Cycladic Secrets in Translation

I made a series of prints at Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, over the course of the last year, as studies for larger paintings. They show how capricious memory is since I was at the Metropolitan Museum and looked at the Cycladic figures that inspired them. In my mind they were direct descendants. As artists we do have quite a transformative  imagination.

Seecond Post of the Day – Roxy Paine

You may remember the Roxy Paine post I did earlier about the pieces he had in Madison Square. He has a new bright silver dendriodic sculpture on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is worth a visit. In this piece the tree tops of Central Park are a perfect foil for the blinding twisting sculpture. People oddly insert themselves into the piece and seem lost in a wilderness. And it's so bright it's hard to see.

His dendroid sculptures can also be seen at the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, the Wanas Foundation in Sweden, the Montenmedio Arte Contemporaneo in Spain and the St. Louis Museum of Art. The tension between organic and man-made environments is usually amplified by his works.

Lessons in driving on Astroturf

I recently discovered Jane Dickson's work, through it's resonance with my own. She paints similar subject matter (to mine) on unusual surfaces such as Astroturf, sandpaper, vinyl, or carpet to exploiting the textural qualities of these materials.
She is vastly better known than myself having shown at The Whitney Museum, Creative Time, and The Metropolitan Museum.

Most recently she has completed a mosaic for MTA in the 42nd street station. The figures are weary revelers after New Year's Eve in Times Square. I'm sure she will continue to be an inspiration and aspiration for me.

The Pictures Generation — The Advertised Generation

I dropped by “The Pictures Generation” at the Met museum, to see the ghost of my own past. I remember when all these images burst upon the scene, advertising and marketing levered, self-reflexive and conceptual. These artists utilized recognizable commercial imagery, and mirrored or reshaped our perceptions of ourselves. The thirty artists in the show are: John Baldessari, Ericka Beckman, Dara Birnbaum, Barbara Bloom, Eric Bogosian, Glenn Branca, Troy Brauntuch, James Casebere, Sarah Charlesworth, Rhys Chatham, Charles Clough, Nancy Dwyer, Jack Goldstein, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Thomas Lawson, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, Allan McCollum, Paul McMahon, MICA-TV (Carole Ann Klonarides & Michael Owen), Matt Mullican, Richard Prince, David Salle, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Michael Smith, James Welling, and Michael Zwack. If you were making art in the 70s and 80s, it's memory lane.



These images are by top: Richard Prince, bottom: Cindy Sherman

Doing, Done and Undone

I was taken with these images as an unlikely pair. The left I shot at the Metropolitan Museum, an interesting example of an artist's methodology in painting. The right I shot in New Orleans after Katrina, carefully painted on a fence and then partially obliterated, perhaps not by the artist. They came together for me as a musing on portraiture. In one case an identity mandated by societal mores — community and the other an identity obliterated by societal mores — community. One old, one modern. Doing and Undone, what a pair.

Over Easy with Bacon

There is a major Francis Bacon show marking the centenary of the artist’s birth in 1909, at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. I've been several times already and also attended the all day symposium. The exhibition hosts together many significant works from each period of Bacon’s career. The thing I found most exciting was that he was trying new methods and ideas in his paintings at the age of 70+. One of the later paintings that really sent me was "Jet of Water" painted in 1988.

I'll be going back again several times I'm sure before it closes. I'd say I'll see you there but you might not see me. In case you don't know, I love bright orange and wear it a lot, so it occurs to me that this show is one of the few places where I am truly camouflaged.




One of the lectures was about the archaeology, transportation, reconstruction and exhibition of Bacon's 7 Reece Mews studio at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin was humorous to me in its absolute devotion to Mr. Bacon. However it was gripping in the depth of illumination of how Bacon worked. Over 7,000 items were found in the studio and all of them were database catalogued before they placed them back in their exact place in the reconstructed studio. They even took the walls section by section. I loved that he used walls as his palette, and I wish I'd been there to drink some of the champagne from the many empty boxes he threw at one end of the studio. A circular mirror hung behind him when he worked. Bacon might have turned and looked at the reflection of his work, perhaps looking at the structure in a more abstract way. Pieces of thick corduroy and things like cotton wool were found in the studio, which Bacon used to impress into wet canvas. And one last note, so no artist should ever be ashamed by their methods, cut-out photo heads of George Dyer with number of pin holes in them and paint all around the outlines, suggest they were used to trace Dyers profile on to the canvas.

O.K. you've guessed I'm now deep into the cult of Francis Bacon, if you are too...enjoy these vids!

Faces to remember

One of the joys in life is seeing new faces and meeting new people. The same holds true for art, these are two of the new faces I encountered at the Metropolitan Museum recently. It is such a large museum that even though I've been frequenting it for 50 plus years I always discover something new.

I enjoy too meeting and greeting at home. The Met's collection database is online. Check out Figure of a reclining woman or the Nude female figure. Or the Spout in the form of a man s head, now's there's a guy you even go out drinking with.

Low Tech

Sometimes these days low tech is a relief. Everything is everywhere all the time. The Metropolitan Museum, home of ancient Egyptian and Summarian peoples, has a historical costume exhibition where the whole point is to blog, on the spot, about what people are seeing/thinking/narrating.

Today I've included a photo taken from my window with a lens I built myself, from components I got from Edmund Scientific. Admittedly it is now mounted on a digital camera, but there is a comfort in the idea that we still might be able to do things all by ourselves without assistance and certainly without blogging about it. Oops...