Secret Language

Abstract painters always seem to talk about painting as language and the individuality of mark making. I have come to enjoy the secret coding of the walls and sidewalks of New York. These particular ones are clustered in Chelsea.

A red, blue, green and yellow Herring

Oliver Herring's recent show at Meulensteen was vastly entertaining. Part happening, part exhibition, part people spitting paint. I went a few times to see the evolution, layer on layer, an artist's form of reality TV or is that just what we fondly remember as reality?

Chelsea sightings...

In Chelsea recently, lots of shows about...surfing. Made me sooooooo want to get outta town.

Missing Edward Winkleman

The thing about gallery wandering through Chelsea is that you intersect with lots of people. At the openings you expect it. In fact, I recently introduced myself to Chuck Close, a personal hero because he has that renaissance touch in multiple media, at a Pace opening. But the sweetest moments are fleeting. At the instant I was taking the photograph above, Edward Winkleman walked by. He saw me and turned his head to see what I was seeing and kept striding. By the time I gathered my wits to say hello, he was gone. For the rest of the day I felt an odd kinship, every photo a mapping of that oh so slender event.

Appropriate Appropriation?

An exhibition I saw recently at Cheim & Read hosts recent work by London-based artist Paul Morrison. Morrison is best known for boldly graphic landscape paintings, wall drawings, sculpture and animations. his work brought up some of the "Fairey Use" issues we've been discussing but is so beautiful I didn't care at all. His work incorporates found imagery culled from various pictorial genres and different time periods; early botanical illustrations, Northern Renaissance woodcuts, and even Disney cartoons (Oh Fairey...) I especially liked the way he uses scale both in the works and in the installation. He also had an elegant blue moulin video, simultaneously soothing and slightly menacing.

Artwalk 11103

O.K. compulsive image gathering must have a name. Pixomania? Snaprography? Photogaphobia? Well...here are a few from a recent walk in Chelsea.

But is it art?

In galleries and on the street...

Outsider Art

I was thinking about outsider art yesterday since my friend artist Lori Henderson is visiting from Louisiana. She may or may not be an outsider artist. Does outsider mean naive? If so then she is not. Does it mean primitive? then maybe. Self-taught? then yes. Is she a vernacular artist (another definition)? No, since she recognizes herself as an artist. We hashed this over all afternoon and came to no conclusions. But as we were walking down the street on gallery row in Chelsea, I spied this work in the trash, on the street, next to a banana peel. It is absolutely "outsider art."