It isn’t often you get to be in a show with other artists who are both friends and talented makers. I am having that chance now with Riki Moss and Keith Maddy. The artist reception on Friday night was pure joy, and the people that came seemed particularly warm and receptive. Maybe they sensed the […]
Seeing and looking
The Compound Eye
Elizabeth Bishop. I’ve written about her and her poetry many times before on this blog. But her effect on my interior landscape is like frost heaves, pushing up vertically through the thickest pavement and foundation stone. It is not just her final poetic product that captivates me, but also the way in which she went […]
Painting the Facelessness
Another passage of interest from W. S. Piero’s Out of Eden: Why are the jets and emulsive tracks of paints in Pollock’s Lavender Mist: Number 1, 1950 so compelling? It’s not only because he was creating a greater plasticity of space and laying out dozens of contested fields of formal activity where disintegrating patterns pitch […]
Joe Felso: Ruminations, on Roger Kimball’s Jeremiad
Every once in a while a comment made on this blog is so good it needs to be called out, front and center. That’s true of a comment made by one of my favorite bloggers, the author of Joe Felso: Ruminations, in response to the posting about Roger Kimball’s article in The New Criterion, directly […]
Leaving it in the Unknown
Deliberately low-keyed art often resembles ruins, like neolithic rather than classical monuments, amalgams of past and future, remains of something “more,” vestiges of some unknown venture. The ghost of content continues to hover over the most obdurately abstract art. The more open, or ambiguous, the experience offered, the more the viewer is forced to depend […]
Painful Beauty
Chris Jordan’s photographic works are extremely memorable. He knows how to create retinal appeal to be sure, but he also packs a political wallop. Some of you may know of his photographs of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, In Katrina’s Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster, published earlier this year. Circuit boards Another […]
Natalie Alper at Seraphin Gallery
(Image courtesy of Seraphin Gallery) Natalie Alper’s show at the Seraphin Gallery in Philadelphia was scrumptous. Big, lush strokes of metalic pigmented acrylic ribbon across a subtle underlayer of graphite marked canvas. And as her last painterly gesture, she sets this juicy field back just a bit from us by marking the surface with a […]
Richard Tuttle at Sperone Westwater
I caught the last day of Tuttle’s show at Sperone Westwater in New York last weekend. SW on West 13th Street is an open, multi-roomed white space. It could be daunting for someone whose works are often delicate and small. But Tuttle fills the galleries to the brim with intimately-sized wall pieces whose only similarity […]
Morphic Photography
Ferrofluid with permanent magnets underneath (Image courtesy of Felice Frankel) Here are two provocative examples of morphing developments in photography, especially in the age of digital (and signficantly, nearly cost free and unlimited) options. The first features Felice Frankel, author of Envisioning Science. Frankel has come a long way in bringing meangingful visual imaging into […]
Hype-Proof
Serra installation in the Sculpture Garden at MOMA For all the hype around the Richard Serra show at MOMA, I was still in awe, pure awe. There’s no way to not be, these works are insanely beautiful, massive, haunting, playful, and unforgettable. Seeing these with your inner child in full command is my best recommendation. […]