I finally finished the Old Croton Aqueduct Trail (OCA). This trail follows the path of the old water delivery service between the Croton Aqueduct and New York City. The aqueduct went 29 miles from bucolic natural land, through the suburbs of Westchester County, and ended in the city. The aqueduct is no longer used, but the land it was on has been wisely converted into a long trail that serves as an escape from the hectic congestion of New York. Beginning in the Bronx and going in a fairly straight shot, one can feel many miles away from hte world of concrete, taxis and construction. Before Iris was born, I walked about 20 miles of the trail. Since then, I haven't had the opportunity to finish the OCA. Last week, however, Iris was in daycare and there was a clear sky and moderate temperatures. I pounced on the opportunity to walk in the woods. Getting off the commuter train at Scarborough, I picked up the trail and immediately realized I had chosen the best time possible to walk the OCA. The woods were ablaze; leaves were falling and in full fall splendor. I reached for my camera right away, but...
I just finished Ross Feld's wonderful book "Guston in Time." Feld belongs to that line of poets like Baudelaire and Frank O'Hara that were deeply involved in visual art. He brings an incredible eye and descriptive power to Philip Guston's work and also a great asset: he was one of Guston's closest friends in the later years. This book lays open the minds of two artists struggling to get at something in their work and arguing over what it means to create. The book is quite short, and much of it consists of letters between Guston and Feld. Guston had given up abstract painting and was considered a traitor by many in the art world. He said he could no longer spend his life just measuring whether a dab of red would suffice on the picture plane. Abstraction and "pure" picture-making held no more allure for him. He had to paint recognizable forms and figures. Guston tells Feld about teaching at Boston University and watching a student trying to paint a mural with a clock in it. The student fussed over how to paint the clock, working a long time and re-working it over and over. In the end, says...
While in the library a couple weeks ago, I came across Gregory Curtis's book "The Cave Painters." It's a slim volume that is an excellent introduction to the art produced in the caves of western Europe from 30,000 to 10,000 years ago. By the time I finished it, my mind was awash in ideas about my own painting and what it means to put paint to a surface. The strangest thing about the study of cave painting is that it's almost a forensic science. Anthropologists gather evidence, chart history, where things appear and how often. But there's an elephant in the room: why? Why did people go to the caves to produce art? No one knows. And there is a stigma on the people who seriously study cave painting to actually create coherent theories as to why. The dominant thinking now is that we'll never understand why these paintings were created. I sympathize with this point of view. There's just not a lot of evidence. My regret is that I can't listen in to the lunchtime conversations of the people who study this stuff. There have to be interesting and provocative ideas out there that will never be published, just...
Today was a memorial service for painter and teacher Carl Plansky. I was enlisted to speak as one of his students. I have so many fond memories of Carl and felt honored to be asked, even though I felt inadequate to the task. He was a big presence in my time at the Studio School last year, and his influence will always be felt in my painting. He's just one of those strong voices on my shoulder. The best part of the service was seeing the people from Carl's life and getting an even richer sense of the man. Sadly, I had to leave after the service because Iris was not being a happy baby. For my birthday last January, Jennifer decided to buy me a few tubes of really nice oil paint that she knew I would never buy myself. She knew I love Williamsburg paint and that I felt a connection with Carl. Sneaking on the internet, she found Carl's e-mail address and e-mailed him about wanting to get me a nice gift of colors. She gave him a budget, and Carl generously gave a gift of much more paint than she asked for. He sent me a...
Former Artforum editor Joseph Masheck and MoMA's John Elderfield have a good conversation about Piet Mondrian and his retrospective in 1996 in the video from Charlie Rose below. It's clear Rose doesn't know much about Mondrian, but his combative and aggressive questioning eventually gets at something interesting. And speaking of something interesting (and Joseph Masheck), I came across this quote by Thomas Nozkowski at artist Ashlynn Browning's site: I think any artist reaches a point at which their motor skills have developed. Once their brain/hand coordination's gotten to a certain level, they finally know how to do their own paintings. And it's a terrible moment. A terrible, terrible thing. Before that, it's all adventure. I'm gonna crash and burn or I'm gonna make it happen. Suddenly, you can make it happen, and that's scary. It's really the worst position, I think, for an artist to be in, and you have to find a way around it. Years ago, Joe Masheck and I were talking about Renoir's Society of Irregularists, the fight against what Renoir called false perfection. He said something like, "I'm going to start painting with my left hand and mess it up on purpose." And fifteen, twenty years...
I'm slowly making my way with acrylics. It was hard to give up oils, which I know I'll go back to, but having my studio in my apartment means not being able to use all the lovely toxic chemicals that I feel the need to use with oils. So I'm diving into the world of plastics. The pieces below are all 9" x 12". A funny thing has happened where I've begun starting pieces with particular feelings, ideas and colors in mind. And then I put them down and the painting speaks to me about what it needs. Because my ideas and feelings are different, each piece calls for something different to be completed. I used to worry about cohesiveness. Now I just think that's silly. Who lives their life worrying whether one day will fit the next? Dinosaur For C.P. Sally's Shadow Two Monsters...
I've always loved Irving Penn's still life photos the best. Gnarled cigarettes in velvety silver have as much character as a his famous image of Picasso's face; frozen food looks geometric like the third stage of cubism (after analytic and synthetic comes organic, of course). NY Times obit here. Irving Penn, Picasso at La Californie, Cannes, France, 1957 Irving Penn, Cigarette 17, New York, 1972 Irving Penn, Frozen Foods, New York, 1977...
I published a piece on these two artists over the Examiner. I've been in the studio a lot lately, working with acrylic paint in a serious, sustained way. I've always avoided it because the colors don't come naturally to me. I can be blown away by other people's acrylic color, but mine always has seemed artificial and harsh. Somehow I've gotten over that hump (and will post pics soon). In any case, I've been thinking a lot about how artists' approach liquidity....
After disappearing into the abyss of Independent Film Week for a documentary about a gold-mining town in Colombia that I'm working on, I'm finally back in groove of making art, thinking about art, and writing about art. Yesterday I posted my latest piece for the Examiner: an interview with Matt Held, who has received notoriety for having the idea to paint portraits of people based on their Facebook profile photo. Since much of the art world is about ideas but fails to find a suitable visual form, I was skeptical about seeing Matt's show at Denise Bibro. But after seeing the paintings, I was a true believer. The man can paint, and the work looks fantastic. The experience added to my continuing problem with the role of ideas, which are allied with words, to art, which is allied with the visual/spatial sense. It's an age-old dilemma of how much of our experience comes through language, and how much transcends it. On the one extreme would be postmodern structuralists like Derrida who say our experience is completely formed by language. On the other extreme would be anthropologists and biologists who say language is simply performing a biological function of soothing and...
