Painting Freedom

Coming soon - a post with my newest work. I am having two pieces re-photographed because I made changes after the first go-round. (The photographer says some people have gone for three and four times on the same work, so I guess I'm ahead of the process.)

Anyway, meanwhile, I just noticed this today:

Joan Mitchell, untitled, 1991

Willem deKooning, 1983

I thought the Joan Mitchell piece had a lot of the same feeling of deKooning's late work in its openness and freedom of marks. This imagery seems just as different for her as deKooning's did for his oevre. Maybe we all get to that place in our work as we release our hold on life?

The Joan Mitchell image is from her New York dealer, Cheim & Read, where an exhibition of 13 of Mitchell's works called "Last Paintings" will be shown November 3 - January 4.

The Latest NY Art Trip: Chelsea Galleries

This feels so long ago that I can barely remember - but it was only a bit over a week ago. In between have been long sessions of oil painting, work, writing and lots of heat - you know,  the usual. My intention for this post was to finish up Friday since I only posted the morning session the other day. However, I have just finished looking through, adjusting and resizing the photos I took - and now I have carpel tunnel in my right hand because there were so many just from the galleries. So I'm going to include what I can in this post and save some for next time. Here goes...

Mark Wagner at Pavel Zouboc Gallery

Pavel Zouboc on W. 23rd Street was the first stop on the tour after lunch. This gallery specializes in collage and is currently showing "Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death" by Mark Wagner (through August 12th). This show was nothing short of totally AMAZING (even though I hate that overused word). Mark Wagner must have no life because it is all spent making this work. I took a lot of closeups, but the work has so many tiny details that I don't know if you can see them. (Be sure to click on these images because they will enlarge.)

Greg beside the huge, 14-panel  "Liberty" with a part of the
viewing platform in the right foreground

Wagner calls this work "currency collage" because it is all made from actual one dollar bills. The biggest piece in the show, "Liberty," is 16 feet x 4 feet and is composed of 14 panels that I figure must about 38" x 16". Within each panel, the detail is incredible and the overall composition is ingenious - very humorous and inventive. He cuts the tiniest little slivers of the bills - really incredible.

Liberty torch - note George Washington and the cartoon character at the apex

The press release from an earlier exhibition at Pavel Zouboc Gallery states that Mark Wagner, "creates collages that speak to the cultural, social, political and symbolic roles that money plays in our society....[He] transforms this icon of American capitalism into representational images whose symbolic force asks us to question our understanding of money, its cultural significance and relationship to art." See the gallery's website for many more photos of the work.

Worker Bees, 2011, currency collage, 16 x 37 inches

Closeup of Worker Bees

Trafficking, 2011, 37 x 16 inches

Closeup of the green light in Trafficking

In case you forgot, here's a dollar bill with the green seal to the right of George.
How many of these were used in the green light above?

I really loved these pieces - so clever, so obsessive - all made with currency

Closeup of Pretty Please, 12x16 inches

*&?@#!, 12 x 16 inches

This trunk contained a stop-time video of Wagner and an assistant
at work making the collages plus snippets of currency and
assorted objects. It was fascinating to watch the video. 

Of course I also liked this unique piece (image from the gallery's website) called
Plumbing the Depths, with collage by Mark Wagner and paint by Joey Parlett, 2011,
24 x 24 inches. Great surface.

Cheim & Read on W. 25th Street was the next stop. They are showing "The Women In Our Life: A Fifteen Year Anniversary Exhibition," up through September 17th. This was a more pared-down show with single examples from ten women artists who have worked with the gallery. The exhibition announcement notes about the artists, "their selection, impressive in its scope, evolved in response to the artists' individual work." I take that to mean that they weren't chosen just because they were women. (Remember to click to see bigger images of the works.)

Joan Mitchell, Minnesota, 1980, oil on canvas in four parts,
102 1/2 x 243 inches

Closeup of Minnesota

Lynda Benglis, untitled, 1972, "beeswax, damar resin and pigment" on wood,
36 x 5 7/8 x 3 1/4 inches

Greg showing the scale of the Benglish piece

Louise Bourgeois, Nature Study No. 5, 1995, pink marble and steel,
20 x 36 1/2 x 23 inches

Also included in the show was work by Ghada Amer, Diane Arbus, Louise Fishman, Jenny Holzer, Chantal Joffe, Alice Neel and Pat Steir - all first rank artists. Check out the gallery website for a checklist of the works in the show.


Next was Stephen Haller Gallery on W. 26th Street. There was a group show of gallery artists, including my favorite Lloyd Martin, and an exhibition of "Collage Paintings from the 1960s" by Larry Zox. These pieces were quite interesting because they were just assembled roughly with staples and looked very contemporary.

Banner, 1962, collage, oil, staples on board, 72 x 72 inches

Another piece by Zox, this one much smaller and mounted in a sort of shadow box

Another Zox piece, about the same size as the one above. This one was my favorite.

The group show and the Zox show are up until August 5th.

Well, I think three shows are about it for this post. Still to come: Ruth Hiller's show at Winston Wachter, Li SongSong at Pace and Tamar Zinn at The Painting Center - plus the fabulous High Line.

P.S. Many thanks to Greg Wright for serving as the human scale for some of this work.

A Week From Hell

It's been a long, hard week here between the extreme heat and humidity and exhausting computer problems. Ultimately the heat broke a little with a good soaking rain on Saturday morning and the computer(s) are fixed and improved beyond where they initially began after nearly 12 hours of work on them by a friend who is an IT wizard. I now have a brand-new operating system on my main computer and sparkling files that have been scrubbed of all the malicious viruses, worms, trojans, and evil-doers that were lurking in them. I won't detail what actually happened because I don't want to publicize the cretin who devised the knockout punch, but suffice it to say that it was a serious blow. Anyone who would inflict such a terrorist attack for no reason other than getting some kind of smug satisfaction at wreaking havoc on the world at large deserves to fry in computer hell.

Archangel. Michael slaying the devil. (Guido Reni's archangel Michael (in the Capuchin church of Santa Maria della Concezione, Rome, 1636) tramples Satan. A mosaic of the same painting decorates St. Michael's Altar within St. Peter's Basilica.)


No, I haven't gone and gotten religion over it all, but I am extremely grateful (in general) that there are kind and intelligent people around who understand the inscrutable world of computers and that one of these great souls came to our assistance. I'm sure that India is a wonderful country, but I would much rather have a knowledgeable guy from the next town be here in person. So I'm glad to put this bad experience behind me and focus on the improvements this has brought to my dear computer.

New York, New York
Looking ahead to this coming weekend, I am making the trek to Manhattan via dear friend Binnie's in Connecticut. The Binster and I hope to rendevous with other friends in NY and see some art in the flesh. One show I would really like to see is the new Matisse show at MoMA, “Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917.”

Henri Matisse, Bathers By a River, 1909-1917

The Times today had an article about the research done on Bathers By a River, a painting which they say Matisse considered one of his five greatest works. The Times has an interactive feature about the painting showing the stages of its development over eight years. Here is the link to the slide/video/audio description of the process. On that site you will also find the link to MoMA's website which has a lot more about that painting and the show in general. Unfortunately, this show does not open until next Sunday, July 18th. Perhaps I'll get back to New York before it closes in October.

The Arting Trip List

Lee Bontecou, untitled sculpture, 1959.

1. Lee Bontecou
But in looking at the MoMA site, I see that they have now have a show on of work by Lee Bontecou, one of my very favorite artists. If my mind wasn't such a sieve, I might have remembered reading about it before, but I had completely forgotten it. This would be great to see because I only know her work from a couple of real pieces and mostly from reading about it. This is not a huge show, but I'm making it a must on the arting list.

2. The Modern Myth: Drawing Mythologies in Modern Times

From the MoMa website: This exhibition addresses the artistic traces of these motifs in modern art, as well as the practice of modern myth-making, through a nonlinear, thematic representation of works, following a rough chronology from 1797 to 2008. Among the artists represented are Matthew Barney, Joseph Beuys, Paul Cézanne, Enrique Chagoya, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Willem de Kooning, Juan Downey, Max Ernst, Adolph Gottlieb, Arshile Gorky, Wifredo Lam, Matta, Ana Mendieta, Wangechi Mutu, Pablo Picasso, Richard Prince, Jackson Pollock, Odilon Redon, Mark Rothko, Jim Shaw, and Andy Warhol. I'd say worth a look.

Mark Rothko, Archaic Idol. 1945. Ink and gouache on paper, 21 7/8 x 30"

3. Several other shows at MoMA
Such as Mind and Matter: Alternative Abstractions, 1940s to Now, Contemporary Art from the Collection, and Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography.

4. Chelsea Galleries

Including: Jack Shainman Gallery - Leslie Wayne "One Big Love" with Jonathan Seliger "Spoils", Cheim & Read, "Le Tableau," French abstraction, and many others that I will have to look up or we can just walk by and look in the window. 

Leslie Wayne "One Big Love"

Installation shot from "Le Tableau"

The last time that I visited Binnie for an arting trip, it was February and, wouldn't you know it, that Saturday was the day that there were 17" of snow in Central Park. I just hope that this time the temperature is not over 100 degrees as it was last week. I've been hot enough for a while.

P.S. Any recommendations? If you have any suggestions on shows to see this weekend, July 16 and 17, feel free to make your recommendations in comments.