I recently finished a painting I’m calling “Secondary Process”.  Enjoy!  The term “secondary process” is a Freudian term, with many sort of confusing definitions on the Internet, though I like this one.  In this case, I’m using it to refer to the use of secondary colors (along with optical primaries) in a structured way within the painting.  Several years ago I titled a painting “Primary Process” which only made use of red, green, and blue.

Secondary Process, acrylic on panel, 30x30 inches, 2009

The opening reception for this year’s Mercer County Artists show is this Wednesday, March 18, 2009, from 5-7:30pm.  The annual juried show of work from artists who live, work, or go to school in Mercer County, NJ, is held at The Gallery @ Mercer County Community College.  The juror is Kristen Accola, director of Accola Contemporary in New York.  This year my painting Moving Forward will be in the show, which is up through April 9.

Moving Forward, acrylic on panel, 24"x24"

I hadn’t been to Chelsea since January and so was looking forward to catching up on the scene yesterday on an art-filled day in the city.  I had my list of galleries to visit, planned carefully via ChelseaArtGalleries.com (which, sadly, seems to be missing more and more gallery listings these days) and the latest copy of ArtNews.  The weather was reasonably cooperative — gloves and scarf required but at least it was dry and not too windy.

Yesterday it seemed that a recurring theme in several of the shows I came across was “Big Heads.”  For fans of Alex Katz, you might be particularly interested in the paintings by Ridley Howard at Leo Koenig on 23rd St, up through April 11.  The figures are stylized — features are simplified into geometrical shapes but in a way that is beautifully painted.  The pieces include flat fields of color but also have enough articulation to suggest the third dimension more than most Katz paintings do.  (Particularly compelling was “Mexico City“.)

On 27th Street, another show of Big Heads — portraits of famous world figures — by California artist Lee Waisler is up at Sundaram Tagore gallery.  In this show, Waisler attaches thin strips of carefully shaped wood fastened to the underlying canvas as a drawing framework for his “dimensional portraits”, which are then fleshed out with acrylic paint in a sort of pop-art style.  The wood strips give the paintings a sculptural dimension (almost like Wesselman steel drawings) and I particularly enjoyed the smaller of two Einstein paintings and this colorful portrait of Gandhi.

Continuing the Big Head theme and moving towards Floating Bodies, over at Mike Weiss Gallery Piet van den Boog exhibits a number of large figurative works, including this one called Erwin Olaf (listed as Acrylic and Oil on rusted Steel).  The paintings in this show are worth looking at up close, where you can see the texture of the individual brush strokes with very little smooth blending.  The exhibition is called “Ophelia” (after the character from Hamlet who drowned, possibly by suicide, after being spurned by Hamlet and losing her father), and water and darkness play a role in several of the pieces.  The artist has a video of his studio along with a close-up of one painting posted on YouTube.  (Someone who has often painted big heads in the past, Rudolf Stingel, has a show of very small portraits up at Paula Cooper; these have a similar painterly texture to the van den Boog works but are monochrome and I thought not as interesting as other Stingel paintings I’ve seen).

At Von Lintel, back on 25th Street, Izima Kaoru exhibits large intriguing photographs of famous Japanese models and actresses in fantasy scenes of their own deaths — in this show, the most common image is of a woman in a dark peach-colored outfit “floating” in a room of flowers.  You’re drawn to the blank expressions on the model’s face (with perfectly smooth makeup applications), the selective focus in the images, and the peculiar contradictions of bleak subject matter and well-executed photography.

Fortunately, not everything was big heads and floating bodies in Chelsea yesterday.  At Danese gallery, I caught the Larry Poons show of new paintings (Check out the very cool online catalog of this show, though don’t expect perfect color reproduction).  I was most familiar with Poons’ early dot and ellipse paintings, but these works are pure abstract expressionism, large canvases of colorful, vigorous brush strokes.  There are faint glimpses of things that could be read as figures — perhaps a face here, a body there, an overall sense of landscape — but mostly they read as abstract.  (They reminded me of the Cecily Brown show a few months ago, though the Poons paintings are more lyrical in their brush stroke and more harmonious in their use of color.)  Most of the Poons pieces in the show have a high key color palette, with the exception of one painting in the back room whose overall tone was aquamarine blue with punches of magenta, green, yellow, and orange (Calling You).

Finally, at Betty Cunningham there’s a pretty nifty show of “Diaphans” by Clytie Alexander.  These sculptural/painting objects consist of thin sheets of painted aluminum, perforated by hundreds of “hole punches” (probably drilled), floating four inches away from the wall by small rod fixtures.  As the ceiling light shines through these works (“diaphanous”), they create vague shadows on the wall that intermingle with the aluminum support and at times make the edges of the paintings appear hazy.  The backs of these paintings (which you can’t really see directly) are often painted a different color from the front, so that the reflected light tints the shadows on the wall behind the work.  In the back room, this is particularly interesting as pieces that otherwise look to be similar shades of white end up casting different tints of shadows on the walls behind them.  At the surface, these pieces can remind you of a Yayoi Kusama infinity net with hundreds of densely packed holes, while from far away you’re more likely to think of Robert Ryman, where white sits on top of color and the mounting against the wall is an important part of the piece. (Interestingly, as I signed the guest book, I noticed that Robert Ryman had in fact signed in just a few names before mine.)

On Friday, I headed into Manhattan for The Armory Show, located on piers 92-94 at 12th Avenue and 55th Street.  (Since the show didn’t open until noon, I had some time in the morning to catch up with Bonnard at The Met, but I’ll write about that in a separate post.)  This year I didn’t try and stuff four art fairs into a single day (perhaps art is like ice cream, wonderful stuff but if you try to take in too much too fast you get a headache?).

As with last year’s event (wow, I’ve been blogging for over a year now), there was some confusion at the entry to the show that could have been prevented with better signage.  Even though I had an e-ticket purchased ahead of time (recommended), there was still a wait as people sorted themselves out into proper lines and the staff gated people into the lobby rather ad hoc.

This year, the exhibition is comprised of two separate pavilions, the main “contemporary” show (“International Fair of New Art”) in the same upside-down T-shaped pier as last year and a “Modern” component in the adjacent pier.  Both parts are included with the same $30 (!) entry fee.

Turning the first corner in the show, I noticed a large epoxy resin painting by Peter Zimmerman at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin.  Zimmerman writes that he used Photoshop to abstract an image of a book cover algorithmically and used the resulting design as a starting point for his painting.  This seems similar to a process that I’ve used on some of my own recent paintings, where I’ve used photographic reference material and my own Photoshop algorithms to create the framework for a painting.

I noticed two or three different artists using Venetian blinds prominently in their work — something symbolic of the time or just a coincidence?  Evan Gruzis @ Deitch Projects hangs black blinds in front of a plasma TV displaying a bright orange video loop to create an eerie but intriguing object.  (I don’t normally go for this type of piece, but this year I found several assembled objects or sculptural works to be compelling and worth looking at for more than a few seconds.)

Also at Deitch was something completely different, a huge Kehinde Wiley painting (“oil wash on paper”) depicting an African American man in a pose entitled “Confederate Soldier from Mississippi Memorial” with trademark decorative elements floating in the background.  Having only seen Wiley’s canvases before, I enjoyed examining the different texture and brushstroke application in this oil wash on paper painting.

Another assembled-object piece that was visually enjoyable was Cornelia Parker’s “Composition with Horns” (similar to this one) at Frith Street Gallery.  It’s comprised of two instruments, a cornet and a bugle, hanging from thin threads just an inch or two from a pedestal (think Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible), with the cornet hanging perfectly vertical and a flattened (steamrolled?) bugle hanging horizontally at its side.  I’ll assume, given the title, that we’re to appreciate the object’s formal qualities (which I did) and not try to figure out the meaning of the flattened bugle and upright cornet.

At the same gallery, Anna Barriball’s “Green Glass 2008″ reminded me of a James Sienna drawing, or an Altair Design, or a construction from World of Goo, with thousands of delicately drawn green lines connecting to fill a sheet of paper.

One of my favorite paintings in the show, and one that captured the zeitgeist perfectly, was Carl Hammoud’s “House by the Rai…” at Magnus Karlsson.  It showed Hopper’s House by the Railroad, but half of the house was falling down, crumbling, in disrepair.  Maybe it’s too literal, but since I love Hopper, this painting “hit home” for me.

Another favorite, and another “object” work, was Ján Mancuška’s “Tatlin’s Tower (this time in proper direction)” at the Andrew Kreps booth.  I’d prefer to call it “Filmstrip Yoga”:  it’s a strip of film with images of someone doing various shoulder stand yoga poses, with the strip twisted into a spiraling twirl, strung up with dozens of white strings and suspended adjacent to a fluorescent bulb lighting a plane of frosted glass.  My description isn’t doing it justice and I’m sure my memory isn’t completely accurate, but what I liked was that you could enjoy the piece at various scales — either up close by looking at the images on the film or the way it was strung up, or from further away by looking at the overall shape of the piece.

I found two Anish Kapoor pieces (both of which I think were sold), one a straightforward concave highly polished mirror that does typical fun house inversions and one that was much more interesting:  a bright magenta open-ended “semi-sphere” where, as you look into it’s interior, you lose all sense of depth and your eyes can’t focus on the back of the piece.  Mesmerizing and beautiful.

Over in the Modern wing, there was quite a lot to enjoy, though I won’t go into all of the details.  Highlights for me included a high quality Philip Pearlstein 2-figure oil painting, a Vasarely that happens to use almost the same palette as a painting I recently finished (oddly enough at the same gallery as the Pearlstein), some nice little Oscar Bluemner watercolors at O’Hara that are alas way out of my budget now, and a few nice Sol LeWitt wavy ribbon gouaches.

Overall, I found the contemporary part of The Armory Show to be about what it usually is:  enjoyable though a bit overwhelming; full of much that wouldn’t garner a second glance, but also providing enough that I enjoyed looking at to make me glad that I went.  Thankfully, this year the $30 entry fee gives you acces to the Modern part of the show as well, where you can take in and enjoy some familiar museum-quality pieces to help get your money’s worth.

This Sunday is the opening reception for the March group show at Artists’ Gallery in Lambertville  (32 Coryell St, Lambertville, NJ).  Unlike most previous openings, this one takes place on a Sunday afternoon, from 2-6pm. This month’s theme is Madness, “an exhibition exploring chaos, passion, and general craziness,” mostly not related to basketball.

I’m exhibiting four paintings and two photographs.  The paintings  include Affordances, Figment, and a recent completion, Points of View:

Points of View (2009), acrylic on panel, 24 x 24 inches

Among the photographs I’m exhibiting is “Crazy Roots”, taken in Central Park several years ago:

Crazy Roots, photograph, 10x8 inches