Category: Notes On Painting

We met our neighbor, Jared, at the mailboxes. He pulled a pamphlet from “In Touch Ministries” out of his box and gave it to us. He told us he didn’t know why he got these and he said he had sent them an email to ask them to take his name off their mailing list. An avowed atheist, he said, “I think the world would be better off if they banned all religions.”

Our friend Pete is attracted to the spirituality in art and his art certainly has that as a foundation. I came across a couple of passages I thought he would like so I texted them to him. He called a few minutes later to say he loved the statements and we arranged to meet in his hospital room today at one.

When we got to the front desk, a woman was checking out as we were checking in. She told the woman behind the desk that she had been visiting Peter Monacelli. I told her we were on our way up there and I asked how he was doing. She said, “He has lots of stories.” We were thrilled to hear this. That is the Pete we know. 

We found his new room and shouted in to him. He told us we had to suit up with the baby blue gowns and dark blue gloves that were sitting by the door. And while we did he sang the first verse of Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue.” 

He has been in the hospital long enough to see the division between life inside, where the focus is on healing, and outside where the focus is on . . . here he let us fill in the blank. I was thinking “Partying? Peggi said “Living?” Pete offered “Fixing things.” Imagine if we focused on healing on the outside.

Below are the two statements I sent Pete.

Chillida – “I am a religious man. Questions of faith and my problems as an artist are closely linked. Naturally my conception of space has a spiritual dimension, just as it also has a philosophical dimension. My continued rebellion against the laws of gravity has a religious aspect.“

Kiki Smith – “It’s one of my loose theories that Catholicism and art have gone well together because both believe in the physical manifestation of the spiritual world, that it’s through the physical world that you have spiritual life, that you have to be here physically in a body. You have all this interaction with objects, with rosaries and medals. It believes in the physical world. It’s a thing culture.“

“It’s also about storytelling in that sense, about reiterating over and over and over again these mythological stories about saints and other deities that can come and intervene for you on your behalf. All the saints have attributes that are attached to them and you recognize them through their iconography. And it’s about transcendence and transmigration, something moving always from one state to another. And art is in a sense like a proof: it’s something that moves from your insides into the physical world, and at the same time it’s just a representation of your insides. It doesn’t rob you of your insides and it’s always different, but in a different form from your spirit.”

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Dia Chelsea is an oasis of sorts. Not only do they have great art shows, they have a bathroom and a bookstore. We were there to see the Chryssa show but I spent some time with this book on the Chicago Art Institute’s collection of Ray Johnson work, mostly collages and mail art. The book feels like the original Whole Earth catalog, one foot in the recycling bin, but the more I looked, the more I wanted to see.

Born in Detroit the same year as my parents, he doesn’t fit neatly into any movement but he heralded several simultaneously. A pop artist, earlier and more fluid than Warhol, a performance artist before the category existed and certainly a conceptual artist. He made fun of them all. A queer street artist well before Keith Haring. His collages looked like the best of the punk era a decade before they were born. He made fun of it all. He blew up a deal with Gagosian when he priced his collages at one million each.

At ease with appropriation, Johnson was quick to make connections between everything. As a student at the legendary Black Mountain College, his art was in dialog with his teachers, Joseph Albers and Robert Motherwell and his friends John Cage and Jasper Johns. He lived like a monk and made art with magazines, Xerox machines and the post office. In the sample spread above he spoofs the intellectual Abstract Expressionist, Barnett Newman.

Most of all I see my friend Rich Stim’s work in the humor. And the post cards that Pete and Shelley sent us over the years – rectangular pieces of cereal boxes with cryptic messages for the mailman to decipher before we tucked them away.

“Some people just didn’t get it, and other people like me thought he was an absolute genius,” said the painter James Rosenquist, with whom Mr. Johnson corresponded for years, often asking him to forward mailed artworks onto Willem de Kooning. “Sometimes I did what he asked and sometimes I just couldn’t part with them,” Mr. Rosenquist said, adding: “I really miss him because I accumulate all these strange things that I’d like to mail him, but I can’t because he’s not there.”

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We couldn’t leave the house until the Atletico/Cadiz match finished so we got a late start on First Friday. Our first stop was the Wilder Group opening at Lumiere on College Avenue. George Wegman had sold about half of his beautiful pencil shaving drawings before we even got there. Pete Monacelli was having some repair work done so he wasn’t able to attend. His drawings on digital prints of his work added yet another dimension to his dynamic work.

We headed over to the Anderson Building and ran into a couple that had just come from Lumiere show standing beside their Hyundai. The passenger side glass had been smashed but nothing was stolen. They surmised the thief had been scared off. The sun was still up and their car was scheduled to get the theft protection software upgrade in two weeks.

We loved Ann Punzi’s paintings at Colleen’s. Her show, called “Current Events” features gorgeous abstracts based on environmental disasters. In her statement she says, ” While researching information on climate change I discovered information on Blue Carbon Ecosystems and this presented a hopeful direction for this series.

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Twelve years ago we stumbled onto a Hermann Nitsch performance at Pace Gallery in Chelsea. This wasn’t one of his bloody crucifixion performances, this was a musical performance of Hirsch’s composition for strings inside Pace Gallery where Nitsch’s paintings were on display. Nitsch, himself, sat in a chair in front of the quintet.

Last week, while popping in and out of galleries in Chelsea, we stopped in at Pace, just as they were turning off the lights for the day. It was six o’clock and we were cramming in as much art as we could digest. They turned the lights back on and we discovered we were at another show of Kitsch’s. He died last year and his paintings looked particularly somber but even more beautiful. His altar installation in the back of the gallery knocked me out.

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I love the fact that Mark Bradford gets all his art making tools at Home Depot. I love our local outlet as well, even though the owner supports the T-man and they don’t take Apple Pay. The place is full of art supplies. We saw his show in Chelsea last week and I particularly like “Manifest Destiny,” above. The idea that the United States is destined by God to expand and spread democracy and capitalism across the entire North American continent is so bloated it is laughable. But then here we are. Underneath Bradford’s piece is a large billboard for a Los Angeles entrepreneur that reads, “Johnny Buys Houses.”

Earlier in the day I took the photo below as we worked our way through TrBecCa.

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Dia Chelsea’s two large spaces are currently filled with big work by the Greek artist Chryssa. Her light sculptures were in the first dark room and her large newspaper like pieces are hanging in the the light filled space. I love her little plaster, terracotta sculptures from 1955.

Gerhard Richter has stopped painting for now but he is still working at the top of his game. His show at David Zwirner in Chelsea is a showstopper. In addition to some some of his last paintings there are rooms of pencil drawings, ink and wash drawings and watercolors. Peggi and I spent quite a while in front of this one (his third drawing from September 12, 2022) marveling at how he layers abstract textures and then dramatically plays with the space by adding ink lines.

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We had tickets for a Broadway play in the old Studio 54. The building was originally an opera house and I can’t imagine how the space ever worked as a club. The play was a matinee so we I made a short list of Midtown galleries to check out before the show. We struck gold in three of them, I don’t remember the fourth and we discovered the fifth had closed permanently. The John McLaughlin show was fantastic (above.) Had never heard of Markus Lüpertz but the picture in Time Out drew us to his “Et in Arcadia ego” show and we loved his funky, luscious paintings. And at Hauser Wirth we discovered Winfred Rembert‘s dye on carved and tooled leather work, a revelation.

The play went deep into family relationships. Just three actors, all great, performing a script developed from the text in photographer, Larry Sulton’s book, “Pictures From Home.” That text is mostly transcriptions of dialog with his parents as he involved them in a series of photos of them in their home. He turned the tables on his parents who documented him as he grew up. What he uncovered was rich and moving as his parents pushed back on the “art project.”

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We helped Pete hang his recent show at the Little Theatre. The show was a mini retrospective and it included large paintings from the 60’s and 70’s so Peggi and I helped him move the lot. We left one item behind, a plaque given to Pete in honor of his work in creating the space that is now the café. Pete’s Renaissance Man resume includes rehabbing half the city as owner of Monacelli Construction. Pete’s sculptures line the shelves of his storage space and “Rock of Ages” (above) caught my eye.

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Rochester Contemporary’s annual 6×6 Show provides an opportunity to revisit the small format. So many of the show’s parameters are fixed, the size (36 square inches), the $20 price, the 100 per cent take by RoCo (a donation) and yet there are so many possibilities. I particularly like working in multiples, letting my four submissions play off each other. And beyond that I enjoy competing with or complimenting my pieces from earlier 6×6 shows. Win/Win and all that.

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It was SRO all afternoon at the Little Theatre Café for Pete’s opening. Zanne Brunner visited Pete’s downtown warehouse space and curated a mini retrospective of his work entitled, “Thread – Art of Seven Decades.” The pieces she chose spanned 56 years a period of non-stop creation for Pete Monacelli and he is by no means done. Anybody who know Pete knows he is a dynamo. And everyone, it seems, knows Pete. He connects us to one another. He is the glue that holds our community together in Rochester.

Pete only misses a Margaret Explosion gig if he has one himself. If he wasn’t the man of honor yesterday his band would have been working the room. We were honored he asked Margaret Explosion to perform. It may have been the loudest room our quiet band has played but it was a treat.

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It wasn’t until we were back home, looking at my pictures, that I realized how similar these two paintings are. Both artists were Abstract Expressionists but Gottlieb’s painting was done in 1946, before that movement had been established and the Guston painting was done after Guston had moved on. Both artists, of course, took what they had learned with them as they broke barriers.

Gottlieb called the pieces he was doing in the forties “pictograms.”Almost like a box of curiosities, the elements interact and tell a story. Guston calls the elements in his paintings “forms.” His piece is more three dimensional than Gottlieb’s but his forms are pushed to the surface. They are in your face.

Both paintings continue to tell stories long after they were completed.

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The first thing Colleen said to us was, “This is the first time I’ve seen you here without masks.” We didn’t think we were being that cautious. She was standing by the door of her studio on First Friday and we were there for the opening of Madeline Coleman’s show, “In The Room Over.” Oddly, at that moment I was in the incubation period of a case of Covid. The place was packed when we played on Wednesday so I probably picked it up there. Peggi has escaped so far and I’m just coming up for air.

A young man and woman handed us a pamphlet as we entered Colleen’s studio. I assumed the woman was the artist but I don’t like having to read something before I look so I didn’t take one. The couple turned out to be the artist’s parents so that was understandable. And I’m so happy Peggi took a booklet. Rather than explaining the pieces we looked at, the pamphlet was an additional treat, sketches, poetry and more questions. I hope you can get up to see this show, it is sensational on many levels.

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Joyce’s “Dubliners” was referenced in something I was reading this morning so I downloaded a public domain copy and read most of the first story. The eBook library on my iPad is stocked with books I have only partially read but I have devoured the artist’s books in my collection. My favorites are are from friends, Anne Havens and Pete Monacelli. Strangely, they were both born on the same day in the same year.

Anne Havens is in the habit of making an exhibition book for each of her art shows. The printed versions are long out of print so she gave me pdf copies of the original files for seventeen of her books. I converted them to ebooks and they are available as free downloads here. In Anne’s “Graceland” book there is a statement from her that points to why I like her work so much. “I borrow from biblical themes, and play with the BIG questions in my quest for Beauty and Truth – and usually find my resting place on the fence between the sublime and the ridiculous, the priest and the jester.”

Visit “Artists Books” page for more free eBook downloads.

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The wind storm last week took down a huge pine tree on Zoo Road. The core of the trunk was slightly discolored so maybe it was compromised. It snapped off at the base throwing large pieces of wood in all directions. I found this piece, carried it home, put a couple of wood screws in the back with a short wire and hung it on the wall. It is my first art piece of 2023.

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A beaver felled this tree with his teeth and left it for us to marvel at. Interesting that he or she started gnawing at the trunk nearer the ground and then moved up a bit. Once the trunk was down the beaver stripped the bark off the top side for food. They usually topple trees nearer the lake in hopes of damning the outflow but this one is quite a ways from the shore. It is a striking art piece, an installation in the woods.

We called Brad and he had a joke for us, just like in the old days. But this one was pretty bad. Brad plays drums (he taught me everything I know and that is not much) and he favors musician jokes. “Why did the trombone cross the road?” We gave up. “To get to the other slide.” He told us he gets his jokes from Alexa now. I picture that as a bank of generic jokes. An artificial intelligence joke app is just around the corner.

Ken Frank has been fooling around with AI art sites. He picks styles, dictates a description, sits back and asks it to generate an image. He did a mind-blowing, surreal version of the stations of the cross for me. And last night he sent along portraits of Margaret Explosion’s band members. Here’s what the drummer looks like.

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Kurt Ketchum walks a fine line well. His fine art work comes right out of his advertising work and engages you like a good ad but leaves you with questions rather than answers. To me this feels very comfortable, a space where everything around you could be an art piece. He has a finely tuned sense of color and uses it sparingly. White, he uses loosely and liberally. His show is up at Colleen’s until the end of the month.

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I found the video of a talk and slide presentation by Ana Mendieta at Alfred University in 1981, currently showing as part of a show called “Elemental” at RIT City Space, particularly engaging. I watched it three times before moving on to the five videos of her recently restored one hundred films, most documenting her “earth-body” work.

Mendieta worked in drawing, sculpture, photography and video and the wall text summarized the themes in her work as “exile, displacement and the return to the landscape.” Why had I never heard of her and why did she die so young? I turned to Wikipedia.

In Cuba Mendeta (1948-1985) attended an upper class, all girls Catholic school. She was able to escape Castro’s dictatorship but her father spent 18 years in a political prison in Cuba. Ana Mendieta died on September 8, 1985, in New York City, after falling from her 34th-floor apartment in Greenwich Village at 300 Mercer Street. She lived there with her husband of eight months, minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, who may have pushed her out the window. She fell 33 stories onto the roof of a deli.

I kind of like Carl Andre’s work, I modeled the base of our outdoor fire pit on one of his works, but not anymore. “Elemental” runs until February. Don’t miss it.

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Anselm Keifer’s show at Gagosian, entitled “Exodus,” features extremely large paintings based on the Hebrew book of Exodus. I stood in front of the one above for the longest time, drawn in by the glass-filled walls on either side but then never really landing in the space before the back wall. I loved the disorientation. “The penumbra between life and death,” as Roger Cohen calls it in a recent article on the artist’s work.

We fell in love with Keifer’s work after spending an afternoon in the large warehouse/gallery devoted to him at Mass MoCa. There the paintings fill the walls, three high, salon style. Gagosian has given him an ultra luxurious amount of room. Enormous paintings on enormous subjects mounted in an enormous space. I am still wow struck by the experience of being in this space with these works.

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Alex Katz was right up there with Andy Warhol when I was in my twenties. We used to stay with Charlie Coco at his place on 43rd when we came down to New York back then. He took us over to see Moondog passing out sheet music on the corner and to Times Square in 1977 where Katz’s giant portraits were painted on the sides of building, back when the cigarette billboard puffed steam, before LEDs took all the visual space. I still have the article from the NYTs.

Alex Katz is on a short list of artist’s I have run into in New York (Chuck Close-twice, John Baldessari, Julian Schnabel and Annie Leibowitz). A full drum set was part of an installation at one of the Whitney Biennials. Visitors were welcome to play it. I sat down and made a two minute racket. When I stood up I was face to face with the smartly dressed Alex Katz.

The Alex Katz retrospective, “Gathering,” at the Guggenheim was on our agenda. Not that we had much of one. We seem to have the best return, a feast for the mind and eye, when we just stumble around the gallery districts of Tribeca and Chelsea as we did on Tuesday and Wednesday. Full days of absorption. And at Marlborough Gallery on 25th Street we found an Alex Katz spoiler on their second floor gallery. I was able to study, up close, the magic at the edges of Katz’s broad brush strokes that David Salle calls loving attention to in his book, “How to See.” After watching the Guggenheim video of the show and with the forecast for a few feet of snow upstate. we lopped a day of our NYC visit and took a train back.

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If we are lucky we will see some Carroll Dunham paintings on our upcoming trip to NYC. I’ve been reading “Into Words – Selective Writings of Carroll Dunham” and really enjoying it, especially his probing interviews with artists. Since the 1990’s he has written for Art Forum, Bomb and various artist catalogs. According to Wikipedia Dunham came from great wealth, which he had squandered on a series of misguided investments. He is married to the artist Laurie Simmons and they have two daughters, actress-writer Lena and writer-activist Cyrus Grace

We have come across two shows of paintings in Chelsea on previous visits and his images have stuck with me. David Pagel, in a Los Angeles Times review intended to be complimentary, described his paintings as “vulgar beyond belief…” They are graphic. Dunham describes “painting’s dual nature as a repository of capital and a facilitator of profound contemplation, a perfect storm of the crass, the sacred and the intimately personal.”

I am looking forward to reading the piece he wrote on Otto Dix. Here is a page from his book describing the work of Max Ernst.

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