new painting

It's small.


Here it is with the one from last week.

artblogs beget artblogs

Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof have a new artblog project called visiting artists projects, maybe something for them to showcase their own work more.


Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof

Roberta also has another new projects blog called night before xmas; this one lists her name as the sole contributor, but I don't know if she will be able to keep herself from sharing and collaborating for very long. Actually, she used a photo I took of them in her first project!


Bill Gusky

Artist and frequent artblog participant Bill Gusky has started a blog called Artblog Comments, to keep track of his contributions to various artblog discussions. What a great idea! His most recent post responds to my post from yesterday on the Surface Charge show. The best artblog comment threads (that I'm aware of) are to be found at Artblog.net, Artistic Thoughts, Edward Winkleman, Phantastic, and Thinking About Art.

Comment boards are, for me, maybe THE BEST part of artblogs. I like both the anonymous angry stuff and the smart discussion stuff, and the fact that artists, curators, critics, gallerists, and collectors can all interact - regardless of location or recognition/success level. Edward Winkleman recently had a post asking artists who they are most inspired by and one of the non-anonymous repliers, Mark Creegan, was an artist in Florida who included a link to his website. Great!


Mark Creegan

(art.blogging.la used to have lively comments but she stopped it, you can read about it's demise here - wish she would turn them back on)

Surface Charge - Elana Herzog, Maix Mayer, Karina Peisajovich, Kim Schoenstadt, Katrin Sigurdardottir, Sally Smart

Tyler's post last week mentioning Katrin Sigurdardottir and the Anderson Gallery's Surface Charge show is the prompt needed to finally finish posting my own thoughts on the show. The previous post, talking about the work of Lisa Sigal, Odili Donald Odita, Karin Sander, and Ragna Robertsdottir, was way back on November 6th.

Elana Herzog - Formally interesting. Old bedspread stretched across a corner, a million silver staples. Nice scrambled-egg color and texture to the coming undone bedspread. The whole thing was on an angled wall that was built on-site, itself sort of stretched across the gallery's actual walls.

Too bad she had to be so close to Katrin Sigudardottir's large floor sculpture. Most of the artists in the show had their own rooms or bigger spaces; the very close proximity of these two works compromised both. Sigurdardottir had two small floor models each in their own very small rooms, it would have been a better presentation for both artists if Sigurdardottir's large piece had been given one of the small rooms, and that room's small model were in this room with the Herzog.

Maix Mayer - He had two videos. It's hard sometimes to just think about the work itself, to consider it on it's own merits, when it is included in thematic exhibitions making elaborate claims. Surface Charge, according to co-curator Gregory Volk (along with Sabine Russ), is supposedly all about turning the "very surfaces into active forces as opposed to neutral supports", with the brochure stating that much of the work was made on-site, specifically for this exhibition, and "will exist only for the duration of the exhibition". I think he used the word "miraculous" in an interview with the Richmond Times-Dispatch. It was frustrating to try and appreciate a video (made in 2003) within this context.

It also took me a little while to realize that the sound I was hearing from one video was actually coming from the artist's other video next door, and vice versa. I had to walk back and forth a few times between the two rooms - separated by a makeshift wall - before I got that the music of the large video wasn't intended to be heard with the smaller video and it's softly murmuring crowd.

....more on the Maix Mayer...

Karina Peisajovich - This was a very popular room at the opening reception, and looks great in the photo on VCU's website, but the initial enchantment lessened with each subsequent visit. Maybe a nice place to have a drink or something, take a nap, have a rack of groovy clothes to sell, make out.


Kim Schoenstadt - She had a big center wall painted chalkboard green, with a white-lined drawing carved into it, flanked by two smaller wall drawings in pencil. The three drawings were all architectural, and interesting in that the big green one up close almost read like a map, with maybe roads and rivers, and from farther back it was like a specific place - maybe a house in Caliornia. You can see this nice place to be, but the closer you walk up to it the more abstract and farther away it becomes.


The much smaller pencil drawing on the left, way up near the ceiling, was like a house up close but like a chandelier from farther away; or maybe the diagram of the shadow of a chandelier.

The more I think about this work the more I appreciate all the shifts of scale and space and place, including my own place in the room and wondering where that room exists.


Katrin Sigurdardottir - She showed three floor sculptures, two from 2003 and one dated 2004. My take on these three imported sculptures is similar to (but stronger than) the frustration with the Maix Mayer videos; these pieces not only didn't surface charge anything, they had no relationship to the space whatsoever.

What is the deal? Are the curators to blame for hyping up a show's themes and selecting work that doesn't fit, or did the artist not live up to the curator's expectations?


Sally Smart - This piece, The Exquisite Pirate, was so much better on the second visit, without all the people of the opening reception obscuring the view of the floor. Did she know how shiny and reflective the floor would be? Very nice.

The cut-out pirates (and fairy tale-ness, and travel themes) reminded me of the paper cut-outs of Hans Christian Andersen.


Sally Smart rorschachs.


This was one of my favorite Surface Charge moments, arriving one day to find that a bookshelf had been moved so they could paint the wall, leaving a ghostly mirage. This was right around the corner from the Karin Sander, the difference between them being that this was an unexpected delight.

The only artist left to discuss is Laurence Weiner, but I can't because I have no idea what I think - which is an excellent thing. To be confounded is the best.

Richmond Christmas Walk

Richmond Holiday Pentagram.


Christmas Rats. Remember, "rats" spelled backwards is "star". I opened this box, but there was no baby inside. It was a miracle.


Somebody decorated this tree.


He sees you when you're sleeping. He knows when you're awake. He knows if you've been bad or good, SO BE GOOD FOR GOODNESS SAKE!

Shibuya sculpture thing

This is the sculptural thing I used to walk by in Shibuya all the time, and referred to in the post talking about Louise Bourgeois' Williamstown Eyes. This has nothing to do with Christmas, but always gave me a Christmas-y feeling. No idea what it's called or who the artist is.

Merry Christmas!

new painting

This is a painting I finished last night.


Paintings in progress. These will be the last paintings of 2005 and/or the first paintings of 2006.


Work space.

go see

Friday, December 23rd is the LAST DAY to go see Barbara Tisserat's retrospective of thirty years of lithographs at the Hand Workshop.

This is an excellent show.

The Endless Battle To Survive - The Continuity Of Life On Earth

Last month I visited the Hannaford's in Greenwich, NY.


A sign in front of a door marked employees only offered a tantilizing secret.


Inside the forbidden room was a mural that spanned the length of the entire wall, and continued onto the next. The mural began on the left with primordial ooze, illustrating the arrival of dinosaurs and the rise of mammals, ....


... and continued on the right, far far into the future; after the fall of man, the arrival of new creatures, and the eventual rise of a new intelligence.


This is Brian Baker's Endless Battle To Survive - The Continuity Of Life On Earth!

Brian was in the room when I visited and finishing the mural after more than a year of work. He works in the meat department, and management offered him the empty walls of the employee meeting room as a place to make a mural after seeing how much talent and effort he put into writing and drawing the daily specials. He did this ON THE CLOCK!

I salute the management of the Greenwich Hannaford's.

various AWESOME news in the world of ART

Good. Tyler has today addressed the Whitney Biennial question I posed to him yesterday.

Hey struggling artists, here's another one: Do you know that the Museum of Modern Art recently bought a painting by Tony Curtis for its permanent collection? Yes, I know, he really hasn't gotten his due. Which one is it? Who is the curator responsible for this purchase? Please please please release a statement about the awesome art of Tony Curtis.

i am the missing meatball

.

I can't believe Fleisher/Ollman Gallery is having a show called Meatball without me!!!

As stated in the Scope Miami post, I have long loved this gallery. I love it so much that I have sent slides to them for fifteen years, even though they have shown outsider and self-taught artists almost exclusively. Here are some of my rejections* from them -


from 1991


from 1994


from 1999


from 2004


date unknown

Aaack, the irony. Not only are they finally showing local "schooled" artists, but they are calling the show Meatball!!!

RELATED: Meatball participant P. Timothy Gierschick's blog, Libby's Meatball review, a photo of Libby (and Roberta) with the REAL meatballs, the REAL meatballs, Meatballs at Stuffy's explanation, announcement/coupon, and installation photos.

*These are not bad rejections, as far as rejections go; handwritten notes from the director are way better than photocopied form letters - thanks, John Ollman!

raison d'etre

This line from Tyler's post on Roberta Smith on Pixar at MoMA (whew!) makes me wonder what he thinks about the upcoming Whitney Biennial -

"How is MoMA "relatively clean" (Smith's word) for doing a show that betrays its raison d'etre?"

From the Whitney Museum of American Art mission statement -

"The Whitney Museum of American Art is dedicated to collecting, preserving, interpreting, and exhibiting American art. We exist to serve a wide variety of audiences and to celebrate the complexity, heterogeneity, and diversity of American art and culture."

How does that square with Carol Vogel's 11/30/2005 NYTimes report that states -

"the curators have scoured artists' studios in art capitals like Milan, London, Paris and Berlin."

UPDATE 12/19/2005: Good. Tyler has posted a Christmas wish list today including a wish for the Whitney - "The Whitney: An identity. Because the museum seems to be throwing away its "Museum of American Art" identity with its 2006 biennial."

Hylah Wright

This sign is in the window of the closed National Theatre, on Broad Street, in front of a rack of paintings. A postcard next to the sign states that the paintings are by an artist named Hylah Wright, who "at 21 came to Richmond to work for the Andersons" and "was with the Anderson family almost 70 years"... "No one was aware of her paintings until recently, when she had to give up her house and move into a nursing home".

The paintings are very textural and lumpy. Some landscapes, some flowers, some abstractions. I've visited twice and some of the paintings I first took (bad) photos of have been replaced by other paintings. There is a contact number, which I called, and the man said that they are replacing paintings as work sells; I think they have a lifetime's worth of work. The prices are $250 and $350.

Contact me if you want his number.

recent comments from artists

People often leave comments on older posts which aren't looked at much anymore, following are some links to posts which have had recent comments added by the artists being discussed -

Nick Kuszyk, or R. Nicholas Kuszyk's internet representative team member #4 here.

Michael Oatman here.

Chris Vecchio here.

Thanks guys.

the Belmont Library is ruined

Mike Martin and I took these photos of the Belmont Library's fantastic installation of moonlit seascapes early this year, and I regret not posting them sooner - because I went in today and the paintings are GONE!!!

The librarian said they took them down because they have been there for two years, and also that "some kids" had come in once and taken pictures and that they didn't know what to do with them anymore. Aargh! That was probably me and Mike!


There were nine or ten dusty seascapes propped against the wall on top of the bookshelves, each with a label stuck to the front. Don't recall now the name of the artist.


Alien beach on the moon. Fantastic is the best word to describe these paintings. Individually they are okay, strange and interesting, but all together along the top of the library bookshelves was a perfect installation.


It's like the Martian Chronicles. Look at what is on all the books. Skulls!


All of the books have skulls on them. What does this mean? Are they pirate treasure? Is reading dangerous? These skulls beneath the seascapes gave me shivers of pleasure. They shivered me timbers.


RUINED!!!!

Belmont Librarians, please bring back the paintings!!! This was a big inspiration for Meatballs at Stuffy's. Am I the only one that loved them and has commented on their absence?

stills from Baron Prasil

Stills from last night's showing of Baron Prasil, at Nonesuch.









They are showing movies every Wednesday night at 8pm. Here's a look at the current show at Nonesuch.

Danielle Riede

Danielle Riede has a successful (a stunning?) piece currently on exhibit in the FAB Gallery, called Paint Chip Dream. The artist has a large and ever-expanding collection of paint chips, and with each exhibition opportunity she re-applys them to the walls of a given space. All of the installations are created on-site and I think fairly intuitively, with some results more rewarding than others. She had an excellent installation on the Plant Zero ramp (fourth image) a couple of years ago, and I also enjoyed a little wall zip called VCU Rainbow #2, which was included in a show down on Shockhoe Slip a while back.

With this installation the gallery is empty except for the walls of one corner, with straight, parallel lines of paint chips running floor to ceiling. The initial impression of the installation is formal, elegant, and quiet.


Here's a shot of one of the walls. All of her paint chip pieces that I have seen have utilized straight lines, never curves or a pile or anything different; it's worth noting that Danielle studied with Daniel Buren in Germany. My photos don't show it, but getting closer you become aware of ALL THE COLOR of the individual paint chips, and their individual irregularities.


Here is a shot of the same wall, at an angle. So much color, so much variety.


Each paint chip has a personality. Close-up, at an angle, the wall is like a dancing circus regiment. Looking at one wall like this, the opposite wall of straight formal lines is visible. With previous Riede installations you could step back and have the straight lines, or get close and study the individual chips, but with this piece you are able to look at both simultaneously.


Chips on both sides cast shadows meeting in the corner, creating phantom shapes. Is this the Paint Chip Dream?

destroyed

excellent photo taken from Gregg Chaddwick's blog.

The LA parking garage with all the Barry McGee and Margaret Kilgallen murals has been destroyed.

This wasn't just a parking garage, this was the art museum's parking garage!

RELATED: Tyler Green's Los Angeles Times editorial, Speed of Life's plea to the Mayor.

a job

I need a job. Ideally, I would like to work at an ice skating rink, but I will consider anything.

Look at that happy baby in front of the mural I painted for him and his twin brother last month. They now sleep in a submarine and can look out five different "porthole" windows to see fish, an octopus, a manatee, a turtle, a seahorse, and plant life. My favorite part to paint might have been the rivets around the windows; I kept thinking of how Jack Kirby might have painted metal, space, and Iron Man.

This was fun. Let me know if you would like a mural, or have any other job leads. I am seriously BROKE.