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.

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

Friday in the City: Part 1 - Gina Werfel at Prince Street Gallery

Friday in the City: Part 1 - Gina Werfel at Prince Street Gallery

Once a month, I try to get into the city to look at what’s going on in Chelsea.  First Street is there and I go for monthly meetings.  We saw a ton of art and it was great!  Some of it I liked, some I didn’t, and all of it I had opinions about.  There were three shows that have really stayed with me, though. 

Gina Werfel at Prince Street Gallery was one of the most unexpected and fantastic shows I’ve seen in a while.  The abstract expressionist California painter paints with exciting west coast color.  I could almost see in my mind’s eye, the artist as she drenched the canvas with sunlight yellows, tangerines, too blue to be true sky blues, gold, and fuchsia all the while dancing with flushed pinks and bright, clean neutrals. I felt immediate uplifting and positive energy on a cool, cloudy, and blustery, not to mention gray, April morning after a long winter in NYC.   As if the color weren’t exciting enough, the paint handling and texture of it all was rich, juicy, and bold.  Her mark making felt honest and sensitive, as if from delicate and thorough observation, oozing with confident assertion.   The work gave the impression that the paint was applied with equal measure academic discipline as pure glee!  This is painting for the wonderful sake of painting!  As a bonus Werfel was there sitting her show, which is common for co-ops (I sat my own show) and we had a really nice conversation!   She paints oil on canvas, as well as paper in acrylic and showed us a small book of her “sketches” which were gorgeous little gems of color and gesture.  As a landscape painter from CT, she transplanted herself from the head of the Art Department at UCONN to UC Davis and with that drastic change in environment; she showed us how her work had transformed through the change.  I loved talking with her and found her delightful personality and her exciting work to be fascinating, energizing, and refreshing!

More: http://www.princestreetgallery.com/index.html
Image: Werfel - "Tumble", 60 x 48 inches, oil

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

Pics from my opening in March!

What a blast!  No blizzard could keep away a good time!  This is the second solo show of mine that has coincided with a snow storm.  In 2011 I was featured as the Register Citizen's Artist of the month and they had an opening for me which was also snowed out in the third major snowstorm of that winter dropping another 2 feet of snow onto our preexisting 3.5 feet.  March 2013 had a few major snowstorms but non left us with more than a foot.  As you can see in the paintings, I'm a big fan of snow so it didn't bother me one bit.