During the first month of the exhibition, I will have seven paintings up at the gallery, including the following:

Twisted, acrylic on panel, 20x20

Center of Narrative Gravity #6, acrylic on panel, 20x20

Center of Narrative Gravity #15, acrylic on panel, 20x20

Figment, acrylic on canvas, 20x20

Perceptual Present, acrylic on canvas, 20x20

We made it to a total of (I think) eight art fairs & exhibitions:  The Rubell Family Collection, Art Miami, Scope, Pulse, Red Dot, INK, Art Basel, and NADA.  We found work to like in each of these and overall I was happy with the state of the art world.  It seemed that there was a high “quality” level to the things on the wall, even when the work was something I didn’t like.  There was a lot of painting and less of the head-scratching “what the heck is that?” than I’ve seen at many recent New York art fairs (though there was still some of that).  There was a mix of abstraction and representation (not much realism, though) and art at all ends of the price spectrum (though not much that would fall into the “very inexpensive” range).

One quote by Jeffrey Deitch in The Art Newspaper (the daily that covers these sorts of events) caught my attention: “There is a tremendous energy in painting right now, particularly abstract.”

Every year there are a few artists whose work seems to turn up everywhere.  This year, to my eye at least, the two were John Miller and Carlos Cruz-Diez.  I saw John Miller’s faux gold leaf coated assemblages everywhere (dozens of objects glommed together and coated in gold).  Unless you want to go up close and really decipher what you’re looking at, though, these tend to all look the same from afar (“Oh, look, there’s another one!”).

Cruz-Diez’s interactive wall pieces are fun and interactive.  The first time I remember seeing his work was in 2007 at The Grey Art Gallery’s excellent exhibition of Latin American Geometric Abstraction.  In Miami, it seemed to be all over the place.  Each piece consists of several dozen vertical slats that jut out a few millimeters from the support; the background and each side of the slat can be colored differently.  As you move from left to right, your eye sees more or less of the sides of the slats and more or less of the background color and so the piece appears to change color as your eye integrates the colors of the work differently.

At Art Miami, I liked the spacious environs for the show — each gallery had room to breathe — and thought that throughout the show there was a very high level of work that looked good on the walls.  One gem was Nathan Slate Joseph‘s “Orange Step” from Sundaram Tagore Gallery (I found myself wondering where we could put it; unfortunately it was beyond my budget…); Joseph welds together galvanized steel plates fused with colorful pigments and this particular piece’s three dimensional, sculptural aspects were particularly eye-catching.  Other familiar work included a John Zinsser painting and several of his drawings after Warhol at (the newly re-titled) Graham.

Red Dot across the street from Art Miami

Scope felt like an extension of Art Miami — that’s a good thing — with a lot of eye catching fare.  Red Dot, unfortunately, was a bit of a disappointment; a few highs but much of the time I was thinking, “Need to keep moving”.

Aqua‘s opening reception had a relaxed, casual atmosphere.  Some  work from a gallery I visit regularly, McKenzie Fine Art, made one of the gallerized hotel rooms look familiar.  I’m kicking myself for forgetting to visit the room where Joanne Mattera‘s work was featured — I had hoped to see it in person (her blog is a very helpful resource of tips for artists as well as for reports on Art Basel).

We looked

We really enjoyed Pulse, partially because we had a pass for the opening brunch but mostly because it was a nice-sized fair with a variety of work, much of which we thought was creative and fun.  One artist whose work caught our eye was Karin Waskiewicz at Shroeder, Romero & Shredder gallery.  She carves out wonderfully complex, overlapping patterns into layers and layers of acrylic paint, revealing swarms of colors at multiple levels.

INK was definitely worth a visit for the diversity of prints and works on paper that are (mostly, but not always) in the lower price ranges.  One nifty piece was a Lichtenstein painting on blue “rowlux”, a highly reflective, brightly colored “multi-lensed” film.

NADA was also fun and worth a visit; the location up north right on the beach was a nice change of pace from the other venues.  This definitely had the most “contemporary” feel of the fairs we visited, which I mean mostly in a good way, but some of it was of the head-scratching sort.

Beach View From the Back of NADA

The biggest fair, of course, was Art Basel.  It is, indeed, massive.  Unfortunately, both times we made it into the convention center (for the Vernissage and to explore more thoroughly a few days later) we had to wait on long lines for entry or ticketing.  But once in, there was quite a lot to behold, from the very blue chip to the much more edgy.  Also, since we waited until Friday to tour the entire show, by that point we had seen so much art at the other fairs that our brains were a bit frazzled.  A few great Gerhard Richter paintings stand out in my memory (especially a triptych).

Stormtroopers and Mr. Potato Head, having a party

One problem with trying to get through so many fairs in such a short amount of time is that you really can’t spend much time with any particular artwork.  I’m glad that I did this once, but in the future I think I’d try to slow down a bit so that I could take in more than just the pure optics of the artwork I’m walking past.

Found Art? (outside the convention center)

Tips For Art Basel Miami Beach Visitors

If you can plan out what day you’re going to attend Art Basel Miami, I would definitely recommend getting your tickets ahead of time.  Although you’ll have to pay the obnoxious Ticketmaster fee (assuming you don’t have a free pass of some kind), it’s worth it to avoid waiting in the long box office lines.  You’d think that with all of the money flowing around, the fair organizers could hire a few more people to run the box office.  The last thing you want to do is wait on line for 45 minutes (or more) before walking around the tremendously huge art fair: doing so does not put you in the right frame of mind to enjoy art!

Also, don’t count on the free shuttles to get you between the convention center on Miami Beach and the art fairs in downtown Miami.  They don’t run on a published schedule and so you might wait a *long* time for the next shuttle to arrive.  Most of the time we ended up taking a cab after getting frustrated by the wait for a shuttle.  The shuttles to and from NADA were much better!  Kudos to the organizers and the company that ran the NADA shuttles: they were frequent, they were on time, and the drivers were very professional and knowledgeable.

Wear comfortable shoes!  I brought two pairs of shoes that I knew from previous experience were good for walking long distances and that made a big difference.

Confirm your reservations ahead of time!  Although I used the Basel-approved travel agent to book my hotel, when we arrived the hotel had no record of our reservation!  It was a good thing that (a) they had rooms available, and (b) that I had a printout of my reservation from the travel agency.  Even in this digital world where these things ought not to be necessary, next time I will call ahead to confirm!

We had a lot of decent food, none that was bad, but a few places were memorable.  For a quick bite near Art Miami / Scope / Red Dot, we enjoyed the Cuban diner, Enriqueta’s (con sabor).  Large plates of simple but tasty food at great prices hit the spot.  For a more creative menu, we had an excellent lunch at Sugarcane Raw Bar Grill a few blocks away (try the not-so-traditional hamburger — yumm!); nice, spacious, bustling restaurant with friendly staff.  For an expensive but beautiful and very tasty pan-Asian meal, try The Restaurant at The Setai (the food was great, though this restaurant, bar, and hotel was also worth it for the people-watching and the gorgeous cocktail lounge).

Collins Park had some impressive looking trees,which I liked more than the sculpture

The first of the new paintings is Seeing Red, a piece that contains about a dozen layers of lightly tinted glaze in between my personal marks, so that older marks are buried under deeper and deeper layers of paint, pushing them both physically and visually deeper into the painting.

Seeing Red, acrylic on panel, 20x20

I also am exhibiting three new paintings in my ongoing “Center of Narrative Gravity” series.  These are paintings where interacting colors swirl around to create a nebulous sort of center whose appearance varies depending upon your perspective when looking at the piece.  Here are numbers 21, 22, and 23 in the series:

Center of Narrative Gravity #21

Center of Narrative Gravity #22

Center of Narrative Gravity #23

The final two paintings up this month are Time’s Texture (an older piece) as well as Tango (for which I don’t have a photograph right now).  Artists’ Gallery is located at 18 Bridge Street, Lambertville, NJ, and regular hours of operation are Friday-Saturday-Sunday from 11am-6pm.

Attractors #2, acrylic on panel, 24x24

I’m also exhibiting one of my long-time favorites, “In Light of Our Knowledge”:

In Light of Our Knowledge, acrylic on canvas, 36x36

The show is up now through Sunday, October 2, with regular gallery hours Fri-Sat-Sun from 11am-6pm.  There’s an opening reception for this month’s featured artists, Richard Harrington and Charles Katzenbach, and their bicycle-themed exhibition on Saturday, Sep 10, 2011, from 4-8pm.

Both of these paintings are acrylic on panel, 20×20 inches:

Center of Narrative Gravity #15

Center of Narrative Gravity #6

Two of the paintings are new ones, both 12×18 inches, acrylic on panel:

Meandering, acrylic on panel, 12x18

Attractors, acrylic on panel, 12x18

In addition to these, I’m exhibiting two paintings from my Center of Narrative Gravity series (#17 and #14, both 12×12 inches), the painting Enaction (36×24), and the painting Continuum (20×16).

Artists’ Gallery is open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from 11am-6pm and is located at 18 Bridge Street, Lambertville, NJ.

The largest of the three is The Affect Effect:

The Affect Effect, acrylic on panel, 24x24

Also up this month are two smaller paintings, continuations in my series, “Centers of Narrative Gravity”.

Center of Narrative Gravity #16, acrylic on panel, 12x12

Center of Narrative Gravity #17, acrylic on panel, 12x12

This month’s exhibition runs through July 31, 2011.  There’s an opening reception for the gallery’s featured artists, John Treichler and Alla Podolsky, on Saturday, July 9, from 2-6pm.

Center of Narrative Gravity #15, acrylic on panel, 20x20

Center of Narrative Gravity #14, acrylic on panel, 12x12

The show is up now through July 4, 2011.  The opening reception for this month’s featured exhibition (Jo-Ann Osnoe and Eric Rhinehart) is Saturday, June 11, from 4-7pm.  (Regular gallery hours are Fri-Sat-Sun 11am-6pm, with extended hours for Lambertville’s Friday Night Fireworks…).

On Sunday we explored Boston’s Museum of Fine Art, a fantastic museum that is both manageable and diverse.  It is presently undergoing some renovations and/or additions that make navigation, however, slightly detour-filled.  I recently read The Invention of Painting in America, a brief meditation in three lectures on how painting developed in America.  It has a number of images from the MFA that were a pleasure to see in person, including this Copley painting (which is delightful, except that I hate squirrels given the past damage they have done to my house).

Henry Pelham (Boy with a Squirrel)

According to author Rosand, when Copley presented this painting (via Benjamin West) to the Society for Artists in England, West’s reply was: “…at first Sight the Picture struck the Eye as being to liney [sic], which was judged to have arose from there being so much neatness in the lines, which indeed as far as I was Capable of judgeing was some what the Case.”

I had forgotten that one of my favorite paintings of all time, Sargent’s “Daughters of E.D. Boit”, was in the Boston MFA and so was very excited to come across it in the gallery.  Unfortunately, its current positioning leaves it subjected to a distracting glare coming from the adjacent gallery’s natural lighting.  This is one of those paintings that cause you to stop in your tracks (as it did when I saw it at the Met some years ago).

Sargent's "Daughters of E.D. Boit"

The museum was featuring a Dale Chihuly exhibition which was packed, fun, and more interesting than I had expected.  In the adjacent store, a fascinating video demonstrated the hard, sweaty work by a team of experts that goes into producing these complex assemblages of curved, colored glass.

Dale Chihuly at MFA in Boston

MFA has a many other treasures, including a few that I stopped to take quick photos of (top-to-bottom: Cornelis Bega, Edward Hopper, Norman Lewis):

Cornelis Bega, Edward Hopper, Norman Lewis

After MFA, we proceeded a few blocks away to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum,  which I have to say was a disappointment.  It seems that she was more of a hoarder than a collector and most of the works of art are hung in bad light in ways that simply aren’t meant for you to appreciate the works themselves (to be fair, the museum is undergoing a renovation that may improve the lighting).  Rather, you’re supposed to be impressed, I suppose, by the density of the hanging.  Unlike Barnes, however, there’s not much excitement, not that many great paintings, and not a lot of coherence to the quirkiness.  One standout, however, is the beautiful courtyard that you can view from three levels and four sides throughout the building.  However, no photographs are allowed on the premises

That night we took in a Red Sox game against the Cubs at Fenway, my first time at the great ballpark.  I didn’t have a rooting interest and for safety reasons remained non-committal.  Sox fans were well behaved until around the 5th inning, when a group of women who had been doubling up on beers all night began abusing a poor Cubs fan behind us.  Red Sox won 5-1.

Red Sox vs Cubs at Fenway, May 2011

On Monday we walked around Cambridge, taking in both Harvard Square and just a bit of MIT.  Mostly I was looking for bookstores.  Harvard Square wasn’t as cute as I remembered it, but Raven Books was nice.

View from the 2nd floor of the very nice Starbucks at Harvard Square

The MIT Press Bookstore (as I remember from a long-ago trip to Beantown) is awesome, with tons of fascinating books on my subjects of interest: psychology, science, art, and design.

On Tuesday, we hit the galleries and shops on Newbury Street.  The highlight was the Barbara Krakow Gallery, one of the few on the street that focused on well known (to me, anyway) contemporary artists.  My wife and I loved the Kate Shepherd and Anni Albers show, especially Shepherd’s new use of puzzle compositions of laser-cut wood.  Also on the street are several co-op galleries (I think) that exhibited some high quality representational paintings in a variety of genres; there are also some secondary galleries with things like Chagall prints, of which I’m always suspect and not particularly interested.  At the end of the street we hit the Boston Common, where we paused just long enough for this photo:

Boston Common

On Wednesday we drove out to Hartford and visited the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, a pleasant, medium-sized museum with a focus on early American art but which also includes a decent collection of more modern and contemporary work and which featured a small but very worthwhile exhibition of Monet waterlily paintings.  I enjoyed the Sol LeWitt wall paintings in the lobby:

Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing at Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford

On the last day of our trip, we took a slight detour to visit the New Britian Museum of American Art, a smaller museum that focuses on American art with strengths in colonial portraiture, Hudson River School paintings, American Impressionism, and the Ash Can School.  We arrived early Thursday morning but the musuem was already open and absolutely packed with school children on field trips who were zooming around the galleries and in some cases being asked to identify which paintings they liked best, voting by the placement of small cards on the ground in front of their choices.  It’s great to expose the kids to the art, though I was terrified for the docents as I watched children dart here and there just a few inches away from the precious paintings!

The New Britain Museum of American Art

The highlight of the museum (in addition to a complex Thomas Hart Benton mural) and one of the draws to our visit is Graydon Parrish’s “The Cycle of Terror and Tragedy: September 11, 2001“, which amazingly gets very little mention on the museum’s website (you have to search with Google to find their blog with details).  (Parrish is an Austin, Texas, based classical painter who founded an online forum where I’ve participated in a few discussions about the nature of art and related matters.)

The painting is truly a master piece and, as you would expect, is much better to see in person than in reproductions.  One can immediately appreciate the massive amount of effort, planning, and technical excellence required to implement the monument (nearly 18 feet wide and more than 6 feet tall).  For me, the response to the painting is different from other monuments with which I’m familiar.  At the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, for instance, the seemingly endless list of names etched into the black wall (with mourners taking rubbings of those names) hits you viscerally in the gut.  A similarly lachrymose reaction grabs you at the Oklahoma City monument where the repetitive forms of empty chairs and a reflecting pool remind you immediately of the personal losses incurred.  Parrish’s memorial is a more intellectual thing, requiring some decoding to make sense of it, and as such, the emotional reaction isn’t as direct.  What are we looking at here?  How do the two twin towering figures represent both Terror and Tragedy?  Why are the innocents holding the toy planes?  Ironically, though I’m personally very interested in metaphor as it’s related to cognitive psychology, I’m somewhat linguistically challenged when it comes to artistic allegory, a type of metaphor where the figures of a painting symbolize something else, requiring a complex interpretation to get at the artist’s meaning.  Nevertheless, I was fascinated with the overall construction of the painting, the perfect composition, and completely refined (yet not too crisp), all-over treatment of the canvas.  In particular, one of the fallen figures virtually spills forth from the surface into the gallery:

Detail from Graydon Parrish's "Cycle of Terror and Tragedy"

Finally, following our visit to New Britain, we headed home, unsuccessfully avoiding pre-holiday rush hour traffic due to a massive backup at the George Washington Bridge that Google Navigation was unable to direct us around.  Four museums, many galleries, meals with three separate long-missed friends and their spouses, and a baseball game:  a very nice trip, indeed!

View from our hotel in Boston, from The Prudential Center to Copley Square

I started off on the upper east side at the Whitney to see the Glenn Ligon show. I like the formal qualities of the disintegrating stenciled text pieces, but didn’t have the heart to really dig into the rest of the artwork, whose conceptual nature requires a consideration of the politics around race. (I am reminded of a recent paper that shows judges are unlikely to grant paroles right before lunch; after lunch, parole rates jump back to 65%… Perhaps I ought not see art right before lunch?)

On another floor, the “Breaking Ground” exhibition displays several rooms worth of art from the museum’s 1931 opening. The highlight was the room containing two Bluemners, Hopper’s “Early Sunday Morning”, a few Stuart Davis paintings, and a few Charles Scheeler — all great stuff (alas, no photography was allowed).

The Fuller Building, 57th & Madison

After the Whitney I headed south along Madison, where good lunch spots with room for one on a nice sunny day are hard to find, but did manage a decent meal on 60th Street. From there I proceeded to the Fuller Building where I finally got to see the “70 Years of Abstract Painting” show that includes a small piece by my former instructor, John Zinsser, as well as a nice collection of paintings by notables such as Anuszkiewicz, Albers, Held, Hofmann, Nozkowski, and others. The final room in the exhibition is hung salon-style and provides quite a feast for the eyes.

Across the street Pace has an exhibition of de Kooning figurative paintings and drawings (the best of which, IMHO, are the ones where he stayed within the color range of yellow-to-peach-to-orange without too much green), and around the corner D. Wigmore takes on an earlier slice of abstraction history than McCoy with a focus on (primarily) geometric American abstraction of the 1930s and 1940s.

I felt compelled to stop by MoMA to check out “German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse” since I was in the neighborhood, but it wasn’t really my thing. I liked the Kandinsky and the Beckmann paintings, where color and brushwork are prominent, but the more graphic pieces, often woodcuts, aren’t as interesting, at least not on a quick stroll (this show might be worth another visit if I had some more time to spend with the graphic items, but there’s something about the drawing style of many of these artists that just doesn’t pull me in).

Jennifer Bartlett in the atrium at MoMA. Click for larger view.

I took the E train down to Chelsea and caught a few regular hour exhibitions that I had missed earlier in the week, most notably Tim Maguire and Donald Judd. Maguire’s gorgeous paintings at Von Lintel are exciting and they look great from across the room and from up close where you can see the overlapping washes of color (that mimic the printing process) and the purposeful disruptions to the surface in the form of splotches of color (or removed color) that reads almost as photographic grain from far away. The subject matter in this show is flowers, up close, and is an interesting contrast to the Naoto Nakagawa show I mentioned a few weeks ago in terms of close-up, macro views of flowers with a highly personalized style of coloring.

I wasn’t sure about heading all the way down to 19th Street to the Donald Judd show, since his work can be so hit or miss for me, perhaps depending upon my own mood. But I enjoyed most of these box constructions at David Zwirner. Each of the pieces in the show is a large open-topped “box” with a silvery finish. Looking into the pieces over the edges of the box you see a super-glossy floor, often in chromatic hues like bright orange. Crossing from side to side within each box are a number of thin vertical planks of varying heights and distances from the ground. In the best of the pieces, there’s some nifty color interaction going on that changes as you catch the work from different angles, such as when the orange floor reflects upon a bright phthalo blue plank causing the plank to look nearly black from one angle but bright blue from another.

After a quick bite to eat for dinner it was time for a couple of openings. One that I enjoyed was Torben Geihler at Leo Koenig. These large geometric abstractions, according to the press release, are based upon musical structures and the Fibonacci sequence, though I read them as crystalized, desaturated Brice Mardens, with some similar formal issues about approaching edges, overlapping structures, and pentimenti.

On 28th Street, there was a crowd, a buzz, and a lot of fantastic “photograms” at the Foley Gallery’s Edward Mapplethorpe show.  I wasn’t at all familiar with this artist until I heard about the exhibition a few days ago and then read the fascinating back story about his relationship with his famous brother, Robert (whose work is also on display the next block northward). In “The Variations,” Mapplethorpe creates unique photographic prints without a camera, purely through chemical processes and (I presume) creative exposure to light. The result are depth-filled, warm-toned, Pollock-like allover abstractions that, like Pollock, are exciting to examine at multiple scales, up close and from across the room. In many of the pieces, the splashy marks remind me of a Edgerton “Milk Drop Corona”. The artist looked happy and I can understand why, as the crowd was into the show and the exhibition looked great.

Photo Impressions of Rush Hour Traffic in Chelsea (c) Andrew Werth