New York City Journal

NYC: Fifth Avenue walk to the MET

Walking over to The Metropolitan Museum of Art on the weekend after viewing Hilma af Klint at The Guggenheim, I was not prepared for the crowds - literally waves of humanity packing into the entrance to the museums.  At The MET they have a new mechanical ticket booth where they scan your credit card, and the line was backed up.  Once upstairs, I wanted to go and commune with Eugene Delacroix and along the hallways leading to the show I stopped to look at a new print by Kara Walker - which was kind of monumental in it's own right.  Kara Walker you will know from her silhouettes in black that depict situations for African-Americans based on the deeply disturbing racism that is part of our national heritage.

Kara Walker and "Patronage"

at The MET

Kara Walker's trio of images recall the idea of "Patronage" and the central panel shows people erecting a large statue of an African-American woman in some classical landscape of the imagination.  This acts as something of a mental wedge against all the mythology that tends to be the highlight of other prints and drawings found in this hall, and Kara Walker makes her point.  If you like this powerful print,  I saw a copy of it in the MET store which can be purchased for 24K.

Eugene Delacroix "Young Tiger Playing With Its Mother

This is also a rare moment to see the show of paintings and drawings collected now by Eugene Delacroix ( 1798 - 1863 ) at The MET.  It is not often that his artwork could be seen in such a massive show which on the day I visited was packed with onlookers. 

When I was a student, I read The Journal of Eugene Delacroix and I have studied his paintings and I am always interested in how his art was generated - and who he was - given the history and the important role of painting in 19th century France.  Delacroix is a flex point in painting even though the standards of art are still wrapped up in history and allegory.  Delacroix's art begins to look towards other regions so he travels abroad to find inspiration.

Eugene Delacroix's "Women of Algiers"

I have admired his painting "Women of Algiers" and that carries through today.  There is a timeless quality in his handling of light and the care taken with each character; the details of the room, the gestures and so on.  I think that this painting represents a period of contemplation - maybe about these women's lives - and it attracts my attention.  When I was a younger artist I spent many hours painting portraits, so I am aware of the power of paint and how it can structure emotion in a work of art.

Delacroix ( 1798 -1863 ) at The MET

Delacroix also conveys the nature of power and conflict in his animal portraits, and the image above gives a portion of the tumult he can convey in a composition - the abstract forms seen in a study for this painting could step right out of expressionism which would arrive many years later.  There are not too many people who want to portray the struggles that Delacroix imagined, and I think they represent something of his own psychology in these attempts at dealing with violence.

Delacroix's drawings of ancient coins

As with any large retrospective there are always going to be some surprises.  The present exhibitions show selections from a collection of drawings, and I found this drawing of coins to be kind of unusual.  This is Delacroix looking back to ancient history through symbols and scenes that evoke a certain respect for institutions.  I think  Delacroix was torn in his respect for governments while still maintaining his own freedom and integrity.

Delacroix and his "Lady With a Parrot"

at The MET

Going back to The Journal of Eugene Delacroix he takes a moment to quote a friend saying "what characterizes a master is his recognizing of the essential thing in a picture, the thing that must absolutely be reached.  Mere talent thinks only of details:  See Ingres, and David.....

Delacroix may not have been the supreme master, but he was well aware of his ability and his work is a flex point moving towards a modern era of painterly expression.

Study: Death of Sardanapalus by Eugene Delacroix

at The MET

Coney Island On My Mind

On the boardwalk, Coney Island

November, 2018

In Brooklyn, I am standing on the boardwalk looking out to sea on a cold clear fall day having just left the nursing home where my aunt has been living for the past few years.  She failed to recognize me and threatened to call the police!  Quickly, we left with a lasting impression made for this Thanksgiving Day!

Inside The Guggenheim

We were going into the city to see the museums and I was looking forward to going up to The Guggenheim to view the art in a new show called: "Paintings for the Future" by Hilma af Klint.

So, you say you have never heard of this artist- Hilma af Klint  ( 1862-1944 ) - so why is she being given a retrospective now - almost 75 years since her death?  Well, the art history books will have to be re-written - especially when it comes to notions of abstract art for which Hilma af Klint will be forever known.

Paul Singer steps in to get a closer look

at 

"Paintings for the Future"

by

Hilma af Klint ( 1862-1944 )

From the moment we stepped out of the elevator, and worked our way down the spiral of The Guggenheim, we knew we were seeing something entirely engaging and nearly overwhelming in its simple approach to our heart and mind.  This is a moving experience, as the critic Ann McCoy has written in the Brooklyn Rail.  Credit also has to go to painter  R.H.Quaytman - who is given her own exhibition at the top of the museum - she has championed Hilma af Klint by arranging early shows in the U.S. of her work.  However, R.H. Quaytman is overshadowed by the present situation - quite a challenge for an artist, when her predecessor is so strong.

R.H. Quaytman on view at The Guggenheim

Hilma af Klint was really out ahead of the curve as they say.  Born near Stockholm in 1862, she never marries, but she did go through art school training and she produced traditional paintings ( see below ) that were sold to the public.  She also created another body of work which she held in private - hoping that one day it would be housed in a temple of her own spiral design ( which was never realized ).  Tracey Bashkoff, the curator for this show at The Guggenheim does get to realize this dream, and we can all participate until mid-February when the show must come down.

"Summer Landscape", 1888

by Hilma af Klint

Hilma af Klint:  The Ten Largest ( 1907 )

Tempera on paper

Run, don't walk to The Guggenheim Museum of Art to see this art in the perfect setting!  We enjoyed reading the stories  that accompany this exhibition which represent only a portion of her accomplishments.  She kept copious notebooks that outline her progress as an artist who was profoundly moved by visions she had during her meditations on art and life.  She was a mystic, but not beyond contemplation among the roots of life, involving the sciences, religious teachings, and an artful approach to mathematics and physics.

Hilma af Klint

"Evolution", 1908

oil on canvas

If one reads a traditional chronology of abstraction in art, there is the inevitable descriptions of the pioneers such as Kandinsky,  Malevich, and Piet Mondrian - perceived to be the ones worthy of reverence when it comes to the "invention" of abstraction. That honor should now go to Hilma af Klint, and this show is the proof that makes the necessary argument for her elevation into that sphere of real mastery for a new language in visual culture.

"The Swan", No. 9, 1915

oil on canvas

Hilma af Klint

Working our way through the exhibition her later works become more acute towards the 1920's.

She looks for graphic ways to transform volume into light and back again.  Her major series of ten foot tall paintings ( Tempera on paper ) give the soul an uplift, just what we need in this climate!

Hilma af Klint has the uncanny ability to invent an abstract language for us to consider.  Spirals may represent movement of opposing forces - day and night- or yin and yang.  Colors can represent the male and female sex, or the gravity of push and pull - to use a modern term for painterly movement.

Hilma af Klint, 1907

Detail:  Tempera on paper

Group IX/UW, The Dove, No. 1, 1915

oil on canvas

"Paintings for the Future"

at

The Guggenheim Museum of Art

This is your opportunity to visit with an artist's work that changes the course of a dialog about modern art, and  the "Paintings for the Future" really gives you something to dream about and enjoy in the here and now.

Missing Words & Autumn Color

Autumn Colors come to my block

When I read the description that Emily Glass wrote about some of her recent paintings now on view at The Geisel Gallery, I was shocked to understand that print editions of the Oxford Junior Dictionary deleted words that relate to nature in favor of words that promote new technology.

Poster announcing paintings by Emily Glass

A strategy or a focus on deleted words for creatures like the newt, or the adder, or for plants like a fern seem hard to imagine - that a dictionary editor would deprive a younger reader of this connection to a living world!  In so doing, Emily Glass paints a picture of a drastic change in our relationship with a world of growing things.  With this feeling that our attachment to nature is under attack, one could "read" her paintings as a direct appeal for us to stop this from happening!

Emily Glass: Deleted Word "Fern"

oil on canvas

In her compositions she directs our attention to the forest floor, and the passing life that one finds there, the slow movement of a snail, the shapes of decomposing leaves, the cycle of life that we won't find when we glance down at the latest news coming out over our smart phones..

Emily Glass at Geisel Gallery

downtown Rochester, New York

Emily Glass also shows a sense of humor in her Jackson Pollock-like portrait of arugula on a sheet of paper.  In this way her paint handling reminds me of many works by Catherine Murphy - where she uses realism to mimic abstraction.

Emily Glass at Geisel Gallery

Her technique has an illustrational focus - to show us details when necessary, and also to inform the viewer of a persistent kind of abstraction in the factual nature of life.  In fact, I can remember when I was very little how abstract the entire world looked - and  there is an internal thrill in seeing that experience translated in the strokes of paint applied by Emily Glass.

Sainte Victoire by Bruno Chalifour

Rochester has a vibrant arts community and there are a variety of places to go and see what artists are doing today including the hall at the East Avenue Inn ( 384 East Avenue at Alexander Street ).  Up now is "Trio" with Howard Koft, Bruno Chalifour, and Paula Santirocco.  So, on a cold afternoon in November I went to see these three artists and immediately got drawn into the documentary details of photographs made by Bruno Chalifour.  The mountain made famous in paintings by Paul Cezanne is one focus for Bruno Chalifour, and his photographic prints have a clarity and lightness that is remarkable.

Howard Koft  at 384 East Avenue

Howard Koft works with digital tools to create images that take reality to a new plane.  Buildings can be bent, warped and given new dramatic significance.  The digital realm is something I am very familiar with, and the materials that one can use as subjects for art can really manifest themselves in unfamiliar ways - at least as fine art is concerned.  For hundreds, maybe thousands of years we have trusted our eye to comprehend our surroundings, but with the new digital tools we can transform almost anything into a new artful experience - call it augmented reality!...

Paula Santirocco - "Its a New Day", acrylic

Paula Santirocco works her abstractions with bright color and a love for her materials.  She makes it look easy, but I will bet that there is a lot of trial and error to get her paintings to look this way.  All in all the "Trio" is an interesting show - though the space at 384 East Avenue may not have been on your list of must see galleries, still it deserves your attention.

Environmental

Melinda, barn owl, along with Wild Wings volunteer

November 1, 2018

It has been raining all day, but I am inside, at my job - teaching drawing for students at R.I.T. with a special visit from two volunteers from WILD WINGS, and three wonderful birds that are in their care.  Each semester a visit from the natural world is in order, and these birds make terrific models to study and draw.  Once students get to see and hear about these birds - rehabilitated by the volunteers at WILD WINGS, they have a whole new respect for our environment.

Main Street Arts, Clifton Springs, New York

This weekend we drove over to Main Street Arts in Clifton Springs to see an exhibition by another R.I.T. faculty member who has a show of her recent paintings.  Lanna Pejovic is a prolific landscape painter and she presents"The View From Here".  I wrote a little introduction for the new catalog that was produced for this special show - and I have to say that her paintings were really worth the drive  to see them while they are still on view ( thru November 16, 2018 ).

Lanna Pejovic " Lily Fountain"

The gallery at Main Street Arts has never looked better, and the installation is very sensitive to the needs of these nearly abstract paintings.  Lanna may have had the original inspiration for this from her visits to Linwood Gardens near Pavilion, New York, but she has taken her art to a new level.

"Meditations" by Lanna Pejovic at Main Street Arts

The first things to hit me were her textures and colors..There is a sense of an overarching structure in notations that continue from painting to painting.  Some of her work verges on realism (more often in drawings) but the most satisfying works create a sensual experience - as in "Meditations".  Rather than being made strictly en plein aire these paintings are mostly finished in the studio - and like the Monet show at the Memorial Art Gallery - the art has a touch of the wild, a tactile exuberance.  Even though the catalog gives you an impression of her paintings, you really need to see them in person.

..

Upstairs at Main Street Arts I found a fine set of dimensional works in porcelain by Jody Selin  and a gouache that he calls: "Top of the Hill" ( that reminded me of Edward Hopper ) by another R.I.T. graduate - Chad Grohman.

Jody Selin

Chad Grohman "Top of the Hill"

This busy season takes us back to Rochester, in the Public Market where we went upstairs to The Yards Collective which has been doing things in their rugged space for seven years now.  The curator for the new show is Shane Durgee and the exhibition is called - "Into The Out Of".  He must have had fun selecting the work for the show by two other R.I.T. grads - Cecily Culver and Ashley Ludwig - because their works achieve a nice harmony in an art that is experimental and spare in many respects.

Cecily Culver has been teaching students recently at R.I.T. and I hope that they get a chance to see what their teacher has been making - her installations have a sense of humor - in part because they are minimal but also because they create a situation.  You really can see this art through her eyes, looking down between some bricks where you can see a salamander ( all part of a witty sculpture she has created ) - as if there was a hole cut in the floor of the gallery.

Cecily Culver at The Yards

Cecily took the time to tell me that the neon bird in her sculpture was resurrected for this exhibition which made me think of artists like Bruce Nauman.  Her sculpture is like a window with some irony -you don't know whether you are looking out or you are looking in!

Her exhibition partner in this show is Ashley Ludwig, who exhibits a whole wall of diamond shaped compositions that often are collages with a poetic saying, or something else that galvanizes your attention.  So if you are in the area - visiting the public market, walk upstairs and enjoy the show!

Ashley Ludwig at The Yards Collective

in

The Public Market, Rochester, New York

Ashley Ludwig's collage works

at The Yards Collective