John Seed: Art World Satires for 2014

December 30, 2014, 12:49 pm

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One lesson I have learned as an art writer is that sometimes you can say things with humor that you can't say any other way. Please enjoy the art world satires I wrote this year for the HuffingtonPost Arts Page and for Hyperallergic.

 - John Seed

Art World Satires, 2014

Artist's Statements of the Old Masters

A Children's Tour of the Metropolitan Museum: 2034

April Nordbee: Small Town Duchamp 

Meet the Ladies of the West Hamilton Koons Club

Not at the New York Galleries

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Kimberly Merrill: 'Divine Journey' at Lora Schlesinger Gallery

January 20, 2015, 1:03 pm

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From Whence We Came, 2014oil on canvas panel22-1/2 x 26-1/2" fr. At Lora Schlesinger Gallery in Santa Monica, painter Kimberly Merrill is showing a group of fifteen works that explore themes of spirituality, human connection and saintliness. Painted with exquisite care, Merrill's oils demonstrate her mastery of light and form, both of which are remarkable, especially considering that she came to painting late in life after raising a family. I recently interviewed Kimberly and asked her about her background, her ideas and her subjects.

Kimberly Merrill: Photo - Jon Swihart Tell me a bit about your early life: when did you know you were an artist?

I grew up in a middle class Minnesota family where art was not on our radar. Later, when I became a stay-at-home Mom, I did the traditional female arts: knitting, quilting, crocheting, etc. When we left Minnesota for my husband's career, I starting taking classes at the local community college. One of the first classes I took was ceramics, which I loved, but when I took my first 2D class, I was hooked. It was during that time that I accustomed myself to the idea that I could actually be an artist. It was so out of my perception of myself that it took a while. I was divorced in 2000, which forced me into making a decision to fully commit to painting. I was accepted at Laguna College of Art and Design that year, at the age of 44: it was a bit of a late start! With hindsight, I realize that the 'female arts' were my outlet for expression before I discovered the fine arts and knew that I was an artist.

Reverence, 2014oil on panel 30 x 22-7/16" fr. Tell me about your experience in Laguna? Did you have any particularly helpful teachers or mentors there?

I graduated from LCAD with my BFA in 2004 and MFA in 2008. During my undergraduate years two teachers were pivotal in my experience and progress: Betty Shelton and Jonathan Burke. My confidence was in a particularly low place because of the divorce and they gave me added support and guidance that made all the difference. In graduate school, Jon Swihart was my mentor, for which we have taken much ribbing! Jon likes to joke that he was paid to date me. All kidding aside, we had so much in common artistically and aesthetically, that it was a great match. People sometimes assume that Jon is responsible for influencing me with his style, but the truth is that we already had that in common. He has been instrumental in helping me evolve as a painter and has been my biggest champion.

Peacock, 2013oil on canvas panel 30 x 24" fr. How has your art evolved over time?

I haven't been painting all that long, but in the course of painting this show, I felt myself moving toward more simplicity. I love the emotional power of isolation and how in the isolation of a figure, the viewer can find connection to our human sense of being in this life alone, which ironically, we are all in together. In some of this work, I have used isolation from other people to focus on our connection to something bigger than us and to describe the phenomenon of being physically alone, but never alone in the true sense of the word.

Your recent work features the figure of Pierrot. Tell me about your interest in this character and what he stands for in your work.

The Pierrot character originated in the 17th century as part of the commedia dell'Arte, which was a type of Italian theatre made up of masked characters. He has evolved over the years in both appearance and purpose, but this isn't actually relevant to my work. My interest in Pierrot had a serendipitous start... We were planning a party for Jerry Ackerman's birthday and decided to do a live replication of one of Gerome's paintings, 'The Duel after the Masquerade,' in which there is a Pierrot character. This character originated in the 17th century as a part of a type of Italian theatre made up of masked characters. I was struck by the character, how in his costume and make-up he lost connection to race or nationality, or even age. He became an icon for the everyday man. To me, the white shimmering costume, on the other hand, is a generic reference to religious or ceremonial robes. The costume on the 'everyday man' is a reference to the spiritual nature, or 'saintliness' of us all. With this, I have to say, I am not associated with any formal religion, but I do believe this connection is our life-force and our connection to each other.

Man's Best Friend, 2013oil on canvas panel 13-5/8 x 13-7/16" - fr. You have a long-standing interest in painting animals: tell me a bit about that side of your work? My first show was, 'Unleashed,' a show of dog paintings and portraits, and a dog does make an appearance in this show also. I believe dogs and other animals are our greatest teachers. They live their lives in the moment, innately aware of a life force beyond their physical form, through the good and bad experiences. They don't worry, complain and wish things were different than they are, and no matter how old they get, they still know how to enjoy life. The most amazing thing to me is how people change with the company of an animal and how that relationship can be remarkably healing. This relationship and these creatures deserve to be honored, and that's why they are represented by Lenny, the dog.

No Dress Rehearsal, 2014oil on canvas panel 30-3/8 x 27-5/8" - fr. Can you say a few things about the spiritual aspects of your recent work? The stresses of the culture we live in are continually pulling us away from our own spiritual connection and from each other. I have come to see my work as a spiritual practice and contribution to countering that imbalance in my own small way. These days, the foundation of everything I paint is spiritually based, in that it brings attention to the divine connection we have to a higher power/energy, nature and each other. We are faced with so much negativity all around us; I want my work to be more of a peaceful retreat from all of that noise.

Ephemeral, 2012oil on canvas panel 23-1/2 x 19-1/2" - fr. What are some of your favored media and working methods?

I have focused just on oil painting for the last several years and work in a traditional academic style. A large percentage of my pieces are quite small, which suits my temperament and studio size well. I have always taken an intuitive approach to my work, but in the beginning I thought it was just being naïve. Now, I realize this is authentic for me. I'm not an intellectual painter. If I work just from my head, the work seems contrived and flat, because it lacks the emotions I feel most driven to relate.  

What are your interests outside of art? We have great friends that we enjoy spending time with and I have come full circle and re-embraced knitting and sewing, which surprises me more than anyone. I love the meditative quality of knitting and, as it turns out I'm not bad at it, so I've been taking commissions and selling my work. It's a great thing to be making money while watching TV in the evenings! I love to read, although I haven't been spending much time at it lately.
KIMBERLY MERRILL  
Divine Journey
Lora Schlesinger Gallery
2525 Michigan Ave. #T3
Santa Monica, CA 90404
January 17 - February 21, 2015

Jon Swihart: A Portrait of Louis Zamperini (1917-2014)

January 26, 2015, 1:43 pm

≫ Next: A Brief Rant on the Exhaustion of the Avant-Garde, Zombie Formalism and What Contemporary Painting Needs to Move Forward

≪ Previous: Kimberly Merrill: 'Divine Journey' at Lora Schlesinger Gallery

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Jon Swihart, Capt. Louis Zamperini, 2013, oil on wood panel, 12" h. x 9" w.Collection of Angelina Jolie

When you forgive it's like it never happened. True forgiveness is complete and total. - Louis Zamperini

"This whole year has been very bittersweet," says Cynthia Zamperini Garris, whose much-loved father Louis (Louie) Zamperini passed away last July at the age of 97. "Losing my dad was heartbreaking -- it's still hard to say goodbye -- but there has also been all the celebration of his life, especially with the film and the Rose Parade."

The movie that Garris is referring to is Unbroken, a feature film directed by Angelina Jolie. Released in December of 2014, Unbroken is a true-to-life drama that recounts Zamperini's rapscallion youth, his ascent as a track star and Olympic athlete, the 47 harrowing days he spent floating in a raft in the Pacific Ocean following a WWII plane crash, and the torments he faced in a Japanese prison camp. Unbroken -- as its title suggests -- is ultimately a story of resilience, transcendence and forgiveness. Regarding the Rose Parade, Louis Zamperini was its 2015 Grand Marshall in Absentia, honored as a profoundly heroic and inspiring figure.

Zamperini's long, varied and eventful life has also been the subject of two books. In 2003 he published his own book -- Devil at My Heels: A Heroic Olympian's Astonishing Story of Survival as a Japanese POW in World War II -- which was followed in 2010 by Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, the basis of the recent film. "From the day I first spoke to him," says author Laura Hilenbrand of Zamperini, "his almost incomprehensibly dramatic life was my obsession." Hillenbrand's detailed and vivid book, which stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for over four years, and the paperback edition retains a five star Amazon rating after over 18,000 customer reviews.

In the Fall of 2013 Jon Swihart, a scrupulous and preternaturally patient artist who lives and works in Santa Monica, was commissioned to create an oil portrait of Zamperini. Part of what made the commission especially meaningful for Swihart was that he had been offered the chance to paint Zamperini six months earlier, but that first opportunity had fizzled. "It was hugely disappointing to me when the first commission fell through," Swihart recalls, "as I had read Unbroken and already envisioned how I wanted to paint Louie dressed in his old WWII bomber jacket and officer's cap. Then out of the blue, fate gave me a second chance to paint him."

Jon SwihartSwihart's second commission came from Angelina Jolie's husband, actor Brad Pitt, who planned to present the finished painting to his wife as a present. It was meant as a gift of love and also a talismanic image of the hero at the center of Jolie's film. Pitt had seen and admired Swihart's portrait of artist Don Bachardy, and that had given him some idea of what Swihart was capable of.

As a result, Swihart was offered the opportunity to paint Zamperini as he saw fit: "Brad gave me complete artistic freedom," the artist notes. What Swihart hoped to do was create a single small painting that would transmit some of the qualities that Angelina Jolie's movie had dramatized in 137 minutes and that Hillebrand's book had taken over 500 pages to illuminate and distill. It was a challenge that Swihart took to heart: "I put everything I had into this," he states.

In late 2013 Swihart arranged to meet Zamperini, then 96, for a photo session. Zamperini's wartime bomber jacket -- which had been borrowed by Unbroken's costume designers -- was brought back to his home and Louis wore it for the sitting. "He was frail," Swihart comments, "and when he put on the jacket you could see that it had once fit the larger physique of a young man who had been an athlete just before he joined the service. It was the size he once was." With the help of Zamperini's daughter, Swihart took a group of reference photos, hoping to capture just the right mood and moment:

Cynthia mentioned when I first spoke to her that there was a certain look he occasionally got in his eyes, a masculine, transcendent but determined look that really personified Louie and no photographer had ever captured. Cynthia agreed to work closely with me to try to elicit that expression when I first met and photographed Louie. Conveying that look in Louie's eyes became essential.

After carefully scrutinizing the photos that he took that day Swihart selected a single photo that he captured just the right "look" in Zamperini's eyes. Working on her own, Cynthia Garris chose the same photo. "There was this openness in his face," says Garris, "and determination in his eyes." Jon Swihart says of Zamperini: "He reminded me of the evangelist Billy Graham, who I had painted years earlier. They both exuded a quiet, peaceful strength and charisma. I found out later they were friends."

As he prepared to paint Swihart decided that the portrait would resemble -- in both mood and technique -- a Flemish devotional icon of the early Renaissance. It would measure just twelve inches high by nine inches wide. "I like small, quiet work," Swihart philosophizes. "It draws you in and creates a world that holds you. You also have to be very quiet to connect with small work."

When the painting process began, Swihart experienced the panel as being perhaps even too small. "How am I going to enter this world?" he remembers asking himself. With time the image began to take shape, the panel magically began to appear a bit larger as Swihart spent countless hours becoming sensitized to its dimensions. As it developed the portrait that was appearing didn't seem quite right. After about two weeks of work Swihart woke up one morning and realized that he needed to start over. The second attempt went better, and Swihart was able to methodically conceive and modulate the important aspects of the portrait. Zamperini's face was resolved quickly --"I got it right off the bat," Swihart recalls -- and the piercing blue of his subject's eyes remained the brightest note of color in a composition that would remain muted and sober, emphasizing umber, tan and grey tones.

Captain Louis Zamperini (detail) Although Swihart works from photographic references, he takes considerable liberties with his images as they develop. In the case of the Zamperini portrait, there were things that the artist wanted to allude to in subtle ways. For example, the flight jacket was re-shaped to suggest a kind of Baroque dynamism: "His jacket folds became metaphors for the twists in his life," Swihart explains. "In the lower area the folds are active and writhing, but around Louie's face they open to release and frame his features."

Captain Louis Zamperini (detail) The teeth of the jacket's zipper, which glisten and move upwards in a sinuous curve, represented a special test of Swihart's patience, but he found that by building up his powers of concentration through weeks of painting he was able to manage them. "By that point I was so locked into the painting," he says, "I was thinking about it during every waking moment." The most difficult detail of the painting, surprisingly, turned out to be the bomber wings, which measure just over an inch across. "I ended up repainting them several times to suggest an upward movement and flittering effect," Swihart reports.

Captain Louis Zamperini (detail) Completely absorbed in his project it took Jon Swihart six weeks to complete the painting. "This is one of the most gratifying commissions I have ever had," says Jon Swihart. "The story of Louie's life is such a huge story, and I felt that I had to get it right. I was motivated by my desire to honor Louie."

For Swihart to declare the painting "finished" he had to feel that it went beyond the materials and process involved in its making:

I believe a good portrait is absolute magic and conveying someone's essence in paint is an intuitive blend of fidelity to reality and poetic license. I've been painting close to forty-five years and it still puzzles me that, what is essentially colored earth smeared on wood, can be permanently imbued with the ephemeral quality of someone's presence! A great portrait, even of someone unknown to the viewer, needs no explanation to be understood and appreciated, because it is a communication that transcends words.

Captain Louis Zamperini (detail) Swihart was able to show Louie Zamperini the completed painting before it was presented to Angelina Jolie. As Swihart explains, he was genuinely very pleased with his portrait and said, "It's very good, thank you!" Angelina Jolie, who received the portrait as a gift in December of 2013, was equally happy and deeply moved. She took the painting with her when she traveled to Australia to complete the filming of Unbroken, and now keeps the painting in her private office. "Angie treasures the painting," says Cynthia Garris. "It was a wonderful and very romantic gift."

Zamperini was given a framed photo of the portrait for his 97th birthday, and around that time he and Jon were able to visit. "He was a great storyteller," says Swihart. "It was an honor to visit and spend time with this man who had an amazing memory and ask him specific details about his extraordinary life. He was kind, giving, sharp and had a great sense of humor." During their final visit, Jon had an iPhone photo taken with Louie Zamperini, that later disappeared when his home computer crashed. "I wish I still had that photo," Swihart sighs, "but I will always have great memories of Louie Zamperini. He had a strong, quiet presence."

With his considerable patience -- and egoless skill -- Jon Swihart managed to immortalize that presence perfectly.

Links:  
www.jonswihart.com

Jon Swihart: Jean-Leon Gerome is his Master

Unbroken: The Film

A Brief Rant on the Exhaustion of the Avant-Garde, Zombie Formalism and What Contemporary Painting Needs to Move Forward

January 27, 2015, 4:01 pm

≫ Next: 'Interiors and Places': David Park, Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff at HACKETT | MILL

≪ Previous: Jon Swihart: A Portrait of Louis Zamperini (1917-2014)

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Pierre Auguste Renoir, Nude in the Sun, circa 1875-6, oil on canvas, 32"× 25.6"

"...Try to explain to Monsieur Renoir that a woman's torso is not a mass of decomposing flesh with those purplish-green stains." 

- Critic Albert Wolff, writing about Renoir's Nude in the Sun

Hard to believe, isn't it, but Renoir's Nude in the Sun was once considered threatening: when first exhibited it's Impressionist palette violated long-standing academic rules about the use of color in shadows. These days you won't find a museum director anywhere in the world who wouldn't covet the tiny, sun-dappled nude, and the once offensive image is emblazoned on a coffee mug that can be purchased on eBay for $13.99 with free shipping. Now that its original aura of challenge and disruption has dissipated, a work of art that was once cutting-edge has now entered another category: it is a certified and fully commoditized masterpiece. Nude in the Sun should be considered "formerly avant-garde" as the cultural shock that it once evoked was exhausted years, even generations, ago.


To fully understand the original antipathy critics felt towards Renoir and other French modernists -- Wolff, for example, felt that Manet was an improviser whose work was marred by searching, hesitation and pain -- it is important to recall that the sclerotic critic was defending the aesthetic ideals and traditions of the French Academy, an entrenched and formidable cultural institution.

Now, 140 years after Wolff derided it, Nude in the Sun resides in another kind of cultural institution, the Musée d'Orsay, and the tables are turned. Modern art and its children -- Postmodern and Contemporary Art -- are the "Academy" of our time, and the tradition of the avant-garde has been elevated and enshrined to the point that you might even say that it has been embalmed. The values of the avant-garde, including individualism, experimentation and progress, are now sacrosanct, and the boards of Modern and Contemporary art museums in the United States are populated by the nation's wealthiest, most culturally elite citizens. They serve the same conservative role that titled aristocrats played in the European academies of the past: they are guardians of the dominant culture.

 This creates real problems, as truly avant-garde works of art need the tension created by opposing cultural values and institutions to sustain their meanings and put them in relief. When too many people come to embrace avant-garde works and styles, their intended purposes and meanings wilt and die quickly. As a biologist will tell you, things grow best when subjected to the right stresses, and culture is the same way. Healthy values -- including social, political and cultural values -- need constant challenge and revision to remain fresh, and it strikes me that the spirit of the avant-garde in art is exhausted and complacent: Its "progressive" values have become de rigueur. If you see the words "pushes the boundaries of..." in an art review, you have encountered a critical blandishment that has become a cliché, ready to be retired.

Digital Collage by Photofunia.com
Modernism's ennoblement of progress -- a value it absorbed from the Industrial Revolution -- made new types of painting possible while demoting others. In the United States modernism's determined march forwards opened the door for Abstract Expressionism, America's most significant and genuinely avant-garde form of visual art. On the other hand, a continuing over-emphasis on the value of the "new" has strained and distorted many of painting's historical purposes and intentions. In too many instances the notion of "progress" has stripped meaningful content from painting only to replace it with novelty and gimmickry that poses as "new."

Realism, one of the related forms of painting that would have been acceptable to the members of European Academies, has been consistently relegated to the sidelines. As artist Eric Fischl noted in a 2009 interview, "There's always been realist painting. The avant-garde ignores 99 per cent of it."

Compared with realism, the broader field of representational painting has done a bit better in finding its place in the avant-garde: I'll be bold and say that only 98 percent of it gets ignored. Generally speaking, the representational art that makes its way into the mid and upper ranks of the contemporary art field has to be credentialed as avant-garde in some fashion. "Outsider" status can work, as can a reliance on subject matter that is "deconstructed" in relation to social, sexual and political issues. Self-conscious strangeness, obsessiveness, and irony can "credential" representation, and so can Warholian strategies involving mechanical and technological methods of image making. Conceptualism, which I think tends mixes with representation very lamely, can also get you in the front door of the avant-garde academy. Sadly, a connection to wealth and/or celebrity can work too.

For representational painters whose work does fall into one of the categories above there are pitfalls to be avoided. For example, painter Bo Bartlett believes that"To be earnest is the greatest taboo in contemporary art." Any representations of conventional beauty that don't have a dose of nihilism mixed in are excluded from the avant-garde as "kitsch," but self-conscious super-kitsch is a hot ticket.

If I haven't transcribed the current rules and perimeters of acceptable avant-garde representation perfectly, I apologize: they aren't written down in a handbook anywhere, but they definitely exist. I also doubt that the French Academy had a manual forbidding purplish-green shadows on human skin, but Albert Wolff knew the rules and limits of his era's academy regardless. When a cultural system has ossified and become fragile, knowing the rules is especially important, and both artists and critics need to pay close attention. In New York right now, the matrix of unspoken rules has resulted in a vogue of abstract and semi-abstract paintings by young artists that play it safe by saying very little, but sell well. Critic Walter Robinson, who first noted the "reductive, straightforward, essentialist..." urges present in this new school of painting, gave it a grim, clever name that has stuck: Zombie Formalism.

Peter Schjeldahl, the art critic for the New Yorker, has been looking over this new genre of offhandedly abstract painting, and in his recent review of The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, he observes that the young painters represented use "tactics" which "include emphases on gritty materiality and refusals of comforting representation." He also notes that the "joys" of the works on view come "freighted with rankling self-consciousness or, here and there, a nonchalance that verges on contempt." The "joy" he describes sounds very circumscribed indeed, especially for a show presented at MOMA, the original temple of America's avant-garde.

The "nonchalance" that Schjeldahl notes apparently exists in a void that critic Andrew Sullivan believes has been created in an art world "bubble" inflated by "flipping" and the transformation of avant-garde works of art into bankable financial instruments. In a year-end commentary titled Where Does 2014 Leave the Art World, critic Goldstein derides Zombie Formalism complaining that: "The intellectual content that allowed previous developments in painting--gestural abstraction, process-driven minimalism, et cetera--to break new artistic ground is voided, leaving a colorful corpse so devoid of ideas one could imagine it craving human brains." Is it just me, or does Sullivan's use of the phrase "colorful corpse" sound a bit like Wolff's complaints over Renoir's "mass of decomposing flesh with those purplish-green stains"?

 The situations that both critics describe -- even though their tone differs somewhat -- strike me as symptomatic of avant-garde exhaustion: Zombie Formalism is an ironic, self-conscious artistic response to a situation in which academic rules have choked off the oxygen painting needs to breathe. And yes, it is also a tiny over-commoditized avant-garde zone supported by speculators. Andrew Goldstein thinks the movement is short of "intellectual content" and "ideas," but I see it a bit differently.

If the situation I have outlined sounds distressing -- and in many ways it is -- it is also a moment when change seems imminent. There are many fantastic artists out there making significant work, ready to burst onto the scene when change blossoms. There have never been more institutions dedicated to contemporary art or more money available to be spent on it, and that is a good thing. The problem is that the definition of avant-garde needs to be revised to encompass and include art and artists that are brave enough the reach backwards and forwards at the same time. The avant-garde of the future needs to feed itself with hybridization, consolidation and assimilation.

I think that painting has to look back over its shoulder to realist and academic painting before the Salon des Refusés; in fact, it can and should go all the way back to Lascaux if it needs to. I see the history of painting as a very long line with no beginning and no end. Culture has certainly created moments and movements in painting -- most recently we have called them "isms" -- and living in a media age artists can have access to all of them, although not always on a first-hand basis. I like what the painter Jean Hélion said: "All the 'Isms' seem to me to be facets of a whole that should be painting."

There is a deep need for art that is authentic, engaged with the world and more about skill and knowledge than ego. Representation, which has been so restricted for the past decade, has vast untapped potential, and can be "progressive" in countless unexpected ways. As I commented in my review of The Figure: Painting Drawing and Sculpture, Contemporary Perspective, "contemporary representation is coming on strong," and I think that schools like the New York Academy, which equip students with a strong base of traditional skills, are equipping a generation of artists who will re-invigorate and re-define the avant-garde.

I would like to think that zombie formalism is the end-point of one kind of thinking about painting; as "isms" go, I predict it will be a blip. Peter Schjeldahl believes that "painting has lost symbolic force and function in a culture of promiscuous knowledge and glutting information," but I think he is wrong. As Renoir knew, when painting finds a way to resist rigid culturally imposed rules, it can persist, become relevant again and thrive.

'Interiors and Places': David Park, Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff at HACKETT | MILL

February 1, 2015, 6:32 pm

≫ Next: Dan McCleary: 'Every Day Sacred,' Paintings from 1993 to 2013 at the USC Fisher Museum of Art

≪ Previous: A Brief Rant on the Exhaustion of the Avant-Garde, Zombie Formalism and What Contemporary Painting Needs to Move Forward

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Helen Park Bigelow and Michael Hackett with David Park's The Bus
Interiors and Places, on view at Hackett | Mill in San Francisco through March 27th, brings together a selection of 13 paintings by the three founding members of the Bay Area Figurative Movement: David Park, Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff. Park is best represented, with nine paintings on view, along with two works each by Diebenkorn and Bischoff. Co-curated by Michael Hackett and Francis Mill, and made possible by the willingness of private collectors and one institution to lend rare works, Interiors and Places is an exceptionally beautiful show that makes a valuable point: Bay Area Figuration has its roots in scenes of familiar people, scenes and objects, rendered with genuine affection.

David Park, Woman with Coffeepot, 1958, oil on canvas, 39.5 x 53.25"Collection of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts; Director's Fund PurchaseThe exhibition offers a chance to see paintings that have rarely or never been seen in public, including David Park's 1958 Woman with Coffeepot, which is on loan from the collection of Michigan's Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. According to Francis Mill, it took about 10 years -- from conception to fruition -- to make the exhibition happen. Its opening night clearly brought a great deal of joy and satisfaction to many people, especially friends and family members of the three artists: so did the opportunity to stare at and closely inspect the works on hand.

Artists Kelly Detweiler and Jennifer Pochinski take in David Park's Surf Bathers
Seeing a David Park painting in person always offers a reminder of just how fresh and bold his use of paint was. Looking across the surface of his Bathers, with its fluid intermixing of brushwork and palette knife, provides viewers the chance to appreciate the balance between representation and abstraction that give his works their aesthetic tension and vibrancy.

David Park, Surf Bathers (1956) detailGazing at the works on view also offers the chance for fresh revelations about their themes and meanings. David Park's The Bus, a large oil from 1952 struck me as having an underlying theme of individualism. As a woman walks away from a bus she goes her own direction while the bus carries its group of riders on to the next stop. For Park, who a few years before had chosen figuration when every other ambitious modern artist was painting abstractly, the theme of being on one's own had a special resonance.

David Park, The Bus (c. 1952) detailThere are many other personal meanings suggested by the Park paintings on view. The three orbs of fruit in a black and green striped bowl in Park's deeply moving Table with Fruit have something to say about the sweetness of family life: there is one piece of fruit for each Park family member depicted: David, Lydia and Natalie. The red chair stands empty as a reminder of Helen, who had recently left home and married.

David Park, Interior with Fruit, 1951-52, 46 x 35.5", oil on canvas, private collectionDavid Park, Table with Fruit (1951-2) detail of the bowlDavid Park, Table with Fruit (1951-2) detail of the chairHung in the same room as Table with Fruit is another empty chair, Richard Diebenkorn's 1960 Black Chair, painted the year of Park's death. In the dialog between the two paintings, with their suggestions of presence and absence, is a message about the importance of family and friends. Interiors and Places is a show that pays tribute to the exchange of ideas and enduring friendship between three artists who were in turn supported by the love of their wives and families.

David Park paintings © Hackett | Mill, representative of the Estate of David Park

Interiors and Places
January 30, 2015 - March 27, 2015
Hackett | Mill 201 Post Street, Suite 1000
San Francisco, CA 94108
Tuesday - Friday, 10:30am-5:30pm; & by appointment.

Upcoming Lecture:
Hackett | Mill will host a lecture with Nancy Boas, author of David Park, A Painter's Life, on February 19, 2015.

Dan McCleary: 'Every Day Sacred,' Paintings from 1993 to 2013 at the USC Fisher Museum of Art

February 9, 2015, 8:22 pm

≫ Next: Wesley Kimler: 'I Never See Beauty'

≪ Previous: 'Interiors and Places': David Park, Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff at HACKETT | MILL

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Dan McCleary: Photo by Wayne Shimabukuro
Painter Dan McCleary, who in 2010 founded Art Division, which serves young adult art students in the Rampart District of Los Angeles, has a deep feeling for human dignity. For more than 30 years McCleary has been painting models chosen from his friends and acquaintances, portraying them with equal doses of solemnity and candor. A carefully chosen selection of his works, now on view at the USC Fisher Museum of Art gives some indication of McCleary's accomplishments. Christopher Knight of the Los Angeles Times says that McCleary "...is among the finest figurative painters working today."

I recently asked Dan about his style, his working methods and his influences.

John Seed Interviews Dan McCleary

JS: How did you choose the paintings on view at USC from twenty years worth of work?

DM: There was only space in the galleries for 16 paintings. I worked closely with the curator, Ariadni Liokatis on selecting which works to show. She did an excellent job editing the paintings down to the 16 on display.

The Channel Surfer, oil on canvas, 40 1/2 x 56 inches
JS: Tell me about the style and approach that characterizes your recent paintings.

DM: In 1992 I had a job at the International School of Painting, Drawing and Sculpture in Umbria, Italy. Wayne Thiebaud was on the faculty. Up until that point I was using a lot of earth colors. He introduced me to an Impressionist palette that employs pure color. It changed the way I worked.

It was also the first time I saw in person the work of Giotto, Massaccio, Piero della Francesca and other Italian painters. That exposure had a huge effect on this body of work.

I also became less reliant on working from photography and started working directly from life. I will have the model come and pose for drawings and sometimes a photograph. The models return many times and pose in sets I build in the studio.

Security, 2007, oil on canvas, 40 1/2 x 46 1/2 inches
JS: Once you set up a scenario, how long does it take to complete a painting?

DM: It can take up to nine months to finish a painting. I usually work on four or five painting simultaneously. I work two to three hours a day with the model and continue to work on the paintings alone. There are usually two or three models posing throughout the week.

The Blue Guide II, 1998, oil on canvas, 55 x 45 inches
JS: Since you now have a studio next door to Art Division, where you teach, do you let students observe your process?

DM: For about 3 years a student Emmanuel Galvez had a studio in my studio. I think it was helpful to him to see how a painting is put together from beginning to end. He is doing really well and is getting ready for his second exhibit at Craig Krull Gallery.

I am preparing for an exhibit at Vita Art Center in Ventura that will feature portraits of the students. Other students will work alongside me.

Woman Painting Her Nails, 2004, oil on canvas, 46 1/2 x 40 1/2 inches
JS: Tell me about your painting Woman Painting Her Nails.

DM: That was one of a pair of paintings I did using a bathroom as their setting: the other is Man Weighing Himself. In many of my paintings women are doing rather androgynous activities, for example working in restaurants and I decided that I wanted to try making a really feminine painting. I talked a number of women friends as to how they did their nails. I tried to recreate that act as closely as possible. The finished painting is seen from a child's point of view, as if they are watching their sister or mother getting ready for the day or evening.

Man Weighing Himself, 2004, oil on canvas, 45 x 36 1/2 inches
JS: Even though you are depicted something private you seem very interested in giving your model dignity.

DM: I want to keep a prudent distance from the model. The people I paint are always people I have respect for. I have to have some sort of connection to them.

JS: What kind of working attitude do you bring to the studio?

DM: For me, painting is just working. It requires a lot of time alone which I enjoy.

Seven-Eleven, 1996, oil on canvas, 36 x 52 inches
JS: Even though you work from live models, you have mentioned that memory plays a role in your work too.

DM: I relied heavily on memory when I did the Seven-Eleven painting. When I went back to the actual Seven-Eleven store it looked nothing the set I put together in the studio The two bathroom paintings are based on my memory of the bathroom we had when I was a child, In actuality it may have looked nothing like the one in the painting. I do remember the color -- that sort of aqua -- but I'm not sure if that color was actually there.

Alex, Robert and Sami, 2009, oil on canvas, 59 x 45 inches
JS: Who are some of the artists you have been looking at recently?

DM: I continue to look at Vermeer and Manet. I'm also interested Euan Uglow: I'm really curious about the way he works.

The Manicure, 2013, oil on canvas, 56 1/2 x 51 inches
JS: You have been a representational painter in the era of Postmodernism: how has your career progressed in that context?

DM: I never felt like I was an "outsider" making figurative art. In the Bay Area where I lived for 6 years in the 70's and got started there is a great tradition of figurative art. I discovered David Hockney's work in the early 70's and it had a huge impact on my work I also liked the paintings of Eric Fischl and Alfred Leslie. I never felt I was an odd man out. John Sonsini and I talk to almost daily and I also keep in close contact with John Nava. I was also very close with Mark Stock, who recently passed away. I have always felt like I had a community of like-minded artists.

The Manicure (detail)
JS: How has being at Art Division changed you and your work?

DM: It's a big change opening the school. I am no longer in a cloistered world: my studio is right next door to the library and there is a constant flow of people in and out of my world and my studio. I have very little privacy but it's a pleasurable trade off. Life at 62 is very different from life at 32 or 42. I feel more in charge of things. I try to work 6 days a week and take Sunday off.

Dan McCleary: Photo by Wayne Shimabukuro
Artist's Talk:

Dan McCleary will be speaking on Saturday, February 14th at 1 PM
USC Fisher Museum of Art
823 Exposition Blvd. Los Angeles, 90089

Wesley Kimler: 'I Never See Beauty'

February 28, 2015, 8:36 am

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≪ Previous: Dan McCleary: 'Every Day Sacred,' Paintings from 1993 to 2013 at the USC Fisher Museum of Art

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I never see beauty. It is foreign to me and if even I could glimpse it, it would only be in recognition of a struggle gone cold, soon to be discarded as I move on. No satisfaction taken: a corpse kicked to the curb. It's about not knowing how to live, thats what painting is, what is performance, and coming with it, a whole lot of heartbreak.

-- Wesley Kimler

Wesley Kimler's Chicago studio
Wesley Kimler, one of the last tough-guy painters, likes his studio chaotic. It's a kind of parallel universe, which suits Kimler fine, since he acknowledges that he has "an inability to live in the real world." Painting furiously, with some of his six exotic birds screeching as he works, Kimler is prone to 48 hours binges and also to re-working "finished" works. Kimler's most recent paintings have themes of war and he sees the creative process as a form of destruction. Still, he is clear about why he does what he does: "I make beautiful things for other people."

I recently interviewed Wesley Kimler and asked him to tell me a few stories, and share some of his opinions about art and artists.

Wesley Kimler: Photo by Amina Dollah Kimler
John Seed Interviews Wesley Kimler

JS: So, tell me about this tough childhood of yours...

WK: I left home at 14: I was on the run. I was looking to get out of a bad situation at home and I just had to get away from where I was. As far as what I was looking for, I suppose I lacked intent -- it was kind of like being shot from gun -- I had run away so many times that when I finally got caught and went in front of a judge he said: "Either you get into some kind of military boarding school or we are going to put you in one of our schools."

 My hero at the time was the character Paul Newman played in Cool Hand Luke, so I said "Yes sir, judge!" went home, found 22 dollars, got on a Greyhound bus and never went back. I grew up in the south of Market area of San Francisco, which at the time was a sizable area of downtown. It was a derelict district full of large dilapidated SRO hotels. I lived in them all at one point or another. I was a street kid.

Wesley Kimler: Photo by Amina Dollah Kimler
JS: How did you get through all this?

WK: One of the things that saved me and taught me how to survive is that I ended up being arrested with a small amount of pot, and even though I was underage I lied my way through two months of incarceration in San Francisco city and the county jail. My alias was "John Russell," from another Paul Newman film:

Hombre.Hey Hoooombre: you have put a hole in me!

I had to grow up pretty suddenly to survive that: afterwards the streets were a piece of cake. I was the prince of my domain, which consisted of all of south of Market between Third and Sixth Street. I remember stepping over the drunken winos, and being used to everything smelling of stale booze and vomit from one dusty hotel room to another as I could scrounge up the means. Of course, I was secure in knowing if I couldn't find some money on any given day, there was always Saint Anthony's Kitchen over in The Tenderloin district for stale donuts and watery beans.

Untitled
JS: So this all left you toughened up, and ready to move to Afghanistan, right?

WK: Well... yes! By the time I was 20 years old I was living in Afghanistan keeping apartments there in Kabul, Herat and Kandahar: I was working for an importer. I gotta say, it did get pretty out of control wild at times. Afghanistan back then was like an eleventh century version of the Wild West. Living there was my real education -- my university you might say -- and graduating meant you didn't get yourself killed. I was still 20 (maybe 21) years old when I had to take a gun away from a man and kidnap him. I dragged his ass across Afghanistan and held him for ransom until he and his family coughed up the money they had stolen from the man I worked for. Just that one story is a would make a nice feature article someday for the Huffington Post...

The whole episode culminated on the dusty streets of Herat, Afghanistan, with me taking on this guy and his family and then the both of us being carted off to the Herat prison -- where fortunately the Turkish sergeant liked how kind of tough and hell or high-water I was -- and took up my cause. Abdul Awaz went to jail and I went free: a good thing as at that point they still had balls and chains for the prisoners.

Afghan Kite
JS: Wesley, I'm betting that a single article would barely scratch the surface. Give me one more good story and then we'll talk about art.

WK: I have always carried with me the images of my last afternoon in Afghanistan, as they reverberate and resonate through my life to this day. I was leaving with mixed emotions: I so loved the place and I had been there a long time. Anyways, I was traveling in the back of a lorry with 20-25 Pathans (Afghans) going through the gun turreted no-man's land lunar landscape of the Khyber Pass. It's a tribal area and you can only travel through there during the day.

Well, there was one Americanized lost soul of an Afghan who had been to a university here and of course he decided to adopt me as his ally/fellow sophisticate, in this truckload of illiterates. On and on he went about his backwards fellow countrymen: he was of course dressed in a suit, so proud of his university education. He didn't seem to get that I was dressed like everyone else in the truck that perhaps my sympathies were not 100% with him.

Anyways, we pulled up at the edge of a muddy gulch where a chai shop had been dug back into a cliff and I sat there and watched this man, child in his arms, black turban double rows of bullets crossing his chest, rifles slung on his back and then turned to his father -- his reverse image wearing a white turban -- and we spoke. I told them both how much I loved their country and how I had learned so much how much I didn't want to leave. Anyways, the old man got up, motioned to me C'mon and the three of us went in the back where there was a large hookah sitting there. The black turbanned dude put some hashish in the pipe and his father admonished him:

Don't be so cheap! Put a bigger chunk!

Next, a hot coal was placed over the now larger chunk of hashish and we commenced smoking. It was strong, very strong, and I started coughing. At which point the Americanized Afghan burst into the room yelling: '

Mister, mister! don't do that ! It will make you crazy! 

In response, the old man pointed to the door and replied:

"Burro baha'i! (Go by god!) This young man is more of an Afghan than you will ever be."

That remains, to this day the greatest compliment, I've ever received. It was the moment when I first considered the inherent dichotomy of the self-realized individual as opposed to the university driven generic.

Works on paper in progress
JS: As a university driven generic I need to think about that Wesley, but you tell a great story. Now tell me what happened next when you got back to the states.

WK: I started painting upon my returning from Afghanistan. I moved to Austin Texas where my formal studies began at Laguna Gloria School of Art. I painted with the little old ladies who were busy painting grandson Johnny or a niece and nephew's portrait. The little old ladies were for the most part badasses. I painted portraits, seascapes and still lifes. And yes, even then the comments were always along the lines of: "There is something different about your work Wesley. You are going to go do something larger than this place."

Funny enough when I went to a regular art school (MCAD) everyone was like WHERE did you learn to paint like that? With the little old ladies is where...

Untitled (Seascape)
JS: How did you get your nickname: The Shark?

WK: You bring up my old alter ego 'The Shark,' which I employed while being the leader/mascot /driving force behind Shark Forum blogsite here in Chicago. Shark Forum served multiple purposes: first it was a weapon I used to attack institutional hackademic art world apparatchiks that run rough roughshod over the Chicago scene emanating from the art education system. Primarily at this point in time, SAIC. The Shark, swam in a cesspool of institutionalized corruption pushing academic conformity/ mediocrity.

War, Kite Flyers: for Shannon, 2015, 9 x18 feet, alkyd resin on canvas
JS: So you have some pretty stinging things to say about the Chicago art scene...

WK: Of course Chicago can surely be seen as metaphor for the toweringly stupid art world of the moment. Its such a sea of shit awash in massive piles of stupid money: where to begin taking on this dystopia?

Wesley Kimler: Photo by Amina Dollah Kimler
JS: What about New York?

WK: Look at The Forever Now exhibition now on view at MOMA in New York: not a good painter in sight. Much has been written about how bad it is. As Christian Viveros-Faune noted, it should be called Forever Sucks. But then, everyone is using the pejorative term Walter Robinson coined -- Zombie Formalism -- which is great. In NYC we are looking at massive decline and a whole power structure in place: holding the reins, clinging to power. As far as critics go, I like Jerry Saltz quite a lot. He is a good man and in ways the equivalent H.L. Mencken of today's art world. That doesn't mean he knows anything about painting. I am convinced actually, that he wouldn't know a good painting if it came up and bit him on the ass. The problem is that he's not alone!

Operation: Foragers (Admiral Raymond Spruance), 201512 x9 feet, alkyd resin on canvas
JS: Who are your artist heroes?

WK: As a kid I would wander through the old Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and scratch my head at those strange David Park paintings. Even after a few years of art school I was far more interested in the Bay Area Funk scene -- Roy De Forrest with his psychedelic dogs -- and then I changed and started seeing the way I see even now. I love early Joan Brown and her work became very important to me: also Diebenkorn, early Paul Wonner and Frank Lobdell.

But first and foremost is David Park.

I like a wide range of painting going back in history: what serious painter doesn't? Titian was good... I think we can ixnay the lower strata of Impressionism and revisit Gerome and Messionier: some revisionism might be in order there. Malcolm Morley I have always liked the whole London school: particularly Kossoff. My friend Don Suggs is a brilliant painter as is another pal Ashley Bickerton. Mark Dutcher and I have become fast friends: he is a wonderful painter who is just now unfolding. Ed Moses is a dear friend and hero of mine for sure both as a painter and as a man. And of course Joan Mitchell and de Kooning are important to me, but so is Lee Bontecou.

The Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard is doing interesting work.

The drawing wall in Wesley Kimler's studio
JS: What would you say is the situation of painting right now?

WK: There are all kinds of art and all kinds of painting. No matter your preference, there are good versions and bad versions. The trouble is that in this age of visual illiteracy, the people in power are clueless as to the difference.

Susan Beallor Snyder: Stories in Rope

March 25, 2015, 6:39 pm

≫ Next: Temporary Space LA: An Alternative Exhibition Platform

≪ Previous: Wesley Kimler: 'I Never See Beauty'

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Susan Beallor Snyder -- whose work is now on view in the group exhibition "GATHERED" at The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia -- makes ambitious and compelling Manila rope reliefs that represent the culmination of a lifetime of creative impulses. First, as a photographer, then as a goldsmith, Beallor Snyder channeled her creativity into traditional media, but her discovery of the work of Magdalena Abakanowicz provided an "aha" moment that led to her adoption of an unexpected material with spectacular expressive results. Tapping into themes of personal growth and pain, Beallor Snyder has created a body of work that is physically imposing but also deeply lyrical. Having hit her stride as an artist, Susan Beallor Snyder has created a highly individual and remarkably powerful body of work: she stands poised to take her art into new expressive territory.

I recently interviewed Susan and asked her about her personal history and her art.

John Seed Interviews Susan Beallor Snyder

Susan Beallor Snyder: Photo by Jeff Roffman
JS: How and when did you begin making art?

SBS: I was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and began shooting black and white photos while I was a student at the High School of Art and Design in New York. I followed the work of Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Margaret Bourke-White and others, but my favorite photographer at that time and my biggest inspiration was Edward Steichen. I loved how he captured the quality of light in his photographs. In the late '70s I worked as a waitress at Sardi's restaurant and would carry my camera everywhere. I developed my work at night in a closet studio I had set up in my apartment on West End Avenue and 80th Street.

In 1982 I got a job working at ABC News Closeup as assistant to the executive producer, Pamela Hill. It was during my time there that I reconnected with a friend I had met near our summer home in upstate New York. We fell in love and his career took us to Los Angeles, California, in 1987, and we were married a year later in Greenwich, Connecticut. I missed the streets of New York and lost my inspiration to shoot, and I began to study Ansel Adams' Zone method. I set up a darkroom in our house in Woodland Hills. During this time, I worked for the producer Joel Silver; Dawn Steel, who ran Columbia Pictures; and Coline Serreau, a director and writer.

I gave up film production in 1990 to start a family, and it was at that time that I put aside photography because of the harsh chemicals and to focus on my first child, Sara.

JS: How did you become interested in health and diet?

SBS: In 1985 my father was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, and my parents decided to follow a macrobiotic diet and lifestyle instead of following the conventional medical path. In order to be supportive of my father's healing, I started to read about their new diet and was so inspired that I completely changed my eating habits. It was about that time that I was starting to have my own health crisis. After Sara was born, I decided to start my own business making gourmet macrobiotic meals in my home and coaching others who wanted to transform their diets to a healthier way of eating.

After living in California for some time we eventually moved to Atlanta, where I continued helping others with healthy food and coaching, and had our second daughter, Madison, in 1995. All the while my health was in decline. I had terrible chronic fatigue and did what I could to keep up with our busy lifestyles as my husband's career progressed.

Crossroads
JS: When did you restart your art career?

SBS: It was 1999, and we were living in Maryland and moving to New York for a job opportunity for my husband. I had decided that I missed my life as an artist and ordered a 92nd Street Y catalogue to look for art classes. I had studied art there as a child and knew they were well known for their high quality teachers and classes. I don't paint or draw but I wanted to do something with my hands that was more tactile than photography. I wanted to learn something new. They didn't have woodworking or metalworking classes, but they offered a wide variety of jewelry classes.

I didn't wear much jewelry, but I thought I would learn to solder and make table sculptures. I was thrilled to be moving back to New York and to have an opportunity to make art again. I began with the most basic jewelry class, called Absolute Beginners. I was hooked. I took one class after another until I discovered high karat gold and classical goldsmithing. I continued my education at the Jewelry Arts Institute, where they specialize in the ancient methods of classical goldsmithing. I began selling my jewelry through gallery stores around the United States.

Then we moved again, first to Westport, Connecticut, and then back to Atlanta.

Going In Circles
JS: It sounds like all of the moves made it hard for you to keep up your creativity.

SBS: It was difficult, and the moves were disruptive and took a lot of my energy. My oldest got involved in theater, and I began doing some photography again in connection with that. I was making some jewelry too, but then the price of gold went through the roof. Still, I needed an outlet and was feeling the urge to make and exhibit something. Nobody wanted to exhibit jewelry, so I thought about exhibiting my photography. A photographer friend and mentor, Jerry Siegel, kept encouraging me to shoot outside of theater to build a body of work, but as a New York street photographer I wasn't inspired by the streets of Atlanta. One day I realized that I had a body of work in the form of the 20-year-old negatives in my garage.

A curator friend, Hope Cohn, put some of my photos in a show, and that was the beginning of a new stage for me.

JS: How did you become involved with making rope pieces?

SBS: After the show and exhibiting my old photographs, I decided I wanted to work larger and became interested in sculpture. I took a few classes at SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design) for professional development, and a professor there introduced me to the work of artist Magdalena Abakanowicz. I was inspired by an article in the New York Times that talked about her Abakans series that she began in her small one room apartment in Warsaw in the late '50s. She used fiber because she could fold them up and put them under her bed. I was drawn to the large scale as well as her ability to express emotion; the fiber was rough and stiff and she was able to make a statement about the world around her.

Inner Struggle
JS: What are some of the themes and ideas that your works express?

SBS: The first piece I did with manila rope is called Inner Struggle. This piece represents my desire to express the frustrations I felt in my corporate wife and mother role. By this time, 2011, I had spent years raising the kids, moving for my husband's work, and playing the role of corporate wife--all things I chose and wanted to do, but I felt that I was losing myself as an artist, woman and individual. I wanted to find more time for me. I wanted to create artwork that would represent those emotions. I felt that the natural manila rope that I had discovered and used for this first piece was the perfect material. It was rough and held together yet was also pliable and possible to manipulate. The forms I create with rope are able to express pain and angst while also presenting themselves as beautiful, flowing forms.

My second rope piece was Expectations. It includes patina copper "eyes" that say something about all the people in my life watching and judging and about the obligations and expectations I felt. I have come to realize that in some way these expectations were self-imposed. I could easily have created a life for myself where my art would be the top priority, but I chose to give that up in order to be married to my husband and be involved in my children's lives. This rope sculpture expresses my personal feelings, but is also meant to connect with others who have felt similar struggles between the needs of others and their own expressive needs.

Expectations
JS: Tell me about your working methods.

SBS: This work is physically challenging. The rope gets into my fingers, and the pain of creating these pieces is similar to the pain and emotion that many of them represent. I create them on the floor and loom over them on a tall ladder as they develop. There is a lot of repetitive motion, and that is where my thoughts can wander and the work becomes an extension of my mind and emotions. The work speaks to me. It is intuitive and spontaneous. I sometimes feel like Jackson Pollock with rope. The work evolves as I create. There are no sketched studies before I begin. I usually have a shape and size in mind and then I begin. There have been times when I have worked for days only to realize that the piece is not working and I have to pull it all apart and begin again. I look at them from above to get a sense of the whole piece, but it isn't until they are hung that they really show themselves.

JS: What have you learned about yourself and your creative drive by making these rope pieces?

SBS: In making my first works in this medium, I often found myself angry and frustrated, and those titles reflected that. However, one day I noticed I was feeling peaceful and happy, and the title Women's Work came to me. It wasn't all about me. It was about all the women of the world who are the caretakers of the world. Women have been using fibers since ancient times, and I realized that my work was not only about me but that everyone--man, woman, and child--could relate to my work as I titled it and find their own story in any of the pieces I create.

GATHERED: Georgia Artists Selecting Georgia Artists
The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia
Exhibition dates: February 28 - April 11, 2015
75 Bennett Street, Suite A2 Atlanta, GA 30309

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Temporary Space LA: An Alternative Exhibition Platform

March 25, 2015, 6:42 pm

≫ Next: Chris Liberti: 'California, etc.' at John Natsoulas Gallery

≪ Previous: Susan Beallor Snyder: Stories in Rope

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Richard Shelton: Photo by John Seed
Temporary Space LA, which opens its first physical location on Saturday, March 21 at 5522 Wilshire Blvd, is meant as an alternative to the traditional gallery model. Dreamed up by artists Richard Shelton and Stacie Meyer, it was conceived to help artists have more control of the sale and display of their art. Designed to serve "mid-career" artists who have been working for at least 20 years, Temporary Space will present both physical and digital exhibitions of their artwork. It will also connect artists and art buyers directly without a "dealer" serving as an intermediary.

Temporary Space LA
Artists themselves will decide which artworks will be on view in the gallery's physical space where technologically based tools, including digital archives and spoken commentaries by art historians and others, will enhance the understanding of each artist's work and career. It's an ideal situation for artist/curators who want to take control of the presentation of their own work, and who want to have a complete digital archive of their work assembled. One of the ideas behind the project is that mid and late career artists have been under-appreciated -- both critically and economically -- and Temporary Space hopes to rectify this by making years worth of work visible and available.

A Temporary Space billboard on view in Los Angeles
Sales of artwork will be worked out between each artist and their collectors. There will also be opportunities for buyers to purchase digitally on the Temporary Space website, or interact directly with the artists at their studio. The space's commission rate is fixed at 25 percent, less than the typical 40-50 percent rate charged by traditional galleries.

"What we are doing here," says Richard Shelton, whose own work will be on view in the space's first exhibition, "is bringing the art gallery experience into the 21st century." After Shelton's two-part show, exhibitions of works by Margaret Neilsen and Scott Greiger will follow before Temporary Space moves to a new downtown location at the end of 2015. Temporary Space is an ambitious project that is intended to move, morph and evolve over time. With its commitment to technological innovation and mission to present art and artists in a more complete, direct fashion, Temporary Space will be an experiment very much worth watching.

TEMPORARY SPACE LA
5522 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, 90036
 Opening: Saturday, March 21, 2015, 6 - 10 PM
To RSVP or for more information: (323) 297-8464

Richard Shelton: 50 Years of Painting
Curated by Fatemeh Burnes
Part One: March 21 - May 2, 2015

Links: An interview with Richard Shelton, Stacie Meyer, and Melissa Urcan

Chris Liberti: 'California, etc.' at John Natsoulas Gallery

March 25, 2015, 6:44 pm

≫ Next: Sandra Mendelsohn Rubin: 'A Common Thread' at L.A. Louver Gallery

≪ Previous: Temporary Space LA: An Alternative Exhibition Platform

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The subject matter in Chris Liberti's recent paintings comes from his interest in the way the forms around him can be re-configured and made to work together. Whether Liberti is painting rooflines, bookshelves, palm trees or telephone poles, he sees them not as isolated elements, but as part of a larger scheme.

I recently interviewed Liberti in connection with the show of his work on view at the John Natsoulas Gallery in Davis, California.

John Seed Interviews Chris Liberti:

Chris Liberti
JS: Tell me about your art education: who was your most important mentor?

CL: Jim Phelan was a big influence. When I studied with him at Buffalo State College in 1995-6 he introduced me to the work of Richard Diebenkorn and Frank Auerbach, who both became very important to me. Jim is a "painter's painter" who let me do my own thing. His goal was to get each of his students on the path they wanted to be on. He never painted in front of us or showed his own work: that was important. He didn't want us to be too distracted by what he was doing.

148 Across, 2015, 30 x 24 inches, Oil on canvas
JS: How would you describe your approach to painting and imagery?

CL: It's kind of been a struggle between abstract and representational. I don't want to lock myself in to being one or the other. I think of abstract as free: there is more looking involved, more than looking at what was being painted. Also, I like working with the negative space around an object more than working with the thing itself.

Garages, 2015, 30 x 48 inches, Oil on canvas, Oil on canvas
JS: You have mentioned to me that both Diebenkorn and Van Gogh continue to influence you. What do you admire in each man's work? I admire their uninhibited use of color, the immediacy of their paintings and also gestural and painterly qualities. Both Diebenkorn and Van Gogh had the ability to take everyday scenes and subject matter and turn them into something compelling. You can see and feel their passion for their work and each used line very powerfully

Lemon Tree, 2015, 16 x 20 inches, Oil on canvas
JS: Your paintings look as if they have been worked and re-worked many times: is that true?

CL: I have a problem on deciding when things are finished. I constantly work over things and am never truly happy. For example, the painting 148 Across was started in 2008, and then I worked on it again recently.

Canal Wall, 2014, 12 x 16 inches, Oil on canvas
JS: What do you enjoy most about painting?

CL: Physicality: that's what I enjoy the most.

Dock, 2015, 18 x 14 inches, Oil on canvas
JS: How do you know when a painting is finished?

CL: If I can get into a piece and get into that zone, someone else will feel that same way. I'm not looking for a specific feeling. I hope others can as well.

Chris Liberti: California etc. 
March 11 - April 11, 2015
John Natsoulas Gallery
521 First Street Davis, CA 95616

Sandra Mendelsohn Rubin: 'A Common Thread' at L.A. Louver Gallery

March 25, 2015, 6:46 pm

≫ Next: Nathan Lewis at Fernando Luis Alvarez Gallery

≪ Previous: Chris Liberti: 'California, etc.' at John Natsoulas Gallery

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Installation View of Sandra Mendelsohn Rubin: A Common Thread
In the upstairs gallery of L.A. Louver Gallery, painter Sandra Mendelsohn Rubin is showing a suite of works that depict views of Mendocino County. Connected by the theme of water -- which appears in a swimming pool, river views, a pond and a lake -- Rubin's paintings also form an extended painted essay on patience and preciousness. I saw the show after a morning spent driving through dense LA traffic, and the expanse of white walls between Rubin's paintings, interspersed with Rubin's faultless and serene canvases, provided a tonic for my senses.

Bridge Over the Navarro, 2013, oil on polyester, 6 1/2 x 7 1/4 in.
Several of the exhibition's aerial views are very small: for example, Bridge Over the Navarro is just over seven inches across. As a result, I was drawn near as I inspected the painting, only to find that at close range it suddenly felt expansive. Rubin's brushwork is uncannily perfect, and the detail of a roadside stop sign represented by a pinprick of red paint -- look for it to the right of the bridge -- made its verdant green surroundings suddenly seem vast. The two thin, straight lines defining the edge of the bridge add a note of manmade geometry that provides a counterpoint to the blue river's serenity and meandering natural presence.
Aqueduct at Quail Lake, 2014, oil on polyester, 9 x 54 in.
After looking over some of Rubin's smaller paintings, her Aqueduct at Quail Lake, which is five and a half feet wide by nine inches tall, felt like a mural. It is a magnificent painting -- one of Rubin's very best -- that is remarkably spare and disciplined. The prevalent greens of Rubin's aerial works falls away as this work presents a study of rippling water wedged between dry, rocky triangles of tan and grey earth. I took a long time looking at this painting, knowing that soon I would be back in my car fighting the rush hour traffic again. I wanted to be in the place of the lone figure fishing the aqueduct's rippling waters, soothed by a view of cool blue water and waiting for a fish to bite.

Detail of Aqueduct at Quail Lake

SANDRA MENDELSOHN RUBIN: A COMMON THREAD
Through Saturday, March 28, 2015
L.A. LOUVER45 N Venice Blvd Venice, CA 90291
Tuesday - Saturday, 10 am - 6 pm

Nathan Lewis at Fernando Luis Alvarez Gallery

April 7, 2015, 12:51 pm

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Nathan Lewis, whose work is now on view in a solo exhibition in Stamford, Connecticut, is a painter with a strong feeling for the cycles of history, but no desire to reach back towards a "Golden Age." Lewis finds more than enough subjects in the world that surrounds him right now and he paints abandoned factory sites with the same vigor and pathos that Piranesi brought to this views of ruined Greco-Roman temples.

In the view of his dealer, Fernando Luis Alvarez, Lewis is endowed with an intense sense of intellectual curiosity that "prevents his work from becoming stale." Alvarez sees Lewis as an artist whose work "vibrates with electricity and is masterfully painted; soaked in multitudes of historical, literary, philosophical and cultural references..."

I recently interviewed Nathan Lewis to ask him more about his background and the ideas behind his recent work.

Nathan Lewis JS: Tell me about your early life. Were you always creative and artistic?  

NL: I certainly liked to draw, but I didn't think of myself as creative until I started acting on it enough to realize that perhaps I was creative. I came out of the skating/bmx culture of the late 1980's. I had created a 'zine about bmx and youth culture in Northern California. The 'zine led me to photography, and photography led me towards art. At about 20 years old, I had taken a few art classes, and the idea that art was a potential way to make sense of the world absorbed me. I got very serious about it, and it grounded me in a way nothing else was able to.

Division Collapse, Oil on canvas, 24" x 36", 2014 JS: Nathan you have studied painting both in the US and in Europe. Tell me a bit about your studies and how they shaped you and your art.  

NL: My relationship with academia was a tenuous one. I was in and out of school a lot and took eleven years to get an undergraduate degree. I went to Sacramento City College for about 8 years on and off, just taking classes that interested me. I moved to St. Petersburg, Russia for six months in 1993. I had no formal training there, but I lived about three blocks from the Hermitage, and would draw regularly from the Rembrandt and Rubens paintings. I spent more time in that museum than I had in any classroom and I really started to detect the eccentricities of different artists' work. I didn't know who Ribera was before I was in St. Petersburg, but I was so excited by the paintings of his, I thought I had discovered a great unknown artist. Of course as I went to more and more museums, I would come to realize that they also had work by Ribera.

The paintings in the Hermitage held a secret and spoke a language that I felt connected to but did not understand fully. The time in front of those works was the beginning of a lifelong pursuit of looking at paintings in museums and galleries, learning and deciphering the language. At the tail end of my time in Russia, I went to Krakow, in Poland to see Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine, and hitchhiked to Germany, to visit the Alte Pinakothek in Munich and the Gemaldegalerie in Berlin.

The time in museums, the books I was reading, the music I listened to all shaped my work. I consider these integral parts of my education, much of which happened outside of school. in 1995, I studied in Italy at the Florence Academy of Art for a semester. It wasn't a great fit for me, but being in Italy was a dream. I skipped school a lot and would go to the churches and the drawing-room of the Uffizi to be with the works that spoke to me.

When I moved back to the states, I painted a lot, but over time felt I still needed some form of instruction. I went to Lyme Academy College in CT, which had a component of academic instruction, but a larger faculty with broader scope than the FAA and a great art historian, Joy Pepe, whom I married ten years later. I got my BFA there, took a year off, and then went to SMFA, Boston and Tufts University, receiving my MFA in 2004.

SMFA was very different from the other schools I attended, and it was a welcomed change to be thrown in with artists working in the full gamut of media explored today. As far as the people in formal schooling that had the greatest influence on my work, Fred Dalkey at SCC and Joy Pepe at LACFA. In Fred, I saw that it was possible to be connected intimately to this vast history of art, even in work that is contemporary in nature. Through Joy I came to realize that art was much bigger than its maker. She challenged me intellectually and gave me insight into the complexity of how art can be interpreted, and how it has functioned in culture. This excited me to think that we, as artists, are playing with images and juxtapositions of which we may not gather the full meaning. It gave me a larger sense of what art could be.

Orange Was the Sky, Oil on canvas, 72" x 66", 2010 JS: What did your art look like a decade ago?  

NL: My work in 2005 was a bit more graphic (visually). I was using more appropriated imagery and experimenting heavily with masking and varied methods of applying paint- pouring, staining, spraying, swiping. It was a little more like printmaking. My work fluctuates between naturalism and a constructed, designed, collage influenced presentation. I have also done some installations and am currently starting some large format woodcuts. Painting is my primary practice, but there are occasional offshoots.

Octaves, Oil on canvas, 24" x 24", 2014 JS: How and when did you begin painting abandoned factories?  

NL: I've always loved exploring abandoned spaces. 2011 is when I first decided to paint them. I've always been more of a figure painter and object (form) oriented. The factories were a departure from that mode of thinking and more related to settings. Although figures are in most of the paintings, the architecture and composition play a larger role in the psychology of the piece. Some of these spaces that are collapsing provided an experience of light that was uncommon and made me contemplate anew the strangeness and beauty of light. I think that is what prompted me to the series of works. The unfamiliar forms provided the challenge of inventing new personal translations of what I saw and felt into the formal language of painting. The factories themselves are ruins of an industriousness that is foreign to us today.

Gate Keeper, Oil on canvas, 72" x 48", 2013 JS: Is it fair to say that nostalgia, transformation and loss are some of your recurring themes?  

NL: If I tried to pinpoint recurring themes, I think mortality, desire, and history are what guide the work most. I'm particularly interested in doorways or moments between worlds or realities. The subject within the painting, myself, or the viewer is often in a position to choose between, or at least to come up against two, often conflicting, fields. These could be the history and the present, the abject in light of the mythic, the tension between ethics and desire, or absurdity and humor amidst grave realities.

Of the terms you mentioned, transformation is the one to which I feel the most connected; particularly the occurrences that can change us or reveal our distinctions or make us understand what our hidden motivations are. Loss can certainly be a part of change, and I tend to think we as humans gain more from failure and the things in the world that pose the greatest threat to us. Failure and loss help us understand and question our desires. It can breed doubt, which I see as difficult, but ultimately very healthy, if one can still hold on to their desires or a sense of purpose.

Nostalgia is a little trickier. As much as I study and admire the history of the arts, I'm really not interested in living in the past or idealizing it. I see nostalgia as a symptom of being human. It is easier to idealize something that is safely established in the past than it is to work with the difficulties and uncertainties of the present. This is what I see as the main problem with the atelier system and the Classical Realist movement in art we see today. I have no desire to go back to a golden age. When I rely on historic modes of depictions or formal languages associated with a certain time period, I'm often doing it to shed light on the time we live in and how it is different from the time I am referencing. Other times I'm trying to get at the nature of humans and dissect the need for nostalgia or complicate its purpose.

Till We Find the Blessed Isles Where Our Friends Are Dwelling, Acrylic on canvas, 72" x 120", 2008 JS: Tell me about your painting Till We Find the Blessed Isles... 

NL: Till We Find the Blessed Isles Where Our Friends Are Dwelling is a contemporary re-imagining of Washington Crossing the Delaware, by Emmanuel Leutze. Looking at the original painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I contemplated what the difference was between America at the very beginning and America now. Leutze's painting is one of the first depictions of what we associate as the American Dream, a quest for independence and freedom, and the willingness to partake in the struggle to achieve it. The painting is an icon of the American Spirit. Using the framework of the original painting as a starting point, I reference the painting directly, using some of the same poses of the figures. The differences between the paintings become a 230 year dialogue of a nation continually struggling for their independence.  

Till We Find the Blessed Isles Where Our Friends Are Dwelling gets its title from a line in Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The Blessed Isles, also called the Elysian Fields, is a Greek concept of where the virtuous go to rest at the end of their lives. Tying this in with the idea of the quest of the American Dream, I depicted the boat battling seemingly insurmountable swells towards a promised land. The youth in the boat strive towards a future they have yet to achieve.

The diversity of race and gender gives a more contemporary view of the America we see today. The models for the painting were specific college students becoming adults through education and struggling towards their own unique futures. This is hinted at through the Asian American female seen twice in the painting. Near the back of the painting, she is seen holding a doll-like a child, yet at the front of the painting she stands in Washington's position confidently leading the group over the treacherous waters. In George Washington Crossing the Delaware the boatmen row their way towards a chance at a new future and the chance of a nation built of independence and freedom.

Till We Find the Blessed Isles Where Our Friends Are Dwelling shows a diverse, multicultural America, already a nation, already free, already successful, yet struggling with the sustainability of a lifestyle still dependent on foreign resources. Clues to this in the painting are the emergency gas can dragging behind the boat and the tiny oil derrick the standing figure grasps. In both paintings the American Dream is revealed as a continual fight for independence.

The text on the sides of Till We Find the Blessed Isles Where Our Friends Are Dwelling quotes the Declaration of Independence, which in essence is a text that speaks to the tension between the individuals that make up a culture and the government that is meant to serve them.  

JS: Do you favor comedy or tragedy in your work?  

NL: I use both in my work. Tragedy is perhaps the more apparent, but I do feel a special connection to comedians. They so often see society from a position on the peripheries of it, and they point to sore spots and taboos of our cultures in ways that only the persecuted could. Comedians regularly come out of tragic lives, but they use humor as a way to triumph over the ills of living. And if they don't triumph, they at least put up the good fight. I do get questioned a lot for making paintings that are dark or seemingly pessimistic.

 As someone who came into the world not feeling ready for it, I sometimes use painting to explore and point to the dilemmas I face and others will face living in the world. Focusing on the dilemmas gives me time to question my fears or at least to recognize them in a realm where I have a higher degree of interaction and say. I'm not sure this is tragedy, more than it is coming to terms with things that may threaten the parts of humanity I value most. Some of the artists and writers that have been the greatest help to me have seemingly dark or absurdist views on life.

Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Calvino, Nietzsche, Bach, Goya, Rembrandt, Kollwitz, Blake, and Beckett. I see in them, their works, and their characters, an intense will to hold onto their humanity in spite of the multitude of things that threaten it. Their inclusion of the darker side of human nature gives integrity to their art in that their humanity has to survive and play out in an uncertain world that is not unlike our own. Along these lines, I think my exploration of darker subjects is more than anything else trying to ensure that art is not simply about beauty and aesthetics. That it is not merely a pretty thing to admire, but a reflection on the full complexity of what it is to live.

Light is the Lion that Comes Down to Drink, Oil on canvas, 48" x 67", 2012JS: Who are your most important influences?  

NL: The people I was lucky enough to come across in life when I needed them, my wife and family and a few others are whom I value most. My artistic influences are all over the board, but here are some:

Magritte-his interest in the language component of images

J.L.David- the narration and politics

Ingres-design and the strangeness of his desire

Titian/Lennart Anderson/Turner/Inness- their faith in the substance of paint (application)

Duchamp-the creativity of his intellect

Poussin- composing and earnestness

Vermeer- formal language

Grunewald-expression Fra Angelico-clarity/purity

Van Eyck, -patience, devotion

 Durer-ambition, will, and patience.

 Early Kollwitz- innate ability to understand form

Tiepolo- Color and Orchestration Brueghel- Social Commentary and composing

Some contemporary artists that excite me are Ann Hamilton, Janine Antoni, Anselm Kiefer, Larri Pittman, Neo Rauch, Urs Fischer, and Marlene Dumas. In the realm of words: Italo Calvino, Wallace Stevens, Nietzsche, Rousseau, Plato, the story of Joseph, Margaret Atwood, Stephen Crane, Meister Eckhart, Kafka, Borges, Dostoyevsky, Beckett, Rousseau, Plato, Stephen Crane, William Blake, the narratives of Moses and John the Baptist. Music: Bach, Beethoven, Frank Black, Minor Threat, Ty Segall, Lead Belly. Film: Jane Campion, Mike Leigh, Kubrick, Tarkovsky, Kurosawa  

JS: What are your interests outside of art?  

NL: Anything that tries to get at the core of what we might be doing here. I love to see people suddenly finding a voice and say in the world.

 JS: Is there anything else you would like to mention?  

NL: Fernando Luis Alvarez Gallery will be having a lecture and panel discussion in the very near future on the painting Till We Find the Blessed Isles Where Our Friends Are Dwelling. The Panelists will include curators, politicians, myself and Fernando.

I have a couple of museum shows coming up. One is in Summer 2015 called Remythologies: New Inventions of Old Stories, curated by Stephen Kobasa at the Housatonic Museum in CT. The other is a solo show in Fall 2015 at Oglethorpe University Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA, curated by Elizabeth Peterson.  

Nathan Lewis: Solo Exhibition
March 14 - April 18
Fernando Luis Alvarez Gallery
96 Bedford Street, Stamford, CT 06901
Tues. - Sat.: 11 AM - 6 PM Sunday: closed

'Heightened Perceptions': A Call to Artists

April 7, 2015, 12:55 pm

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Dear Artists,

I have been asked to curate an issue of Poets and Artists Magazine to be published in July of 2015. The theme I have chosen is Heightened Perceptions. For my curated issue of Poets and Artists I am seeking paintings that powerfully reflect the ways that individual artists perceive, and respond to the visual world around them. The works can be representational, abstract or somewhere in between. Works derived from both actual observation and/or photographic references will be considered.

Each artist chosen will be asked to submit a short statement about how their visual perceptions are present in the work. I am also interested in how each artist's emotions and imagination may have played a role in the development of imagery.

Artists from anywhere in the world may submit their work, and each artist selected will be sent a complimentary digital edition of the magazine.

All selections will be made by John Seed based on his taste, judgement and curatorial standards.

If you would like to be considered, here is the information you will need:  

Deadline: May 1, 2015  

Publication: July 2015  

Submission Guidelines -Follow directions closely so as not to have your work go into our junk/spam folder. 

Name the folder: Heightened_Perceptions_First and Last Name Send up to three images (high resolution 300dpi - jpg). Do not send TIFF or any other format. Place a word doc or txt file with your submission including the title, size and medium for each of the works included along with your name and email address. Also send a statement about the work as indicated below. We will contact you only if your work will be published. If you are contacted for publication, we will ask for further materials.

Share your folder via dropbox.com with didimenendez@gmail.com.

Jim Morphesis: 'Wounds of Existence' at the Pasadena Museum of California Art

April 7, 2015, 12:58 pm

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"Wounds of Existence," an exhibition of the works of Los Angeles artist Jim Morphesis, now on view at the Pasadena Museum of California art, explores the predicaments of human life. Based on themes inspired by the Greek Orthodox faith and the paintings of Old Masters, Morphesis' works of the past four decades communicate the artist's ideas about both human vulnerability and transcendence.

I recently interviewed Jim Morphesis and asked him about his background and the themes of his work.  

John Seed Interviews Jim Morphesis
 
Jim MorphesisJS: Tell me about the early years of your life and how they shaped you. When did you know you were an artist?  

JM: As a child growing up in the Philadelphia area, I would draw, paint, make models and catch bugs and slimy things. By the time I was in the fourth grade, I knew most species of frogs and butterflies in the Northeast United States. My father was an exceptionally talented illustrator whose burgeoning career was interrupted by war and a call to service. He remained in the military long enough to achieve the rank of Air Force Colonel. This had me growing up in a disciplined house that, to this day, affects my studio practice.

In time, my father returned to art, becoming a designer for the government. This meant that I had access to wonderful, good quality art materials and I took full advantage of the situation by using these materials to draw and paint everything that interested me. At thirteen, I decided that I would become a working artist following my retirement as a professional football player. My high school football career convinced me to give up the dream of being a Philadelphia Eagle and I headed straight to art school.

I attended the Tyler School of Art for my BFA degree and then headed to the West Coast to be a part of the first graduate class at the California Institute of the Arts. CalArts landed me in Los Angeles and, while I lived and worked in New York for eight years, I have spent most of the past four decades working as a Los Angeles based artist.

No Sanctuary, 1981, Oil, acrylic, wood, nails, wire, tape, and gold leaf on wood panel, 26.5 x 29 inchesCollection of Dr. Ray Mnich, Palm Springs JS: What role has your Greek Orthodox faith had in your artistic development?  

JM: For anyone raised in the Greek Orthodox tradition, strictly or loosely, the church will remain a significant part of your life. For me, the aesthetics of the church affected my work from the beginning. Entering the church of my youth, in Philadelphia, was like stepping into Byzantium. Hundreds of bees wax candles illuminated gilded icons and filled the air with an aroma of honey that mixed with the scent of incense. Along with the chanting that also filled the large open space of the church, this was quite a sensual experience.

I was fascinated by the icon images that lined the top of the altar. St. George slaying the dragon was heroic and the Christ on the cross presented man in both the most vulnerable and certain position possible. To this day, these experiences and remembrances affect my work both in content and the materials that I use.

Destiny, 1982, Oil, magna, alkyd resin, and wood on wood panel, 68 x 64 inchesCollection of Laifun Chung and Ted Kotcheff, Beverly Hills JS: You are known for experimenting with media. Tell me about some of your experiments.  

JM: I never consider combining different mediums and materials as experiments. At the same time, I suppose all that we do as artists can be seen as experimental; the outcome is never a certainty. The materials used in my mixed media paintings were in response to the natural growth of the work. There was a time, years ago, when I wanted to bury my history and make way for something new.

I began collaging all the personal letters that I had been keeping into a series of works on paper. This was a cathartic endeavor that lead to the works in which I rendered versions of historic paintings such as a Bellini, Pieta and the Velazquez, Christ on the Cross, onto surfaces constructed of found timbers, old furniture and doors. These were objects that brought their own history into my work. The process was natural and never seemed experimental.

There was, however, that one time very long ago when I tried to create a thick silver colored paint matter using rhoplex, glass sand blasting beads and aluminum powder. The concoction exploded all over the walls of my studio ...twice. That was something that I might consider an experiment.

Big Dream, 1983, Oil, magna, wood, fabric, and gold leaf on wood panel, 68 x 86 x 9 inchesCollection of the San Antonio Museum of Art JS: Is it fair to say that your art really began to take off when you began working with the imagery of the crucifixion?  

JM: The paintings that included crucifix images were first shown in a 1981 exhibition at Mt. St. Mary's College called Cruciform Paintings. Solo exhibitions soon followed at then popular Los Angeles galleries including Traction Gallery and Tortue Gallery. These exhibitions received a great deal of attention, created a demand for the work and had me realizing that I was one of the artists at the fore of the Los Angeles Expressionist art movement.

Female Torso with Green Doors, 1989, Oil, acrylic, gouache, charcoal, and collage on wood panel with wood doors, 71 x 83 inchesCollection of the Orange County Museum of Art JS: You have been working with Peter Selz, who curated your show. What kinds of revelations has working with Peter given you?  

JM: Working with Peter Selz has been an honor and an opportunity for which I am very grateful. I often asked Peter about artists who have influenced me as a painter. Because Peter personally knew people such as Jean Dubuffet, Willem de Kooning and was a close friend of Mark Rothko, these artists seemed very present during our conversations. There is a humanist connection among all of the Expressionist artists that Peter is interested in. Peter's enthusiasm for my work was most encouraging and reminded me that I am a part of this continuing tradition. We all need an occasional shot in the arm by someone for whom we have the greatest respect.

Skull and Red Door, 1987, Oil, magna, enamel, charcoal, paper, wood, and gold leaf on wood panel, 80 x 72 inchesCollection of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego JS: Are you a Neo-Expressionist? If not, is there a school of painting you feel most connected to?  

JM: I never considered myself a Neo-Expressionist, but the weighty Expressionist paintings that I was doing through most of the 1980's connected me to the Neo-Expressionist movement and that has been fine with me.

Rose XV, 2012, Oil, enamel, gouache, and collage on wood panel, 26 x 26 inchesCollection of the artist JS: What has your most recent work been about?  

JM: I have been painting images of fleshy and brooding roses. These works are my versions of a classic memento mori. They are, like my paintings incorporating images of the crucifix, skulls and mythological characters, meant to represent us all as both heroic and painfully mortal.

Marsyas III, 2001, Oil, gouache, charcoal, pastel, joint compound, and collage on paper, 80 x 45 inchesCollection of Brent Giddens  JS: How do you hope viewers will respond to your show?  

JM: This exhibition includes a selection of my paintings from the past four decades.. I would like visitors to the PMCA to have an appreciation of my commitment to the development of my art. I hope that viewers might realize a connection, in the paintings, with their own triumphs and wounds of existence. And I would, of course, be delighted if some viewers see my work as dynamic and beautiful to look at.  

JS: What are your interests outside of art?  

JM: I apologize for how this might sound, but outside of making art, I am primarily interested in finding more time to make art. Okay, I admit that I also want to be a responsible art educator, put some energy into maintaining relationships, occasionally watch sports on television, make time to damage my joints at the gym and there are certain movies that I can see again and again. Everything, however, still relates to making art.

JIM MORPHESIS: Wounds of Existence

January 25, 2015-May 31, 2015
The Pasadena Museum of California Art
490 East Union Street Pasadena, CA 91101
Wednesday-Sunday: 12-5pm 3rd Thursdays: 5-8pm

David Allan Peters at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe

April 10, 2015, 10:51 am

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David Allan Peters, whose work is on view at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe through April 19th, has been building heavily layered paintings that he carves into to reveal rich stratigraphies of color. Kaleidoscopic in their intensity, Peters' works are both intuitive excavations and explorations of pattern.

I recently spoke to David Allan Peters and asked him about his background, his education and his methods.

John Seed Interviews David Allan Peters:


David Allan PetersJS: David, from what you tell me you grew up in a family that supported your creativity...

DAP: Definitely: as a child I was making things all the time. My parents were very supportive and I was was allowed to try whatever I wanted.

JS: When did you decide to be an artist?

DAP: I took my first art class in junior college in Cupertino, CA (which at time was a very small agricultural town) and began playing with materials and received encouraging feedback from my teachers.

Then I got serious and attended the San Francisco Art Institute from 1995 through 1997. In San Francisco, I was exposed to more art and artists: it was a big step. My parents got me an SFMOMA membership and I would stop in at the museum daily. I was exposed to so much there: I loved their Sigmar Polke, and I remember seeing a Richard Serra splash piece.

Untitled #26, 2014, Acrylic on wood panel, 48 x 36 inchesJS: What kind of work did you do in San Francisco?

DAP: At SFAI I was into abstraction and materials. I was trying to make my own kind of marks, but not a brushstroke. Being in the Bay Area I was looking at "juicy" paintings -- like Joan Brown and Jay DeFeo's The Rose -- and I kept asking myself: 'How can I use that kind of energy another way?'

I did some cut out paintings, and also some that were scratched out and had sand in them. That was the beginning of the layering in my work. I was just making a lot of work, painting all the time, becoming obsessed with the process of making paintings.

Liat Yossifor, who is also showing at Amerigner | McEnery | Yohe, was an undergraduate at SFAI with me, and I remember that we were both completely "geeked out" on painting.

Untitled #1, 2015, Acrylic on wood panel, 18 x 14 inchesJS: And after that you did grad work in Claremont with Karl Benjamin, right?

DAP: Actually, when I got to Claremont I hadn't heard of Karl Benjamin. But I started to see him and his dog 'Macho'. We started to talk a lot, and we clicked and became good friends and I started helping him out as a studio assistant. Karl reinforced the intuitiveness in my art work. That was a turning point for me. Although I still wasn't sure what was going on in my work at that time, something was changing and I began to work with color more.

Untitled #2, 2015, Acrylic on wood panel, 18 x 14 inchesJS: Have you always been an abstract artist?

DAP: Not exactly. As a kid, I copied old master paintings out of my parent's old art books. I tried hard to paint those kinds of paintings, but I couldn't quite do it. I soon figured out that I could make them look good by hiding paint layers by putting stain over them. It made them look much better, and I used sandpaper to bring up the colors. It definitely connects with some of what I am doing now.

Edge detail: photo by Lance GerberJS: Tell me a bit about the processes involved in your recent "carved" works.

DAP: They just go and go: I don't keep track of how many layers I have used...sometimes hundreds. One of my big things is the edge. I am always thinking about lines and stripes in my paintings. And to see all of those, you have to look around the piece. As far as carving goes, its just one little chip at a time... like a mantra... until the painting becomes harmonious.

Untitled #4, 2015, Acrylic on wood panel, 18 x 14 inchesJS: Are you pouring paint as you go? Scraping?

DAP: I do it with a paintbrush. I start by hiding the strokes from the layer before: I make all these fine layers and then I try to erase them from the surfaces. There are a lot of happy accidents along the way: random things. But then, I regain control by carving the surface.

Untitled #6, 2015, Acrylic on wood panel, 18 x 14 inchesJS: Who are some of the other artists that you are looking at?

DAP: I live in Little Ethiopia in Los Angeles which is blocks away from LACMA. I take breaks from my work and ride my bike up to LACMA a few times a times a week. I enjoy looking at Gerhard Richter, Robert Ryman and Tomma Abts.

I keep to myself so I can stay directed. You have to work hard.

JS: What are your interests outside of art?

DAP: I ride my bike, garden -- I try do quiet things. And I enjoy NHL hockey.

JS: Is there anything else you would like to say about your work?

DAP: I'm a shy person which enables me to stay directed and work hard at making work. I want people to get what they can from them, to take their time and enjoy.

David Allan Peters
March 19 - April 18
Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe
525 West 22nd Street, NY, NY 10011

Works by David Allan Peters can also be viewed at:
Royale Projects: Contemporary Art
73190 El Paseo Suite #3 Palm Desert CA 92262
760.742.5182

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Carl Dobsky: 'Ship of Fools' at John Pence Gallery

April 21, 2015, 4:55 pm

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Carl Dobsky,Ship Of Fools, Oil on Canvas, 72 x 108 inches, 2014 - 2015
Carl Dobsky, a realist artist who is also the proprietor of the Los Angeles based Safehouse Atelier, is currently showing his recent six-by-nine-foot canvas Ship of Fools at John Pence Gallery. The painting takes up an entire wall in Pence's Gallery Three, and is accompanied by eight preparatory studies of the painting's characters.

Carl Dobsky: Photo by Sadie Jernigan Valeri
John Seed Interviews Carl Dobsky

JS: Carl, how did you come to choose this image?

CD: The theme for the work has been around for a long time, but kind of comes into it's own in the 15th and 16th centuries with works by the likes of Hieronymous Bosch and others. It usually depicts a boat without a pilot filled with deranged or people who are kind of oblivious to their situation. In some cases, it has been used as social commentary.

Ship of Fools (Detail)
JS: In your version, is there social commentary involved?

CD: I wanted to take these elements, but give the theme a personal interpretation. For starters, I didn't want to make it into a social commentary where the viewer or myself was some how looking at it from a privileged point of view where we can pass judgment on the people in the boat. In fact, I wanted they viewer to sympathize with their plight. So, instead of making each person an archetype of a particular social class, I tried to keep them all on the same level, or rather, belonging to no social class in particular.

Ship of Fools (Detail)
JS: Tell me about how you constructed and organized the image.

CD: To set the stage for their dilemma, I wanted to show them in a situation where they were caught between an ideal vision and a practical situation. In this case, the practical situation is obvious enough; they're about to wash up into the rocks if they can't take care of matters at hand. To show the vision of the ideal, I chose the symbol of the butterfly for it's delicate and fragile beauty.

Ship of Fools (Detail)
JS: Yes, the butterflies add something unexpected...

CD: The thought to use butterflies came to me after reading about Chuang Tzu's dream where his identity becomes interchangeable with the butterfly. In a similar way we often identify ourselves by our ideals or dreams. It also has the connotation of daydreaming from the expression "chasing butterflies" where one is chasing something that aimlessly flutters about but cannot catch it and is always out of reach.

Ship of Fools (Detail)
JS: How did you orchestrate the emotions of the characters?

CD: The boat taking on water and approaching the rocks is perhaps a bit too obvious of a symbol, but I suppose sometimes obvious is the way to go. Between these two, the butterflies and the rocks, these people are all stuck on a boat and their fates are tied together whether they realize it or not. But instead of passing judgement on these fellows I wanted to focus on a range of reactions that people would have when caught between these two poles moving from a kind of rapture to panic.

Ship of Fools (Detail)
JS: How long did it take you to complete this painting?

CD: The work developed over a period of a year. I have always wanted to tackle more complicated narrative subjects, and for the first time since who-knows-when, I've had a stable enough situation to go ahead and paint something without worrying about whether or not it would go to a gallery, or if it would sell. So I decided to go for it. I hope to be doing more of this sort of thing in the future. It has been a really fun experience and one of the most rewarding things I've painted to date.

Carl Dobsky
April 10 - May 2
John Pence Gallery
750 Post Street
San Francisco, California 94109
Hours: 10 am to 6 pm (Mon - Fri)
10 am to 5 pm (Sat)

Is Having an 'Eye' for Art a Thing of the Past?

April 23, 2015, 12:26 pm

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A few years ago I was standing in a Malibu furniture store looking at coffee tables when I heard another shopper whisper excitedly to a friend:

"Hey, isn't that Bruce Willis? He looks just like he does in the movies... but maybe just a bit shorter."

I can confirm: it was Bruce Willis, and that was one hell of a nice Ferrari he was driving. He didn't look short to me, but I digress.

The author looks over John Currin's Reclining Nude: Photo by Matthew Couper While viewing the recent John Currin exhibition last month at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, I found myself saying some rather similar things to my friends Matthew Couper and Jo Russ, who were touring the show with me. Currin's paintings were already well known to me, but only in the form of photos in magazines and jpeg images seen on the net, and I assessed them just the way that the woman in Malibu had assessed Bruce Willis:

"They are a bit more painterly when seen in person," I told Matthew, "and the canvas is a bit rougher than I expected."

Of course, considered in the context of today's media-driven art market, these observations are inconsequential. Everything in the show was already sold -- for $2 million plus each, or so I am told -- and Currin's reputation as an art world star is well established. The feeling I had looking over Currin's work was that the paintings themselves were celebrities, glamorized by the fame of the artist who made them and their high market values. That isn't an original idea: I think it was Robert Hughes who more than 30 years ago said something along the lines that "Paintings are now celebrities and museums are their limousines."

Selfie Takers in the Van Gogh Museum. Photo by Becca Burns Hughes was prescient in his observation and the recent phenomenon of museum selfies drives his point home very nicely. Being in the presence of a famous painting seems to be replacing -- especially for younger art viewers -- the experience of closely inspecting works of art. If you are interested in scrutinizing the surfaces of works of art slowly and scrupulously you are a connoisseur or possibly an artist with a kind of professional vested interest in a given painting's construction.

A case in point: when a number of my artist friends visited Kehinde Wiley's exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum recently, they had a lot to say on Facebook about how Wiley's paintings looked to the naked eye. There was quite a bit said about what Wiley's assistants in China had painted (the patterned backgrounds) and what he had painted himself (the faces) and also some comments about the fact that Wiley's technique was gradually becoming more confident.

I enjoyed hearing their first person observations, but also realized that they were having a similar experience to the one I had at the Currin show. Wiley has become famous because of the social messages of his artwork, especially his bold imagery of African-American men presented in a context largely borrowed from the grand traditions of European portraiture. What I and my other "painting geek" friends observe about his work in person isn't going to affect his career trajectory at this point. Like Currin, Wiley has created a body of work that transmits its messages well in magazines and on the net, and that aspect of his work is very potent -- and possibly essential -- at this moment in time.

In a media society the reputations of painters are made in magazines and on the web. Seeing surfaces in person is a luxury and an afterthought. A recent survey indicates that over 50 percent of contemporary art collectors have now purchased art on Instagram. There is clearly growing confidence among collectors that digital images can tell you enough about a work of art to spend big bucks. When the crate arrives, they can look over their purchases the way I looked over John Currin's paintings on the gallery wall, and make a few discerning comments if they are so inclined.

If you have an "eye for art" and a keen interest in inspecting the surface of works of art, both out of curiosity and a quest for deeper meaning, your abilities are linked to an increasingly outdated notion of connoisseurship. Having an "ear" for art -- which means that you pay attention to what people are saying about what is hot on the market -- is now the best way keep up with the trends. Maybe all of this has something to do with why art critics, who have been traditionally been relied upon to carefully scrutinize works of art and make critical pronouncements, seem increasingly impotent and irrelevant. When the editors of Hyperallergic suggested at the end of year that art critics might as well be replaced by Instagram, they made a very funny and rather relevant point.

When I can manage to pry myself away from my laptop and make the grueling drive into the city I always make time to see art in person. That said, I'm increasingly realizing that looking at art on the web is the only way I can really keep abreast of what is happening in my field. I'm still dedicated to the idea of connoisseurship, even in an age when visual ideas transmitted with immediacy are in the forefront. It's still great to visit museums and take things in slowly, inspecting the surfaces.

In L.A. there is also the chance I will see some celebrities, as they seem to frequent art museums. One of my students returned from a field trip recently and told me that she saw Tom Hanks at the Huntington. She said he looked just like he does in the movies, but a bit older now.

Muse of Art Criticism Reportedly Hospitalized for 'Nervous Exhaustion'

May 8, 2015, 10:00 pm

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The Muse of Art Criticism: Image by Matthew Couper
(Not Reuters) - Pablo Art Market-Criticism, the eldest son of the muse and allegorical figure Art Criticism has confirmed reports circulating earlier today that his mother has been hospitalized. Speaking to several reporters gathered outside his offices in Chelsea earlier this morning, he issued the following public statement:

As many of you know, my mother has been under considerable strain since her separation and divorce from my father, The Art Market, in early 2013. I can confirm that after an unfortunate incident last week, she was admitted to a private psychiatric hospital where she is being treated for stress and severe nervous exhaustion. We ask that the public respect her privacy during this exceedingly difficult time.

Reached by telephone the next day, her friend Academic Eminence provided a few details about the "unfortunate incident" that may have triggered Art Criticism's breakdown. "We had decided to see the Björk Retrospective at MOMA last Friday and then grab some lunch afterwards, but I'm afraid we never made it to lunch. The long lines and the endless looping Björk clips put Art Criticism in a foul mood, and when we got into the actual exhibition she simply lost it."

Art Criticism's meltdown, reported first on Twitter and then on Buzzfeed, included the Oxford-educated muse tearing off her headphones and hurling them at a translucent mannequin wearing an Alexander McQueen wedding dress. Although there are varying reports as to what she was screaming while being escorted from the exhibit by museum security guards, several onlookers concur that they heard her exclaim: "Get me out of this fucking Icelandic-themed techno-crap hellhole."

After exiting the museum, Art Criticism drank Evian water while sitting on the curb, sobbing and telling stunned passersby: "This is the museum that gave Mark Rothko his first retrospective. I can't believe I just paid $25 to see pierced nipples and yak heads. I'm so done with this..." Moments later, she was strong-armed into a cab by several friends, still visibly agitated, and driven away.

Christie Sotheby's, a longtime friend of both Art Criticism and her ex-husband The Art Market, says that Art Criticism has been feeling "ignored and powerless for some time."

"It hurts," Sotheby's explained, "to see your influence fade so fast. Art Criticism once had the power to make or break an artist, but those days are gone. Plus, when people say that you could simply be replaced by Instagram, that really, really hurts."

Another source, an independent curator who declined to be named, believes that the continued success of the Art Market has left his ex-wife exceptionally jealous. "He is wined and dined by billionaires every day" the source commented, "while she can barely find work. Writing art criticism doesn't pay much these days, and nobody actually reads ARTFORUM anymore. They just look over the glossy ads."

Musée M. Bord, another family friend offered a frank perspective. "Art Criticism has said some very harsh things through the years, and that has understandably left many people angered. We are in a populist era now, and people want Top Ten lists not tantrums. She shouldn't be surprised that even art world professionals would rather just follow celebrity critics posting Medieval penis pics on Twitter."

"Of course," Bord continued, "as long as I have known her, Art Criticism has been in a state of perpetual meltdown, and we have disagreed about many, many things through the years. Honestly, I thought Björk was a lot of fun. At any rate I wish her well, and expect that she will make a full recovery."

Her ex-husband, The Art Market, who is traveling in Asia, could not be reached for comment.

Raymond Berry: 'Hidden Hanover' at Randolph-Macon College

May 8, 2015, 10:04 pm

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For more than 40 years, artist Raymond Berry has dedicated himself to plein air painting, exploring local landscapes in sequences that record their changes over time. Dedicated to direct observation, Berry sees his study of the land as search for realization that mirrors a "direct experience of our true nature."

I recently interviewed Raymond Berry and asked him about this background, his approach, and his ideas.

Raymond Berry
John Seed Interviews Raymond Berry:

JS: Ray, tell me about growing up in Oakland. As a young adult were you aware of the art of the Bay Area?

RB: I would like to say that I started a gang in Oakland -- one that went out into the hills and stayed for days just painting the landscape -- but unfortunately, I left the Oakland area a few months after my birth (my Dad was stationed there/Navy) and came to back to Virginia and lived in Charlottesville until the early '60s. I did come to later have a great deal of reverence for the Bay Area and the Society of Six. I fantasized that I had some of their DNA in me -- Selden Gile died a year after I was born -- and it was appropriate for me to follow in their footsteps working so diligently in the open air.

Raymond Berry: Hidden Hanover, Installation View
JS: How did you end up at the University of Virginia?

RB: It was the natural things to do: the University employed my parents and I grew up running around the school from as early as I can remember. I even went to kindergarten there: The wife of a professor in the biology department ran a little "college" for university progeny and we had graduations every year and wore caps and gowns borrowed from the school. I looked at other schools, but that's where I felt the best. I had a great education there.

Gilmans, After the Morning Rain, March 26, 2015, Oil on Canvas, 12" x 16"
JS: Tell me about your mentors and your growth as an artist in North Carolina

RB: My time in Greensboro was a revelation and life changing for me. I had gone there on the recommendation of a New York painter, Warren Brandt, who wanted me to work with Peter Agostini, the sculptor. He told me it didn't make any difference that I was a painter; Peter was a great artist and teacher and if he liked me, he could help me. So, I took the chance that I would measure up somehow and enrolled in a class he taught in watercolor. I thought I was pretty good until he set up a little still life and asked everyone to paint the glow and the air around all the objects, not the objects themselves. I started to look really hard and pretty soon I began to see the air and the glow and I worked for three hours straight on that little watercolor. I was never the same afterwards.

Luck's, Light Rain, Spring Colors, March 25, 2015, Oil on Canvas, 11" x 14"
JS: How and when did you decide to only paint from direct observation?


RB: I'm not really sure it was ever a serious decision, it always seemed so obvious to me. None of my mentors in college or graduate school depended on photography for imagery. My Greensboro mentors, Peter Agostini, Ben Berns and Andrew Martin were such amazing draftsmen that it was considered the only way to fly. If you could draw, you worked mostly from life or memory. If you sucked at drawing, you used photography and your work seemed mechanical and thin. For me, it comes down to learning something new every time I work and working from life allows that. I need to connect directly with my subject. It's also, not boring! I can see using some photographic references for certain details that might be necessary, but I have almost no need for that given my predilection for landscape. I rarely include architecture in my work. If I was a portrait painter, I'd probably be telling you how necessary photography is!

Luck's, Fog and Light Rain, March 14, 2015, Oil on Canvas, 11" x 14"
JS: You are a veteran artist: how has your work changed over time.

RB: In the late '60s and early '70s, I did a little of everything. Op Art, Surrealism, Conceptual and of course, Abstract Expressionism. We all loved AbEx! I was good at those things and my work was often clever, successful and mirrored whatever was "in" at the time. I got real tired of changing every few months and depending on how clever I could be. I had been doing landscape problems since I was very young. I tried to draw a creek near my house when I was eleven, using my brand new John Nagy drawing set. I just couldn't get it the way I thought it should be and threw all my drawings away. I'm still trying to figure out water almost sixty years later... I think that my painting has become much more expressive and natural over the years. I'm less worried with formal concerns and more dedicated to painting about an experience. What I may be learning may not fit into a more conventional vision of what's a good landscape painting. I'm more concerned about being respectful to the landscape and the "liturgy" contained within. The Buddhists call this the "teachings of the insentient."
Luck's, Rain is Near, March 14, 2015, Oil on Canvas, 6" x 12"
JS: From your long career as an artist: Do you have any favorite stories or anecdotes?

RB: As a landscape painter I've had a diamondback rattler crawl slowly over my boots as I was working and once, a huge black bear rumbled by five feet from me (I was just off his favorite path) while I was painting. He could have stopped and told me I was using too much white in my palette: I would have listened. A good story for the history books was one that Agostini told me back in the 1970's: he and Bill de Kooning were drinking together and complaining about how crappy the New York scene was (the usual conversation) and that basically no one that claimed to be a "New York Artist" actually was from New York! Everyone that was showing then was from out of town. This rankled Peter because he really was from the City, born and raised. It struck him that he was the only real NY sculptor and with the next realization that he was thus the tallest New York sculptor (he and Bill were short) and that meant Bill could be the tallest Dutch Abstract Expressionist in New York! They were both very happy with themselves: and taller somehow.

Luck's, Frozen Pond and Dam, February 28, 2015, Oil on Canvas, 8" x 10"
JS: Tell me about your current exhibition, and what you are showing there.

RB: It's a body of work that covers about two and half years of painting certain specific sites around Hanover County where I live and where the college resides. The farthest motif is probably fifteen minutes from my office. I can confuse a student and then run out to my truck and be on site in very little time. Most of the work is smallish (in the '80s and '90s I worked big all the time, must have been compensating for something) although there are some pieces on hollow doors: A beautiful size and ratio for landscapes. About half of the work is oil and the other is encaustic. For most viewers, I think the show emphasizes the changes that happen in the land, the variations in temperature and light and the resurgence of growth and reclamation. I am more concerned with more meditative aspects and personal investigations; I think sometimes that my motifs are closer to sutras than sources for imagery. It's that Zen thing rearing its head.

Luck's, Melting Snow, February 22, 2015, Oil on Canvas, 8" x 10"
JS: What wisdom can you pass on to aspiring painters?

RB: Be patient and disciplined at what you need to do to actually find your artistic identity. It is distressing to see creative people caught in the trap of trying to be someone else other than who they really are. They mimic others, they borrow others personal alchemy, and they take short cuts rather than earn something with hard work and a personal journey. Never have so many tried so hard to be somebody else! In the beginning we are mostly several influences, that's fine. But soon, discarding the things that are not ours or are holding one back from realization is a necessary task. The other side of the coin is to be open to ideas and concepts that may alter the path you had so carefully planned. Take the chance to be yourself.

Raymond Berry: Hidden Hanover 
April 19th through May 31st
Randolph-Macon College 
The Flippo Gallery: Dept. of Fine Arts 
Pace Armistead Hall, 114 College Avenue Ashland, VA 23005 
Click here for directions to the campus 
Hours: 10:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. Mondays through Fridays

After Postmodernism: Michael Pearce Writes About 'Art in the Age of Emergence'

May 24, 2015, 3:26 pm

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Postmodernity is being supplanted by a new emergent age, characterized by the internet's ability to bring together communities and give them the tools to organize themselves and express the truth as they see it. 

- Michael Pearce

Michael Pearce: photo by Harold Muliadi
After hearing a 2013 talk by theologian Philip Clayton -- The New Sciences of Emergent Complexity: Evolving Religion in an Evolving World -- artist Michael Pearce found himself tremendously excited. Emergence, a cross-disciplinary theory which deals with the way that higher-order complexity can arise out of chaos, presented a powerful new model for aesthetics. For Pearce, a figurative artist and one of the founders of The Representational Art Conference, emergence opened a dynamic alternative to what he feels have been the reductive and culturally erosive tendencies of Postmodernism in art:

Complexity and emergence offer an explanation for the positive experience of the art object, and fills the gap critiqued by Adorno as the great failing of aesthetic writing -- that there is no metanarrative in a world in which idealism has been crushed.

Art in the Age of EmergenceHardcover: 195 pagesPublished by Cambridge Scholars Publishing (January 1, 2015)
Serious discussions about emergence have been appearing in other fields since the postwar era, especially in physics, chemistry and biology. For example, in biology, emergence has been used to explain properties of life forms that go beyond explanation and transcend their component parts. In the words of one postwar biologist: "Life itself is an emergent property."

 More recently, In the field of theology, Philip Clayton has taken an interdisciplinary approach to emergence, and posited that emergence suggests a new approach to the problem of consciousness, which is neither reducible to brain states nor proof of a mental substance or soul. In his book, Mind and Emergence: From Quantum to Consciousness, he advocates emergentist panentheism and a Christian constructive theology consistent with the new sciences of emergence.

Michael Pearce's book is first major effort to use emergence as a model for aesthetic theory. Like Clayton, Pearce takes an interdisciplinary approach, weaving together quotes and observations by archaeologists, art historians, evolutionary biologists, philosophers, physicists, semioticians, and theologians. Partly a personal meditation, but also an exploration of scientific and philosophical ideas, Art in the Age of Emergence is intended to challenge the current orthodoxies of contemporary aesthetics.

In the book's first chapter, for example, Pearce argues for a new "authenticity" in works of art, which he feels is an antidote to the capitalist excesses of the contemporary art market. Pearce writes: The desire for authenticity is antithetical to the money dominated postmodern art world, in which those who purchase art are manipulated by cynical artists and dealers who exploit socialist pretensions but luxuriate in the benefits of a rampant, unregulated free market capitalism.

 Pearce's idealism will strike many readers as being gloriously out of touch: something which he would likely take as a compliment. As well-stocked as his book may be with elegant theories and interdisciplinary overlaps, Pearce is nearly alone among serious art writers in his taste and orientation. One of the book's insistences--that representational art is a favored manifestation of emergence--seemed worth questioning. I asked Pearce: "Why do you feel that Emergence works so well in relation to representational art? Wouldn't it work for abstraction too?"

Yes, it does. Emergent aesthetics support both abstraction and representation. But abstraction is only a part of the whole, not a theme that is superior to representation. To think that abstraction is superior to it is an idea that comes straight out of Kant, who thought that we could somehow detach ourselves from emotional responses to art and view it with "disinterested interest", with an analytical approach that distanced the work from the viewer. It's an idea that was promoted in the early twentieth century by modernists like Herman Broch and Walter Gropius, who were attempting to reinvent culture as a response to the horrors of the world wars. But the idea that we could detach ourselves from emotion dehumanizes us as badly as ever. Broch even said that beauty was evil! He wrote a lengthy essay about it, describing how kitsch led to it. He wanted to dispose of anything kitsch, and to get rid of sentiment. But sentiment is a thoroughly human quality -- what could be more kitsch than the mother holding a newborn baby? And how could anyone regard a moment like that without feeling the kitsch sentiment it inspires? To pretend that human beings can be detached from emotional responses like this is ridiculous. Again, I'm not saying that abstraction is bad and wrong -- but that it's only a part of the art we make as a response to human experience. We've tried to separate emotion from art for a century, but disinterested interest is a completely artificial imposition upon the way mind works. The emergent mind is founded upon sensory experience. If art reflects mind, then why would we attempt to deny the value and importance of sentiment in our art?

Art in the Age of Emergence is a dense book that is ultimately quite optimistic, and a genuine conversation-starter. In its postscript, Pearce states that "We are moving beyond the negative impact upon human consciousness caused by the first half of the twentieth century... We all know what an emergent experiences feels like: it is a moment of harmony, of wonder, of completion, felt both as a deep affirmative feeling of unity and as a physiological experience that takes place in the brain."

For Pearce's ideas to be validated his friends and admirers are going to have to make works of art that live up to his very high expectations. For the time being, Pearce is perhaps the only serious art writer in America who offers toasts to Bouguereau and looks to theology for ideas about aesthetics. He is already at work on another book which will deal with emergence and kitsch. For now, his ideas and enthusiasms mark Pearce as decidedly contrarian. Or course, in the art world taste can shift very suddenly and unpredictably. If things move in the direction Pearce feels they will, he will likely see it as a manifestation of emergence, something he noticed before everyone else caught on.