in a different medium and manner on a different subject, advice that was applicable to her at that moment.
I had this experience last night as Fred was talking to my father. He was comparing the beautiful little watercolors in his sketchbook to the sheet my father was working on, one that got away from him. The sketches, which Fred was calling finished paintings, captured fleeting moments with expression and confidence. The big sheet had been carefully planned and worked up with the sketch as a reference and my father said he felt as though he was just coloring it in. This is one of Fred’s favorite topics and was my father setting him up for another “painting should be an adventure, not the execution of a plan” raps. It’s a topic that bears repeated revisiting. This time I heard Fred say that you want to see the questioning in the final piece. I love that concept and intend utilize it in my own work.
We sent this song (one recorded live at the Little Theatre) over to Saxon Recording on East Main where Dave Anderson applied his digital/analog mastering tools to the file. The cover graphic is a photo of a Robert Irwin piece in the Albright Knox collection. Stop out tonight and hear the questioning.
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Word: A speech sound or series of speech sounds that symbolize and communicates a meaning usually without being divisible into smaller units capable of independent use.
Pete Monacelli’s artwork is all over town. He is included in a group show at the Little Theater and his “Searching for Home” series absolutely sings on the walls of Warren Phillip’s new space. At MCC’s Mercer Gallery the stable of artists from the Southwedge’s Wildroot Gallery were reunited in a show that opened last night. Pete’s acrylic, abstract paintings on seven foot hollow core doors, all hinged together in a circle are the energy center of the presentation.
We slowly walked around the piece studying the black and white abstracts. They reminded me of the much smaller drawings Pete showed a few years ago at Joe Bean based on the lyrics of Richie Havens’ “Follow,” intriguing combinations of tight line and loose brush with delicate ink washes.
We waited our turn to get inside the doors where Pete, armed with Anne Sexton’s poem, “Words,” had “transfigured” words of his own choosing. Each door’s word is titled in hand cut letters in font that Pete designed. The drawings, on paper from an old scrapbook and mounted on the doors, communicate meaning.
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Anne Havens, one of my favorite artists, is taking a break, not from life by any means, just from the struggle that accompanies any worthwhile art. At least that is what she says. But you cannot stop the wheels and her case the industrial sized gears from turning. We had brunch with her and her artist husband, Stewart Davis. (No, not Stuart Davis but it does sound the same.) Their home is filled with art, even one of Peggi’s pieces from a 6×6 show, but their studio is in the garage. Stewart has been busy with no boundary abstracts and figurative pieces. Anne is gearing up. I found this lovely pile of Stewart’s old socks that Anne had painted and stacked. I said I loved it and she said, “I need more socks.”
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The Ramp Gallery at Record Archive is an awkward space for art but no more more so than the sloping Guggenheim in NYC. The intense yellow walls could take the life out of most paintings. The store itself is an awkward space for anything visual. Everything in there screams or gets lost. El Destructo easily overcame the challenge with a sensational display of recent paintings, many of them versions of paintings he has sold in the past like the three Bride paintings in this show. The Sun Ra painting above already had a sold sticker on it when we got there.
We had already been to another record store last night. We had stopped in the Bop Shop to pick up tickets to Dave Leibman’s show at the Lovin’ Cup and I couldn’t help but notice the difference in the vibe. You want hang out out at the Archive, and shop, and listen to music. You want to browse and get distracted and laugh. The new lounge area in the back is like something out of a dream. You could picture Bobby Darin coming out from behind a curtain and taking the stage. And the wall of forty-five boxes is especially inviting.
Marshall Allen, who played with Sun Ra for almost fifty years, has released an incredible collection of Sun Ra music. The two cd set has a few extras for those that have it all and the songs have been remastered but Allen did a great job of selecting the tunes. A far better round-up than Evidence’s “Greatest Hits” collection. This in more like “Mind Blowing Hits” but the songs are as comfortable as hanging out at the Archive.
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My father worked from his sketches of the Charlotte lighthouse to create this watercolor in class last week. Amazing to watch him work so quickly in an additive medium that is so unforgiving of missteps. There are, certainly, missteps whenever you stretch or do something new. He is not beyond putting the whole sheet in the bathtub and washing it out. And he has a short, stubby brush that he uses to scrub out small sections. I watched him the other night as he took some figures and a sign right out of an Adirondack scene. The color came up and ran all over the piece as he soaked it up with a sponge. It is nearly impossible to reclaim a white. Opaque white is a sickly looking substance. You protect whites and they are often the strongest element in the end. It is a dangerous but seductive process.
One week later this lighthouse painting is in a show in the gallery at the Creative Workshop and I was taking this photo of it, trying to dodge the reflections from the glass, when someone behind me exclaimed, “I love that painting.” I proudly said, “My dad did it,” and he said, “I teach the watercolor class.” All very cool but you have to wonder why most classes are segregated by medium. Fred Lipp’s “Advanced Painting” class is the exception. I recently switched from charcoal to watercolor and then oil and needed to be be reminded that the intent is exactly the same. A change in form can be described by change in color just as a change in form is described by a change in line.
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My guess is that we are all looking for a breakthrough. I was especially desperate last night and it just didn’t come. In fact, as I pushed paint around I only made matters worse. What felt like some sort of compulsion to smooth out rough edges was really the lack of confidence to follow through with the expressive nature of the first stabs, the ones that came from the gut and pack most of the punch. If it sounds like a fight that’s because it feels like one and I know if that struggle was evident in the end I would have a better piece.
Maybe Margaret Explosion will have a breakthrough tonight.
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I was ready to try something else, maybe watercolors of trees. I even rounded up my photos of trees, shots with trees as the subject, and put them in an album on my iPad. I did three or four watercolors from those sources but then glanced down at this array, the source material for “Models From Crime Page.”
I felt the pull again. Part of the allure is the way they are shot, flat and point blank. But the rich poses transcend the setting. Maybe these photos, the source material is as good as it gets. That thought is also part of the allure. Why am I, a happy go lucky guy, drawn to these characters? If I knew the answer to that one I would not torturing myself to to make art.
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Francesca Lalanne had just finished hanging her “Metropoliticoncious II” show at Axom Gallery when we arrived last night. We were a day early. Galleries are moving their openings to avoid the First Friday crush and her opening is tomorrow. It worked out for us because we had a chance to chat with the artist and see her show in the rather intimate space without the crowds. Francesca grew up in Haiti and her artwork carries mysterious subject matter into the primitive twenty first century.
Every ten years or so we stop by the Clothesline Show on the grounds of the Memorial Art Gallery. This time we rode our bikes and chained them to the gallery gates. We signed up up for Fred Lipp’s painting class in the Creative Workshop and then circled the gallery. Peggi bought a neckless from Boo Poulin, we heard a few songs by Woody Dodge, saw a bit of the belly dancers and ate a five dollar ice cream cookie sandwich from Pittsford Dairy. It was nice to see Patricia Wilder doing a bang-up business with her abstract photos.
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“Indian Pipes” are sometimes called “Corpse Plants” because they have no chlorophyl. I always thought they were mushrooms. The ones we see around here are white when they’re fresh and black as they die. We were knocked out by the delicate purple vessels we stumbled on in the mountains.
The apartment building where my parents live had an art show this afternoon and my father held court with his paintings and sketch books. A woman brought quilts and a copy of the “American Quilts” book that she was featured in. A man brought a wooden model of the USS Ammen that started making while he was stationed on the battleship in WWII and another woman showed her abstract work. She “likes to start with nothing.” Pete Tierney, who is 101, sat behind a table with his hand carved birds. A younger resident showed us a picture of a painting her grand daughter had done. It was featured in an article about 25 artists under 25. She said I always tell my kids, “You are only as good as think you are.” It was really inspiring. I came home and got to work.
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Singapore artist, Stephen Black, arranged an art show for the two of us in Brooklyn this summer. My bio was updated and a poster was created, modified and approved. we corresponded back and forth on the details. I mounted fifteen drawings under glass in frames, the same frames I had used in the recent I-Square show. Peggi and I were planing to play at the opening and we were going to stay nearby with Duane. About a month before the show Steve told us he was not able to get to the states.
I’m fine with this. It’s tough going anywhere when it is so nice out. The only bummer is that we won’t see Steve.
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