Printedness

Print by: Karen Kunc at
Davis Gallery in Houghton House
"Force of Invention"
now thru December 14, 2012
Hobart William & Smith College, Geneva,NY

There are aesthetic qualities that give hand printed images on paper a certain look and the artist Karen Kunc calls this "Printedness".  The agency of the printmaker is only applauded after a protracted focus on making a plate that is then inked and printed successfully.  Delayed gratification is always a factor in learning how to make a print because one never knows what you are going to get until the last few moments on the press.  Printmaking is absorbed in process; you have to be patient - not lose your enthusiasm to bring the print to its fullest expression.  Some artists work on their own plates and make their own prints, while other artists may create the plate or plates and have master printers make the print or a numbered edition.

Let's not get lost in the technical minutia of how to make a print - but concentrate for a moment on what story is being told with the image.  If you want to speculate on the value of metaphor in visual art, I can think of no better place to start with than the exhibition at Hobart William & Smith College, curated by Nick Ruth - now at Houghton House's Davis Gallery through December 14th.   Aptly titled " Force of Invention ", this show features "the Sublime Worlds of Lenore Thomas, Sarah Smelser and Karen Kunc".  These three active printmakers share a concept - to establish a narrative in an oblique fashion - they rarely address their subject matter in a realist or photographic sense - their stories play out between the realms of abstraction and personal symbolism.  Karen Kunc and Sarah Smelser both have a more kinetic dialog going on in their graphic image than does Lenore Thomas.  Lenore's prints tend towards flat planes of color, they are more obviously landscapes or diagrams of geology topped by a pattern created by applying smoke to the surface of the printed paper.

Karen Kunc and Garden of Disasters ( detail )

There in Geneva, New York, we were in the land of the artist Arthur Dove who lived there ( in the early 20th century) and pioneered a kind of exuberant abstraction whose legacy is shared by the printmakers in "Force of Invention".  Sarah Smelser works in the mid-west as does Karen Kunc, and in their art they seem to grapple with relationships of physical forces, interactions of color and layers of space in general. Smelser tends to be a bit more diagrammatic; Kunc tends to be more theatrical and both of these artists deserve more attention - their art certainly attracted my eyes.

Closer to home, I attended the opening of "Contemporary African American Printmakers" presented by Deborah Ronnen Fine Art in the Arts Center Gallery of Nazareth College.  The present show coincides with the Rochester premiere of "Lighthouse/Lightning Rod", a production by Garth Fagan Dance and the composer and instrumentalist Wynton Marsalis.  During the opening of the print show I had the opportunity to congratulate Garth Fagan on his successful collaboration, and I look forward to a terrific evening of modern dance and music.

Taking a look at the prints in this installation - we get a more diverse grouping than was found in "Force of Invention".  A visitor looking over these contemporary prints can find realism in the style of Rembrandt and Goya in the artists Kerry James Marshall and Kara Walker respectively, and one can also find reductive abstraction in the prints of Jennie C. Jones and Martin Puryear.  One of the more surprising aspects of this showing of African American prints were the "translations" from the Gee's Bend quilters.  I remember being taken by the quilts when I saw them in a show organized for the Whitney Museum in New York City, but I did not know that prints ( color aquatints with Chine colle ) had been made to document the look of these groundbreaking works of art.

Alison Saar
in " Contemporary African American Printmakers "
Art Center Gallery, Nazareth College through December 21, 2012

When I was painting in my loft in Brooklyn during the 1980's, my neighbor across the airshaft was Alison Saar, and I could watch her work away on large scale models, rugged forms which were part of her narrative about the social predicament and semiotics of being a working African American artist ( from a family dedicated to the visual arts ).  How to grapple with a painful history of a people, maintain your dignity as a person, control the integrity of your art and contribute to society as only an artist can - through a transforming vision - that is what I get from Alison Saar.  We will all see her artwork onstage with Garth Fagan Dance as she contributes the sets for this production of "Lighthouse/Lightning Rod".

The nine artists, plus the women of Gee's Bend who contribute the quilt works constitute a wide range of artisitic expression.  Of the younger artsits, Mickalene Thomas is a rising star, and her screenprints have a jazzy surface texture especially in "Why Can't We All Just Sit Down and Talk It Over" from 2006.  Luckily, for this viewer, there is much to see and think about, that is my take away from all of this "Printedness".

Gallery Going As A Social Medium

"Painting Tuscany"
painting by Betsy Taylor on view
at The Mill Art Center & Gallery
Honeoye Falls, NY on view to December 1, 2012


The fall season I had experienced on the way over to the gallery was quickly followed by sunny summer weather indoors at the exhibition:  "Painting Tuscany".   Maybe it sounds like a scenario from a movie, but a quintet of ladies go to Italy, painting en plein air and come away refreshed and full of treasures - both memories and paintings made on the spot.  Accompanying this show of mostly portable size paintings is an enjoyable slide show of the rustic villas and countryside that is so eye catching.  We live a vicarious thrill in the Italian hills famous for their wines, for the gorgeous light, and the romance of it all.  Rebecca DeMarco, Denise Heischman, Jane O'Donnell, Sara O'Donnell, and Betsy Taylor remind us of how seductive painting the landscape in Northern Italy can be.

Over to the Axom Gallery on another night for an artist talk by Susan Ferrari-Rowley.  Susan carried on an animated discussion about her minimalist constructions and answered audience questions.  She made mention of the visceral nature of her creative act of sculpture and her practice of incorporating light and shadow as part of her concept - in evidence whether you visit the gallery during daylight or evening hours.

Susan Ferrari-Rowley
speaks at Axom Gallery
her show continues to November 17, 2012

First Fridays gets underway this November with hordes of people strolling through artist's studios and galleries creating a social buzz that certainly beats Facebook!  Go and see for yourself.... everywhere I looked there was something of interest from the Pop-up books presented by Bill Finewood at the JGK Gallery at 10 Vick Park A -  to the color abstractions of William ( Bill ) Sellers now on view at the Arts & Cultural Council for Greater Rochester.

Among the open studios at the Anderson Arts Building, I found Kathy Clem in her new multimedia space - showing her latest images developed on her iPad - these were colorful puffy kitty-cats that somehow morph into owls and fly away into a land of digital fireworks.  In the same building, The Shoe Factory Art Co-op has "Tone It Down A Notch" a show of minimal art for a modest budget.

My favorite things on this gallery ramble were photographs by Nathan Lyons on view at the Spectrum Gallery at Lumierre, and the photos by Patti Ambrogi and Owen Butler at Gallery r.  Walk over to 100 College Avenue and the doors open to a world of wonderful photos - a cross section of Nathan Lyons and his life's work behind the camera.  I was intrigued by the dialog of photos presented in pairs which maintain an elegant poetry of visual acuity.

Nathan Lyons
courtesy of Spectrum Gallery at Lumierre


I was pleased to see R.I.T. president Bill Destler and his wife at the opening of the show at Gallery r.  Well attended gallery shows develop a buzz, and then become the thing that you must see.  Hopefully all this social whirl has an economic benefit to the city, to the galleries, and to the artists who participate.

The retrospective exhibition of photos by Patty Ambrogi at Gallery r have a spectacular particularity.  I immediately want to go there - to the places she finds through her lens.  The goblins from the deserts of Utah, to a block of stone that resembles an ocean liner - these photos are a document of color and substance, a love letter to geology and geography.  Owen Butler's black and white photography is a tribute to a man who always seems to have a camera at hand - ready for that decisive moment ( to borrow a phrase from Henri Cartier-Bresson).  The eloquence of a glimpse into the life of a lady selling dresses on a hot day reveals a deep seated humanity that is not unlike reading the pages in a great novel....bravo!

Pixture Me

Daniel Cosentino
at Rochester Contemporary Art Center
all photos courtesy of RoCo


At Rochester Contemporary on East Avenue until November 18th, see the show titled: "Me Pix", Picturing Ourselves in Video and Photography.  Social media is thrown into relief through the focus of fine art.  This kind of performance art has been going on for a very long while, and every pebble thrown into the pond of experience makes ripples, some even carry over long distances and have lasting power.  I am reminded of performance pieces ( "Happenings" ) that I witnessed as a teenager  in Manhattan in the 1960's, and some people talk and write about these occurrences ( see Mildred Glimcher's new book ) - in other words they become iconic, almost mythic events in the art world,  Why?, well it is the butterfly effect and somebody has to be there to document it.

Stefan Petranek shows structured portraits of individuals presenting scorecards of their latest thoughts - the equivalent of a cartoon thought bubble - except that many of the people here are involved in scholarly pursuits, some at the university where Petranek teaches.  A geneticist holds up a chart outlining a standard model of how genes are passed along to children, it is a grid she holds in her hand as she stands in front of a grid of windows - part of the architecture - and it is interesting how our pursuits keep coming back to the same primitive forms of lineage.  Petranek keeps a large format camera filled with film to carefully portray individuals engaged in thinking about the sciences and arts ( he mentions trying to photograph E.O.Wilson, whose new book "The Social Conquest of Earth" - well worth reading - is implicated in this exhibition).

Stefan Petranek
at Rochester Contemporary Art Center


How we present ourselves, and to whom, are big questions that open up a window onto social media. The notions of privacy have been eroded, and we are complicit.  "Happenings" were a particular event witnessed by a live audience ( my earliest New York exhibitions as a young artist were engaged with a small audience ).  Now this kind of performance has become inverted.. there are many people watching but they no longer get together to experience an event in the same place together as they may have in the past.  More often than not, people may be watching video from the comfort of their own home, and networking through Facebook - and this fact becomes the focal point for Ann Oren's part of the show.
Ann's video for example has a cartoon apartment room drawn in a very gestural style into which she places her actors and actresses to present typical human interests: cleaning up, taking a bath, playing an instrument, etc. and these simple acts are all seductive in their own way.  The viewer becomes the voyeur, and this is underlined by watching a lady in her underwear perform for the camera, a bit of eye candy for the jaded exhibitionist.

Ann Oren
at Rochester Contemporary Art Center


Daniel Cosentino has spent the past few years in Kosovo, one of the youngest countries in the world, - a hot spot recovering from dislocation, war and other traumas.  Daniel teaches for R.I.T. at this outpost and he works with media in a style related to Andy Warhol's "Auditions" - video or film with long takes and little activity.

Sound is not present, image is prominent, the drama is understated - we get to experience "real time"
in Daniel's work.  Very intriguing is the revolving swivel chair that the performers use during the videos.  The artist is forced to change his perspective through the efforts of a hand cranked transmission of power and vision.  It is this physical manifestation of a metaphor that is so apt for this show.

Meanwhile, Back at the Garden...

Keith Howard
at Axom Gallery

"Fleeing Eve", oil on canvas, 2011
96" x 24"

The Axom Gallery opens their fall schedule with paintings and prints by artist and printmaker Keith Howard, in his first large scale show in the Rochester area.  I have been looking forward to seeing this new batch of paintings, to see how they have progressed over the past few years since the series has been underway.  The show represents a kind of rebirth of photo-realism, but with a twist.  The 20th Century photo-realists represented a kind of neutralized view of common everyday scenes - if you think of paintings by Richard Estes or Robert Bechtel, and now here in the 21st Century we're getting a dramatized narrative, heavily influenced by Photoshop magic and declarative theatrical staging.

Another twist to this show comes with the recognition of the collaboration between the artist, the model, and the painter - that is the equation being rendered here.  The artist has a dialog with the model, who has found her place in nature, and she responds to suggestions and the act of being photographed by creating a pose.  Once a photo session is complete the artist assembles his composition with the aid of the digital tool box.  When the composition is decided upon -the painting is completed on the other side of the globe, in China, by "master painter" Xiang Ming Lin.  So the visitor to the show is forced to deal with contemporary notions of authorship.  The visitor is also faced with a touchy subject - that of the male gaze, and the very act that is being pictured here of Eve offering an apple, or about to suffer the consequences of her actions, as in the image above ("Fleeing Eve").

So we get an emotion that emanates from the model, captured by camera and re-combined with many digital elements in a cinematic panorama which then gets transformed into paint by another hand that injects a whole other vocabulary of expression in the subtle details and delicate brush handling that completes the circle (.. and then the painting is hung in the gallery and we get to ponder it).

It is no longer unusual to have artworks completed by an atelier, -this takes place because the artist is often under pressure to complete many more works than he or she has time to produce, and/or the artist employs a craftsman with a special skill or technique. Painters hire printmakers to run editions from plates that the've made, so Keith, who is a printmaker, turns the table on these expectations by hiring a painter to complete this work.

A few blocks away from Axom Gallery, you can walk downstairs to The Oxford Gallery and check out the "Water Work".  We are talking about the creations from three artists who employ water based mediums to paint in.  Roland Stevens has a conservative approach to his watercolors which meld an abstract structure to representations of Americana- sailboats, wrecked cars, duck hunters,- I am not sure what he feels most passionate about.  This is not the case with Barbara Fox, who fixes her attention on the way light passes through glass, or creates a quiet moment with a still life of poise and balance.
Back to the gritty life on the street, Chris Baker digs heavy equipment, and his gouache paintings of box cars with graffiti are part of the urban history narrative playing out for all to see.

"Cruising on a Starry Night'
by Barbara Fox, 
at Oxford Gallery

Museum of Natural History

The Roger Tory Peterson
Institute of Natural History

Go up a little hill on Curtis Street in Jamestown, New York and nestled in the woods is a castle designed by noted architect A.M. Stern to house a collection devoted to nature study through art.  Here is the collection of artwork by Roger Tory Peterson, along with his library and spaces for invited guests to show their stuff along with a skeleton of a giant bear, and mastodon tusks from an ancient land.

If you have ever looked for a guide book to birds, you came across Roger's book known as the Peterson Guide.  It helped everyone get to know and identify birds using a diagnostic system that diagrams the important elements that you see when a bird appears that you may not recognize.  In the mid 20th century my father commenced work on the Golden Guide which propelled a larger population of bird watchers, to gather up their binoculars for some fresh air and some sharp observations.

I even got in on the act in the late 1970's - helping my father, Arthur Singer, revise his book for a second revised edition of "Birds of North America", which was published in competition with the Peterson Guide.  You learn a lot about nature when you have to draw from it and be very accurate about what you are doing.

This fall I have been invited to be the curator of a show "A Guide to Nature" the Art of Arthur Singer with Alan Singer being held at The Roger Tory Peterson Institute. Included in this show (which runs until December, 2, 2012)  are over 70 pieces of original art and some prints which document a long career in the service of art, education and conservation.  Birds are the primary subjects here as is appropriate in a museum built by and for noted naturalists, and Roger Tory Peterson and my father were friends that depended on each other for advice and counsel.  Painting portraits of birds didn't start or end with Audubon, but continues to this day with a much wider audience, due in part to the artwork of artists like Peterson, and Arthur Singer.  This is an art that most people can enjoy, they can see for themselves, and use as an aid in the field.

Along with the art of Arthur Singer is another show upstairs that included many paintings of another great pro - the artist Stanley Meltzoff who gained an international following for his paintings of big game fish.  He was an ardent photographer who documented sea life, and painted memorable scenes which few of us could witness in oil paintings of robust color and composition.

Baltimore Bridges Art & Math

Joy Hsiao
"Menger Sponge"
at Bridges,  Art & Math, Towson University

I'm down the road in Baltimore participating in "Bridges" an exhibition and conference that attempts to cross the divide that exists for some people,  between the practice of art and the application of math. This is one in a series of exhibitions that allows an affinity group to show their latest work in a juried setting, and publish a catalog of the result.  I was a bit nervous about the prospect of having my artwork
in this show, first of all - because I am not a dedicated mathematician, and second of all I don't particularly like the idea of having my art pigeonholed.

I used to think that math and art were on different sides of the same coin, now sometimes I think they are part of the same continuum.  I came out of a fine art tradition that owes a lot- to a more emotional bond in visual art, and less of a rational, structured approach.  But then I really like the art of Sol Lewitt for example, and I can't think of a more reasoned, analytical kind of statement than his work - maybe with the exception of Mondrian.  I like the minimal aesthetic,- there is something so Zen-like in the hit you get from a Sol Lewitt painting, print or wall work. But alas, Sol's artwork is not in this show.

My interest also remains with an art that is unpredictable, that shows you something you have not seen before, with a depth and clarity that real art contains, and has you coming back for more.  In my own art practice I have added the use of imagery that is derived from the visualization of algebraic equations.
Sounds pretty dry, but in the right combinations, I get what I want from a new composition.  But will it always be thus?

At Towson University, "Bridges" - the exhibition - can be found in the University Gallery, and it is a mixed affair.  There is a lot of repetition within the show, and that is probably true for many large art shows, but seems to be a weakness here.  Does the art go beyond the expression of a formula?
Does the art grasp your attention because it offers something beyond the craft of making a precise object?  Is symmetry always necessary?  Like making a catalog of snowflakes - too much of a good thing may stifle your ambitions for an art that goes beyond.

As I look over this large exhibition space a few works speak to me, including some cut out circles of mylar in layers by Rebecca Kamen, also beautiful mahogany knots by Bjarne Jesperson, David Chappell's "Meander" ( digital prints were all over this show ), and Susan Happersett's "Fibonacci Staircase", which is a scroll in the form of an artist's book.

I would love to see an image with as much power as Durer's engraving "Melancolia" of 1514 - so for "Bridges" I take away a feeling of an art that needs more metaphor to survive, some further relationships in the art need to be developed.  Most of the work is too solitary -too insular - not much humor or room for the errant splash!

BMA Free and Clear

Purple Robe and
Anemones, 1937 -
A late Matisse oil on canvas
from the Cone Collection
Baltimore Museum of Art


Just the fact alone that I could park on the street right across from the museum entrance warmed my heart, and I hadn't even gone into the museum yet.  Anything that makes a museum visit easier helps, especially because I want to pay attention to the art and not be annoyed by the ambience.  Top it off with no admission fee, and I'm in like Flynn.

Then there is the Cone Collection, ravishing Matisse paintings, and much more.  Above is one of those disarmingly nonchalant ladies that Henri Matisse loved to paint in his apartments along the French Riviera.  Matisse makes the painting look like an improvisation, but really it is the result of a lot of practice, and you can see in the collection some works that are not nearly as effortless ( or
seemingly so ).  Matisse's subject is conventional - a clothed portrait, a vase of flowers and a patterned wallpaper, but he makes it look so easy and it never becomes trite.

Another wonderful portrait was found elsewhere in the museum, and that was of a woman playing a game called "Knucklebones", in a painting by Chardin.  The painting shows evidence of having been framed as an oval, and that mars the surface of an otherwise magical mastery of light playing off the face of a woman in a blue apron.

The Baltimore Museum is undergoing some renovations and the contemporary art wing will re-open in November.  In the meantime a temporary exhibition honored the Sondheim prize winners so if you were curious you could see what is happening on the local art scene here in Baltimore..  I was more interested in looking into the period rooms in an otherwise uninhabited area of the BMA.  The collections also have some early 20th Century works by artists like Leger which I found of interest.
Perhaps on the way out you might get stopped by a sculpted man being swallowed by a big fish from the Pacific island of New Ireland.