If you haven’t yet made plans for Valentine’s Day, why not come out to Lambertville, NJ, for some art and some chocolate?

The Art of Seduction

Artists’ Gallery Members Group Show
This show runs from February 6, 2009 until March 1, 2009
Reception:Valentine’s Day February 14th from 6:00 – 9:00

The Artists’ Gallery will seduce you with a captivating collection of traditional and contemporary art. A sumptuous chocolate buffet will be provided for the opening reception on Valentine’s Day, Saturday, February 14 from 6:00pm – 9:00pm. Tantalizing French Truffles and other irresistible chocolate confections will be donated by The Chocolate Box at 39 North Union Street.

This Valentine’s Day make the opening reception at the Artists Gallery part of your evening out in Lambertville or New Hope. Before or after drinks or dinner stop by the gallery (32 Coryell Street, Lambertville, NJ) and allow yourself to be seduced by the wide range of creative expression. The artwork represented is an alluring mix of abstract, modernist, Impressionist, and traditional realist art in a variety of mediums, including oil, acrylic, watercolor, pastel, photography and glass sculpture.

Gallery members Beatrice Bork, Gail Bracegirdle, Jennifer Cadoff, Merle Citron, Richard Harrington, Charles Katzenback, Joe Kazimierczyk, Alan Klawans, Florence Moonan, Alla Podolsky, Marc Reed, Materese Roche, Carol Sanzalone, Douglas Sardo, Bonnie Schorski, John Treichler, and Andrew Werth will be attending the reception and will be pleased to share their inspiration with you. So drop by, say hello and contemplate the perfect Valentine gift—a work of art from the Artists’ Gallery.

Today I had a truly amazing art experience.  The Carnegie Mellon University College of Fine Arts is having a series of special events this weekend in the New York area, and tonight’s event was a studio (& home) visit with world-renowned artist Philip Pearlstein (BFA, Carnegie Tech class of ‘49).  As an alumnus of CMU — even though I toiled away in the engineering school as an undergrad — I was able to participate.  I’d been looking forward to this event for weeks and was relieved that today’s foul weather didn’t scuffle the plans.

Pearlstein lives and works on the west side of Manhattan and upon entering his apartment (with the other two dozen or so visitors) you immediately notice his immense collection of objects.  I would be tempted to say “tchotchkes”, but in fact these objects are much more than that: figurines, models, sculptures, masks, toys, and more.  It’s really a mini-museum of human culture.  Mr. Pearlstein mentioned that for the most part he was a collector of objects before he began being a painter of them.  As you look around you see many familiar items from his paintings — a zeppelin, a neon Mickey Mouse sign, some wooden ducks (that also happen to be represented in a painting behind his dining room table).

Moving into his studio, my feelings changed from nervousness (visiting a famous artist’s home!) to one of pure excitement:  Wow — I’m in Philip Pearlstein’s studio looking at several finished, gorgeous paintings on the walls with two more works in progress on easels!  It’s always instructive to see a “work in progress” as you get a real sense of how the artist does his thing.  Pearlstein has his easels set up fairly close to where the models would be sitting and begins with a rough charcoal drawing on an untoned, white canvas.  Then, it seems he uses Naples yellow to add to the drawing.  Then (as the artist explained) he begins painting from the center and works his way outward, in the present case by starting with a particular intersection of curves between the model’s leg and the arm on the chair.  He mentioned that he’ll touch all parts of the canvas — eventually — three or four times as he goes, each time tightening things up a bit more.

Laid out on his palette were (if my memory is serves me) the oil colors Naples yellow, raw sienna, burnt umber, cadmium orange, cadmium red, and a black whose name I couldn’t see (and I didn’t dare touch the palette to turn over the paint tube).  I asked him if his palette had evolved over time and he said he thought it had; in the past he had used more Mars colors (those made from an iron oxide base).  He mentioned that he chooses the objects to be in any specific painting primarily for their formal characteristics — shape and color and how they fill the space.

After an introduction from the dean of CMU’s College of Fine Arts, Hilary Robinson, Pearlstein spoke about his journey from Carnegie Tech to his eventual success in the New York art world.  He had early training in design and continues to think of himself in a sense as a graphic designer, with composition on the canvas being a kind of page layout problem.  After beginning as a member of an artist’s co-op on Tenth Street in Manhattan, he got a big break when one of the art magazines did a review of his show and put a large image of one of his paintings front and center, while images from the likes of Rothko, de Kooning, and Kline were small and off to the sides.  This got him attention and landed him an uptown gallery relationship.  When he later told that art reviewer about the success the magazine placement had gotten him, the writer told him (I’m paraphrasing), “I did that because I had just gotten fired.  I thought your work was the worst of the bunch and I wanted to stick it to the magazine.”  Pearlstein’s audience laughed as he told this story — a little luck is always a good thing, it seems…

Pearlstein and his wife Dorothy were gracious hosts and everyone I spoke to expressed great appreciation of this opportunity to meet him.

Every once in a while you have to sacrifice for your art.  Today, on a day when both the Giants and the Steelers were playing in huge playoff games, I had a conflict.  Scheduled at the same time as the Giants game was the opening reception for the Portrait Society of America’s local/NJ portrait show at the Bernardsville Library.  I really wanted to go, but definitely didn’t want to miss the games (especially the Steeler game).  Thankfully, there exists the DVR.  The trick is not to talk to anyone about the games and to turn the radio off on the drive home, lest you be told the score and have your plans ruined.

Well, I’m glad I went to the reception in Bernardsville because it was a good time.  A couple of friends stopped by to see the show (thanks!) and I met a bunch of nice people, both visitors to the show and fellow artists.  I was particularly impressed with the questions people were asking me about my funky portraits regarding technique, materials, purpose, etc.  Thanks to Jamie Lindholm, the local ambassador of the PSA, for organizing the show.

Bummed about the Giants, but very happy that the Steelers will advance another week.

After visiting the show in Newark, I headed into Manhattan to for this year’s first trip to Chelsea.  Although many of the galleries are still closed for the winter break, it was opening night for many shows.  Even with the chilly and windy weather, the receptions still drew good crowds.  In an economy where nobody wants to spend any money, free wine and free art (at least to look at) is a bargain.

I was glad to catch the Al Held show at Paul Kasmin, which I had accidentally missed on my last trip to the neighborhood.  The exhibition consists of approximately half a dozen medium-sized paintings (for Held they’re medium-sized, for me they would be gigantic), each a highly saturated, hard-edged colorscape of perspectival scaffolding and twisting roller-coaster-like beams.  In what I consider a sign of a good show, the other two people in the gallery with me were similarly scrutinizing the paintings carefully, from near and afar, from the front and from the sides, looking for color and composition, working to see how they’re all put together.

There are a couple of interesting shows on 23rd Street, a street that often gets short shrift on my visits to Chelsea.  At Pavel Zoubok Gallery, George Deem has a show entitled, “We Were There”.  It features a series of gouache and oil paintings (I think) whose subject matter is taken from combinations of famous works by the masters, particularly Vermeer.  Of particular note is “Sargent Vermeer”, which places one of the girls from Sargent’s “Daughters of E D Boit” (perhaps my all-time favorite painting) into a Vermeer interior, with the Sargent painting itself hanging on the wall Vermeer-style.

Also on 23rd Street at Leo Koenig (extended beyond its Jan 3 end date) is an exhibition of works on paper by Christian Schumann.  Each of the pieces in this show consist of obsessive, meticulous, paper-filling drawings of a sort of fictional landscape that’s reminiscent of the movie Wall-e.  The imagery is of blobs of… something, perhaps organisms, maybe robotic, mostly organic, not a lot of straight lines.  Although all of the works are fairly similar except for differences in the light washes of color underneath the drawing, there’s a cumulative effect of seeing so many of these works lined up in the gallery one after the other.  Given the nature of my own work, I can appreciate the kind of voluminous mark-making and mindful process that must have gone into each of these pieces.

At Kathryn Markel gallery on 20th Street, there’s a fine exhibition of oil paintings on aluminum panels by California artist Tyrell Collins.  Each of the panels contains a lovingly painted landscape in mostly yellowish hues, a combination of trees and fields.  The aluminum supports make these perceptually very interesting, as the works can glow depending upon the angle of view, an effect that reminded me of Daguerreotype photos.

There’s a very nifty show at Gana Art, a gallery that consistently puts on high quality shows.  Korean artist Lee Jung-Woong shows a dozen paintings in a series called, “Brush”.  Each work presents a very finely depicted paintbrush on top of an ink-splattered piece of paper, and you’re compelled to think about how the work was painted and what it’s a painting of.  The press release says that the artist splatters Chinese ink on the “canvas” (though I think the supports are stretched Korean paper) and then renders the brushes in oil paint.

Finally, there’s a beautiful show of “Railings & Shadows” by Andrew Jones at George Billis Gallery.  Jones (who’s a friend of a friend of mine) captures the light on the stoops and railings that line the streets of the West Village.  The paintings are representational but through cropping and carefully selected points of view have somewhat abstract compositions.  My favorite pieces in this series are the ones where the articulations of the brush are visible even in what would be a flat area of color, giving you something very interesting to look at up close.  Some of the works — the ones with the most contrast, I think — really pop when you stand back, especially “West 15th Street Newels” (already sold!).

I was finally able to make it up to Newark today to see the City Without Walls show which includes six of my paintings.  Here’s a photo of the overall installation — you can click on the image to get a higher res version.

I’m very pleased with the way my paintings look in the lighting of this atrium — a nice, neutral light with very even illumination.  If you’re thinking of going to the show but nervous about going to Newark, it’s incredibly easy to get to by train or car.  I’ve posted directions by train in a separate blog post.  By car, you can follow the Seton Hall law school’s directions, which work very well; today I used the GPS which took me via Turnpike exit 13A through Newark and that was perhaps even easier.  There’s a parking garage right next door at 103 Mulberry St (it’s not cheap, but it’s easy).

In addition to my own paintings, the show includes the work of three other artists.  David French, who happens to also be from Carnegie Mellon (where he graduated from the fine arts school just before I got there as an engineer), exhibits a number of large sort-of-Richter-esque abstractions.  Using mostly subdued tones and a wide-open composition, French perhaps uses large palette knives or squeegies to apply the paint to canvas in ways that pit horizontal versus vertical (I found this image, though I don’t think this one is in the show).  Sonya Chusit, who happens to be from Teaneck — where I lived for 8 years growing up and still consider my “home town” — hints at representation in otherwise large fields of color with expressions of hands, foliage, and streams of “0″ digits running across the canvas.  Finally, Karim Marquez (no serendipidous connection, as far as I can tell) exhibits a variety of works ranging from a bright and bubbly blue meditation on color and depth to a dark, monochromatic mixed media expression.