Completing the trilogy

To complete the trilogy of artists talking about working practices - and the back and forth dance of painting- here below is a studio interview with Elizabeth Murray. Murray's works can be found in private collections, in NY subway commissions and in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She was one of a few successful and respected artists in the heavily Neo Expressionist 1980s in New York that garnered respect in what was largely still a man's game -- and even more admirably, she did it while inserting graphic, cartoonish imagery into the conversation of abstraction.

Watch Humor on PBS. See more from ART:21.

Trip to see art - SATURDAY!

We will meet at 11am THIS SATURDAY MORNING the 23rd, at the corner of 26th street and 10th avenues in New York. If you are coming by train to Penn Station, it's a short walk southwest (see map below). If it's raining, we will meet inside the lobby of 526 West 26th Street. Email me if you need more specific directions (tcalvert@raritanval.edu)

Here are some of the shows we might see:

Jeff Bailey Gallery
625 West 27th Street, 212-989-0156
Chelsea
June 14 - July 13, 2012
Opening: Thursday, June 14, 6 - 8 PM
Web Site

Syd Mead – Future (Perfect)

BravinLee Programs
526 West 26th Street, #211, 212-462-4404
Chelsea
May 11 - June 30, 2012
Opening: Friday, May 11, 6 - 8 PM

The Joan Mitchell Foundation 2011 MFA Grant Recipients

CUE Art Foundation 
511 West 25th Street, Ground Floor, 212-206-3583
Chelsea
June 7 - July 28, 2012 
Opening: Thursday, June 7, 6 - 8 PM
Web Site

Vision Quest

Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery 
532 West 24th Street, 212-243-3335
Chelsea
June 21 - August 10, 2012 
Opening: Thursday, June 21, 6 - 8 PM
Web Site

Nicole Eisenman: Woodcuts, Etchings, Lithographs and Monotypes

PICK

Leo Koenig, Inc. 
545 West 23rd Street, 212-334-9255
Chelsea
May 24 - June 30, 2012 
Opening: Thursday, May 24, 6 - 9 PM
Web Site

Selma Parlour and Yelena Popova

Horton Gallery 
504 West 22nd Street, 212.243.2663
Chelsea
June 14 - July 14, 2012 
Opening: Thursday, June 14, 6 - 8 PM
Web Site

***The Big Picture

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. 
530 West 22nd Street, 212-929-2262
Chelsea
June 8 - July 27, 2012 
Opening: Friday, June 8, 4 - 6 PM
Web Site

Brent Green: To Many Men Strange Fates are Given

PICK

Andrew Edlin Gallery 
134 Tenth Avenue, 212-206-9723
Chelsea
May 5 - June 23, 2012 
Web Site

Post for Monday - Thomas Nozkowski

One of my favorite videos: Thomas Nozkowski in the studio.

David Hockney video

Click here for a video with David Hockney that shows some of his landscape paintings in the studio in progress. He also discusses the changing nature of landscape as a subject.

Trip to New York - Saturday

We will decide Wednesday whether there will be a trip to New York art galleries: THIS Saturday 6/23 from 11am-2:30pm. We can go to the Met and look at Rembrandt and Carravaggio up close, or we can go to Chelsea Art galleries and look at an array of contemporary artworks. The Nicole Eisenman show will still be up. 

Article about Sue Coe on Hyperallergic

I first heard artist Sue Coe give a talk on her work at Carnegie Mellon in 1995. In person, she is a soft spoken and judicious person, not the personality you expect from the unleashed depiction of violence in her artwork. She showed a very compelling and personal series of drawings of her mother in the moments before and after she passed away.

Reading this article (click here) on her work reminded me of several artists whose work is similar formally, but also in its notion that one role of art is to make us recoil, and then realize that an illustration of something terrible is only a meagre stand-in for the real thing.

Sue Coe, Woman Walks into Bar - Is Raped by Four Men on the Pool Table - While 20 Watch, 1983. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, NY. (*Notice the reference to Picasso's Guernica!)

Leon Golub, Interrogation I, 1981

Ivan Albright, And Man Created God in His Own Image, 1930-31. Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Francisco Goya, from The Disasters of War series, Plate 39: Grande hazaña! Con muertos! (A heroic feat! With dead men!), 1810-1820.

Exhibition in Chinatown, NY

You're all welcome to attend a group exhibition in which I am showing work, opening reception this Saturday night:

Mike Rollins Fine Art presents:

Dystopian Delight 

OPENING RECEPTION

Saturday June 16th

6-9 PM

105 Bowery, Third Floor

New York, NY 10002

Featuring paintings by:

John Bent

Tiffany Calvert

Mark Epstein

Ronna Lebo

Meridith Passabet

DYSTOPIAN DELIGHT

HERE!....painting is presented as a human gesture of celebration crashing head-on, purposely, with natural disasters, world crisis and dismal market catastrophe.

HERE!....lies the disparity between representational and abstract space; the natural world forced into a hand-made violation of the two-dimensional picture plane.

HERE!...,mutilation is present as perfection; authentic misery under the guise of happiness.

HERE!...we feel a compassion for the horrible, a pathos for the comedy of worldly knowledge, a self-conscious attachment to detachment.

HERE!....painting acts-out a visual recognition of something unknown, painting behaves as an immoral revelation of heraldic emptiness.

HERE!...the eternal moment is skewed into pictorial space where Beauty and Ugly fight for the surface before drowning.

Here is a group of paintings that ultimately say only what needs to be said about themselves as paintings.

Some Abstraction

O'Keeffe, From the Lake, 1924

Tomma Abts, 2005

Alexander Ross, 2009

Artist Video: Charline von Heyl

Watch below a great interview with contemporary painter Charline von Heyl. Von Heyl uses some alternative painting techniques such as spraying, masking, taping, which we will experiment with during Wednesday's class.

Extra post: play the Surrealist/Dada game exquisite corpse on your phone

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has made a new free app that allows you to play the Surrealist /Dada game of exquisite corpse on your phone! It's called Artswipe. (More about exquisite corpse below):

http://hyperallergic.com/46984/lacma-lets-you-play-exquisite-corpse-on-your-iphone/

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exquisite_corpse#section_1

Post for Monday: Painters...

In response to our first critique, I'm posting some relevant artists. For Painting I, some painters who use varying a wet-into-wet processes. For III, the Hudson River School painters - -

Dana Schutz, Feelings, 2003

Claire Sherman, Snow and Trees, 2010

Philip Guston, 1952-3

And Hudson River School:

Thomas Cole, the Oxbow, 1836 and more information here