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.

More Collage + Encaustic

Sometimes I feel like I spend my whole life stumbling around like Mr. Magoo at the hind end of the elephant, taking the tail for the whole beast. Myopia is me. I get so focused on whatever is near at hand or last to arrive in my mind, that I can't see the big picture or remember what came before.

Cuppa, collage with encaustic and oilstick on book cover, about 7"x5".

Or maybe it's just that I get so wrapped up in the new, that I forget the old? Anyway, I'm in the studio and having a really fun time making these little collages on book covers. I'm making some bigger work at the same time, but these little pieces are very enjoyable.

Hear Ye, collage with encaustic and oilstick on book cover, about 7"x5"

What I mean by my opening statements is that in my rush to embrace the next new thing, I completely erase all memory of what had me so engaged with the old, abandoned thing. I forgot that I really love doing collage, that is, I love the kind of collage that's more like mosaic because I really love mosaic. You see how it goes.

In the Pool, collage with encaustic on book cover, about 9"x 5.5"

I've done mosaic with glass and tiles but that's a lot more work than these and you have to be careful about glass splinters. Plus it's very heavy. All I have to be careful about with these is the paper storm that I have brewing on one of my tables. I hope it doesn't get hot too quick because if I turn on a fan, I'm done for.

Wish You Were Here, collage with encaustic on book cover, about 9"x 5.5"

In Other News 
I received the stolen and recovered paintings back from Tucson today. I kind of dreaded opening them to see their condition, but they weren't bad - a few chips and scrapes. I think the rubber surrounding the panels in place of frames really saved them from more damage. That's one of the great things about encaustic - easily fixable.


Preparing for NEW @ FAC
New England Wax is having an exhibition at the Fairfield Arts Council gallery in Fairfield, CT that opens next week. It was organized by my pal, Binnie Birstein, who lives in Connecticut and belongs to the FAC as well as to NEW. The show was juried and curated by Laura Epstein, who has a background in Asian and contemporary art. I've been working on the show for a while - gathering images, preparing lists of accepted work, putting together the catalog, etc. This Saturday I'm helping to receive, unwrap and check in paintings. There's really so much work to it all. It's worse than housework - but more exciting and with a better ending. (You do know that you can click on these images and see them larger, right?)

Embracing Passionate Color

Painting reveals my inner state better than any analyst could. Think how much I have saved on therapy over the years by allowing color to signal my interior emotional state and alert me to what is happening in my life.

This is not something that I really notice right away unless I just drown myself in it, but this past year or so it's really been apparent to me. I've been through a black and brown phase when I was so depressed about my mother's condition, I emerged into a blue and green period when the stress and anxiety were lifting and then I found myself in a dark red and orange state when I began to feel much better about life in general. Apparently I'm back to being even lighter and brighter than I thought I was because I can't get enough of pink and red. Wow! The Little Woman and I have been together nearly 25 years so it's not a new love affair, but to judge by my palette, it's spring and I am passionately embracing the whole wide world.

Actually I'm embracing a new method of working in the studio. I have slowly begun using the old books and papers I've been collecting and begun collaging them in various ways with encaustic and other materials. This process began with the rubber and copper I started using a year ago and now it's morphed into books. I've previously shown in this blog the book pieces that will be included in Wax Libris II, the library show that Joanne Mattera has curated for this year's encaustic conference in June. (Note that those pieces were pink and red!) Now here are a few more recent pieces.

Still untitled, 12" x 12", encaustic over paper collage

Bumpy Red Ride, 12" x 12", encaustic and mixed media

The second piece does not include books but has my standard things embedded plus some larger, cruder hunks of wax and a lot of red/pink colors. The pink blur in the center is a color called Opal Rose that is transparent and iridescent - very pretty. The reason that I include this piece in this post is that I thought I might make a diptych from these two.

Here's the diptych. I think the dots bring it together, but we'll see.

And here are the first pieces with book collage I made:

Library I, encaustic over collaged parts of books. I think it's about 32"H x 18"W or something like that. This is still pretty dark.

Library II, encaustic over collage parts of books, same size. You can see the red and pink creeping in there even though there's a lot of blue.


I am getting a kick out of working with these materials because they're so rich all on their own. I've been struggling to discover how I can make them my own, and now I think I'm working my way into it.

This week I also made a few collages on cut off book covers, thinking about the small works show later this month in Fairfield, CT. They were fun to do. Here's one of them.

Untitled in red, pink and black, about 9" x 6" or something like that, encaustic over collage.

It always surprises me how much my emotional state is affected by what happens in the studio. When I have a good day, I'm just exhilarated and when it goes badly or doesn't go at all, I am in despair. It's the life of an artist.