Paul Behnke blogs about a recent series of work by painter Hamlett Dobbins. Behnke writes: "The forms of the simpler compositions possess a tantric purity while the color evokes the layered, jewel like preciousness of Russian icons. Only in scale do Dobbins' drawings defy this reading. The medium size just begins to flower into the
As part of her series exploring color in painting, Joanne Mattera blogs about the recent exhibition Douglas Florian: Dawn Thieves at Bravin Lee Programs, New York. Mattera writes: "The color is... largely dry and flat, now fabulously textured, and highly chromatic thanks to Florian's propensity toward complementary hues. As before, the works are modestly sized--larger
Jennifer Samet talks with painter Sharon Horvath about her new paintings and her process. Horvath, referring to a recently completed painting, remarks: "It is made of all this cross-hatching and weaving of lines. It is a specific energy. The question is, what energy are you really working with? When you compare painters, there can be
Sabastian Smee and Michael Auping discuss artist Lucian Freud with Tyler Green. Asked how American's might relate to Freud's work, Auping comments: "Freud doesn't follow a modernist narrative. American art really was the great tail end of the modernist narrative… Freud doesn't fit that narrative at all. He's working in a genre that's the most
Valerie Brennan interviews painter Ward Schumaker about his work and studio practice. Schumaker remarks: "I like to work on a very defined, consistent group... then follow that with a group of things that veer wildly in different directions... Most important and most uncomfortable is that once a direction is decided upon, I have to be
Laura Gilbert reviews the exhibition Bartolo di Fredi, The Adoration of the Magi: A Masterpiece Reconstructed at the Museum of Biblical Art, New York, on view through September 9, 2012. Gilbert writes: "The exhibit, with only seven works, is stunning in its simplicity and beautifully conceived, and it shows off one of this museum's strengths
Michael Shaw interviews artist Fritz Chestnut. Chesnut remarks: "I hope to make something vulnerable in that I am accountable for it, putting it out there and backing it up. Painting for me is a super risky thing and sometimes it comes easily. Other times I have a hard time turning off my mind and am
Julie Torres discusses the paintings in her exhibition Ghost in the Machine at Storefront Bushwick, on view through August 5, 2012. Of her process Torres comments: "I sort of bang my head against the wall for hours and weeks and months until something happens and when the thing happens, it's bigger than me… it's a
Painter's Bread
Michael Rutherford interviews painter Page Whitmore. Whitmore remarks: "I derive immense tactile pleasure from making and materiality. In alignment with some of the tensions in my work, achieving a high level of craft is important to me with the minimalist painting-esque objects, whereas some works I show are industrially manufactured; almost artless. My work has
Martin Herbert talks to Seamus Heaney about Titian, poetry, and painting on the occasion of he cross-disciplinary Metamorphosis: Titian 2012 sponsored by the National Gallery, London. The exhibition/event invited visual artists, poets, choreographers, and composers to respond to three Titian paintings in the National Gallery. Heaney, Herbert writes, "chose to write about The Death of
Adele M. Reed reviews the recent exhibition Robert Holyhead at Peer Gallery, London. Reed writes: "Running across the first three walls are three rows of small 'drawings' set out in a grid-like narrative reflecting the stream of creative consiousness that Holyhead travels through before starting work on each final major piece. They present less a
Ann Knickerbocker blogs about abstract paintings seen recently in San Francisco including works by Indira Martina Morre, Teo Gonzalez, Judith Foosaner, Patrick Wilson, Marilyn Levin, Lora Fosberg, and Reed Anderson. Knickerbocker discusses qualities and approaches in the works in terms of day - "stability, continuity, a kind of plotline managed through repetition, a plan" -
Stuart Jeffries talks to painter Howard Hodgkin as the artist approaches his 80th birthday. " 'I am a representational painter, but not a painter of appearances. I paint representational pictures of emotional situations,' said Hodgkin once. But for the most part, Hodgkin doesn't talk about his work. Paint is, for him, more eloquent than words.
Kevin Muente reflects on George Inness' painting Near The Village, October in the collection of the Cincinnati Art Museum. Muente writes: "Tonal shapes read harmoniously throughout. Grass plains flow and mysteriously turn into a stand of trees. Buildings in the village Inness handled in a similar fashion to an overturned log in the foreground. The
Deborah Barlow writes about the her experiences viewing Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park paintings on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. through Septmber 23, 2012. Barlow notes that a "facet of this work and this artist that is important to not overlook is what Ocean Park has come to say about Diebenkorn himself.
Teri Tynes talks to painter Alfred Leslie about his recent exhibition The Lives of Some Women at Janet Borden Gallery, New York. Tynes writes: "The images of women in 'The Lives of Some Women' similarly reflect... unnatural realism, pictures where light sources are unjustified. Beyond this approach, the images reflect on the layering, semi-erasures and
Taking Michael H. Miller's post of images from the 1978 New Museum exhibition Bad Painting as a catalyst, Sharon Butler asks if the label should be revisited in a contemporary context with "some specific examples, because the changing nature of what we consider bad painting is a fascinating subject for a good discussion. If these
Joanne Mattera blogs about a recent exhibition of paintings by Charline von Heyl at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA. Mattera writes that von Heyl "plies color against black and white, and she uses a variety of picture-making materials in her paintings. Some are rich and drippy; others, rendered more minimally with charcoal and
Katherine Luer blogs about Pierre-Auguste Renoir's extraordinary drive to paint late in life and posts a video of Renoir painting in 1915. She writes: "Renoir suffered from debilitating rheumatoid arthritis for [the] last three decades or so of his life. His hands were deformed, his joints severely damaged, and he was wheelchair-bound for most of
Suzanne Muchnic reports on the death of painter Karl Benjamin, July 26 at the age of 86. Benjamin's work was recently on view in the exhibition Karl Benjamin and the Evolution of Abstraction, 1950-1980 at Louis Stern Fine Arts, Los Angeles. Muchnic notes that "in a 1986 essay Benjamin wrote: 'I am an intuitive painter,