Color: Field and Form, Part 1

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Color: Field and Form is a series that will show you some of what I've seen over the past few months in New York City, and in a few instances, Boston.  I'm going to keep the text brief but provide links where appropriate. The series is planned for six parts (maybe more?)which I'll post over the next few weeks.  In this post we look at the work of Anne Truitt, Anne Appleby, Julian Jackson, Stuart Shils and Rory Donaldson. .

Anne Truitt, Drawings

Matthew Marks Gallery, February 5 - April 14

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Untitled, 1967, acrylic on paper, 27.5 x 41 inches
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This retrospective exhibition presented 40 years of Truitt's works on paper—flat color, largely monochromatic, yet with color shifts that become more apparent with sustained looking. Truitt created these "drawings"—really, paintings on paper—concurrently with her iconic minimalist sculptures. (I reported on a 2007 exhibition of the sculptures at Matthew Marks here.)

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You can see three installation views below, which I shot. The gallery has more images here and a video here.

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View from the entry . . .
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. . . swinging around clockwise, with a far-wall view of the work that opens this post  . . .
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. . . and contining around the room with the dividing wall to our left

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Anne Appleby, Paintings

Danese Gallery, February

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Faded Sweet Pea, 2008, oil and wax on panel, 33 x 33 inches

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Appleby, who divides her time between San Francisco and Montana, builds her color fields layer upon layer. In her case “field” has a literal meaning, as she sees herself a landscape painter. There is a distinct seasonal feel to the palette in her work here: spring pinks and greens, autumnal ochres, wintry grays. The photographs do not do justice to the works, since the layers of oil and wax are luminous and subtle, deepening toward the center. I suggest you seek out an exhibition of Appleby's paintings and stand before them to absorb what they have to offer.

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View the online catalog here.

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Installation view with Winter into Spring, left wall, Late Summer Aspen, far wall, and Faded Sweet Pea, right

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Julian Jackson, Crossing

Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, May 17 - June 16
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View from the entrance showing Crossing Earth, left, and Crossing Green, both 2012,  oil on canvas

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Forget that hack Kinkaid, who appropriated a title he didn't deserve. Julian Jackson is the real painter of light. Handling oil masterfully, he appears to illuminate each meditative canvas with a source that emanates from deep within. Says Jackson, “I try to bring a sense of movement and the experience of time into the stillness of abstract painting.” Done. Exquisitely.
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See more here.
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Entering and turning to the left, you see the painting below: Crossing White,  2012, oil on canvas, 54 x 54 inches

(Image below from the Kathryn Markel gallery website)
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We're now in the second gallery looking back into the first.
Below: Crossing Air, left;  Crossing Blue in the front gallery, right
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Stuart Shils, The Residue of Memory

Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, April 26 - May 27
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Installation view with End of a Summer Day, Last Blast of Warm Light, Looking Back, 2012, oil on linen, 30 x 42 inches, shown above and below
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Drawing from landscapes in Vermont and Ireland, Shils has created a series of moody, warm-toned canvases, all easel size, in which hues merge and dissolve. Indeed, the titles provide the time and place, and even the frame of mind of the artist, like the one here.

See more here.

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Rory Donaldson, Shared Roadway Ahead

Winkleman Gallery, March 23 - April 21
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Installation view with Time Shardin, 2012
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Donaldson is a photographer whose most recent work is about as close to painting as photography can get. Manipulating the images digitally, he creates fluid, Frankenthaler-like abstractions from the urban landscape. I selected two of the most chromatically lush works to show you.

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See more here..

View in the Curatorial Project Room, which for this exhibition was an extension of Donaldson's work. The image below, Atomic: Bordeaux D'Amour, 2011, is shown on the left wall above. See more images here

(Photo from the gallery website by Etienne Frossard)
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In coming posts I'll show you Carlos Estrada-Vega, Gregory Johnston, Douglas Florian, Guy Goodwin, Harriet Korman, Fran Shalom, Charlene Von Heyl, Martha Clippinger, Fabienne Lassere, Sheila Hicks, and a fab show at Schroeder Romero with three artists working with color and form. I suspect there will be more if I can make the time.
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Marketing Mondays: Bogus Advice and One-Percent Thinking

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 Total and utter bullshit. Artists are professionally trained. Art is a profession, not a religion

 Image from Trust Me, I'm a Designer page on Facebook

In addition to questions from Marketing Mondays readers, Facebook has been a marvelous resource for ideas. Take this "page" from Kurt Vonnegut's notebook, which I pulled from Facebook. Now I've posted Bad Advice before, but this is particularly insidious because Mr. Vonnegut, a successful novelist, seems to be telling others that making a living at their art isn't important, or shouldn't be a priority. Here are a few comments:
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Kevin F:   "Particularly offensive coming from artists who had successful Pop culture careers. My soul is fully grown, Mr. Vonnegut. What remains problematic is managing a world that crushes that soul every day.

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Kim M:  "If only Citibank would understand that I can't pay my mortgage anymore because it's compromising my soul."

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Oriane S:  "Making a living and growing your soul: apples and oranges."

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Sean C: "As artists we're always being cornered into apologizing for wanting the same things everybody wants. This is because we're supposed to be the guardians of those expectations of purity that art embodies in the minds of people who don't have to make it."
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I realize that not all artists make a living exclusively from the sale of their art, or even from art-related jobs. Even some well-known artists still teach, or have family money, or receive rental money on real-estate that they bought in the 70s. But my point in commenting on Vonnegut's "advice" is that it's bad advice. Vonnegut, who earned  a living from his writing, is doing what my professors did in art school--what many professors did to many of us in art school, and some still do--which was to say that it's not important to even aim to support yourself from the sale of your work. That does a disservice to artists everywhere.

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The practice of art embraces the whole package--the making, the thinking about, the growing from, and the sale --in exactly the same way a doctor develops her career and gets paid for her services or a scientist for his. Vonnegut's statement is simplistic. And what's worse, it has the potential to misdirect legions of artists, just as those art school professors did to generations of art school students with pronouncements like, "Selling well is selling out." Artists need to go out into the world with the idea that it is at least possible to earn a living from what they have been trained to do. Vonnegut's statement throws all of that under the bus.

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And the hits just keep on coming.
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Here's The Busy Trap an Op Ed piece from The New York Times, whose author lives like a One Percenter. ("On the best ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the afternoon, and in the evening I see friends, read or watch a movie. This, it seems to me, is a sane and pleasant pace for a day.") It is a sane and pleasant pace for a day. Bravo for him, but artists have to find sanity in a 12- or 18-hour workday.

This is a screen grab of the online piece. Click here to access the entire article

Clearly this guy is not self employed and doing the work of three people because that's the only way he can stay in business. He is not an artist who works a full-time job so that he can then go into the studio to work *another* full-time job. He's not someone who juggles three part-time jobs, each without benefits, to be able to pay the studio rent, hoping for enough energy to make art after that. 

Non-artists often say to us: "How nice that you can  make your own hours."

Yes, indeed, I reply. I can work any 18 hours of the day I choose.

Your comments, as always are welcome.

If you have found this or other Marketing Mondays posts useful, please consider supporting this blog with a donation. A PayPal Donate button is located on the Sidebar at right. Thank you. (Or click here and scroll down the sidebar).

Thank You, Ivan

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Ivan Karp 1926-2012

Photo by Algis Kemezys, taken 1995; courtesy of the gallery

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SoHo in the Seventies and Eighties was the center of the art universe, and OK Harris on West Broadway was the center of the center. Actually, Ivan Karp, who sat at a desk in the back gallery, was the center of it all, the Higgs boson particle of the art world.

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Ivan was legendary for his accessibility. Artists walked in with their slides and he would actually take the time to look at them. I never had the courage to approach him.
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So you can imagine my surprise in 1994 when I got into my Union Square studio and heard this message on my answering machine:  “Hello, this is Ivan Karp [he pronounced it Oivan Kop]. I saw your work at the Small Works Show and I’d like to make a studio visit.”  I don’t remember the exact words—I should have, because I played the message dozens of times—but that was the gist.

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The Small Works show was an annual event that took place at New York University’s 80 Washington Square East Galleries, a sprawling exhibition that drew hundreds of artists from New York City and the region (at the time, the work had to be hand delivered).

Alba, 1994, encaustic, 10"x10"

 A different dealer, critic or curator juried it each year. I entered three 10-by-10-inch paintings, reductive compositions in encaustic, a medium I felt I was finally getting control of. The juror that year was Jacquie Littlejohn, who had a gallery on 57^th Street. Earlier in the day, when I was at my day job, I’d received a phone call from NYU congratulating me on having been selected for a Juror’s Award. I walked on air to the studio.

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But the message from Ivan sent me soaring. It turns out that Marilynn Gelfman Karp—sculptor, NYU faculty member, and former curator of the 80 Washington Square East Galleries, who just happened to be married to Ivan—had a tradition with him that continued even after she’d relinquished the gallery. They went together to preview the show, with Ivan casting an eye for new artists and new work.

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Ivan came to the studio on a Saturday Morning a few weeks later. I was listening for him to come down the hall, but it turns out I smelled his cigar before he knocked.

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I’d laid out a selection of breakfast food--coffee, tea, bagels, croissants, fruit—and beckoned. He chuckled and said by way of no-thanks, “You think dealers don’t eat breakfast before they leave home?”

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OK, then. I showed him my work. He looked. Asked questions. Puffed. Looked some more. At the end of a long silence he said, “I’m going to give you a show.” 

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My solo took place in January, 1996, and from that time I have felt like a relative of the gallery family, which includes Ethan Karp, Ivan's son; Suzanne Kreps, Rick Witter, Ana Menezes, Christine Adapon, and Amy Fishman. I went on to have another solo at the gallery in 2007, during which time I worked with Ethan, but Ivan continued to oversee it all. With Ivan it was not about age or gender, or who you knew but by how he responded to your work. Somewhere there’s a quote from him saying that if you’re beautiful or rich, you will have no trouble finding a place for yourself in the art world, otherwise you will have to depend on talent and hard work.

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I believe my career was helped immeasurably by Ivan’s interest in my work, and I'm sure my story can be repeated in some form or other by countless other artists who have been touched by his generosity.

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If you have a story about Ivan Karp please share it here. I will make sure the family sees what you write. But equally important, I’d like this post to honor, via all of our stories, the generosity of someone who had a legendary "eye" and a great deal of power and used them in a way that supported artists in a business that has lasted well over 40 years.
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The gallery plans a memorial service for Ivan in the fall. And, says gallery manager Suzanne Kreps, "The gallery will be continuing with vigor."  

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Read obituaries in Gallerist NY and The New York Times

Marketing Mondays: Knock, Knock

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Today we lighten up, just in time for the holiday. Your art-related jokes, puns and anecdotes are requested. I'll start.
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Three artists walk into a bar
. Rachel Whiteread makes a cast of it and shows it at the Tate Modern
. Thomas Kinkaid stays for three days and drinks himself to death
. Marina Abramovic sits there for two-and-a-half months and doesn't say a word


What’s the difference between an artist and a trash collector?

The artist takes out her own trash. The trash collector makes $50,000 a year with sick days and benefits and a retirement income at the end of 30 years.

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How many artists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
.Twenty five thousand
. 12  to debate the merits of incandescent versus complact fluorescent
. 2 to get the ladder
. 1 to actually change the lightbulb
. 8 to turn it into a performance in a Bushwick pop-up
. 30 to attend the performance
. 15 to Tweet about it
. 3 to blog about it
. Jerry Saltz to post about it in Facebook
. 24, 928 to respond to Jerry.

Goddesses, Revolutionaries, Femmes Fatales, Wild Women, Bad Girls and Warriors

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In Twisted Sisters at the Dodge Gallery:

Nancy Spero, To the Revolution, 2001, handprinted and printed collage on paper, 48.5 x 19.75 inches. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong

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Forget the madonna/whore dichotomy. That’s a male construct. When women portray women, including themselves, a whole new set of identities emerge. In six exhibitions this spring—five solos and a curated group show—goddesses, warriors, femmes fatales, wild women, bad girls, bumpkins and a host of related personas take over.

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The artists include veterans like Audrey Flack and Linda Stein; those who live on through their work, such as Nancy Spero and Ana Mendieta; art-fair powerhouses like Mickalene Thomas; and relative newcomers like Rebecca Morgan. Here’s a look at what I saw: .

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Audrey Flack: Reimagining the Archetype of Queens and Goddesses

Gary Snyder Gallery, Chelsea
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Love Conquer All: Looks like Medusa, but it's Amor Vincit Omni

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The installation photo below gives you the scale. Image from the gallery website

Click here for more installation photos

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Audrey Flack: Sculpture, 1989-2012 at the Gary Snyder Gallery featured the work of the hyperrealist-painter-turned sculptor. I have to admit that I'm not fond of the Flack esthetic. The work seems out of time, neither classical nor contemporary, but how could I do a post like this without it?

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Maquettes of public commissions. I'm not sure if all of these have been realized, but the center maquette represents one of four 20-foot gilded bronze statues made as part of the Gateway to the City of Rockville, South Carolina. Flanking it are American Athena, left, and Egyptian Rocket Goddess.

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The installation photo below gives you the scale. Image from the gallery website
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Who is this indigenous figure with the heart, the artillery shell and the features of a young Audrey Flack? I will let you know when I find out

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Marybeth Edelson: Revolutionary
Accola Grieffen Gallery, Chelsea
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View into the gallery. The works shown below are visible in this shot

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In  Hail to the Feminists Who Produced the Revolution: Works by Mary Beth Edelson from 1971 to 2012, Accola Grieffen presented the retrospective of an artist who has worked in a variety of mediums over the past four decades, all in service to a feminist vision.

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Some Living American Women Artists: Last Supper, 1972- 2012, digital archival print with mixed media, 23.5" x 36.75" (Disclaimer: I acquired one of these prints from the exhibition)
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Above: Ana y Yo, mixed media
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Both works, in mixed media, are visible on the far wall in the installation view above. The image of Ana Mendieta with her husband, Carl Andre, on her forehead echoes the iconic Frida Khalo paintings with Diego Rivera. (Andre was famously acquitted of having killed Mendieta, who fell from a high-rise window, but doubt lingers)

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Below: What You See is What You Get, 1972, mixed media

Goddess Head, single/yellow, 1975, collage and water color on silver print, 8 x 8 inches

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Eva Lake: Femmes Fatales
Frosch and Portman, Lower East Side

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Installation view of Judd Women Targets
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In her first New York solo, Judd Women Targets, Eva Lake showed collages from three bodies of work, Judd Montages, Anonymous Women, and Targets. In several of her collages the women and the targets come together, a visual image as disturbing as it is compelling (when have women not been targets of something?). I include some of Lake's Anonymous Women here: the femmes fatales of the forties, with their Betty Grable legs and Bette Davis eyes, mysterious and unattainable, like Susan Hayward below.
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Though you missed the show at Frosh and Portman, you can see work from Lake's Target series at Chris Ashley's Some Walls exhibition space Oakland, California, in September. They won't be the same ones, though, because the wall labels at Frosh and Portman were covered in red dots.

Target No. 10 (Susan),  2008, 15 x 11 1/2 inches

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Above and below: from the Anonymous Women series, 2011-2012

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Wild Women, all 30 of Them

Dodge Gallery, Lower East Side

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Above, view from front to back, left wall: Summer Wheat painting, Lorna Williams sculpture

Below, front to back, right wall: Judith Linhares painting

These two images courtesy of Dodge Gallery

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Twisted Sisters, curated by gallery owner Kristen Dodge and independent curator Janet Phelps, was a compendium of what my mother would have called "unladylike and undignified behavior." The curators strove to incite and unsettle, repulse and amuse, which is exactly what they did in a sprawling, multigenerational show of work by 30 artists, 11 of whom I've singled out here. In part it was the subject matter—Summer Wheat's self-pleasuring figure greets you when you enter—as well as materials used messily and with abandon. Ah, sex, mess and excess! The space felt a bit like walking into a giant Id, an experience of don't-mess-with-me badness that I can only describe as extremely liberating. 

Farther down the right wall:  Xander Marro grid of silkscreens and mixed-media diaromas of women holding guns
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Gallery view from back to front

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In the lower level space, from left: Patricia Cronin, Alison Schulnik, Serena Cole, Katherine Bernhardt; Mickalene Thomas sculpture

Mickalene Thomas, Brawlin' Spitfire Wrestlers, 2007, resin, paint, Swarovski crystals; courtesy of Lehman Maupin Gallery

This and two previous images courtesy of Dodge Gallery.

Below, on the other side of the lower level: Four photographs by the late Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Facial Cosmetic Variations)

.The photographs document the artist with shampoo in her hair. I pulled these images from the internet, so they are not shown in the horizontal order in which they were installed in the gallery

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Rebecca Morgan: Bad Girls

Asya Geisberg Gallery, Chelsea

The Smoker, 2012, graphite and oil on panel, 26 x 22 inches

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In Cabin Fever at the Asya Geisberg Gallery, the recent MFA graduate Rebecca Morgan showed a collection of transgressive dope smokin, Cheeto-eatin, fleshy figures—"bumpkins," she calls them—who could have been the love children of  R. Crumb and J. Clampett. These are the People of Walmart when the're not out shopping. And was it me, or did they all look alike, including the ugly figures described as Self Portraits? I'll be honest, they creeped me out. But it's just the artist exorcising (or exercising) her Appalachian demons. One of the reasons she can pull this off—and I'm not sure she does so entirely—is that her lighthanded combination of graphite drawing and oil washes mitigate the heaviness of her figures and their weighty circumstances. 

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Above: Self Portrait post MFA wearing a smock of a former employer, 2012

Below: Homecoming Picnic, 2012

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Selection of  page-size "self portraits" and "Bumpkin" drawings

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Below: I love New York, 2011, 30 x 24 inches. This is an actual self portrait

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Linda Stein: Warrior Women

Flomenhaft Gallery, Chelsea

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Installation view of The Fluidity of Gender

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With a collection of wall-hung and pedestaled sculptures, and of body costume that is presented as sculpture, Linda Stein challenges gender roles. I'm not sure I see "fluidity" here. What I see are female forms in decidedly unfleshy materials: wood, metal, leather. I would describe them as the embodiment of women who take no shit. If that's fluidity, I'll take it. I must admit that I'm partial to Wonder Woman, substance and shadow, shown below.

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Justice for All, 2010, collage and archival inks, paper and wood, 79 x 24 x 9 inches

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Marketing Mondays: Staying Connected

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In last week's MM post, Own Your Space, I talked about the various options for buying. Many artists responded with their own stories of properties bought or built. One artist responded with this question:

The financial benefits of working at home are inarguable, but how can I overcome the social and creative hurdles of working in isolation?

Sometimes if feels as if you can't win. When you spend all your income-producing hours earning enough to pay the studio rent, you don't get much studio-visit time. And when you have a more affordable setup in an out-of-the-way place, no one makes the trip out.

I can suggest a few bricks-and-mortar options
. Regular visits to the gallery cities near you (an anonymous Philadelphia artist commenting in the same post says s/he takes the Bolt Bus up to Manhattan once a month)
. Get to the openings, where everyone is more social
. Visit open studios in your area
. Form a crit group with other artists, or even a reading group, to maintain contact with your peers. If you can't use your home when it's your turn to host, come up with an inventive solution: a room in the local library, art center or college, perhaps. Or volunteer to be the event organizer in lieu of meeting in your space
. Consider a short term rental when you need to show work to dealer or curator. Or rent/barter the use of a friend's in-town studio (could you trade artwork or a service?)

Cyberspace offers greater specificity and geographic diversity
. Maintain a blog, or comment regularly on several. You can do this from anywhere, yet the community can be rewarding
. The Facebook community is large. If you don't let it take over your life, it's both fun and useful
. In particular, Facebook groups allow people with particular interests to "meet" regularly. The group can be open--which means that anyone can read the comments, "listening in" as if the meeting were in a public park; or closed, which means it's more like getting together in someone's living room or studio. In both instances, artists are from dozens of  locations. I belong to groups in both categories, and I find that the friendships, exchange of ideas and personal support have become important the busier I become and the more isolated my work sometimes makes me. Start a group and invite people to join it.
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Readers: How do you stay Connected?