I have just finished a new painting entitled Sheer Doing. The phrase “sheer doing” is common enough, but in this case it comes from the Daniel Gilbert book, Stumbling on Happiness. In this painting, the thumbnail doesn’t have enough detail to really capture what’s going on, so to see more you’ll need to click through to the detail page.

I have finally managed to properly photograph my painting Strange Loops 5, which was recently on display at the Mercer County Artists Show at The Gallery @ Mercer Community College. This painting is the fifth in my mini-series of “Strange Loops” paintings. The phrase “strange loop” comes from Douglas Hofstadter, first described I think in Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, but elaborated on more fully in his 2007 book, I Am a Strange Loop.

The notion of a strange loop refers to a kind of recursive hierarchy of multiple levels of abstraction that eventually loop back to where you started from. Hofstadter often uses as a kind of metaphor the idea of pointing a video camera at a TV showing the output of the video camera — it’s possible to end up with rather startling feedback loops that seem to take on a life of their own. Hofstadter talks about “The Self” as being a kind of strange loop within the brain. My paintings in this series try to capture some of this, though I don’t think you can look at them in any sense as “pictures” of strange loops. But, as Hofstadter is a big fan of Escher, I use Escher-like tessellations of patterns, wrapped around in one or more loops of various kinds as the foundation for these paintings. I also try to imbue the works with multiple levels of colors, layers, and patterns that might click differently depending upon how you look at the work.

In addition to the primarily photo-based exhibitions I described the other day, I also visited a number of painting shows in Chelsea as well, a few of which are worth mentioning here.

First up, at Pace Wildenstein’s 25th Street gallery is a show of recent work from Thomas Nozkowski. Nozkowski was born in Teaneck, NJ, where I lived for most of the 1980s and which I consider my “home town”, so I have an extra interest in this artist. Although he’s been around for a long time, my familiarity with his work stems from a couple of shows at Max Protetch and his works on paper at BravinLee Programs.

The images in the show are so different from one another that it’s hard to have an overall opinion on “The Work” as a whole. What’s common is a playful sense of imagery, abstracted heavily from reality but still relying upon it, with a painterly touch that descends from Philip Guston or Caroll Dunham, minus the signature symbols of those artists. In some pieces, such as Untitled (8-93) , Untitled (8-109), and Untitled (8-107), I read the works as containing charming puppet-like characters and enjoy the formal as well as the “intentional” (what-it’s-about) aspects of the paintings. There are a few pieces, such as Untitled (P-19) or Untitled (8-100) where I find the peculiar compositions or lack of lead characters to be distracting — I can’t decide what to make of those works. For Nozkowski’s take on how he comes about his images, a short video on YouTube is helpful. In the You-do-the-math category: Nearly all of the 40 or so pieces in the show were sold or on reserve, at prices ranging from $30,000 to $75,000.

A fine new James Sienna show is in its last week at Pace’s other Chelsea gallery on 22nd Street. About a quarter of the 80 works on display (all since 2006) are enamel paintings on aluminum, with the rest being works on paper. The pieces I enjoy the most are the medium-sized enamel paintings that are full of patterns, rules, topography, and color. The rule systems that were fairly strict in past shows are relaxed occasionally here, to dynamic effect. Some of the larger works are drawn with India ink on paper and while interesting (e.g. a sort of tessellation of interlocking squiggles), they don’t have the kind of recursive design or evident labor found in the enamel paintings. There are at least two kinds of smaller drawings in the show — some greatly reduced, abstracted but essentially figurative forms and some “little old men” drawings. The more figurative works are full of scribbles and shadings that read as “hairy”, while the old people drawings are reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch.

Finally, perceptual artist Julian Stanczak has a stunning show of work up at Danese. As you enter the gallery, the 50-panel piece “Parade of Reds” draws you in (and the online image comes nowhere close to capturing either the color or texture of the piece) . While examining the individual panels that comprise the parade, you also notice that the space in between the panels turns green and purple, a purely optical effect resulting from after images and bouncing light.

One of the paintings in the show — Uninterrupted Blue (2005 [unfortunately no image available]) — reminded me of the James Welling photograms, with it’s blue curvy lines and organic shapes.

The show catalog includes an excellent interview of Stanczak by Dave Hickey in which the artist explains his take on narrative, abstraction, and color. In comparison to, say Nelson Shanks (whose opinions on abstraction I mentioned previously), Stanczak explains, “I have the facility to be a realist — and I love realism — but that is not ‘my art.’ Realism demands storytelling, which doesn’t appeal to me. When I looked for ‘my’ art, I saw it in the beauty of abstraction, in the possibility of achieving some clarity of experience — as a mental challenge, a provocation.”¹

He discusses how he was influenced at first more by Bonnard and then later more so by Monet, for whom “filtration of wavelength is more important than the reference of the image. He is more concerned with the behavior of color, with how he might make it airier, more atmospheric, and more volumetric.”

And in a point that I found especially interesting, Stanczak says that, “In my art, I do not dwell on ‘what is it?’ but rather on ‘what does it do to you?’ I want to leave my paintings open to interpretation. I tell my wife that if I had more time, I would be a minimalist. But then I imagine dishing out orange so that it can say proudly ‘I am Orange!’ Then I think, What about the metamorphosis? What about the interactive process through which paintings become alive?’”

[¹All quotes from Stanczak interview with Dave Hickey. Julian Stanczak. New York: Danese, 2008.]

Today was a beautiful day to stroll around Chelsea (especially compared to the brutal winds on my last visit). With lots of time and no museum shows to visit, I was able to leisurely work my way from 19th Street up to 26th Street, enjoying quite a few of the exhibitions along the way.

One show I was particularly looking forward to — Gregory Crewdson at Luhring Augustine — didn’t disappoint. Even though I love photography, in many photography shows I find myself just moving from one image to another without any need to spend a lot of time on any one image. But the Crewdson photographs demand more attention and it’s worth it. They are beautiful on a purely formal level. The camera is placed for perfect composition and everything fits together: edges don’t touch awkwardly and positive and negative shapes give each other enough room to breathe. The photos are large (approximately 59×90 inches), perfectly printed (inkjet!) on luster paper. But beyond the formal, the images draw you in and as you look around the photo you find one symbol after another: a turned over shopping cart, a broken window, an illuminated street sign. In almost all of the images, one or more old American cars (Pontiacs, Buicks) share the stage with figures who are often alone standing outside a building or under a bridge. Occasionally a pair of figures are visible in the car or in a building window. I found the typical Crewdson cinematic setups to be less intrusive in this show than in the past and the narratives less creepy and more psychologically interesting.

For a completely different kind of photography, see Ion Zupcu’s show at Clamp Art. These small (15×15 inch) black-and-white gelatin silver prints are abstract, geometrical swirls and angles. A few of them look like aerial shots of Richard Serra sculptures, but in fact the artist is photographing black paper in natural light that the artist has folded, twisted, and sculpted into interesting shapes.

I’ve stumbled upon Devorah Sperber’s work at a number of art fairs in the past: you’re walking down the aisle and at first you notice a wall of color splotches, but then you look into a small crystal ball and those splotches (really spools of thread all strung together) are shrunk and inverted, and voilà, you get the Mona Lisa or a Vermeer. When I stumbled upon her show at Caren Golden Fine Art this time, it was the subject matter that was most surprising: images from Star Trek! There are a few of the spool thread works, complete with mirrored balls that do the shrinking and pixelating, but when the images resolve you see Mr. Spock or Captain Kirk. In addition, there are a few pieces that are made from hanging strands of glass beads and these shimmering images read like figures in the process of being beamed up. There’s also a piece made with “chenille stems” (i.e., pipe cleaners!) to do the pixelation.

At the Dike Blair show at D’Amelio Terras, the room is filled with dozens of small inkjet prints of eyeballs scanned from the artist’s previous paintings. This reminded me of one of my own paintings from several years ago of my own eye. The question raised by this show, however, is: if the press release is itself an inkjet (or laserjet) print of one of the eyeballs in full color (albeit at a lesser quality), do I now own one of the artist’s works (unsigned, of course)?

Kim Foster gallery has two intriguing photography-based shows. First, Sherry Karver makes large black and white prints of digital images and uses them as a kind of grisaille for a subsequent oil painting. Layers of glazed color are added so that it’s hard to tell where the photo ends and the painting begins. The subjects are people caught moving about in a crowd, such as on the street or in a train station. Some of the figures are superimposed with fictional texts that are a kind of psychological description of the characters’ thoughts or hidden histories. I don’t usually enjoy text works as they demand a certain kind and direction of attention, but these were worth reading, full of sadness, insecurity, and sometimes humor.

The other show at Kim Foster by artist E.E. Smith contained a series of hyper-grainy “oil prints” made from cropped, enlarged photos. (The press release says that the artist hand coats watercolor paper with a light-sensitive coating in order to make the prints.) The resulting images look like conte crayon renderings. As with the Karver show, the subject matter is people caught in the act of doing their daily business and the grainy imagery of the prints has the look of surveillance photos.

One of the galleries in the huge David Zwirner space on West 19th Street contains a series of James Welling “photograms” (camera-less photographs, a few of which are also on view at the Whitney Biennial). The artist has taken window screens and cut, twisted, and sculpted them into torso-like shapes and then laid those shapes onto photo-sensitive paper to create beautiful, biomorphically abstract images.

Alexander Ross, whose works I loved several years ago at Feature Gallery and also at the Whitney’s “Remote Viewing” show, has moved on over to Marianne Boesky’s gallery (see the NY Times article, “Dear Gallery: It Was fun, but I’m Moving Up”). Unfortunately, these works don’t seem to have quite the same dimensional pop as the earlier works which so fascinated me. Some of the large green paintings are still quite interesting — blobs of green organic shapes (based on the artist’s clay models) rendered with gradients of color on a blue background. But they look flatter than in the past and aren’t quite as playful. In addition to the large oil paintings, the show also includes some smaller collages that mix photos of the artist’s paintings (or perhaps photos of the clay models) with crayon-like scrawls on paper.

Thankfully, not everything that I saw today was photo-based! I’ll save the descriptions for some fine painting shows by Thomas Nozkowski, James Sienna, and Julian Stanczak for my next post.

The final morning of the conference was led by two more prominent portrait artists, Daniel Greene and Nelson Shanks. Greene started off by showing slides of some of the works from his ongoing series of carnival paintings, recently on view at Gallery Henoch in NYC and also extensively covered in the art technique mags. Greene is an articulate speaker and the remaining portion of his session was devoted to Q&A, supposedly on technical issues though more of the questions went to intent and background information. I’d have liked to have gotten a question in on palette choice and color mixing, but time ran out. Interestingly, although there was almost no mention of acrylic paints at this conference and all of the principals are oil paint sticklers (with an occasional nod to pastels), Greene answered a question about acrylics giving them full-fledged status without knocking them, though he admitted it wasn’t a medium he had used extensively himself. Interestingly, Greene mentioned that he lived for a while in the 1950’s East Village and occasioned the Cedar Bar when it was the regular haunt of de Kooning, Pollock, et al., but that abstract painting wasn’t for him: he tried it but found it “too easy” and so instead he set out to continually challenge himself with representational painting.

Speaking of abstraction, the final speaker of the conference was Nelson Shanks, who can barely hide his contempt for any kind of non-representational painting (not that he tries to hide it). “Realism is the only language an artist can really use,” he said (if my notes are accurate), though “if realism is to be a valid form of art today, it needs to break barriers and not just break competence.” His talk was fascinating, though he is incredibly off-putting if you like abstraction. He slammed de Kooning and Twombly and derided Matisse as having not reached a level of artistic competence comparable to prehistoric cave paintings. Shanks is undoubtedly a very fine painter – his portraits of Lady Diana and Pope John Paul II are stunning – but I would rather spend a day looking at a room full of de Koonings or Matisses any time! (Not a big Twombly fan, myself…) He opined that in later years Renoir must have been painting mostly from the heart, without his intellect, as his later output was “pretty pathetic.” He exhorted viewers to look beyond Sargent’s brushstroke, liking brushstroke to type on a typewriter versus the words that were typed (which I think was a quote from Robert Henri). (Interestingly, as one who appreciates good graphic design and likes to learn about typeface design, I find that typeface *is* important and can make a difference in how you read the work.)

Perhaps sticking his brush in the eyes of other speakers at the conference, Shanks claimed that color is as important as value, whereas at least three other speakers had put a premium on Value, Value, Value. Shanks said that starting with a gray background is limiting and boring, perhaps needling several of the other presenters who explained that they liked to start off their paintings on a neutral gray background.

Shanks has a very high opinion of himself and claims to consider quality to be of utmost importance. Yet he didn’t give his presentation the kind of effort one would expect: his opening remarks were scribbled down at 3am and he didn’t seem to know the format of his lecture; i.e., that he would be accompanied by video to which he was supposed to be explaining his process. The introductory video was something of a barf-inducing deification of Shanks, complete with classical music and worshipful quotations from his students. Fortunately, the video showing the artist in action was much more compelling and helpful. It included a high-speed demo of the artist painting a reclining model as well as a real-time performance of Shanks painting Marisa Tomei at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The main speakers at the conference – John Howard Sanden, Everett Raymond Kinstler, Burton Silverman, Daniel Greene, Aaron Shikler, and Nelson Shanks – are all very famous names within the portrait genre of American art, or at least within the community that they themselves nurture through conferences, workshops, and magazines like International Artist and The Artists Magazine. If I didn’t subscribe to those magazines, I might not have heard of any of them (though a few of their works, such as Shikler’s JFK portrait, are iconic). With the exception of Daniel Greene, I don’t think any of these names make it to any of the same galleries I regularly visit in Chelsea, 57th Street, or the Upper East Side, so it was interesting to participate in an event from a corner of the art world that has very little intersection with my usual familiar territory.

On Saturday morning, Everett Raymond Kinstler kicked off the day with a slide presentation about the portrait artists of the past who had inspired him, including:  Sargent, William Merritt Chase, Joaquin Sorolla, Anders Zorn, Giovanni Boldini, and James Montgomery Flagg.

Following Kinstler, Burton Silverman gave a demonstration entitled “Searching for the Truth”, though there wasn’t much philosophy in the talk and instead was pretty much a straightforward demo.  Starting with a scraped down canvas from a previous painting he hadn’t been satisfied with, he began a quick portrait of his sitter, Anne E. Hall, costumed in a deep magenta hat and black coat.  Starting with very brushy strokes and working all around the canvas (in a way that made you think at first he wasn’t going to get very far), he pulled together a very interesting piece in about 75 minutes of painting.

One problem with all of the demonstrations at the conference was that the video screens didn’t seem to be properly color calibrated – they were invariably too warm and too saturated.  In addition, sometimes the camera focusing on the model was cooler while the one focusing on the canvas was warmer so that it looked like the artist wasn’t doing a great job of mixing colors.  Yet when you looked at the actual canvas rather than the screen, you could tell that the colors on the painting were more nuanced and less intense, more closely matching those of the sitter.

David Leffel gave a demonstration about “finishing” a painting, though he started with a blank (toned burnt umber) canvas.  Rather than do a complete painting from life, he painted an eye (and then a nose) from memory and brought that portion of a painting to a decent state of completion.  Leffel says that most of his “consciousness” is on the tip of his brush, either on the palette or on the canvas.  He says the most important part of learning to paint is gaining the ability to manipulate paint on the brush with total confidence so that it will do what you want.

I skipped out early from the Aaron Shikler late afternoon session because the talk wasn’t particularly well prepared and wasn’t accompanied by any visuals (and I was tired!).  Shikler is the artist who painted the official White House portrait of JFK (painted posthumously) and has also painted official portraits of Jacqueline Kennedy and Nancy Reagan.  Unfortunately, by this time in the afternoon, I wasn’t in the mood for being awestruck and felt dinner was calling.

I just returned from the 3-day Portrait Society of America’s 2008 conference in Philadelphia. Why would I attend this conference, given that I am primarily an abstract painter? Well, I also enjoy painting representationally and every once in a while I paint portraits. So I went to the conference looking for some tips, some product information, and most of all for some inspiration. For the most part, the conference fulfilled my expectations.

First, some overall observations. I would guess that there were about 500 attendees at the show (although one speaker mentioned 800 copies of his brochure were printed), and it seemed that perhaps 70% were women. The crowd skewed older, with a large chunk of the audience probably over 50 years old; I think perhaps I was in the 15th percentile age-wise (i.e., 85% of the attendees were older than me). From the relatively small sampling of people I spoke with at the show, attendees came from all over the country (I spoke to artists from Ohio, Virginia, Tennessee, and Long Island, for instance.)

On Friday morning, things kicked off with some introductions and then a fine, long demonstration of premier coup (“alla prima”, or “first stroke”) painting by John Howard Sanden. Sanden was well-prepared and his demonstration of putting down the right brushstroke with the right color was effective, clear, and informative. He admits to not being perfect with the technique, where in theory you look at the model, look at your palette, load your brush, look back at the model, and then place the brushstroke on the canvas. His ten tips for the process were: (1) start with a toned canvas; (2) draw with your brush; (3) the 1st stroke is the final stroke; (4) base your marks on observation alone (not what you think it should look like); (5) every stroke counts; (6) use the largest brush possible; (7) work with speed & finish in 1 session; (8) every stroke is a drawing stroke; (9) tonal judgments are the most important; and (10) be deliberate and decisive.

Sanden uses a pre-mixed set of colors for his palette, which he also sells as a set called the “Pro-Mix System”, though fortunately his demo was not a hard sell for his product and the brochure he gave out tells you how to mix his palette yourself if you want.

In the early afternoon, Michael Shane Neal talked about some business practices that he has found helpful in his professional career, focusing on how treating your customers properly and with a formal courtesy (e.g., thank you letters) can pay dividends in the form of future referrals. During his demo, he added to a portrait-in-progress that he’s working on of Sandra Day O’Connor and he brought an example of another judge portrait that he’s finishing up (because the work wasn’t yet varnished, it had a rather uneven surface sheen, but if you caught it in the right light it was a fine painting). Shane is a dynamic and engaging speaker, and though his demo wasn’t as informative as Sanden’s, it was still helpful and worth watching.

The afternoon session, though, with Edward Jonas talking about the anatomical foundation of building a face wasn’t very helpful. It was his first time giving the talk and though he’s a clear speaker and I suspect knows a great deal about facial anatomy, the material wasn’t organized in a way that provided any actionable information to the audience (other than perhaps some book references).

In the evening, Michael Shane Neal addressed a packed room on the subject of John Singer Sargent. Although the day was long and the lights were out during the presentation, Sargent’s amazing portraits and Shane’s passion for the subject matter kept me awake. Shane (and other speakers at the conference) urged viewers to look beyond Sargent’s oft-regarded amazing brushstroke and to consider his color, composition, and especially the emotional understanding of his subjects.