My painting, Connections, has been accepted into the Absolutely Abstract juried show at the Philadelphia Sketch Club. The exhibition runs from August 27 through September 18, 2010, and there is a reception on Sunday, September 12, from 2-4pm. The Philadelphia Sketch Club is located at 235 South Camac St, Philadelphia, PA.
Connections, acrylic/panel, 30x24
I’m very pleased to announce that one of my paintings, The Reality Problem, has been accepted into a juried show at Muse Gallery in Philadelphia. The show runs from August 6 through August 29, 2010. The first day of the exhibition is Philadelphia’s “First Friday” when galleries in the Old City part of town stay open from 7-9pm. There will also be an Artists’ Reception on Sunday, August 8, from 1-4pm. Muse Gallery is located at 52 North 2nd Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106. I hope to see you there!
The Reality Problem, acrylic/panel, 24x24
I recently returned from a 10-day trip to Hungary that included a brief stay in Budapest followed by a visit to the southern Hungarian city of Pécs (pronounced variously like “Peach”, “Paych”, or “Paysch”). Aside from making a nice vacation to a place I’d never visited before, the purpose of the trip was to attend Bridges 2010, a conference that “brings together practicing mathematicians, scientists, artists, educators, musicians, writers, computer scientists, sculptors, dancers, weavers, and model builders in a lively atmosphere of exchange and mutual encouragement.” I’ll keep this blog post focused on the conference, but hope to eventually add some more information about the rest of my trip.
View of Pecs from our hotel
This was my first time attending the Bridges conference and I only learned about the gathering a few months ago while randomly searching the web for something or another related to art (tessellations, I think). One of the more interesting subtexts throughout the conference, though seldom explicitly part of the presentations, were the ideas of “What is art?” or “Is that art mathematical?” So, a painter who was fully engaged in the art world might look at a visual representation of some complex mathematical construct and wonder if the computer-generated image “counts” as art. On the other hand, some of those more focused on the mathematical side of things wondered whether paintings or photographs that aren’t explicitly based upon equations of some sort were appropriate for the conference. Fortunately, most of the crowd seemed to be open-minded about and interested in both art and math — thus the apropos appellation “Bridges”.
The best of the talks (formal paper presentations) were fascinating and stimulating and had me writing down topics to explore in the future, tools to track down, and ideas for further reflection. I’ll highlight a few of the talks here.
Early on the first day, Christopher Carlson kicked things off with an excellent presentation about using the powerful tool Mathematica to interactively explore visual designs such as for corporate logos. Recently, I had been thinking about Douglas Hofstadter’s ideas about “knob-twiddling”, where he says that, “Making variations on a theme is really the crux of creativity.” (Hofstadter, 1985) Carlson’s talk was a perfect example of “knob-twiddling as creativity”. He starts with a basic logo modeled in Mathematica (a tool that he made look incredibly simple), figures out what the “knobs” should be (i.e., how to parametrize the logo), and then starts twiddling. If you pick the right knobs, you end up with an incredibly powerful way to explore a visual space of logos and find things that would probably have been too difficult to design from scratch.
Later in the morning, Joel Varland, a professor at Savannah College of Art and Design, summoned another author whose work I’m fond of, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Craig Kaplan gave a talk about Parquet Deformations, another topic made popular by Douglas Hofstadter. Parquet Deformations depict a kind of metamorphosis (a la M.C. Escher) where a tiled pattern varies slowly across space into a different pattern. They’re fun to look at, hard to draw manually, and Kaplan explained the tools he’s built to help explore the possibilities (more knob-twiddling!).
On the second morning of the conference, Bih-yaw Jin from National Taiwan University explained how he and his students were able to string together some beautiful molecular structures out of ordinary beads. Focusing on “fullerene” structures (roughly spherical carbon molecules), he explained how by looking at the “sprial code” of a particular molecule, you can learn how to string the beads together such that each bead only needs to be “strung” twice to construct sturdy models. In his constructions, the beads represent bonds between atoms, not the atoms themselves. I was fortunate enough to be one of the early birds to his talk and received one of his sample C80 molecules, which has inspired my wife to explore bead stringing designs herself!
C80 molecule in beads by Bih-yaw Jin
In several of my paintings, I’ve used a procedure that I developed in Photoshop to take an image and abstract it into what I found to be pleasing patterns of interacting positive and negative shapes. It wasn’t until Jonathan Mccabe’s presentation, though, that I learned that these patterns have been around for a long time and were in fact discovered by Alan Turing, one of the fathers of computer science. (Excitement: Turing found the same thing I did! Dismay: It’s been around forever and is apparently well known, though not by me!) Turing described a “morphogenesis” process in terms of chemical producers and consumers and hypothesized that this sort of process could be the cause of zebra stripes. Mccabe explains his model for generating Turing patterns by simulating the activator and inhibitor dynamics in a randomized grayscale image, and then shows how he can use Turing patterns at multiple scales within the same image to create complex, dynamic, beautifully biological artistic images.
A few of my paintings that include Turing patterns:
Artist James Mai gave a talk about simultaneous color contrast which started with “color theory 101″ but then moved on to his own work, paintings that are specifically about the interaction of colors and the ways in which adjacent colors affect each other in our perceptions.
On “Hungarian Day”, István Orosz explained the motivation and technique behind his double meaning and anamorphic artwork. In work such as “Durer in the Forest”, Orosz places one image within another, often “hiding” (in plain sight) a portrait of a person that the rest of the image relates to. In his anamorphic work, a geometrically distorted image is constructed on a flat surface so that when it is viewed as a reflection in a mirrored cylinder, the “correct” image pops into place. In the best of his pieces, such as in “The Raven (Edgar Allen Poe)”, the anamorphoses are composed so carefully that the image has two meanings, working well without the mirror as one image and then revealing another meaning once the mirror is in place.
Durer in the Forest, from Wikipedia
Later in the day, Ernő Rubik must have been feeling the love from the crowd and he received the full celebrity treatment in giving a talk about the phenomenon of the Rubik’s cube. With cameras flashing left and right, Rubik explained (in English, for which he apologized that he wasn’t as lyrical as he would be in Hungarian) how he struggled against those who thought the cube couldn’t be successful because it was too hard. The allure of the cube was through its combination of simplicity of concept with complexity of solution, and its TV-friendliness hit the sweet spot of 80s culture at exactly the right time.
Rubik at Bridges 2010
The fourth day of the conference was “Excursion Day”. First up were the Vasarely and Zsolnay ceramics museums in Pécs. Vasarely is one of the fathers of Op Art and the museum provides examples of his work from throughout his life. (My wife and I also visited another Vasarely museum in Budapest, but that one was a bit of a disappointment as the lighting was poor and the lady at the front desk tried to rip us off while buying tickets; if I’m generous I’d say she was just bad at math, but realistically it felt like she was trying to take advantage of tourists not familiar with Hungarian language or currency… Fortunately, mathematics is universal and subtraction is simple and we paid the correct amount.) The Pecs museum lights many of the works with perfectly aligned track lighting that makes the paintings appear to glow from within. This large, flat tapestry appeared to bulge out of the wall.
Tapestry at museum in Pecs
After the museums, we took a trip out to the town of Villány for lunch and a wine-tasting, followed by a visit to a local sculpture garden.
Traditional Hungarian lunch plate
In the wine cellar
On the final day of the conference, Henry Segerman gave a short talk that explained the causes of some interesting artifacts (e.g., the spokes and rings) that occur when you color in a “sunflower spiral” according to a Fibonacci-related metric.
Henry Segerman's Fibonacci metric coloring of sunflower spiral
A few months ago I finished a painting that also made use of a similar sunflower spiral in its underlying composition (which coincidentally had a similar color palette).
Center of Narrative Gravity #3
Nearing the end of the 5-day conference, David Reimann spoke about using Bézier curves to create interesting tilings based upon Truchet tiles. For the non-mathematicians reading this, a Bézier curve is a way to draw smooth, continuous curves (Wikipedia has excellent animations). Truchet tiles are squares divided into two triangles (e.g., one black and one white), which when laid out in a grid and rotated in various combinations produce pleasing patterns. A variation uses two curves from midpoint-to-midpoint rather than a diagonal line to divide up each square. Reimann showed how using various curves (with both one arc and two arcs per side) on tilings can create aesthetically appealing patterns (reminding me of Brice Marden paintings). This talk had me thinking about my painting, Conceptual Framework, which has a tiling of curves very similar to those of Truchet tiles.
Conceptual Framework
There were many other talks, but these were the ones that I found most interesting and relevant to my own art.
Two of my portrait-based paintings are included in the show Face Value — The Art of Portraiture at the Trenton City Museum (Ellarslie Mansion) in Cadwalader Park, Trenton, NJ. The show runs from July 31 through September 5, 2010, with an opening reception on Saturday, July 31, from 5-7pm. The show is put on by TAWA, the Trenton Artists Workshop Association.
Introspection, acrylic/panel, 36x24
The Self, acrylic/panel, 36x24
Update: I’m very pleased to report that The Self received a Best in Show award (tied with a wonderful pastel painting by Rhoda Yanow)! Thanks to everyone for the very kind comments about both paintings at tonight’s opening…
Relatively speaking, Thursday wasn’t such a bad day to walk around New York City to see art. The “cool” 90 degrees was bearable and with some strategic south-side-of-the-street-shade-walking, the worst of the heat could be avoided (“…walking on the sidewalk hotter than a match head…”). The No. 6 train uptown, with its working air conditioning, was downright comfortable, if a bit aromatic. I began my day heading uptown to the Whitney.
Starting at the top floor, I finally caught the “Collecting Biennials” show that I had missed during the Biennial proper and am glad I did. It mostly felt pretty familiar, with staples such as Hopper’s “Early Sunday Morning” and Duane Hanson’s “Woman with Dog”, but many such as Peter Blume’s surreal “Man of Sorrows” were memorable and new to me.
The real reason I visited the Whitney, though, was for the Charles Burchfield exhibition. (Note that if you visit, the show proceeds clockwise — start to your left as you exit the stairs — which is the reverse of many shows at the Whitney). It’s a diverse show, with beautifully composed high contrast landscapes alternating with somewhat chaotic, vibrating images in which it seems the artist was attuned to waves of energy from the objects in his scene. I liked the more graphic (and less chaotic) pieces best and a few of the paintings that dealt with atmosphere and seasons were sensational. Burchfield is often grouped into the same set of American modernists as one of my favorite painters, Oscar Bluemner, and so I went to this exhibition with comparisons in mind. Although there are some formal similarities in the occasional use of stark trees and repeated patterns in abstracted architectural elements, to my eye the Bluemner paintings are so much more exciting. Hopefully, once the Whitney expands into a second space in Chelsea there will be enough room to show more of both artist’s work at the same time and on a more regular basis.
I headed to Chelsea and began exploring, this time starting all the way down on 19th Street at David Zwirner Gallery for a show entitled, “The Evryali Score.” It’s a group show of largely conceptual art — not usually my thing, but I point it out because of a few items that caught my eye. One piece, a portion of a composite work by Mary Ellen Carroll entitled “Alas Poor Yorick”, consisted of a large sheet of paper full of tightly scribbled black ink marks that reminded me of the work of one of my colleagues at Artists’ Gallery, Jennifer Cadoff.
I was surprised to find several pieces by Fred Sandback that were not of the threaded space-slicing sort. Instead, they consist of framed sheets of paper with a phrase or two of typewritten text. The text defines, as a sort of a database query onto the world in the style of a linguistic discussion on referents, the existence of a sculpture. For instance, one piece reads, “There exists a sculpture consisting of all infrared radiation present in my studio on 11th street in Brooklyn.”
Another piece was a head-shaker: a blank canvas hung on the wall — that’s it (remember the old Batman episode where the Joker creates a similarly empty painting and calls it, “Death of a Bat”?). Well, in this case it was the metadata that made the difference in Bruno Jakob’s piece (or at least made it entertaining): “The BRAIN Untitled”, Invisible painting: brain on unprimed canvas. It’s not everyday you see a work where the medium is listed as “brain on canvas”!
Moving along, I found another conceptually interesting but much more optically pleasing exhibition at Kim Foster Gallery in the work of Christian Faur. Faur uses thousands of “hand-cast” crayons in varying tones as the pixels in pointillist portraits taken from Depression-era photographs. The crayons are stacked in a grid and bound within a frame so that there’s a three dimensional element to the works: as you move from left to right you catch more or less of the length of the crayon. Though the crayons are colorful, the overall image reads as a toned black-and-white (or sepia) image through a kind of optical integration that changes depending upon your distance from the work.
Upstairs at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, a small group show contains a number of eye-catching abstracts. In particular, I loved the two curvy, colorful abstractions by Julie Gross that combine biomorphic shapes with careful geometry.
At The Pace Gallery on 22nd Street, a show by the enigmatic Tim Hawkinson entitled One Man Band takes a minute or two to register and at first I thought it would be an in-and-out experience. However, the carefully engineered musical objects are each worthy of some study. Most of the objects are wired up to motion detectors so that as you approach the piece they “turn on” and something starts moving in such a way as to cause the object to make musical sounds. For instance, in my favorite piece, a long string of carefully spaced beads winds around pulleys mounted on a large tree branch so that when the beads trigger one or more sensors, a slide whistle receives a burst of air and an adjustment to its length, producing a stream of playful toy instrument notes.
After some much needed fueling up with some friends at The Half King, I went to the opening reception of “New York Moments” at George Billis Gallery. This group show contains several dozen very finely painted images depicting scenes from around New York. David FeBland, whose work I first came across during one of the TriBeCa open studio tours five or six years ago, shows a piece that was instantly recognizable as his: I remember his work specifically because of the appealingly expressive textures in the often watery scenes of people splashing through the streets of the city. Andrew Jones has two fine “stoop paintings” remaining from his solo show last month (featuring lovingly painted handrails and stairs from local neighborhood stoops). Several artists were inspired by the views from rooftops (“…gonna meet you on the rooftop…”) with water towers featuring prominently, including paintings by Ephraim Rubenstein (whose drawing class at ASL was always full so I never managed to get in) and Lucy Gould Reitzfeld, whose Landscape Painting class at The School of Visual Arts I was fortunate enough to be able to attend. Her painting, “Snow Light“, is part of her recent series of “Mercer Street” paintings that capture the light and atmosphere of views from atop a building on Mercer Street at various times of the day and year. The reception was packed and unlike another opening I attended that night, the A/C was working (“…despite the heat it’ll be alright…”)! A New York themed show was a nice way to finish up a day of exploring art around the city (“…in the summer, in the city / in the summer, in the city…”)
This month I have just one painting on display at Artists’ Gallery, but it’s a favorite one that I haven’t exhibited in quite some time:
Journey, acrylic on canvas, 36x36
This month’s exhibition is up through August 1, 2010, and the opening reception for the featured artists (Carol Sanzalone and Alla Podolsky) is this Saturday, July 10, from 4-7 pm. Gallery hours are Fri-Sat-Sun 11am-6pm and the gallery is located at 18 Bridge St, Lambertville, NJ 08530.
The painting Change Over Time consists of approximately a dozen layers of marks interspersed with a dozen layers of thinly tinted glaze, creating both physical and optical depth. The glazing layers contain a mixture of charcoal and “interference” pigments, so that the painting appears to have both coarse texture as well as a very smooth, glossy overall finish.
This piece is on display this month (June 2010) at Artists’ Gallery and will be up through July 4, 2010.
Change Over Time, acrylic and charcoal on panel, 24x24
This month at Artists’ Gallery I’m exhibiting six paintings, including these two “corner canvases”. The canvas is beveled so that the painting hangs snugly in corners (they also can be hung flat against the wall). This show is up through July 4, 2010, and the gallery’s hours are Fri-Sat-Sun from 11am-6pm (18 Bridge St, Lambertville, NJ).
Both Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 24x12 in.
I started off yesterday’s trip to New York on the upper east side where I met a friend for lunch, after which I had intended to see the Julie Mehretu show at the Guggenheim. As I started walking towards the museum, I had a déjà vu moment while thinking about why I don’t get to the Guggenheim very often: I’ve done this before, and it’s closed on Thursdays, the day I’m usually visiting the city. So, no Mehretu (or Kenneth Noland) on this visit.
Fortunately, the Met is exhibiting “Picasso in the Met” just a few blocks away. It’s an exhaustingly huge display of all of the Picasso works within the museum’s collection. Unfortunately, shows like this are usually packed and this one was no exception. More frustrating than just being crowded, though, was the exasperating number of people just moving from painting to painting taking photographs with their cameras… and often with just cell phone cameras! It required much restraint to not scream out, “Look at the painting — it’s right there!” But, I need to get over this particular pecccadillo as it’s not likely to go away and isn’t it snooty of me to tell people how to enjoy their museum experience?
I couldn’t spend that much time at the show because the crowds made lingering at any one piece difficult and because I needed to get down to Chelsea to meet a friend for coffee. So I hoofed it across Central Park to the west side and caught the C train down to 23rd Street. After re-fueling and catching up, I started gallery-going in earnest and there are a several shows worth noting.
First up, on 24th Street at Mike Weiss Gallery is Piet van den Boog (the second time I’ve seen his work at this gallery). Big heads (especially the artist’s) are back, along with large bodies in this visually exciting show. The paintings are large, oil-and-clay-on-acrylic-on-oxidized-steel (mounted on stretcher bars), so each piece has a variety of textures: crumbly clay (part real clay, part trompe l’oeil, I think) on the figure’s body, pleasantly stippled brushstrokes in the flesh (especially in the faces), sketchy acrylic underpaintings, and oxidized black steel backgrounds. Consisting of one intense self portrait and perhaps six or seven showing a woman covered with clay, the show is a metaphorical reference to a scene from a Sylvia Plath book where the narrator is paralyzed with indecision about choosing which fig to eat on a fig tree, and while making up her mind she witnesses the decay of the unchosen figs.
Gagosian’s two Chelsea galleries both are exhibiting impressive, must-see shows from diverse ends modern art history: Roy Lichtenstein’s pop still lifes on 24th Street and Claude Monet’s late Impressionist work on 21st. The Lichtentstein paintings are completely flat and devoid of visible brushwork, using instead a graphic sensibility, bright primary colors, and high-contrast patterns (stripes or Benday dots) for their visual appeal. Though it’s an impressive show, the still lifes don’t have the narrative interest of his comic paintings or the abstract appeal of his brushstroke pieces. The ones I liked the most were paintings that quoted other figures in art history (is that from a Matisse? is that Leger?). The exhibition includes a handful of very enjoyable sculptures that are like graphic paintings that broke free from the canvas and landed on stilts.
With the Lichtenstein show, the pieces are best seen from a good distance away and there’s not much point in getting up close; this type of work looks about the same in reproduction as it does in the gallery. On the other hand, the Monet show on 21st Street needs to be seen in person. These paintings are, of course, brushstroke intensive and worth getting close to (but not too close! The Gagosian guards are particularly aggressive for this show in keeping people at least a few feet away from the works, which is a shame but probably makes sense for an exhibition like this where the insurance costs must be astronomical!). And as is the case with much of Monet’s work, what you see in a painting depends upon how far away you are from it. Up close, it’s brushstroke, scumbling, and swirls of color. If you squint or step back, though, beautiful snippets of landscape pop into place. Especially exciting are the scenes in the penultimate gallery showing “The Alley of Roses” and “The Japanese Bridge”.
I then headed back up to 27th Street to Sundaram Tagore Gallery and an exhibition of acrylic on fabric over panel paintings by Robert Yasuda. In many of these pieces Yasuda is using what I believe to be interference acrylic paints (I’ve used them as well) that produce a “flip” effect as you view them at different angles with respect to the lighting. From one angle, a paint may appear pinkish but from another it will flip to the complementary green. Multiple sheets of these and regular acrylic, either poured or brushed onto the fabric, produce beautiful fields of color that change as you approach the works. Catch the light one way and you see a beautiful haze of purple streaking across the painting but back up a bit and the purple vanishes. In a few paintings, it appears that instead of the interference effect the artist is adjusting the gloss or reflectivity on the paint, so that for instance a reflective golden yellow blends into a matte yellow backdrop. Fabric is stretched across custom-carved wood panels with organic dimples, protrusions, or nooks that add more intrigue to the composition. Unfortunately, it’s probably impossible to capture the visual appearance of these paintings adequately in photographs, so if you want to see them you’ll have to visit the gallery.
Making for a nice comparison with the Yasuda show, McKenzie Fine Art exhibits the work of James Lecce, another artist using acrylics in creative ways to colorful effect. Lecce’s abstract panels consist of multiple layers of acrylic poured under certain artist-defined procedural constraints. The paintings vary between cool, flat color and reflective metallic pigments in biomorphically dimensional abstractions. As with Yasuda, how you catch the light reflecting off the piece changes your perception of lights and darks. I can’t help but think of technique when looking at them and in particular asking questions about how long do those pours take to dry and what happens if you make a mistake? (Working with poured acrylic can be tricky — better get your medium mixed just right and hope you don’t have dust floating around.)
Andy Goldsworthy heads to the city for a nifty show at Galerie Lelong that features several series of photographs documenting patterns of water evaporating on the ground. In one series, a Goldsworthy squiggle appears as a reflection of water painted on the road in between some parked cars. Over time, the scene darkens towards night and the water evaporates so that the patterns begin to fade away. A separate room exhibits a “triptych” of three video projections that show “rain shadows” from various spots in New York: the artist laid down on the sidewalk as it started to rain and then filmed the resulting “shadow” of a dry spot as it changes over time.
Finally, I went to the opening reception for Andrew Jones‘ latest work at George Billis Gallery. This show continues his series of “stoop paintings” that picture the stair railings of (mostly) Greenwich Village in interesting lights and with creative compositions. Even more so than in his last show, these paintings really pop with dimension through control of detail, contrast, and atmospheric perspective. Both the shadows and the lights in these paintings contain variations of color and tone in the brushstroke so that they’re worth looking at up close as well as from across the room. Most of the pieces focus on the “newel”, the post at the end of the stoop on which the handrail swirls to a flourishing finish, though there are a couple with direct-on views of arabesque railing posts that provide a nice semi-abstract variation from the newels.
(After a day full of walking around the galleries (with some very sore feet to show for it — those shoes weren’t as comfy as I thought), I grabbed a quick bite to eat at Rin Thai on 23rd Street between 7th & 8th. I didn’t get to try anything more than my entree (Bamboo Pad Ped, extra spicy), but it was fantastic and wonderfully flavorful (would have been better to share, though). Recommended if you’re in the area and like Thai food!)
Though my 2-person featured show in Lambertville has finished up, I’ll be exhibiting three older works this month at the gallery (Artists’ Gallery, 18 Bridge Street, Lambertville, NJ).
 Enfoldment, 36x24 |
 Metonymy, 36x24 |
Secondary Process, 24x24
The show (which features the work of Beatrice Bork and Paul Grecian in the main gallery) is up from May 7 through June 6, 2010.
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