Helen Frankenthaler at Gallery Brown.
A gallery of Frankenthaler’s prints (etchings, woodcuts, and lithographs).
Marvelous work.
Left:
Madame de Pompadour
1985-1990
Lithograph
42.5×29.5 inches
Beatrice Wood, called the Mama of Dada, was a renowned ceramicist, lover of Marcel Duchamp, and a prime suspect in the Dada art movement of the early 1910’s. She died in 1998 at 105 years of age. Her ceramics were eccentric (like herself), with strange shapes, and iridescent glazes. She was quite a ticket, and beautiful, even as an older woman.
After Dada she became a follower of Jiddu Krishnamurti, and, in a circuitous way, this brought about her apprenticeship in ceramics.
This is a 5 minute clip from a 55 minute documentary from the Documentary Channel. I’ve seen the whole thing some time ago, and it’s a great documentary–well worth the $.99 that it costs to buy the whole thing from Google Video.
(As an aside, it’s a pain in the but to get it on a Linux machine–but not that big a one–you have to manually download the .gvp file (click the “Manually Download the Video” link) and open up that file with a text editor–gedit worked fine in Gnome–look for the line that starts “url:http://vp.video.google.com/videodownload?…” copy that minus the url: part, paste it in your browser, and it’ll download as an .avi file, which you can play in any media player on Linux. It’s much easier for Windows, and even Macs.) (Or, as I just found out because Firefox crashed while downloading it–close out your browser, and go back to the video, and click on the download for Windows/Mac link, and download it that way–as long as you’re still logged in to your Google account.)
New York Time article on Louise Nevelson’s show at the Jewish Museum.
Nevelson earned her place in art history, somewhere between the totemic structures of David Smith and the emotionalism of Eva Hesse, with mysterious abstract assemblages made from street-salvaged remnants of wood: baseball bats, milk crates, driftwood, picture frames, toolboxes, toilet seats, newel posts and gingerbread carvings. Her grand — even grandiose — oeuvre recycles themes of royalty, mortality, marriage, displacement and the tension between interior and exterior space.
Nevelson is one of my favorite artists, and there is a great collection of her work at The Farnsworth Museum, in Rockland, Me. (the second largest collection of her work in a public institution in the US, by the way), (and, which I blogged about here) if you’re ever up this way.
So there was an ad for Paul Matthews’ newest show, at Atea Ring Gallery (no website, sorry), in this months Art in America magazine (the May 2007 issue–the front page of the site changes every month). He’s a very fine figurative painter, who does mostly nudes, showing (among other things) pregnant women, child birth, old men’s fantasies, and a general view of modern life. Many of these paintings are on his site–paulmatthews.net (nudity, NSFW)–and there are links to his portraiture, and landscape, galleries, which, unfortunately, are not online yet. His paintings are lush, and well formed, with beautiful colors, and brushwork, some have background landscapes, seen through windows, that rival his figures. Really a must see as far as I’m concerned.
(Image: Sunlit Wife, Oil on Canvas, 10×15 inches, 1992–Paul Matthews)
is a quirky art program–artist interviews, how-tos, process, studio walks, etc.–on Asheville, N.C.’s URTV public access station. Community TV if you will.
It’s hosted, and produced, by Ursula Gullow, and can be found on Google Video, also.
I particularly liked episode 007, episode 005, and the show on Gabriel Shaffer (an outsider artist).
Heres a primer on approaching galleries from gallery owner Edward Winkleman. He has an excellent blog, and has more advice for artists sprinkled through his posts.
–when John Marin’s father suggested that the younger Marin “do salable etchings in the mornings, and his crazy watercolors in the afternoons”–” that [he] ask his new wife whether a woman could be a prostitute in the morning and a virgin in the afternoon”, which Stieglitz felt was equivalent to what Marin was asking his son to do.
That is from the sidebar of the dead tree version of this article on John Marin.
The sidebar contains a lot of good stuff, and I wish they’d put that up on the site, also.
This time Charlie Rose interviews art critic/historian Robert Hughes.
So I posted a video portrait of Chuck Close not too long ago here
Here’s a interview by Charlie Rose that I found:
Chuck Close is very erudite, and his loved of art–especially painting–really shows through in this interview.
Working in the studio this afternoon, (Yeah, I do actually make art.) I had a small epiphany. Something I hadn’t really thought about before this. I was starting a new painting on a canvas panel, doing some preliminary drawing, roughing some stuff out, and when I set it down to do something else, I was reminded of the first painting I tried making, back when I was 15 or 16. The only similarity here being the canvas panels, the subject matter is not similar, and this panel is bigger.
Those aren’t the only differences. I never finished that first one so many years ago, I gave up on it. I put some colors down, and made a science-fictional space scene, but the colors weren’t right, and I didn’t know how to mix color back then, or about underpainting, or anything really, and that was the end of that painting.
Since then, I’ve learned about color theory, underpainting, scumbling, and how to start, and (more important) how to finish a painting/piece of art, and not to give up until it’s done, or until I know it’s unsalvageably bad, at which point, I’ll start over.
I will go on and finish this painting, it may change in many ways before I’m done, but it will be done. Then I’ll go on to the next one, and then the next, and so on. And that is what it is, and what it takes, to be an artist, whether you sell your work or not, is to keep going on to the next one. It’s not about the one you’ve finished, but about the one still inside, the one yet to come.
