Thanks!

First I need to thank everyone for all the support I got from my second solo show at First Street Gallery!  It was a great show and successful for many reasons!  Firstly it was successful because the work.  The work was so different than my first show and so much better, in my opinion.  It was also so much more risky.

Philblog woot!

PhilblogCheck out Phil's blog!  Phil is one of my all time favorite artists and he's an awesome friend! Bonus!

http://phillique.blogspot.com/

 

New Site for CT Art!

Check out the CT ArtList website!  I am featured on the artist page!  Make sure you check it out for exhibition opportunities, opening reception dates and times, and so much more!  It's a one stop for everything art happening in CT.  They are also always looking for more contributions so if you want to be featured or you want to publicize an event, just send them an email!

Friday in the City Part 2: Judy Glantzman at Betty Cunningham Gallery

Friday in the City Part 2: Judy Glantzman at Betty Cunningham Gallery

My first meeting with Judy Glantzman was when she came to my MFA program as a visiting artist.  She gave us a cohesive lecture about her work, her practices, her ideas, and experiences as an artist.  Afterwards she came around to each of our studios and gave us individual critiques.  She was brilliant, insightful, kind, and encouraging.  She was making paintings at the time that were on canvas and on paper, half drawings and half paintings.  The color and mark making was organically expressionist and packed a punch both in visually and in context.  She talked about sitting on the floor, on top of her canvas or paper, drawing and painting.  She said this helped to be physically as well as mentally involved in the process.  She spoke of the importance of working into the pieces over and over.  She was inspirational and opened doors in my mind about the ideas of process, of technique, of the artist work ethic, and when done is done.  Coming out of a Midwestern undergraduate drawing program and sweating my way through an east coast MFA painting program I felt uniquely connected to her and her work.  The thing about Glantzman is, though, that everyone feels uniquely connected to her work and that accessibility is why she is such a powerful and relevant artist. 

I walked in to Betty Cunningham and Glantzman was in the gallery giving a lecture to a group of art students.  I walked around the perimeter of the mass of students, and felt too close for comfort for the explosive nature of her new work.  At just under 200 pieces the show contains a collection of pen and ink drawings, sculpture, large works on paper, small canvases, and collages.  As a direct reaction to Glantzman seeing Picasso’s Guernica for the first time in person, the work reflected the terrible impact of war on a society. 

The collages were made through a process of taking multiple pieces of previously drawn on paper, deconstructing them, and reconstructing into forms physically bulging out from the wall taking all of the expressive mark making, paint handling, and ideas, and pushing it out into the viewer’s personal space.  The physicality of the work was also obvious in the mark making.  There black marks, red marks, flesh colored marks, heavy marks, pressed marks, light marks, all gestures made from the artist’s entire body being involved in the creative process. 

Along with the collages there was a collection of pen and ink drawings from Goya’s Los Caprichos series, ink drawings, and a shotgun blast of small, intimate, and powerful canvases in the back of the gallery.  Not to be forgotten were the plaster casts of imp faces attached to the wall speckled throughout the gallery.   The quantity of work was as intimidating as the execution and content.

In the background, I heard Glantzman, a small overwhelmingly approachable, nice woman, telling a story about a friend of hers that had given her a hand gun and an AK-47 to draw from.  The work is exploding with loaded imagery, aggressive use of space, and angry, kinetic energy.  It was all made while possessing the power to create chaos, destruction, or death/holding a gun.   All of this imagery was in similar to her previous body of work but what I had realized in the moment was that in the past, it had been all safely contained in the flat, traditional confines of a stretched canvas, mounted paper, or behind glass in a frame.  The current work is not.

Glantzman has always been interested in the impact of terror on the human psyche as well as each individual personality’s capacity for extreme duplicity.  The message: We all have a dark side and it is natural part of being human.  The effect on our highly malleable psyche, from outside sources such as violence in society and/or even from something as simple as holding a gun, a tool with the sole purpose of destruction, can make us all capable of anything. 

For more: http://www.bettycuninghamgallery.com/current_exhibition.aspx

Image: Judy Glantzman at Betty Cunningham Gallery screenshot

New this week!

Teaser:

But wait, there's more: In New York magazine!

It's always nice to see you name in print!

http://innewyork.com/this_month/mar13/eclectic_collector.html