Warren Isensee
Nichole Van Beek
Friday, December 9, 2011
Casheesh Now
Casheesh Now is up for three more days at Geoff Young in Great Barrington. (through Sunday, 12/11) You can get some great work for 400 or less!
Warren Isensee
Nichole Van Beek
Warren Isensee
Nichole Van Beek
Friday, November 11, 2011
Making Art with wheelchairs, skateboards and strollers.
(photo:Kate Milford)Last weekend I had the great opportunity to help kids and their families make abstract paintings using wheelchairs, strollers and other wheeled things at a workshop organized by Eliza Factor of Extreme Kids and Crew in Brooklyn. About a year or so ago I worked out this way of doing a multiple pass mono-prints using a skateboard for workshops I conducted at the Artisphere in Arlington, VA (in conjunction with the exhibition, Skateboarding Side Effects curated by Cynthia Connolly, with the workshop programing by Lisa-Marie Thalhammer). The simple process involves rolling out house paint onto a plastic covered floor, then placing paper or canvas on top of it, finally rolling around on the back of the paper. When you lift the paper, an impression is left from the weight of the wheels, making sometimes beautiful calligraphic images.
This is one from the Artisphere Workshop done by skateboarding on the paper.
This is me and my friend Susie who visited me, giving the wheelchair a try for the first time(Artisphere photos: Sarah Flynn).
another skateboard one.
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Twin Infinities curated by Sam James Velde and Rich Jacobs
I am super excited to have work in this show in LA. here is one of the paintings I sent out and the Flyer. Twin Infinities curated by Sam James Velde and Rich Jacobs. Cynthia Connolly, Damon Robinson, Karoline Robinson, Chris Duncan, Billy Sprague, Calef Brown, Sean Greene, Sandy Yang, Jeff Coad, Tim Kerr, Ben Clark, Jordin Isip, Mike Sutfin, Matt Leines, Rich Jacobs, Chris Shary, Caleb, Bert Queiroz, Melinda Beck, Ryan Patterson, Sam James Velde, James Gallagher, Stephen O'Malley, Chris Johanson, Clint Woodside, Chrissy Piper, Josh Turner, Ross Farrar, Pat Graham, James Ross, David Pajo, Otis Bee, Jim Brown, Sonny Kay, Cali Dewitt, James Wall, Malia James, Lee Spellman, Makr McCoy, Jason Farrell, Nina Hartman, Atiba Jefferson, Magdelena Wosinka and more.
Saturday, June 4, 2011
article from the Brooklyn Rail by Sharon L. Butler
I'm republishing this article from the Brooklyn Rail. I hope Ms. Butler and The Rail don't mind. I think it is well said. May I add to the precursors: Paul Klee, Mary Heilman, Anni Albers? (Noted, I'm not sure my own work is exactly this but I certainly feel an affinity to these words, and feel charged up by the work I am sure it is referring to.)
ABSTRACT PAINTING: The New Casualists
by Sharon L. Butler
The pioneers of abstraction—the Cubists, the Abstract Expressionists, the Minimalists—emerged from firm and identifiable aesthetic roots and developed their own philosophies. In the competitive maelstrom of 20th century art, those philosophies became dogmas, and the dogmas outright manifestos. In the new century, many abstract painters are saying goodbye to all that didactic thinking and exuding a kind of calculated tentativeness. Raphael Rubinstein, in a 2009 Art in America essay and for a 2011 painting exhibition he curated in London, dubbed this new type of abstraction “provisional painting.” Similarly, artist and critic Stephen Maine homed in on the “incipient image” in a March 2011 show he curated at Lesley Heller. And the Brooklyn curatorial team Progress Report (aka Kris Chatterson and Vince Contarino) styled its survey of contemporary abstraction at the Bronx River Art Center The Working Title. All three labels suggest the centrality of the open proposition in contemporary abstraction.
Martin Bromirski, “Untitled” (2011). Acrylic, sand, paper on canvas. 20 × 16˝.
Rebecca Morris, “Untitled (#06-10)” (2010). Oil on canvas. 59 × 59˝.
There is a studied, passive-aggressive incompleteness to much of the most interesting abstract work that painters are making today. But the subversion of closure isn’t their only priority. They also harbor a broader concern with multiple forms of imperfection: not merely what is unfinished but also the off-kilter, the overtly offhand, the not-quite-right. The idea is to cast aside the neat but rigid fundamentals learned in art school and embrace everything that seems to lend itself to visual intrigue—including failure. The painters take a meta approach that refers not just to earlier art historical styles, but back to the process of painting itself. These self-amused but not unserious painters have abandoned the rigorously structured propositions and serial strategies of previous generations in favor of playful, unpredictable encounters. Pervading the work of artists like Lauren Luloff, Cordy Ryman, Amy Feldman, and Joe Bradley is an enervated casualness that may at first recall sophomore-year painting class.
If this sounds disparaging, it’s not meant to be. By reassessing basic elements like color, composition, and balance, based on 1920s-vintage Bauhaus principles taught in every 2-D foundations course, the new painters are exploring uncharted territory. They are looking for unexpected outcomes rather than handsome results. Dashing our expectations of “good painting,” painters like Martin Bromirski, Patricia Trieb, Patrick Brennan, Jered Sprecher, and Keltie Ferris have challenged their validity and thus moved painting in a direction that requires a different way of looking.If a painting seems lousy, perhaps with a poorly constructed support and amateurish paint handling, look again.
Some painters focus on developing a style and spend 20 years refining it. These new abstract painters, on the other hand, are restless, their thrust less intensive and more expansive. Artists like Rochelle Feinstein and Chris Martin (whose first museum solo opens at the Corcoran on June 18) combine non-art materials in their paintings just for the hell of it, work at different scales, employ different color combinations, and experiment with unusual ways of applying paint. With less investment in honing a unique visual language, painters like Kadar Brock, Rebecca Morris, and Jasmine Justice use earlier forms of abstraction the way Rauschenberg used found objects. In the process, there is no room for handwringing about originality; it is simply assumed that it will result from synthesis and recombination. And if it doesn’t, well, isn’t that just as interesting?
Patrick Brennan, “Flow and Fade” (2011). Mixed media on canvas. 72 × 48˝.
Amy Feldman, “Ever After” (2010). Acrylic and spray paint on canvas. 80 × 90.˝
Insofar as the new abstract painters employ old tropes and methods with a certain insouciant abandon, one might call them the new casualists. Yet they are not as iconoclastic as they might appear. In Malevich and the American Legacy, a recent exhibition at Gagosian, curator Andrea Crane attempts to position Malevich’s Supremetism as a progenitor of Minimalism. But in my view, Malevich’s small-scale, quirky abstractions have more in common with the new casualism than the austere, highly refined minimalism of Judd, Stella, Kelly, and the like. Malevich believed that pure feeling was to be found in non-objective painting, and that materialism could lead to “spiritual freedom.” Both Malevich and the new casualists, who approach their work intuitively, are unfazed by ill-defined parameters or truncated lines of thought. Like the philosopher-mathematicians who devised “fuzzy logic,” new casualists, like Suprematists, seek to accommodate a world in which there is often no clear truth or falseness. On balance, they are more intrigued by the questions and contradictions in art than by any definitive answers it might provide.
At Jason McCoy, Stephanie Simmons curated 70 Years of Abstract Paintings: Excerpts, which comprises a good survey of small-scale work by more than 40 artists. The exhibition presents a convincing historical context for the new post-Bauhaus abstraction. Old paintings by Josef Albers, Gene Davis, Jackson Pollock, Al Held, Man Ray, Hedda Sterne, Hans Hofmann, Leon Polk Smith, and Friedel Dzubas are hung side-by-side with recent work by Jim Lee, Joe Fyfe, Rob Nadeau, Sharon Horvath, Cora Cohen, Gwenn Thomas, and Thomas Nozkowski, among others. For most of the artists, their experience of everyday life is the filter through which they focus their paintings, entertaining multiple contradictory ideas at once. Although many of the artists included in the exhibition also work larger, Simmons selected small-scale work so that she could fit as much as possible into the show without marginalizing the smaller pieces. Tellingly, the smaller paintings tend not to be studies for larger work; rather, she told me, “working at different scales is one way they avoid a formulaic approach.”
If the new casualism resists evaluation on traditional criteria, how should it be judged? Here, perhaps, the Minimalists are relevant. Ellsworth Kelly once said, “I have never been interested in painterliness…putting marks on a canvas. My work is a different way of seeing and making something which has a different use.” A new casualist might well make the same general claim. But while Kelly wants to take the personal out of the equation, the casualist believes that exploring even mundanely subjective perceptions can yield extraordinary insights. In many ways, the new approach to abstraction is indebted to female artists of the 1970s like Elizabeth Murray, Mary Kelly, and Ree Morton, who, railing against the macho posturing of the Minimalists, worked from an intimate point of view that embraced messy everyday detail. The new casualists are adapting a like attitude to an increasingly complex, unfamiliar, and multivalent world. If the viewer leaves a show of their paintings agitated by their abrupt shifts, their crosscurrents, and their purposeful lack of formal cohesion, the work has succeeded.
ABSTRACT PAINTING: The New Casualists
by Sharon L. Butler
The pioneers of abstraction—the Cubists, the Abstract Expressionists, the Minimalists—emerged from firm and identifiable aesthetic roots and developed their own philosophies. In the competitive maelstrom of 20th century art, those philosophies became dogmas, and the dogmas outright manifestos. In the new century, many abstract painters are saying goodbye to all that didactic thinking and exuding a kind of calculated tentativeness. Raphael Rubinstein, in a 2009 Art in America essay and for a 2011 painting exhibition he curated in London, dubbed this new type of abstraction “provisional painting.” Similarly, artist and critic Stephen Maine homed in on the “incipient image” in a March 2011 show he curated at Lesley Heller. And the Brooklyn curatorial team Progress Report (aka Kris Chatterson and Vince Contarino) styled its survey of contemporary abstraction at the Bronx River Art Center The Working Title. All three labels suggest the centrality of the open proposition in contemporary abstraction.
Martin Bromirski, “Untitled” (2011). Acrylic, sand, paper on canvas. 20 × 16˝.
Rebecca Morris, “Untitled (#06-10)” (2010). Oil on canvas. 59 × 59˝.
There is a studied, passive-aggressive incompleteness to much of the most interesting abstract work that painters are making today. But the subversion of closure isn’t their only priority. They also harbor a broader concern with multiple forms of imperfection: not merely what is unfinished but also the off-kilter, the overtly offhand, the not-quite-right. The idea is to cast aside the neat but rigid fundamentals learned in art school and embrace everything that seems to lend itself to visual intrigue—including failure. The painters take a meta approach that refers not just to earlier art historical styles, but back to the process of painting itself. These self-amused but not unserious painters have abandoned the rigorously structured propositions and serial strategies of previous generations in favor of playful, unpredictable encounters. Pervading the work of artists like Lauren Luloff, Cordy Ryman, Amy Feldman, and Joe Bradley is an enervated casualness that may at first recall sophomore-year painting class.
If this sounds disparaging, it’s not meant to be. By reassessing basic elements like color, composition, and balance, based on 1920s-vintage Bauhaus principles taught in every 2-D foundations course, the new painters are exploring uncharted territory. They are looking for unexpected outcomes rather than handsome results. Dashing our expectations of “good painting,” painters like Martin Bromirski, Patricia Trieb, Patrick Brennan, Jered Sprecher, and Keltie Ferris have challenged their validity and thus moved painting in a direction that requires a different way of looking.If a painting seems lousy, perhaps with a poorly constructed support and amateurish paint handling, look again.
Some painters focus on developing a style and spend 20 years refining it. These new abstract painters, on the other hand, are restless, their thrust less intensive and more expansive. Artists like Rochelle Feinstein and Chris Martin (whose first museum solo opens at the Corcoran on June 18) combine non-art materials in their paintings just for the hell of it, work at different scales, employ different color combinations, and experiment with unusual ways of applying paint. With less investment in honing a unique visual language, painters like Kadar Brock, Rebecca Morris, and Jasmine Justice use earlier forms of abstraction the way Rauschenberg used found objects. In the process, there is no room for handwringing about originality; it is simply assumed that it will result from synthesis and recombination. And if it doesn’t, well, isn’t that just as interesting?
Patrick Brennan, “Flow and Fade” (2011). Mixed media on canvas. 72 × 48˝.
Amy Feldman, “Ever After” (2010). Acrylic and spray paint on canvas. 80 × 90.˝
Insofar as the new abstract painters employ old tropes and methods with a certain insouciant abandon, one might call them the new casualists. Yet they are not as iconoclastic as they might appear. In Malevich and the American Legacy, a recent exhibition at Gagosian, curator Andrea Crane attempts to position Malevich’s Supremetism as a progenitor of Minimalism. But in my view, Malevich’s small-scale, quirky abstractions have more in common with the new casualism than the austere, highly refined minimalism of Judd, Stella, Kelly, and the like. Malevich believed that pure feeling was to be found in non-objective painting, and that materialism could lead to “spiritual freedom.” Both Malevich and the new casualists, who approach their work intuitively, are unfazed by ill-defined parameters or truncated lines of thought. Like the philosopher-mathematicians who devised “fuzzy logic,” new casualists, like Suprematists, seek to accommodate a world in which there is often no clear truth or falseness. On balance, they are more intrigued by the questions and contradictions in art than by any definitive answers it might provide.
At Jason McCoy, Stephanie Simmons curated 70 Years of Abstract Paintings: Excerpts, which comprises a good survey of small-scale work by more than 40 artists. The exhibition presents a convincing historical context for the new post-Bauhaus abstraction. Old paintings by Josef Albers, Gene Davis, Jackson Pollock, Al Held, Man Ray, Hedda Sterne, Hans Hofmann, Leon Polk Smith, and Friedel Dzubas are hung side-by-side with recent work by Jim Lee, Joe Fyfe, Rob Nadeau, Sharon Horvath, Cora Cohen, Gwenn Thomas, and Thomas Nozkowski, among others. For most of the artists, their experience of everyday life is the filter through which they focus their paintings, entertaining multiple contradictory ideas at once. Although many of the artists included in the exhibition also work larger, Simmons selected small-scale work so that she could fit as much as possible into the show without marginalizing the smaller pieces. Tellingly, the smaller paintings tend not to be studies for larger work; rather, she told me, “working at different scales is one way they avoid a formulaic approach.”
If the new casualism resists evaluation on traditional criteria, how should it be judged? Here, perhaps, the Minimalists are relevant. Ellsworth Kelly once said, “I have never been interested in painterliness…putting marks on a canvas. My work is a different way of seeing and making something which has a different use.” A new casualist might well make the same general claim. But while Kelly wants to take the personal out of the equation, the casualist believes that exploring even mundanely subjective perceptions can yield extraordinary insights. In many ways, the new approach to abstraction is indebted to female artists of the 1970s like Elizabeth Murray, Mary Kelly, and Ree Morton, who, railing against the macho posturing of the Minimalists, worked from an intimate point of view that embraced messy everyday detail. The new casualists are adapting a like attitude to an increasingly complex, unfamiliar, and multivalent world. If the viewer leaves a show of their paintings agitated by their abrupt shifts, their crosscurrents, and their purposeful lack of formal cohesion, the work has succeeded.
Friday, June 3, 2011
check out this double deal
EACH PRINT: WAS $50, NOW $30
Offer expires at 8:00 p.m. ET 6/3/11
Today's Friday Flash brings you prints from Gary Petersen and Sean Greene, whose works are appearing (along with that of Vince Contarino) in the show Traction at the Geoffrey Young Gallery in Great Barrington, MA, now until June 23rd. To us, it makes perfect sense these two color-driven abstract artists are paired together. Both offer an exhilarating combination of fidelity and spontaneity—lines and colors are laid down precisely while bearing the mark of the artists who created them. Strict and calculated geometry sways with velocity and motion. As Jen has said about Gary's work (a sentiment easily shared with Sean's work, as well):
The colors and the crisp, almost graphic, quality of the image combine to create an exuberance that leaps off the screen and into my heart. I love work that makes my heart race.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Monday, May 23, 2011
Traction at Geoffrey Young Gallery
Traction at Geoffrey Young Gallery opens this Saturday in Great Barrington, MA 5:30-7:30.
40 Railroad Street 2nd Floor. It will feature my work with Gary Petersen's and Vince Contarino's.
Show is up May 28-June 23 Thursday through Saturday 11-5pm
40 Railroad Street 2nd Floor. It will feature my work with Gary Petersen's and Vince Contarino's.
Show is up May 28-June 23 Thursday through Saturday 11-5pm
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Monday, February 14, 2011
Gouache
I have been working at trying to use Gouache paints effectively. I am happy with this one. The medium requires me to slow down, and really arrive at the colors that are in mind.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
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