Everyone loves a parade! Or at least on a day when spring seems irrevocable and the nibs on the tips of trees are enchanting us into the thinking life might be for the enjoying. OK, that wasn't a sentence but really all I want to say is this: First Annual LIC Bike Parade Queens, New York Saturday, May 10, 2008 Registration 11:30 AM Workshops 12:00 PM - 3:00 PM Parade 3:00 PM - 4:00PM Free / Rain or shine! Socrates Sculpture Park has more info....
I'm taking the challenge. Or at least half of it. Orange Flower has started a 30-day macro photography challenge over at Flickr -- not a contest, just a share, compare and don't despair kind of thing (thanks for sharing, Kim). Meant to keep you engaged and taking pics every day. Here's the Flickr pool; here's the announcement with a list of participants....
I ask because I don't know. It could mean nothing. It could add to the meaning of a work. In Jasper Johns' case, it certainly means at least one thing: big $$. But I want it to mean more. I started thinking about Johns' signature because I went to his show of drawings from 1997-2007 at Matthew Marks Gallery (NYC, through April 12). I noticed in the end of his show that he marked some of his drawings with very precise signatures. It's not just his signature on this handful of pieces. It's "J.Johns / March '06 / St. Martin, F.W.I." I recently wrote about Johns' "Gray" show at the Met. The show has been trashed online, but I thought it was a tidy retrospective of someone who is still a major force. To sum up: I love his early work, and his later work (after the cross-hatching hayday) leaves me cold and confused. I've been thinking about it since I first wrote about Johns, but now I've got a few thoughts I'll try to add. It's easy to focus on the ways Johns broke from the previous generation. Johns' debt to the abstract expressionists used to escape me....
Faris McReynolds makes paintings like good baseball pitcher throws spitballs. It's nasty stuff, roughed up and delivered with a predictable inpredictability. There's an amazing moment where you lean in and ask "How did he do that?" And as soon as the question is asked, he's got you. Check out the photos above, of a painting in his current show at Goff + Rosenthal (NYC, until April 26). One is a detail from the other. It's a big painting of a bunch of cowboys looking at strippers on a stage. The close-up makes one the of the dancers look like Christ, as drawn by a 5-year-old with a pocket knife. It's angular and direct. Colors are bold and contrasting. Like so many good paintings, you lean in and it looks abstract; you step back and it coheres as an image. McReynolds observes with a touch of rock 'n' roll and a lot of sass. Check out his blog here, and his music here....
Artist Robert Morris spoke last night at the New School as part of the Sculpture Center's "Subjective Histories of Scultpure" series. I have a soft spot for Morris' sculptures. In 1991, I saw a small collection of his work at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. It was like a miniature retrospective of his work. I was just in high school, and growing up in a Richmond suburb, I hadn't been exposed to minimalism or any of the more radical artistic developments from the last 50 years. Entering the gallery, I saw one of Morris' felt sculptures. I looked at the tag on the wall. It said the artist's name was "Robert Morris." It was a big, thick piece of felt, slashed horizontally and attached to the walls at the corners, so the middle formed a slow arc. Interesting. I didn't know if I liked it or not. Was it really art? Did it mean anything?...
In the same way we can be moved by the rustic paintings of Lascaux, seeing something innately human in their creation and stroke, we can look at Katy Moran's paintings and be moved at something that will last as long as our DNA does. They are like cave paintings of the future, descended from those damp, rough walls via Delacroix and Joan Mitchell. There's just something about Katy Moran's paintings that is very, very old. Or really, I mean "old masterful." Old master-y. Whatever the kids call it. (Spray Glue calls them "Victorian.") Moran, a 33-year-old from Great Britain, has her first show at the Andrea Rosen Gallery currently on view in New York until April 19. Strolling around the gallery, Moran's small oils seemed very reminiscent of Constable's cloud studies. It might be in color selection, especially those seductive greenish-blues and earthen browns, or in her delicately descriptive stroke, or maybe she uses old-fashioned mediums. Even though there's an aged patina about them, they seem very current. The press release for the show says Moran uses images she finds from the internet or magazines and works until they become abstracted. They are post-abstraction, but clearly refer to something....
Julian Hatton isn't exactly a cubist, but his approach to landscape is that of an artist trying to compress multiple perspectives into one flat canvas. His colorful landscapes, currently on view at Elizabeth Harris Gallery (in NYC, until April 12, so act fast), are suggestive, evocative, and ultimately satisfying in themselves. His work can be a bait-and-switch where, in the end, you're happy to be fooled. The color is extrapolated, which is to say it's not realistic but nor is it unrealistic, exactly. He'll use perspective lines that evoke a fence by a country road, or a round-ish shape that evokes a pond, but stack them so it's impossible that these things were observed with his feet planted in one place. You're left going through a space that doesn't make sense, like one of those screwed-up perspective rooms in a science museum. Bathe it in a Mediterranean, Matisse-esque color scheme (by way of Michigan, where Hatton was born) and you have challenging painting that feels like silk....
Painter Thomas Nozkowski spoke to a crowd gathered at the Fisher Landau Center in Long Island City, Queens. The occasion was a small survey of his paintings there (until April 14). Pace Wildenstein also has a show up, of Nozkowski's most recent work (until May 3). The show at Fisher Landau spans all of Nozkowski's mature period since the early 1970's, and includes 20 of his small-ish canvases. Mr. Nozkowski, who arrived in his Suburu just as I got to Fisher Landau, is a pleasant and modest man with big ideas and an unassuming manner. He talked about going to art school at Cooper Union in the early 60's, when the main concern was systemic painting -- creating canvases based on a set of rules. Like, what can I come up with if I confine myself to vertical dotted lines or just these colors, etc.? Nozkowski recalled going to a gallery in Soho as a young painter and seeing a show with just one 40-foot long abstract canvas. He realized that something was off in the context of abstraction. "Our rhetoric was totally someplace else." He said he thought these huge works were paintings designed for people downtown painters...
I stumbled upon Brgr yesterday, having somehow avoided any buzz or or word-of-mouth. And the days of me seeking out good hamburger restaurants are a distant memory. But as I was walking back from the art galleries in Chelsea, I happened to see they claimed to have the best milkshake in New York. Could it be true? Could a place without vowels actually have a frosty cold river of frothy, bold taste? I decided to find out. I ordered a black and white shake. They only have one size and it costs $5.50. After five minutes or so, a small, clear, plastic cup arrived about the height of a soda can. The color of the milkshake was deep sienna. The size smaller than I expected. But the flavor. Oh the flavor. It was just the right consistency, melted enough not to roadblock the straw but frozen enough to have a slow creep of wintery goodness. The vanilla taste was up-front and all around and the chocolate was subtle and lasting. It's easily as good as Shake Shack's milkshake, which is the most comparable shake I have to compare it to. And there wasn't a line. Unlike Stand, which I'm...
Since the cupcakes I made for Jennifer's birthday were such a huge success, I thought I'd share the recipe (and the modifications I made from the Barefoot Contessa's). The biggest change I made to this recipe were adding a lot more carrots, baking at 400 degrees for the whole time, and... the coup de sucre... injecting frosting into the carrot cake cupcakes. I've put up a food porn photo set from the making of. Here was the finished product (sorry for the fuzzy but the photo was taken *after* the party): Here's the recipe, with my modifications. Pretty shamefully ripped off of the Food Network's site, but I hate how URLs can disappear. 2 cups sugar 1 1/3 cups vegetable oil 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract 3 extra-large eggs 2 cups all-purpose flour 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon 2 teaspoons baking soda 1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt 3 cups grated carrots (less than 1 pound) Use a whole pound 1 cup raisins 1 cup chopped walnuts For the frosting: 3/4 pound cream cheese, at room temperature 1/2 pound unsalted butter, at room temperature 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract 1 pound confectioners' sugar Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Beat the...
