Archive Page 41
June 14th, 2013 by dave dorsey
River Mosaic I, John Cullen, mixed media
There’s a fine show of John Cullen’s latest work at Viridian Artists. He paints modestly-scaled abstracts that begin with a kind of AbEx experimentation, where he allows thinned acrylic paint to drip down a sheet of paper. In other words, he lets water have its way, at the start, and then he begins to build on the trail it leaves behind with pencil and more acrylic. That may sound like a pretty dry way of describing an artistic practice, yet Cullen is all about the wet. His paintings evoke the flow of water in all its forms: streams, raindrops on glass, mist and clouds. While so much abstraction builds from geometric exploration, Cullen’s provenance is really physics: the irregular, organic waves evoked by light reflected on fluid. He ends up with mosaics that appear to have the intricate order of fractals. His colors glow and hint at different states of consciousness, not simply different angles on the outer world.
His current work builds from a wavy, warped grid, a skeleton, of vertical and horizontal axes, which provides an anchor for his improvisations with color. If you look long enough at some of them you realize he’s created an abstraction from an actual image of a scene reflected on rippled water. You see bits of blue become sky, and tiers of green resolve into trees that surround it. There’s a mosaic quality to his technique inspired by pointillism. Yet he found that Impressionism didn’t allow him to create the color harmonies he wanted MORE
June 9th, 2013 by dave dorsey
The Great Piece of Turf, Durer, 1503
“The piece of turf must have been dug not long after sunrise, for the florets of the dandelions are tightly closed, and the leaves below them are still moist with the morning coolness. Such a clump of plants and grasses might be found today along any country road, in Europe or America, where it dips down into the dampness of a hollow. Besides the dandelions there are the fleshy leaves of the great plantain, creeping Charlie, and a dwarfed feathery shoot of yarrow. As for the grasses, they are the most commonplace–meadow grass, cock’s foot, the thin spikes of heath rush. “In truth,” Durer wrote, “Art is implicit in nature, and whoever can extract it has it.” –Francis Russell
Wish I’d painted that.
Or written that.
June 6th, 2013 by dave dorsey
Rutabega, Amy Weiskopf, oil on linen, 2013
Size: 6 x 8 inches. Hirschl & Adler.
June 5th, 2013 by dave dorsey
Detail from Libidinal Economics, Rafael Leonardo Black
“So the Dalai Lama says, there won’t be any money, but when you die on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness. So I got that going for me. Which is nice.”
—Bill Murray, Caddy Shack
On the other hand, sometimes in the end there’s even a little money for all the effort: “Discovered at 64, a Brooklyn artist . . . “
June 4th, 2013 by dave dorsey
Oh, good grief
And then she Instagrams it. More here. (You have to check out The Scream. Just scroll down a bit for a munchable Munch.)
June 3rd, 2013 by dave dorsey
Eggplant and Bok Choy, oil on linen, 20″ x 36″ at Memorial Art Gallery this summer
In July and August this year, visitors to our local museum in Rochester, the Memorial Art Gallery, will have the chance to press a few keys on their cell phones and listen to me and quite a few other artists talk about our work. This morning I recorded sixty seconds of commentary on painting and why I do it. I was fortunate this year to have three pieces chosen for MAG’s 64th Rochester-Finger Lakes Exhibition. All exhibitors were requested to record a brief artist’s statement for viewers to hear as part of a recorded tour. So, not only will those in attendance have a chance to see my work, but they can listen to me talk about it as they do. Off-hand, this strikes me as a little too much of David Dorsey for most people’s taste, but maybe it will be sufferable since I kept my recording within the time limit.
Once again, this has been a chance to face the challenge of the dreaded artist’s statement. I’ve approached this from many angles over the past few years, and it’s difficult to condense into a few words something as elusive and complex as the act of painting as well as the totality of what drives a person to paint. It’s like asking someone to say, in half a minute, why life matters. Especially if you have an aversion for sounding grandiose and/or pretentious, and I do have that aversion, despite all evidence to the contraryon this blog. So here’s what I came up
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May 31st, 2013 by dave dorsey
May 23rd, 2013 by dave dorsey
It’s just air in there.
From The Atlantic, how performance art, essentially, helped save lives in World War II. Talk about art mattering.
May 22nd, 2013 by dave dorsey
Untitled, Gregory Crewdson
When it comes to photography, I’m a Gary Winogrand kind of guy. I like it spontaneous, fleeting, and unpremeditated. Like a good haiku. But I love Gregory Crewdson, whose shots are as artificial as a movie full of FX. Go figure. I first encountered him, without knowing anything about him, when I bought the Yo La Tengo album whose cover appears above, more than a decade ago. What looks like a great documentary about him was making the rounds this year and is now available on demand from Netflix.
May 18th, 2013 by dave dorsey
Seniors wearing nature on their heads. Some great shots.
May 17th, 2013 by dave dorsey
Adam and Eve on West 57th St., Thomas Insalaco
Thomas Insalaco’s new painting, on view at Oxford through June 1, is a beauty. It feels like a step into a new frontier for him, an advance toward something even more intriguing than what he’s done up until now. I’d walked through most of the show before I finally paused in front of this large oil, and I was stunned by it before I even realized who’d painted it. So much of Insalaco’s career draws from his love of Caravaggio, so the ambiguous complexity of this painting’s composition and color threw me off the scent. It’s not a bright image—much of his work looks and feels dark—yet the baroque murk that always lurked behind so many of his foregrounds doesn’t swallow any detail here. Even in the darkest passages, he has spent a great deal of time lovingly rendering significant and beautiful detail.
I have a lot more to say about it, but first some praise for the exhibit as a whole. Jim Hall has assembled an especially strong invitational show, built around Galen’s philosophy of the four humors: sanguine (pleasure-seeking and sociable), choleric (ambitious and leader-like), melancholic (analytical and thoughtful), and phlegmatic (relaxed and quiet). The ancient four elements—earth, air, water, and fire—can be aligned with the humors as well, and some paintings in this show take advantage of that. I liked the theme from the start, and, with the notion of earth/melancholy in mind, I painted Skull Unearthed Circa 1930—which will also be on exhibit in the Rochester-Finger Lakes exhibit at Memorial Art Gallery this year. Not everybody warmed up to the show’s theme as quickly as I did: I encountered some head-scratching about it at first from Brian O’Neill, for example who ended up contributing a fine abstract to the show. It’s clearly a stretch to see the connection between some of these paintings and the four humors, but that’s part of the fun with Jim’s themes: how, and if, you can connect the dots. Matt Klos submitted a tiny, pleasingly muddy painting of jars, which I actually like for its enigmatic brevity, yet to entitle it Air seems a bit like giving it an alias in order to smuggle it through the door. (Glad he did.) Some personal favorites: Evening of the Cold Heart, Fran Noonan; MORE
May 13th, 2013 by dave dorsey
Give her a strand of your hair and she’ll do your portrait.
May 7th, 2013 by dave dorsey
Cutting Loose, Susan Sills, oil on panel
Susan Sills has a delightful solo show of her work from the past two decades at Viridian Artists, perfectly titled Cutting Loose. It’s really two different shows in one, based on her cut-out portraits and figures—life-sized, enlarged pastiches of people lifted from paintings by modernists and Old Masters, painted on birch plywood. The main installation is really a single scene populated with close to twenty of her three-dimensional paintings, arranged as if each of the figures were loitering on the steps of the Metropolitan. An Ingres odalisque reclines in front of a Norman Rockwell girl playing marbles and a bather by Degas. Michelangelo’s Adam reaches for Manet’s guitarist, rather than God. Behind all of them is an enlarged photograph of the Met’s façade, created with wide-format engineering printers, on long three-foot-wide scrolls hung side by side. On the opposite and adjacent walls are shelves displaying the smaller portrait work—Van Gogh, Gauguin, Vermeer and others.
The show does exactly what it’s meant to do: it draws you into the lives of the original sitters while making you feel as if you’re living inside a painting rather than looking at one. It’s all about love and companionship, the love of art history, love of painting, and the love of people in general. Years ago, when I wrote for Buck & Pulleyn, a boutique ad agency in Rochester specializing in marketing for tech companies, on Fridays we often put together something called a “stair party.” It involved pinball. It involved ping-pong. Mostly, though, we hung out on the staircase in our mezzanine/atrium, drinking beer and congratulating one another on getting through another week. The “cutting loose” feel of that cocktail hour is exactly what Sills captures, yet with creatures you would find, normally, in captivity inside the Met, not milling about on the steps out front. The installation embodies for me the sense that painters I love, and even some of their individual works, have been, more than anything else, a source of friendship. Yes, past work and past artists serve as teachers, idols, source of inspiration, models for how to see the world, but mostly remain faithful good friends. My relationship with favorite paintings has all the complexity of feeling and understanding that friendship entails. When I walked into Cutting Loose, my first reaction was, hey, these are my people.
Susan’s been an artist with Viridian since 1979. I spent an hour at the gallery MORE
May 6th, 2013 by dave dorsey
A great reflection on how an artist statement can actually help, without sounding pretentious, obscure or condescending from Hyperallergic:
“I challenge artists to stop looking outside for language and to start digging on the inside for why they do what they do. No one else knows what gets you up in the morning and makes you finish a painting on the way to your day job, or what problems you’re trying to solve in the world by depicting characters a certain way, or why you found that imagery compelling.”
May 3rd, 2013 by dave dorsey
Still Life with Pocket Door, oil on linen
I found out yesterday that I got three paintings, including the one above, into the Memorial Art Gallery’s 64th Rochester-Finger Lakes Exhibition, which is the museum show for central and upstate New York artists. It will run from July through September.
April 29th, 2013 by dave dorsey
“Flowers from Another Year” has been accepted for Butler Institute of American Art’s 77th Midyear Exhibition, from Sunday June 30 through Sunday, August 18. This will be the first time I’ve shown work in the annual show.
April 29th, 2013 by dave dorsey
Andy Warhol
My wife is completely remodeling the bathroom upstairs, so for weeks we’ve had a steady traffic of foot-soldiers bearing drills, tile, dry wall, sinks, and all the other needed weaponry, up and down the stairs beside my studio, so I’ve been reading and doing other work, rather than painting. Which means I’m delving again into Donald Kuspit, circling around an idea of writing something in response to an excellent column about Warhol the New York Times published months ago. I came across this interesting footnote in The End of Art, about artists who crave a following:
David Aberback, Charisma in Politics, Religion and the Media: Private Trauma, Public Ideals (New York University Press, p. ix) He notes that the charismatic gains power over the public by craving to be loved by it and even belong to it, “though hurt and disillusioned in private life.” Thus, the charismatic becomes a kind of helpless baby and brings out the helpless baby in everyone. As Aberbach writes . . . the baby seeks “charismatic union” with a parent–the public at large in the case of an artist like Warhol, whose charismatic appeal was so great, that is, whose “craving for relation” (wish to belong and to be unconditionally and uncritically loved) was so intense, that it rubbed off on his possessions. One helps Warhol by believing that everything he touches is aesthetically significant.
April 29th, 2013 by dave dorsey
Parquet Courts play in Buffalo on June 26. Learning this an hour ago made my day. I can’t remember the last time I had a chance to hear a perfect set of music, as I expect it to be. I would have been willing to pay far more than $10 to get in. I think my favorite line from all of their songs so far is, “We all know what happened to Socrates.” They make me feel the way Nirvana made me feel when they emerged: there’s still hope.
April 21st, 2013 by dave dorsey
Jennifer Riley, “Wolfcreek Winter” (2013). Oil on canvas, 60 x 84 inches (All images courtesy the artist and Allegra LaViola Gallery)
“I might lean towards a pantheistic view of the world. The lessons of Color Field Painting and Abstract Expressionism, of not reporting on the visible but revealing the unknown, could also be brought into the discussion. I think, however, that wanting to depict/relate images of hard facts needs to be balanced by an awareness of what lies beyond the boundaries.” –Jennifer Riley, Hyperallergic
Her current show of paintings and drawings: Memory from Sight, at Allegra LaViola
April 18th, 2013 by dave dorsey
“Dawn 37”, Yu Tamauchi, from the current issue of Harper’s
Well I guess this puts me in my place (re: my previous post). This was taken from the summit of Mt. Fuji. Small detail: Yu Tamauchi lived near the top of that famous mountain in a hut for five months, taking photographs. At the risk of sounding way, way too much like Chris Farley interviewing Paul McCartney, let me just say . . . what an awesome idea. Two shots from this series appear in the current issue of Harper’s, and they were on view in December at Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery. I would wager a fairly unwieldy sum of money that Mr. Tamauchi was not using an iPhone. On the other hand, would it matter if he had?
