Thank you for your submission to the 2011 Boston Young Contemporaries Exhibition. We are pleased to inform you that the following pieces were accepted:
Percorso di amore
Eight
We congratulate you and look forward to seeing you at the opening and awards reception on July 15th at 808 Commonwealth Gallery.
Your piece must be hand delivered to the gallery between July 5th - 9th. All work exhibited at the 808 Gallery must be ready to hang, complete with all necessary hardware and installation instructions where applicable.
The exhibition will be open to the public from July 15 to August 14, 2011. Since this is a student run show, all artists represented in the show are asked to volunteer time to sit in the gallery. There will be a sign-up sheet at the time that you drop off your work. We ask that you offer your time in this joint effort to promote the show. If someone is interested in purchasing your piece during the show, we will refer them directly to you. At the end of the show, your work must be picked up between August 14-17, 2011.
Please reply to this email, accepting or declining the invitation to participate in this exhibition before June 3rd, 2011. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us using this email address.
We look forward to seeing your work and meeting you.
Sincerely,
BYC
-- Boston Young Contemporaries Boston University School of Visual Arts 855 Commonwealth Ave. Room 552 Boston, 02215
Polke experimented with a wide range of styles, subject matter and materials. In the 1970s, he concentrated on photography, returning to paint in the 1980s, when he produced abstract works created by chance through chemical reactions between paint and other products. In the last 20 years, he produced paintings focused on historical events and perceptions of them.
The anarchistic element of the work Polke developed, was largely engendered by his mercurial approach. His irreverence for traditional painting techniques and materials and his lack of allegiance to any one mode of representation has established his now-respected reputation as a visual revolutionary. It was not unusual for Polke to combine household materials and paint, lacquers, pigments, screen print and transparent sheeting in one piece. A complicated "narrative" is often implicit in the multi-layered picture, giving the effect of witnessing the projection of a hallucination or dream through a series of veils.
His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his "extended definition of art" and the idea of social sculpture as a gesamtkunstwerk, for which he claimed a creative, participatory role in shaping society and politics. His career was characterized by passionate, even acrimonious public debate, but he is now regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.
OK here is my paintings. I am going to start with my process samples and then my bigger renditions.
I explored more acrylic/dye/ink/bleach/egg/resin/alcohol/natural weathering - layered using both sides of the canvas - soak stained dyed and weathered. I throw myself into all of my paintings - in a spiritual context. In my application/process, I become one with my paintings through a stain dying, walking, handling paint with my fingers, rubbing with my fist, touching, pushing and developing layers...ect. Each of my paintings that I have given you in the link, is a piece of ME. I approach each canvas in entirety - handling the front, back, top, sides and bottom pouring my heart, mind, body and soul. Each are confrontations, webs, mazes, struggles, hardships, victories that I work through within each of these canvases. Also, I tie historical context into my present day reality.
Smaller paintings:
Bigger Paintings - 54 x 72 & 54 x 84
Friday, April 1, 2011
New interests and art sources....and a little update: Thanks to my friend Andres - he has told me about some intriguing people that I want to post that intrigue me because of the nature of my artwork, creating a portal. .
The long awaited James Turrell Skyspace, Light Reign, was unveiled to the public in July of 2003. Since then, it has been the site of numerous meditation sessions, a Quaker silent meeting, a performance art piece, an audio installation by artist Steve Roden, and thousands of individual visits. Combining architecture, sculpture, and atmosphere, the work is not only a spectacular addition to the museum√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s permanent collection, it is also now an important part of the building’s architecture. Turrell’s work is meant to be taken in slowly, quietly, and over time. The Skyspace experience varies at different times of the year and different times of day. Visitors are encouraged to stop in again and again to sit back and absorb the effects of the Skyspace over the course of the seasons. Visitors are also encouraged to swing by the Henry Art Gallery after dark to see the spectrum of intense colors that the exterior of the Skyspace emits when lit by thousands of computer controlled LED lights embedded in its glass panels. WHO IS JAMES Turrell? James Turrell is an internationally acclaimed light and space artist whose work can be found in collections worldwide. Since childhood, Turrell has been fascinated with the qualities of light. Turrell√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s mother and grandmother were Quakers. When he was a child growing up in Pasadena, CA, he remembers his grandmother telling him what to do at a Quaker meeting: “Go inside and greet the light.” He majored in mathematics and perceptual psychology at Pomona College, Claremont, CA. He went on to study art at the University of California at Irvine. A recently re-lapsed Quaker, Turrell is also a long-time airplane pilot and rancher. James Turrell uses light as his medium. Over more than three decades, he has created striking works that play with perception and the effect of light within a created space. Turrell has said, “My work is about space and the light that inhabits it. It is about how you confront that space and plumb it. It is about your seeing.” His large-scale, often architectural works incorporate the complex interplay of sky, light and atmosphere in motion across expanses of ocean, desert, and city. Loosely linked to the California light and space art movement, Turrell is best known for his monumental land art project at Roden Crater outside Flagstaff, AZ. WHAT IS A Skyspace? A James Turrell skyspace is a freestanding enclosed chamber large enough for about 15 people and designed and constructed with utmost precision to heighten our sense of sight and perception. The Henry Art Gallery Skyspace is the very first to combine two aspects of James Turrell’s work: skyspace and exterior architectural illumination, making it accessible to viewers from both the inside and the outside. From the outside, the elliptical chamber becomes a luminous light work as the eighteen foot-high glass panels covering its exterior are softly illuminated from within with slowly changing color. Inside the skyspace, visitors sit on a bench and view the sky and atmospheric changes through an opening in the roof. On rainy days a moveable dome covers the opening and a secondary light source creates a seemingly infinite visual space beyond the roof √¢‚Ǩ≈ìaperture.√¢‚Ǩ¬ù
Jeff Donaldson - the muralist
http://www.idvl.org/thehistorymakers/Bio125.html Jeff Donaldson is a muralist. He was the leader of the movement to create an African American art based on black cultural experience. His work deals Racial conscience and political commitment. He also adds the rhythm of jazz, struggle, color, and "shine" that he felt represented the vibrancy and resilency of the African American spirit. The work of art that really caught my attention was The Wall of Respect. Jeff Richardson Donaldson was born and raised in Pine Bluffs, Arkansas. At the age of three, he loved to watch his older brother draw; soon he was drawing his own cartoons and comic books. As a studio art major at the University of Arkansas, he studied with John Howard, who had been a student of Harlem Renaissance painter Hale Woodruff. Howard helped to nurture Donaldson's growing interest in Afrocentric art, which Donaldson expanded through travel in Africa and study of African art history. Donaldson earned a master's degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and later earned a Ph.D. in African and African American art history from Northwestern University. Donaldson came of age at a time of rapid social change, as African Americans demanded both civil rights and respect for a black culture that refused to compromise itself to mainstream white values. Soon after beginning his academic career, he became involved in the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC). Through its visual art workshop, which Donaldson organized, its member artists created the "Wall of Respect" in Chicago. This mural, which 12 artists painted on an abandoned brick corner building in 1967, depicted more than 50 individuals who personified black pride, including Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Malcolm X, and Muhammad Ali.Washington Post critic Paul Richard later described the wall as a "black-is-beautiful piece, a rough guerrilla mural, part hall of fame, part billboard, pridefully depicting black figures who took pride in being black." Pointedly omitting the image of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose integrationist message was at odds with OBAC's more militant approach, the mural emphasized art that, in Richard's words, "would be vigorous and colorful and African at root. And purposefully political. Dazzling and new, it would shine out like a flower on the African family tree." The Wall of Respect, which was destroyed after it was damaged by fire in 1971, became an icon of the black pride movement. It is credited with spawning an urban mural movement throughout the country in the 1970s which included Detroit's "Wall of Dignity".
Nelson Stevens
Nelson Steven's art is a reflection of elements both physical and spiritual which have their grounding in the African-American experience. His rhythmical, multi-layered reassemble of form and color can be likened to the quality of syncretism inherent is most aspects of our African-American culture. When we were brought over here, we were forced to give up our African culture and adopt a wholly different system of philosophy. But our captors were not entirely successful in destroying all that was African and much of what today is considered "American" is really African-American--religion, language, dance and music--a blend-of two opposing systems into one. For more information, please visit his website http://www.nelsonstevens.com
When artist Nelson Stevens looks at a person he sees a broad palette of colors. That vision embues his portraits with a multi-hued, mosaic-like style. "I look at people and see the image in them," said the professor emeritus of art and Afro-American studies at the University of Massachusetts. "My art is anthems in praise of people." Stevens' visual hymns will be on view this month and next at Augusta Savage Gallery at UMass in a retrospective exhibition titled "Gems in the Valley: A Toast to Nelson Stevens." The show commemorates the enormous influence he had on UMass as a teacher during his 30-year tenure, and on the Black Arts Movement in America. Stevens role in the movement has been chronicled in the 2008 book "Resistance, Insurgence and Identity: The Art of Mari Evans, Nelson Stevens and the Black Arts Movement (Africa World Press) by Robert L. Douglas. "Gems" features works dating back to the 1970s in a range of styles and mediums, including works on paper, canvas, doors, board, album covers and prints in magazines and calendars. Unifying the wide-ranging collection is its grounding in the African-American experience and Stevens' exuberant celebration of color. "I love to mix paints," he said. "I love to see what it does to other people. Art is communication; it is selfish to do it for yourself." "Gems in the Valley" opens with a reception on Feb. 9, from 5 to 7 p.m., and will be on view at the gallery in New Africa House through March 13. Stevens' career has spanned over five decades and a multitude of media and styles. But one thing hasn't changed: his commitment to use art to beautify communities. During his long teaching career at UMass Amherst, Stevens would bring his students to Springfield to paint murals around the city. He did it, he said, "to make an outdoor gallery for the community. "It was a way to sanctify the community," he added, in the great tradition of the mural movement, dating back to the early 20th century in Mexico. "The mural movement is like stained-glass windows for people," he said. "We built a lot of friendships in Springfield because of it. The people on the streets would bring us pie." Now retired from teaching and living in Baltimore, Md., Stevens, 70, took time last week to reflect on his lifetime in art in a phone conversation. His earliest memory of wanting to be an artist goes back to drawing with hopscotch chalk on the sidewalks of his native Brooklyn. "We lived in this five-story building," he said, "and after we drew on the sidewalks we would go to the roof and look down at what we had done." Stevens' grandmother, a domestic worker for a sculptor on Central Park West, taught Stevens what she learned at her work about the ins and outs of an artist's career, and became a big inspiration to him, he said. "We would go to Central Park and talk about the color of the pigeons," Stevens recalled. Later his fourth-grade teacher recommended him to a class at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. That sealed the deal. Once out of junior college, Stevens immediately added teaching to his practice of art. "I always enjoyed seeing that oh yeah' moment," he said, "to see [the students[']] eyes get big." One of the highlights of his career as an artist was getting involved with the Black Art Movement in Chicago in the 1960s. Stevens had earned an M.F.A. at Kent State University in Ohio, and joined AFRICOBRA - African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists - an organization that plastered the walls of Chicago buildings with images of the black cultural revolution. Stevens said that in graduate school, he'd had to convince his teachers and fellow classmates that black art exists as its own entity. He remembers his teachers saying things like, "What do you mean? Is there a specific way black people hold a brush?" Previous to the movement, there was no literature to suggest that black art deserved its own category, but murals like "The Wall of Respect," painted in 1967 in Chicago by Stevens and other members of the Organization of Black American Culture helped change that. "He's one of the leading figures in the visual arts wing of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s," said John Bracey, who taught at Northern Illinois University with Stevens and came to UMass Amherst with him in 1972. One piece in the show commemorative of that time is the vibrant and powerful 1972 "Sister Spirit," a piece that usually hangs on Stevens' wall. Though much of his work is figurative, the broad range of styles in the show will also include abstract work on hollow wooden doors and works from his Black Christian Fine Arts Calendar project, "Art in the Service of the Lord." In sum, he said, "It'll be a cross-section of my life that I'm very proud of."
Now just waiting on my next 6 books I just ordered:
This fascinating study of mathematical thinking among sub-Saharan African peoples covers counting in words and in gestures; measuring time, distance, weight, and other quantities; manipulating money and keeping accounts; number systems; patterns in music, poetry, art, and architecture; and number magic and taboos. African games such as mankala and elaborate versions of tic-tac-toe show how complex this thinking can be. An invaluable resource for students, teachers, and others interested in African cultures and multiculturalism, this third edition is updated with an introduction covering two decades of new research in the ethnomathematics of Africa.
Spirit of African Design is as richly vibrant as the masks, nail fetishes, Senufo beds and portraiture that graces its pages.... The authors infuse the spirit of the continent into every area of the home... -- Quarterly Black Review, Judy Willis
Two design experts share their knowledge of and enthusiasm for African design and style, presenting African motifs as displayed in contemporary home settings. As most titles on African design focus on either museum holdings or native settings, this makes for a different approach to African design which teaches a new perspective, standing apart from the myriad of African art and contemporary design standards. -- Midwest Book Review
Fractals are characterized by the repetition of similar patterns at ever-diminishing scales. Fractal geometry has emerged as one of the most exciting frontiers on the border between mathematics and information technology and can be seen in many of the swirling patterns produced by computer graphics. It has become a new tool for modeling in biology, geology, and other natural sciences.
Anthropologists have observed that the patterns produced in different cultures can be characterized by specific design themes. In Europe and America, we often see cities laid out in a grid pattern of straight streets and right-angle corners. In contrast, traditional African settlements tend to use fractal structure--circles of circles of circular dwellings, rectangular walls enclosing ever-smaller rectangles, and streets in which broad avenues branch down to tiny footpaths with striking geometric repetition. These indigenous fractals are not limited to architecture; their recursive patterns echo throughout many disparate African designs and knowledge systems.
Drawing on interviews with African designers, artists, and scientists, Ron Eglash investigates fractals in African architecture, traditional hairstyling, textiles, sculpture, painting, carving, metalwork, religion, games, practical craft, quantitative technologies, and symbolic systems. He also examines the political and social implications of the existence of African fractal geometry. His book makes a unique contribution to the study of mathematics, African culture, anthropology, and computer simulations.
"This Companion represents a move away from the more traditionally conceived broad surveys of contemporary art available to date, and is refreshing in its innovative approach to this complex subject ... essential reading for students and scholars of contemporary art history, visual culture, and visual theory, and general readers just wishing to develop their understanding of this complex subject." Reference Reviews
“Provocative, wide-ranging, and impressively inclusive…a welcome and important addition for the understanding of the art of our historical present and a boon companion for the general reader, the artist, the student, the art historian and the critic alike.” Abigail Solomon-Godeau, University of California, Santa Barbara
“By keeping its finger on the pulse of the present, while commenting on the recent past, this book reminds us why contemporary art, and contemporary art history, matters." Geoffrey Batchen, City University of New York
Hello and what a month! I can barely believe that we are about to start April! I love April - my 3rd anniversary is on the 5th, which makes me really happy that it is arriving at rocket speed.
I will apologize in advance - this is such a long post. Just been really busy!!! Living my dream. Excited and still borrowing full speed ahead.
Shout-OUT: I am truly enjoying my new studio space and really grateful to my husband for making this happen for me. UPDATES: He just hung me up extra lights, put in some ac, ran some blinds and bought me a new day bed. (i WILL SHOW YOU IN MY NEXT POST)
******Side NOTE: Should you only want to see my art work progressions please just scroll down to SECTION 8 -”My WORK”
Overview of Blog posting with Start with my: 1) Inspirational visit 2) Clip of Writing #3 - March Critical Theory paper - The Spirit of Art 3) New techniques and explorations 4) DVD’s watched with Information 5) Books read and recommendations 6) New artist 7) Kuba & Direct impact on my work 8) my work! 9) MID - term REVIEW
Section 1 - Inspirational visit: For starters I went to Cy Twombly Gallery which provided endless inspiration. Here is some info about the gallery: Cy Twombly Gallery 1501 Branard Houston, texas 11 a.m.–7 p.m.Wednesday–Sunday 713-525-9400
A little information: Cy Twombly brought a distinctive approach to painting and sculpture that evaded precise affiliation with the predominant movements of the twentieth century, including Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism. Inspired by ancient Mediterranean history and geography, Greek and Roman mythology, and epic poetry, Twombly created—sometimes on a grand scale, in multiple-panel works—a sometimes-inscrutable world of iconography, metaphor, and myth. The breadth of Twombly’s imagination and his interdisciplinary approach to subjects traverse vast distances, resulting in works that are at once baroque and spare, modern and ancient.
Commissioned by Dominique de Menil and opened in 1995, the Cy Twombly Gallery is architect Renzo Piano’s second U.S. commission (the first being the main building of the Menil Collection). Based on an initial sketch by Twombly himself, the building features an exterior of pre-cast, scored concrete (the façade is meant to resemble stone blocks). Turned demurely away from the street, the entrance faces a great live oak tree on the east lawn. Like the main building across the street, the Cy Twombly Gallery possesses a sophisticated roofing system of filtered glass and steel louvers. Described by Piano as “a butterfly alighting on a firm surface,” a grid of white steel seems to float over the entire building. Throughout the 9300 square-foot interior, canvas sailcloth ceilings further modulate the Texas sun, with light playing softly on the galleries’ plaster walls and white-oak floors.
I also went to my friend Damion smiths’s exhibit. Great stuff!
labotanica presents
Painting as Performance
Friday, March 25
6-8pm
labotanica
2316 Elgin, 77004
Painting as Performance is a group exhibition that frames non-traditional approaches to painting. Featuring artworks by Melanie Jamison, Ayanna Jolivet Mccloud, Erin Joyce, Rebecca Novak, and Damon Smith, artists use the trajectory of painting as a starting point and embed and extend the medium with performative, sculptural, and sonic elements. The process of making these works often involves a performative aspect. The artworks jump off of the two-dimensional plane to demand more from the artist/ audience, challenging a typical static experience often experienced in painting and in this way become performative.
Melanie Jamison graduated with a BFA in Illustration from Parsons School of Design. During her years in New York, she became involved with the MELA Foundation Dream House, where she became a vocal raga student of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. Melanie continues to practice extended vocal techniques in the Houston girl band of rotating fruit names and rotating members. She participates in the multimedia, seemingly multidimensional prank project “Incoming Call” with Aisen Caro Chacin and Al Eckstue. Melanie has collaborated with Ayanna McCloud on exploring sound textures of the physical and visual realms. Her tactile aesthetics are carried over into recently formed noise band VRS with Mary Sharpe and Erika Thrasher. Melanie works in the warehouse district of Houston where industrial influences are prevalent in her work.
Ayanna Jolivet Mccloud is an artist and writer. Her arts practice which manifests itself in different forms draws attention to the unseen, imagined and forgotten. Born in Houston, Texas, she received a BA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has participated in exhibitions and residencies throughout the U.S., Caribbean and Latin America. She is founder of labotanica and is currently an Artist-in-Residence at Project Row Houses.
Erin Joyceis a painter, sculptor, performer, curator and Houston native. She has exhibited in local venues such as labotanica, DiverseWorks, Lawndale Art Center, New Gallery, and Café Brazil. In all her mediums, she creates intimate experiences in which viewers and subjects (and the artist) encounter hidden or suppressed emotions. To add to her self-taught drawing skills and personal sensibility she received a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008. Erin has also lived, worked, and exhibited in Providence, RI, St. Petersburg, Russia, New York City, and Santa Fe,NM.
Rebecca Novak is a sculptor and visual artist who began creative endeavors as a musician, and maintains an interest in cross-disciplinary practices. Her work explores natural phenomenon, ecology, and society’s tenuous relationship to nature, often addressing environment in a broader sense. Ongoing projects include contributing to the greenHouse collective, an artist-based gardening and permaculture project at Project Row Houses; co-curating the film series Science on Screen with 14 Pews micro cinema; and an upcoming debut of her composition Siren Song for the reflection pool at Rothko Chapel for the band currently known as Durian Durian. Rebecca has attended artist residencies at Project Row Houses (2009) and labotanica (School of Latitudes #1, 2010). Her work has been shown at Lawndale Art Center, MFAH Glassell School of Art, Project Row Houses, labotanica, Houston Community College, and the Houston Foundry.
Damon Smith's art practice includes sound, painting, video, graphic and traditional scores, photography, sculpture and drawing. His work had been shown Galleries in the San Francisco bay area, MassMOCA, Vienna, Munich and Denton, TX. An ongoing collaboration with artist Daniel Healey is an important project. He studied double bass with Lisle Ellis and Bertram Turezky. He has worked with dance, theater and film including soundtracks for Werner Herzog's "Grizzly Man" & "Encounters at the end of the World" and an early performance with the Merce Cunningham dance company. He has collaborated with a wide range of musicians including Cecil Taylor, Marshall Allen (of Sun Ra´s Arkestra), Henry Kaiser, Peter Brötzmann and Peter Kowald. He has toured Europe, Israel and North America and worked often in the San Francisco Bay Area Creative Music Community before relocating to Houston in 2010.
labotanica is a project space in Houston, Texas. key words: reciprocity, exploration, freedom, magical thinking, open-ended, flexibility, de-center, soulfulness. labotanica is part of Project Row Houses Residency and Incubation program.www.labotanica.org
Section 2: Also, I wrote my paper on the Spirit of Art - Which I really enjoyed. Here is a clip from the ending of my paper: Art’s form is material, yet deals with inner reality. It is embodiment, a process that enlarges and expands our awareness. My new found inspiration and the basis for this paper is the awareness that God does not only speak through his appointed ministers - that he may be at work everywhere in the world, even in art pieces. So long for the visually naive days in the Renaissance where it was only possible for Michelangelo to represent God as a bearded man, and welcome to the days where we are presently cluttered with images, and only abstract art can bring us in the threshold of the divine!
The object of art is not to reflect the visible but to make visible.
Paul Klee
Section 3 - New Techniques and Adventures: I have been working with mono-types/mono-prints which my mentor urged me to do which has really built on my work. Very happy with my progress here.
I also have been building some major texture with caulking stuff from Home Depo - I will point it out in the pictures bellow. Section 4 - DVD's watched with reviews: 1) Who Gets to Call It Art? DVD John Chamberlain, et al As the curator of contemporary art at New York's Metropolitan Museum in the nineteen-sixties, the drolly rambunctious Henry Geldzahler was a key player in the city's exuberant modern-art scene. Andy Warhol's confidant, David Hockney's longtime friend, and a habitué of countless studios, openings, bars, and happenings, Geldzahler (who died in 1994) organized a legendary 1970 exhibit of four hundred works from the previous thirty years of New York art, and time has borne out the power of his exacting taste. Peter Rosen's engaging documentary about the late connoisseur is over-edited to a music-video rush, but evocative archival footage and trenchant interviews with artists arouse nostalgia for the converging postwar currents that made New York the capital of artistic originality, for the cheap housing that afforded artists the time to achieve it, and for a bygone age of lower image saturation, when the romantic craft of painting was a crucial source of news from the outer and inner world.
2) Painters Painting New York Art Scene, et al The Abstract Expressionists have been cannonized and mythologized to such an extent by popular culture, that the reality of the most important American Art Movement is difficult to experience from the recent books and treatises on the subject. Painters Painting, itself an important art work by film-maker Emile de Antonio, propels us back into that existentialist time in such a complete and satisfying way, that we finish feeling like we just had dinner ourselves with all the suspects of the time at the Cedar Tavern . We discover even the notorious critic Hilton Kramer has a face. From deKooning to Warhol, the musings of the artists include Frankenthaler, Hoffman, Motherwell, Barnett Newman (my personal favorite in this film: "I believe that art theory is to me as an artist what ornithology must be for the birds"), Johns, Rauschenberg, Noland, Olitsky, Pavia, Poons, and Frank Stella. Interviews include the controversial Clement Greenberg at his best. As you can tell from the artist list, the film begins with Abstract Expressionism, winds its way through Hard-Edge and Color Field painting, before it finishes with the Grande Dame of the New York Art Scene of the 60's, Andy Warhol. This is a documentary not to be missed.
3) Robert Motherwell & the New York School: Storming the Citadel Clement Greenberg, et al This program, made shortly before Robert Motherwell's death in 1991, is an exploration of the Abstract Expressionist movement and a portrait of one of its last survivors. Having come to New York in the early 1940s, Motherwell found himself on the battleground of American art. He and a group of painters set out to change the face of American painting. The film charts this epic battle led by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell, who endeavored to make American painting equal to painting elsewhere and, in the process, shifted the center of modern art from Paris to New York. The film contains archive footage and photographs of the artists, of Greenwich Village where they lived, of the events which influenced their lives - World War II, the WPA, the Spanish Civil War. Also included are interviews with art critic Clement Greenberg, art historian William Rubin, sculptor and founder of The Eight Street Club, Philip Pavia, Surrealist Robert Matta, artist Larry Rivers, art historian and curator Henry Geldzahler, gallery owner Sidney Janis, and art historian Jack Flam. Interwoven throughout the documentary is film of Motherwell painting in his Greenwich studio, creating a collage in Provincetown and preparing for a major retrospective of his work at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
BEST YET!!!!!!!!!!!! Natasha told me to get this, and even though it was too much money, IT WAS REALLY AWESOME! Highly recommended and thank you MOM AND DAD for the educational treat.
4) The Shock of the New - 4 DVD Set I saw this documentary and it totally changed my way of looking at art, architecture and eventually even music which it really didn't even address in the film. When you spend the time with the fabulous Robert Hughes who is so impassioned with what he is talking about and describes it in such easily understood terms, you come away with not just an appreciation but a way of seeing. Years later after seeing this documentary I was in Barcelona and stumbled into the Picasso museum with my five year old kid and it all came back to me everything that Hughes had said about Picasso and modern art in general. The two of us had a wonderful time exploring Picasso and a few years later we got to see a Goya exhibit and could make the transition of fascination and joy of art to older works as well. His explanation of the significance of the Eiffel Tower made our journey up to the top just that more thrilling. This documentary for me was a springboard to great things and a way of looking at life. All I can say is thank you Robert Hughes! I think if you are lucky enough to see this film you will say the same thing.
Section 5 - Books: 1) Consciousness of artistic form : a comparison of the visual, gestalt art formations of children, adolescents, and layman adults with historical art, folk art, and aboriginal art / by Henry Schaefer-Simmern ; editor, Gertrude Schaefer-Simmern ; assistant to the editor, Roy E. Abrahamson ; historical drawings by Sylvia Fein.
2) Vision and art : the biology of seeing / Margaret Livingstone ; foreword by David Hubel.
3) Art beyond sight : a resource guide to art, creativity, and visual impairment / edited by Elisabeth Salzhauer Axel and Nina Sobol Levent.
4) Seeing/perception : looking at the world through an artist's eye / Ann O'Hanlon ; with photographs by Ann & Dick O'Hanlon.
5) Catching the big fish : meditation, consciousness, and creativity / David Lynch.
6) Hand-painted pop : American art in transition, 1955-62 / exhibition organized by Donna De Salvo and Paul Schimmel ; edited by Russell Ferguson ; with essays by David Deitcher ... [et al.].
7) Abstract expressionism : a critical record / [edited by] David Shapiro and Cecile Shapiro.
8) The painting of modern life : 1960s to now / [exhibition curated by Ralph Rugoff ; exhibition organised by Caroline Hancock ; assisted by Siobhan McCracken].
MY Favorites and Recommended: 9) Looking both ways : art of the contemporary African diaspora / edited by Laurie Ann Farrell ; with contributions by Valentijn Byvanck, Allan deSouza ... [et al.]
Mark Bradford’s abstractions unite high art and popular culture as unorthodox tableaux of unequivocal beauty. Working in both paint and collage, Bradford incorporates elements from his daily life into his canvases: remnants of found posters and billboards, graffitied stencils and logos, and hairdresser’s permanent endpapers he’s collected from his other profession as a stylist. In The Devil is Beating His Wife, Bradford consolidates all these materials into a pixelised eruption of cultural cross-referencing. Built up on plywood in sensuous layers ranging from silky and skin-like to oily and singed, Bra
Thomas Nowskowski I am struck by the slow process of his painting technique, which is as much composed of removal as addition of paint. That the layers and removals of paint are in fact traces of personal moments in time. There are no premeditated sketches, but all work is produced directly onto the surface (linen stretched over board). He said that he likes to be able to insert his personal experiences in the paintings, for instance if someone dies or gets born. The paintings almost act as diaries. He finishes ten, twenty paintings a year but start about thirty. He has about three hundred unfinished paintings in his possession that are awaiting completion. I find the fact that he allows time into the painting process comforting and also the fact that it is ok to put a canvas to the side and let it sort of wait for the right moment. Regarding the completion of the canvas, he says “I know when a painting is finished when I understand why I wanted to do it in the first place. When it becomes clear, there is this energized space, there is this color, there is something interesting to me.” I am also struck by the variety in the expression of the line and colors of his paintings. It seems like no painting resembles another; however, all paintings are the same size 16”X20”. He says that he pays a lot of attention to the scale and the size of the canvas. By paintings small he has the physical ability to explore much more than on a large surface and the expression remains very intimate. Regarding his process, he says “Everything I do comes from something in the real world, not limited to objects or places but pretty much anything. And I try to come up with difficult sources for images. Could I paint this right now, you and I here talking? The space between us, the light behind you? I might start drawing one of these real objects and try to go with it. See if I can get something that works.” In a video, he shows the site of an old waste site and starts talking about the objects found on the ground and in nature. He says that he uses interesting shapes and colors found in the real world, paints them on the canvas and then evaluates if it works. When, it does not work, he removes the shape or color. He leaves the physical marks of the actual removal visible in the paintings. I find it interesting that he achieves the variety of line and composition because he is using his surroundings as sort of reference. The paintings have some sort of deep mysterious underlying meaning that is highly personal. That it is through this intensively personal and intuitive process that he achieves an expression that deeply touches the viewer's abstraction
Jonathan Lasker (born 1948) is an Americanartist. Lasker was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, and attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City as well as California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. Lasker lives and works in New York City, New York. Lasker has been awarded National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant in 1987 and again in 1989. In 1989 he was also awarded the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Grant. The painting repeated the composition of the study, but not precisely, as it is a freehand rendition of the study only. The gap between the image which one is recreating and the image which one arrives at is an interesting study in perception and intuition. Surprisingly one is very much “in the moment” of creation when attempting to replicate an image, an attempt which is almost designed to fail in order to arrive at a picture, which in spite of its precedents, is unique. -Jonathan Laskerwith an urban flair that’s explosively contemporary.
Arturro Herrera
http://www.pbs.org/art21/slideshow/?artist=86 Arturo Herrera was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1959, and lives and works in New York and Berlin, Germany. He received a BA from the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Herrera’s work includes collage, work on paper, sculpture, relief, wall painting, photography, and felt wall hangings. His work taps into the viewer’s unconscious, often intertwining fragments of cartoon characters with abstract shapes and partially obscured images that evoke memory and recollection. Using techniques of fragmentation, splicing, and re-contextualization, Herrera’s work is provocative and open-ended. For his collages he uses found images from cartoons, coloring books, and fairy tales, combining fragments of Disney-like characters with violent and sexual imagery to make work that borders between figuration and abstraction and subverts the innocence of cartoon referents with a darker psychology. In his felt works, he cuts shapes from a piece of fabric and pins the fabric to the wall so that it hangs like a tangled form resembling the drips and splatters of a Jackson Pollock painting. Herrera’s wall paintings also meld recognizable imagery with abstraction, but on an environmental scale that he compares to the qualities of dance and music. Herrera has received many awards including, among others, a DAAD Fellowship. He has had solo exhibitions at Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; Dia Center for the Arts, New York; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, among others. His work appeared in the Whitney Biennial (2002).
Section 7: Direct Impact on my work: Kuba Textiles and Design An engaging introduction to one of the most unusual and fascinating of all African art forms. The textiles of the Kuba people of the Democratic Republic of Congo are decorated not with human or animal figures, but with astonishing abstract designs: chevrons, squares, lozenges, crosses and spirals, in repeating patterns that shift and interlace. Although the Kuba people have been producing textiles for four hundred years, there is something strikingly modern about their traditional designs. In Kuba Textiles and Design, authors Elizabeth Bennett and Niangi Batulukisi use gorgeous color photographs and accessible text to explain the history of Kuba textiles, the laborious process required to create them and the complex symbolism of their designs. Including chapters on every major type of Kuba textile, this book is an excellent entry point for casual readers as well as collectors hoping to learn more about the pieces they treasure.
Section 8: My Work: I start with two commissioned works (not really where I am going with my work, but since it is painting I figured I would include them). I will label my pictures exploring my steps of progression. These pictures are sequenced in the order they were painted and developed. Without further ado...
Commissioned work - particular person specified what they wanted and sent me a picture of there home. I post this so that you can see my exploration with texture in the middle. This is still a work in progress.
Commissioned work #2 - particular person requested 1 apple and again, I was able to add lots of texture and make it more than just an apple. Again a far cry from where I am going ... but still painting - so I posted.
More of my veiling process, it is really hard to get the full impact of this picture without seeing it up close. I played with texture again in the center.
here is the up close view. Still hard to really see the texture.
Here is the first piece I showed from a distance and another one I will begin - the background before I start to build a veil on top of the praying princess. WIP...
another view.
Here is another veil peace with actual WORDS woven into the "On my knees" - if you look closely you can see the WORDS faith, hope and love. Again, this looks way more impact-ful in person.
WIP Another background/backdrop I have started...I have included words of scripture in all the red areas. This piece is called Haiti, Japan -Libya. Intend on working a dynamic and intricate veil over her. Truly a work in progress.
This is a painting you have seen before that I came back and added writing and more developed my marks.
Similarly, I have added more development to this piece. Building more unity.
On of my favorite pieces yet, I feel I am beginning to master staining and mark making to produce a powerful output.
Another piece I further developed...
More stain dying. Fun times! This is really inspired by Frankenthal, notice my leaving square spaces and turning to circular more round and flowing spaces.
Really exploring and falling into my pieces..
these are never ending ....
Exploration of impacting through space...
Starting to explore how edges will build interest and hold you in.
Another of my favorites, notice how I treat the edges or sides as well as the front of canvas..
This is one of 15 different mono-prints...that I developed and it surely inspired the next piece.
This has influence from mono-print, kuba language now sitting below my infinity pool and I am still pushing the impact of using the sides of the canvas. I loved the results here.
Here I am taking direct influences from Kuba and adding this to work that I previously painted for more sophisticated language exhibit...
Another view of a painting previously posted - this is to show you how I am using the sides of the canvas..
Sides...
I am now exploring my veil technique, dying, infinity pool and kuba influences...
of course...here is your side view....
Again, pulling all my influences together - BOOM.
MY ABSOLUTE favorite! I think here I have effectively displaying and impacting language unified and interacting with color, symmetry and interest.
Truly hope you enjoyed my hard works output. Much, much more to come!
9) MID - term REVIEW:
I figured I would also post my mid-term review from Natasha Bowdoin so that I am really tracking everything.
Artist Mentor: Mid-Term Report
Spring 2011
Student: Tanya Langford
Mentor: Natasha Bowdoin
Tanya has shown a great level of productivity and progress over these past few months. I have met with Tanya for four - five studio visits for 2-3 hours at a time thus far. With each visit I see substantial visual progress as well as great progress in researching the artists I bring up during visits as well as researching images to accumulate a pool of individualized source material specific to her artistic practice. I see the evidence of this progress not only during our meetings but also as on her blog which serves as a record of all the research she is currently conducting to fuel and influence her work. On this blog, Tanya not only posts her own work in progress, but other artists’ work and artistic movements which I have encouraged her to further investigate.
With each meeting it is clear to me that Tanya has invested a great amount of time in the studio. She has also spent the necessary time in organizing a studio space where she can solely focus on making work. The establishment of a designated studio space I believe has greatly enabled Tanya to really focus on the work through the elimination of outside distractions. With each meeting there are multiple new paintings to discuss, as well as older paintings having been pushed to a more refined stage. I encourage Tanya to work on many paintings at once so that she can constantly have something to work on should she need to leave a particular painting alone for a bit. Tanya has fully embraced this way of working and therefore always has many things to show and discuss with each studio visit.
In addition to working hard in the studio, Tanya has put in a considerable amount of time in researching and investigating how her work fits into a larger art historical context. Each visit we discuss contemporary as well as art historical artists whose work her practice seems to relate to. It is obvious that Tanya puts in a lot of time outside of our visits researching art historical movements as well as these individual artists. She originally expressed a lot of interest in Mark Rothko and how her work might engage and share some of the themes his work embodied. Under my encouragement, as well as through Tanya's own initiative, she has expanded to look at a larger variety of artists, including many contemporary painters to help develop her own individual vision. For example she has recently begun researching, Kupa cloth patterns, a form of African textile design that references written characters, in an effort to investigate how text might take form in the paintings. I think this textual element, along with other ideas, is starting to really make the paintings feel individual and less indebted to the artists that have been of influence.
As far as goals to be accomplished over the semester I believe Tanya is also progressing well. As her mentor I felt that the beginning of this semester should really be about paint experimentation. Since Tanya is primarily working in an abstract manner, it was important to really explore process, the various ways paint can be laid down on the canvas and how these many different processes carry meaning. So I asked her to really experiment, across a wide variety of surfaces and with a diversity of different materials, to get a better handle on how to move paint around and how this contributes to content. Tanya has embraced this investigation, experimenting in her studio as well as taking outside workshops that deal with specific materials originally unfamiliar to her. I encourage her to continue to experiment, but to now take those smaller experiments and begin a larger, more focused body of work to present for critique this summer. I am envisioning 8-10 large, well developed paintings that grow out of this process of experimentation in the studio. I think Tanya will have no problem achieving this as long as she keeps up the focus and the hard-working attitude she has exhibited thus far.
I have no doubt that Tanya puts in at least 20 hours of work a week. Her blog is evidence of this as well as the amount of work we have to look at with each studio meeting. I think the rigor with which Tanya conducts her research in and outside the studio most definitely indicates to me that she is working on a graduate level. I do think that Tanya had to play a bit of catch up in that she didn't have as much knowledge of art history and critical theory as perhaps a student entering into a graduate program should have. But Tanya has shown to me that she is driven to make up for that inadequacy by taking the time to educate herself through lectures, books, and studio visits, while at the same time not letting this take away too much from her studio work time. I think Tanya's paintings have benefited greatly from this research and continue to progress at a fast pace.
