represent

Mastery

Belmont Hills, Ian Tornay

When I walked into the Bowery Gallery last week, I could have sworn the ghost of Fairfield Porter had been summoned to choose the current show. Ian Torney’s oils have internalized and absorbed a great part of what Porter achieved, and he has taken Porter’s intuitions and refined them into his own perfectly executed landscapes, still lifes, and the one self-portrait on view here. He works in the same mid-range of values, avoiding the brightest and darkest ranges of light and dark, muting his colors into effortless harmonies, evoking detail rather than rendering it—painting the light between objects rather than the objects themselves, as Porter phrased it. He does it all with seemingly unconscious ease: what others struggle for years to achieve and never attain. If art buyers were looking for genuine greatness, rather than simply a good investment, this show would have sold out. I think I saw only one or two red dots, even though these paintings were vastly underpriced. Buying art now must be a lot like choosing a college for your high school grad: just go to an art fair and look for the one that’ll pick the most money from your pocket. Anything that high-priced has to be the best, right? If you want to know what’s great about painting and what’s depressingly bad about the art market, take a look at Tornay’s work while it’s still up for the final days of the show.

Menial and romantic

A Mixture of Frailties, Susie MacMurray

If you want to marvel at how rubber gloves and fishhooks can be turned into fascinating works of art, check out Susie MacMurray’s current show at Danese Corey. The gallery opened in a new location only a few weeks ago. I stumbled onto it last Thursday while walking past its large street-level windows on West 22nd. I was on my guard against the cool, impersonal feel of the show, which at first had the familiar white-cube redolence of chilly and cerebral, high-end formalities, but it won me over. It’s a beautiful show in a wonderful and much larger space than Danese used to occupy, and the place is perfectly suited to MacMurray’s spare, less-is-more constructions. The artist’s ability to create a sense of poised expectancy out of the most ordinary and humble materials is remarkable. She works in a repetitive range of shapes, using craft shop and household supplies: dollops and teardrops of wax, thin-gauge wire, hooks, hairnets, rubber kitchen gloves, air compressor hoses, and—my favorite—knitting pins. She returns again and again to a tight range of materials: fishhooks, wax teardrops and the knitting pins. In a few cases, her work reflects her previous career as a musician, such as the assembly of those pins bearing what look like conical spinning tops made of wax. Arranged in dozens across one wall, they suggest, collectively, the lines and clefs of musical notation. These slight, long pins have small eyes, like skewer handles, which she pierces with her fishhooks bearing much larger dollops of wax. Rows of those identical dollops dangle in mid-air like topsy-turvy raindrops—or pendant earrings. Those pins, though, are alive. They bristle from a wall like acupuncture needles, arching as they seem to pull back against gravity.

As in so much of her work, there’s an energy in the paucity of means. MORE

All art is contemporary

Finding and Recognition of the True Cross, Piero della Francesca

At Hyperallergic, a great essay on Piero della Francesca, who has become my favorite Renaissance painter. Much of Thomas Micchelli’s precision and eloquence in reflecting on this painting would have applied as well to Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels, where angels and architecture seemed to be echoes of one another and arrayed on a single plane, as well as figures standing within the illusion of a three-dimensional scene. Seeing it at The Frick was the opportunity of a lifetime, and I was so grateful to be there for the time I spent with it. Oh to be able to see The Dream of Constantine some day. Not likely. (You can get as good a view of it as possible here, without seeing the actual painting itself. That angel’s arm. Those stars above his wing . . .)

Also, I love the notion that “all art is contemporary” now, because, well, it is.

Advertisements for himself

A Warhol sandwich 

What could be more Warhol than a photograph of Warhol wearing a photograph of Warhol? Photographs by William Love Kennedy at Steven Kasher.

Let us now eat cake

Marie Antoinette’s bathroom

Don’t say cupcakes. Cheap shot. All I want to know is, where’s the granite-topped St. James Vanity from Restoration Hardware? At Mary Boone, Robert Polidori’s photographs of Versailles. . . could there be a timelier show, all things historically considered?

Swimming with the sculpture

Cancun’s underwater sculpture museum

In Cancun, you have to go underwater to tour the Museo Subacuatico de Arte, or MUSA. It’s a museum that doubles as a new kind of coral reef: a haven for fish and people both. Nature and art become one.

“It’s the story of the three dedicated – nay, heroic – people who made the place happen. There was Jaime Gonzalez, a biologist and hard-nosed bureaucrat sickened by the damaged reefs in his country; Roberto Diaz, the entrepreneurial tour operator and closet artist who knows everybody in town; and Jason Taylor, the outsider with a new idea and the talent to pull it off. In all, it was a herculean effort. But eventually permissions and a little money came through and so Taylor started working in 2006. He makes the molds using plaster on the naked body and then adds the clothing later. Walking through a new dry-land exhibit of his work, he says he can name each of his models – from the young girl to the pregnant woman to the worker he flagged down in the street who was initially confused about what exactly this odd foreigner wanted to do. Even Diaz, who’s also an amateur sculptor, got into the game and created a statue designed from a lost picture of his grandmother. Today, with 470 statues, the museum is a huge success and one of the major tourist draws to Cancun.”

The goal: 10,000 sculptures over the next ten years.

Rich and strange

Apple Bark Borer Moth, up close

If Prospero had had broadband on his little island, he would have spent hours with this cache of macro photography–more than a thousand shots you can scroll through. The collection offers you a glimpse into the way insects actually look–like visitors from another dimension. I don’t know how much the color here as been enhanced, but the tiny iridescent scales on this moth’s body look to me like shingles from a home in Middle Earth. There is nothing any artist has ever made that can compete with the intricate and strange beauty of nature itself. Imagine if this were a photograph of something someone had fabricated and assembled, and you saw it sitting on the floor inside the white cube of a gallery in Chelsea. I’m not sure anything else would be able to compete. And all you need to do is go to Maryland and pluck one from the bark of an apple tree. Just bring a magnifying glass.

Hand-made

DIY glass house

“We thought wouldn’t it be cool if we had a house that was all made of windows so then you wouldn’t have to try to fit the sunset into one little space. Then, less than a year later, we built it.” Interesting thoughts in the video on why the physical process of making something by hand is a large part of what makes it worthwhile: whether it’s a little sunset-viewing home or a photograph. As a painter, I know how much manual labor matters.

Go, Thiebaud, go

Wayne Thiebaud, 92, at work

For those of us whose daily life is becoming a training camp for geezerhood, this Time magazine photograph of Wayne Thiebaud, still tirelessly turning out beautiful work, is a gift. Every day, I hone my skills for entry into the ranks of over-the-hill curmudgeons: random crankiness, disgust with the news, a constant refrain of “what’s that actor’s name?” whenever the flat-screen is on, occasional distrust of all cultural developments more recent than the ancien regime, aches in my feet that don’t go away, a new-found fascination with watching plants grow, since it often happens faster than my mind can process information, and a variety of other hard-won skills that will become faithful companions in the years ahead. One thing that does actually get better, as everything else about me begins to fade, is the ability to paint and the delight that comes from doing it. James Hall, at Oxford Gallery, once told me, “Painting is an old person’s art.” What better proof than Thiebaud, unpretentiously applying paint to his human-sized canvas, using a classic tripod easel, self-taught, still learning. The cutline for the photograph: “He still paints every day, holidays too.” Check. “All along, he says, you just keep hacking away at it.” Check. “I didn’t go to art school.” Check. “When I decided to try and be a painter, I thought I’d better go to work whether I feel it or not, and that’s what I’ve pretty much done.” That’s the big one. There is at least one country for old men, and it’s called painting. Geezerhood, here I come, if this is what awaits.

Sometimes the magic works

Chief Dan George in Little Big Man. A great scene from a great movie. Funny and beautiful both. The chief is right–sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t–and it applies to painting as well. I love the sound of disgust he makes when he realizes he’s still in this world. It’s pretty much the sound I make when I fail to disappear into the act of painting. Loved him in Harry and Tonto, too. (Tonto was a cat.)

Discs of confusion

Girl with a Red Hat, Vermeer

Professional debunkers, Penn and Teller, have produced a documentary that appears to be an attempt to cash in on “revelations” about Vermeer which have been common assumptions about the painter for at least half a century. NPR reported that there were gasps from the audience when the film was premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. Apparently, no one in the audience had read much about Vermeer. Vermeer used mechanical tools to aid him in his drawing and painting! That’s a bit like saying, in the voice of Claude Rains, “I”m shocked, shocked, that camera obscura was being employed in Delft!” In all fairness, the film sounds interesting. It apparently follows the inventor Tim Jenison as he uses a small simple device he invented, a lens and mirror that allows him to accurately match what he’s drawing with what he’s seeing. In other words, the conclusion our esteemed comedy team wants us to arrive at is that Vermeer may have been robotically reproducing only what  a system of lenses enabled him to see. Busted! It may be a fun film to watch, but what’s being uncovered here isn’t news. For at least half a century, scholars have assumed Vermeer used the equivalent of a photographic projector, a camera obscura, to achieve his remarkable accuracy, and they’ve even noted that the way he handled reflected highlights owes everything to the way a lens creates “discs of confusion,” small discreet orbs that appear when the object is slightly out of focus. Jenison’s mirror/lens device is more or less a new generation of the camera obscura. When Hockney went on his crusade, in the same spirit, about how lens-based Western art has been–the horror!–I yawned as well. Either you use photographic technology or you don’t, and in either case, an artist selectively includes, changes, simplifies, and adjusts what he or she sees, with or without a technological shortcut,  in order to create a painting. Photo-realists have been using photographs and projectors for decades. Gerard Richter was happy to demonstrate to visitors how he traced his projected images–before he settled down to the real challenge. Tim Jenison apparently spent seven months reproducing a Vermeer painting for this film. Vermeer may have spent as long, or longer, on each of his rare paintings. And in the process, for each painting, he made a thousand tiny choices on how to simplify or modify what he saw, obsessed with creating a certain kind of scene in a certain quality of light with certain quite specific colors, colors which run throughout his work. His technology didn’t make any of those choices. It served his vision, not the other way around. This brief commentary on the issue from the 60s offers a fine debunking of Penn and Teller’s attempt to debunk Vermeer:

The hypothesis that Vermeer used the camera obscura was recently put to the test by Professor Charles Seymour of the Department of Art History at Yale. He drew parallels between Vermeer’s painting and photography, by demonstrating, for example, how many of the artist’s effects could be reproduced with a camera. In addition, Seymour took a 19th Century viewing camera obscura (no earlier model was available) and set it up about two-and-a-half feet away from a few carefully chosen props–a chair with lion’s head finials, a piece of draped velvet and tapestry backdrop. When these were viewed on the screen of the camera obscura, they exhibited qualities much like those displayed by similar materials in Vermeer’s Girl with a Red Hat. The lion’s head glimmered with discs of confusion, and the fuzzy texture of the velvet was rendered even fuzzier, in all but the middle distance, by the soft focus of uncorrected lenses. Even the quality of light and the color tones mirrored Vermeer’s own. But it was evident, when a photograph was made duplicating these effects in a polished metal mirror, that an all-important ingredient was missing–the artist’s selective eye. The secret of Vermeer’s art is not that he used the camera obscura, but that he used it so well–as a point of departure for art, never as an end in itself.   –Hans Koningsberger

The photograph these researchers took of the staged duplication of Vermeer’s setting looks flat and lifeless. The painting itself is quite the opposite.

More mosaics. It’s alive!!!!!

Edward Scissorhands, move over. Some cool examples of  horticultural mosaics here.

New Van Gogh

Sunset at Montmajour.Vincent Van Gogh.1888

From The Verge. Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum has announced the discovery of a new painting, Sunset at Montmajour, by Vincent van Gogh — the first full-size example since 1928. “A discovery of this magnitude has never before occurred in the history of the Van Gogh Museum.” The clincher: a letter from Van Gogh to his brother Theo expressing his disappointment with it. I’m not seeing any grounds for disappointment.

Be the question

A Chroma painting by John Sabraw

I first saw John Sabraw’s work while visiting with Lauren Purje and Rush Whitacre when they were rooming together in Brooklyn. Lauren treasures a drawing John gave her, a startlingly exact rendering in graphite of a revolver and a syringe. It was hanging on her wall, up near the ceiling—as if she wanted it to be just out of reach. I seem to recall her telling me it was his interpretation of a line from a Modest Mouse song, but what struck me was how uncharacteristically grim it was, an exception to a line of work that otherwise glows with a radiant affirmation of the natural world’s complex unity. I saw one of his Chroma disk paintings, done on a metal support, when Lauren was collaborating with him, which involved destroying John’s painting and doing something of her own on top of it. (Remind me of the dangers of a Purje collaboration if that ever seems like a good idea, not that I expect she’ll ever have any interest in destroying my work.) I recall that John gleefully coached her through the whole thing, even when she complained about how hard it was to paint on metal. Thus I became acquainted with John Sabraw. We’ve never met, in person, but he once told me he loves and admires Illmatic as much as I do, which may not mean much to anyone else, but gave me the illusion that I understand who he is. So I sent him some questions about his work a few days ago, and he promised to answer them. I will post the exchange if he finds the time to attend to it, but he warned that he’s been involved with a segment the Discovery channel is doing on his new show. So, having had my place in the world thus properly adjusted, I’m not holding my breath.

Meanwhile, I got up early this morning to write and, on a Google search for his MORE

Lenka’s lovely mosaics

Self-Portrait, Lenka Brazinova, mosaic

When we became friends in London, at the Persona Art Festival, where we were both showing work, my nickname for Lenka Brazinova was Lovely Lenka. I hadn’t heard from her in well over a year, yet she submitted a comment to represent yesterday, and suddenly I had a chance to catch up with what she’s been doing the past couple years. Despite the struggles she has gone through, and she’s been through many, her cheerfulness and her playful personality tend to light up the room–you can feel it even in her emails–so it was a treat to hear from her and great to know that she’s happy and productive. She’s deeply serious about her work, and she’s painting full-time right now, to the exclusion of any concern about money, and any other kind of work. She lives in Kosice, Slovakia, not far from the Ukrainian border and  hopes to move to London soon and  enroll at the Slade School of Fine Art. The word lovely applies just as much to her work in mosaics, a few examples of which are on view at her website. I’m fascinated by how the requirements of mosaic force her to refine her images until they’re about as simple as a Matisse cutout and how the medium itself creates intensities of color that rival oil. I’m hoping she will do lots more of these. And the examples of her work with mosaics in collaboration with street artists are very cool. Bravo, Brazinova. Stay in touch.

Art I love

Lisa Breslow.Summer Light.oil and pencil on panel

Dysnomia

Cover of Dysnomia, by Dawn of Midi

A track by Dawn of Midi sounds like samples of Pinback, before the vocals start, looped–with just a hint of Erik Satie dubbed in, now and then. Very hard to turn off, once you start listening. The cover of Dysnomia, though: it’s a Tao symbol, and a nest, and a whirlpool circling the drain, and, again, a Taoist wheel with that central hole. A nest that draws you down into the void at the heart of it all. Nicely done. You can see more of Fabian Oefner’s photography here.

More moonlight

The Moonlight.Yong Yongliang

A post in reference to Yang Yongliang’s statement at White Rabbit:

“A longtime student and devotee of shanshui, or landscape painting, Yang Yongliang has watched in dismay as a China hell-bent on modernization tosses its traditions on the scrap heap. But there is no way to stop this 21st-century anti-cultural revolution, he says—older art forms must keep up with the changing times or fade away. Yang Yongliang’s approach to saving shanshui is based on retaining its inner essence while updating its subjects and media… They also parallel the ‘despair and sadness’ Yang Yongliang feels when he contemplates what is being lost as Shanghai erupts into the 21st century.” —Twisted Sifter

Last chance

Les Indes Galantes. Johannes Muller Franken.oil on canvas

Last chance to see a wonderful show around the theme of illumination at OK Harris. The work is diverse and, without exception, of the highest quality. The show, illuminators, was on view in July and is still up for only a couple more days this month, until Sept. 7. The gallery curated the show essentially by scouring the web and inviting artists it liked to participate. The reproduction above doesn’t capture the uncanny level of detail and accuracy in this painting, as well as in the other work by Johannes Muller-Franken in the show. If you see the actual painting at the gallery, you’ll marvel at the raindrops blistering the surface of the car, visible in the moonlight.

Hard work and money

From Canadian singer Dan Mangan’s website,  back in April. Love the detail about the level of work that had to be invested before he could get even a tiny break. He’s replying to a blogger who was critical of FACTOR, an organization that grants money to musicians, almost all of whom these days are struggling for ways to make money:

You’re painting a picture where the ratty punk bars your band plays are the only places where truth can live. Sometimes it does live there. But for god sakes, man, open your eyes.

As for FACTOR “insiders”, I’d like to tell you a story. It’s my story. This isn’t meant to be a “LOOK WHAT I DID” story, it’s meant to be a reality check on “knowing the right people”.

It’s about a musician from Vancouver (approx. 4,381km away from the FACTOR office) who applied twice to FACTOR for support on his first album, and was denied both times. That same musician applied for touring support at the time and was denied. That same musician spent four years flogging that shitty first album to anyone who would listen.

This musician wasn’t very good at the time. But he played hundreds and hundreds and HUNDREDS of gigs, trying to become a better writer, a better performer, a better person, a better singer and a better guitar player. Then he applied two more times for support on his second album, and was denied. Magically, on his third attempt, he got a grant for about $10K, which was a lot of money. It was well timed, also, because he was about $35K in debt at this point, having racked up various credit cards and bank loans on the costs of touring, recording, etc. over the span of about four years. It was the beginning of the tipping point, and once that second album was released, this musician’s audience started to grow and he now has a reasonably stable career in music.

For whatever reason, I had so much blind, naïve optimism in those early days that I was able to look past my well-acknowledged limitations and keep trying despite the fact that the odds were stacked against me. I’m not special, Paul. I didn’t have insider connections. What I did have was a large serving of gratitude for the opportunities that came my way, and an appetite to become a better musician. I wanted (and want) a life in music – to work tirelessly at a thoughtful and relevant body of work, and to assume that it could always grow and be better.

Since my second album was released, FACTOR has been wonderfully supportive. I wasn’t in your top ten hit list of FACTOR recipients, but had you continued, I probably would have been in the top twenty. Do you know why? Because I kept fucking applying and I showed them that I was serious and worth investing in.

Getting FACTOR funding is HARD. That’s frustrating to young bands. But in a miracle measure of karma, generally by the time a band has played enough gigs to stop being so shitty, they’ve probably gotten their ducks in a row enough to properly fill out a stupid application. There should be a Chinese proverb about delusional young bands who think they’re the god-damned Sex Pistols.