Filed under: Review, San Francisco | Tags: California School of Fine Arts, Joan Brown, nadia fellah, San Jose Museum of Art
One of Joan Brown’s first encounters with art was as a Catholic high school student in San Francisco. It mainly consisted of calendar covers in her Christian family living course. She later said of her parochial education: “I [knew] that this was just one tiny bit of what there was, and that I just had to get through this—get old enough is what it was—and get the hell out of there.” After graduating, Joan submitted a few pencil sketches of movie stars to the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) on a whim, and was admitted in 1955 at the age of seventeen. It was during her initial year at CSFA where she met her first of four husbands, William Brown (whose name she kept), and Elmer Bischoff, an influential teacher that would become a lifelong friend and mentor. - Nadiah Fellah, San Francisco Contributor
Joan Brown | Girls in the Surf with Moon Casting a Shadow, 1962, oil on canvas,72 x 72 inches, Collection of Suzanne Diamond
It is a sad day today at the New American Paintings office as our Operations Manager, Jessica Fortin, is leaving the company. During her 5+ years of employment with us, Jess worked her way up from an intern, to a jack-of-all trades assistant to every member of the company. Her ability to juggle multiple projects, produce the funniest sneeze we’ve ever heard, and keep the entire office laughing will be missed. We wish her well as she moves on to a new and exciting chapter in her career.
Best Wishes Fortin!
Filed under: Art World, Video | Tags: Corinna Belz, Gerhard Richter, nowness.com
We saw this awesome video of Squeegee master, Gerhard Richter, on NOWNESS.com and had to share. The film is by Corinna Belz. Enjoy!
From the NOWNESS.COM website:
A New Film Captures the German Impasto Master at Work with His Squeegee
The notoriously secretive creative process of reclusive German artist Gerhard Richter is exposed in filmmaker Corinna Belz’s new fly-on-the-wall documentary, Gerhard Richter Painting. Belz spent three years as an observer in Richter’s Cologne studio capturing mesmerizing footage of the artist producing his radical abstract works. As we witness him mixing layer upon layer of bold primary colors, smearing the wet paint with a giant squeegee and scraping at the surfaces of the canvases, Richter’s masterpieces appear before our eyes. “You get the feeling the paintings are staring at you,” says Belz, who met the painter while filming his vibrant pixelated stained glass window for the Cologne Cathedral. “There’s a physicality to Richter’s paintings. I wanted the viewer to become immersed in the subtly suspenseful cycle of the process.” Belz’s poetic film coincides with Richter’s 80th birthday and a major retrospective at London’s Tate Modern spanning five decades of his varied work.
Filed under: Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, DC, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Must-Sees, New York, Philadelphia, Philly, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Seattle | Tags: Editor's Pick, Must-SEe, New American Paintings, November
We reviewed upcoming November exhibitions at close to 300 commercial galleries from throughout the United States to compile this list. Once again, it is another extraordinarily strong month for the medium of painting. Highlights include the feverishly painted work of Alison Schulnik at Zieher Smith, Nathan Hylden’s complex meditations on the studio at Richard Telles, and Llyn Foulkes idiosyncratic landscapes at Andrea Rosen. - Must-See November painting shows after the jump!
Allison Schulnik | Yogurt Eater, 2011, oil on linen, 84 x 68 inches
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Filed under: New York, Q&A | Tags: Alex Ebstein, Dodge Gallery, Night Painter, NUDASHANK, Pratt, RISD, Ted Galh
Ted Gahl’s new exhibition (and first solo exhibition in New York City) Night Painter, on view at Dodge Gallery though November 13th, includes an honest and uninhibited array of works that suspend memories and personal symbology in the thin stratum of Gahl’s painted surfaces. Dense but not overcrowded, minimal paintings serve as visual respite between larger, tangled compositions where the referential and abstract overlap. Within the dark and specific palette, each painting begins to read as a different element of memory, meditation, dream, insomnia and delirium. - Read the interview between Alex Ebstein, Baltimore contributor, and Ted Gahl after the jump.
Ted Gahl Night Painter at Dodge Gallery, Installation View, photo by Carly Gaebe, courtesy of Dodge Gallery
Filed under: Art World, Video | Tags: Andrew Masullo, Feature Inc., James Kalm, Jerry Saltz, Loren Munk, Steven Zevitas Gallery
We are pleased to present another video “gallery visit” from James Kalm, aka the painter Loren Munk. In this installment, James visits the 2010 Feature Inc. exhibition of Andrew Masullo’s work in New York’s Lower East Side. Andrew has had a 25+ year career making paintings that are notable for their intimate scale and and sophisticated use of color and form. Largely ignoring the trends and fads that have washed over the art world in the past two decades, Andrew has steadfastly produced a highly personal body of work that now seems more relevant than ever. Don’t miss the shout-out from New York-based art critic Jerry Saltz at 7:48, and if you want to see more images, please check out the current exhibition of Andrew’s work at Steven Zevitas Gallery in Boston.
Filed under: Review, Seattle | Tags: Erin Langner, Patte Loper, Platform Gallery
The small row of Patte Loper’s modest, handcrafted sculptures from new exhibition Still Point of the Returning World discretely lines a pedestal in the back of Seattle’s Platform Gallery. Untitled (Leipzig) resembles an awkward architectural model of stacked boxes, covered by a bulbous sheet; the nearby funnel created from sticks and cardboard strips stands stagnant in space, like a film prop without a set. Within the surrounding paintings, however, these foreign sculptural objects explode into complex cornerstones of the artist’s fantastical, painted environments. The mound of boxes becomes a radiating acropolis, stranded impossibly between a fairyland and a modernist kitchen in the painting titled Queen Mab; in Remember Me as a Time of Day, the funnel transforms into a radiant, pink cyclone, expunging tree limbs and frolicking foxes into a two-dimensional forest. - Erin Langner, Seattle Contributor
Remember Me as a Time of Day, 20 x 24 inches, oil on panel, 2011. Courtesy Patte Loper and Platform Gallery.
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Filed under: Art World, Artists on Artists, Los Angeles | Tags: Catherine Wagley, Country Club Projects, Fritz Chesnut, Museum of Pulp Fiction, Pepin Moore, Richard Prince
Painter Fritz Chesnut first stumbled across Richard Prince, the artist whose repurposed photographs of cowboys, bikers and open roads made Americana sexier and more sinister, when still an undergraduate in Santa Cruz. “I think I was in the library just combing through books,” he says. “I remember discovering Rauschenberg the same way. Just grabbing this big glossy book and thumbing through it and being completely fascinated.” - Catherine Wagley, LA Contributor
Richard Prince | Untitled (Upstate), 1995-99, Ektacolor photograph, 40 x 60 inches, 101.6 x 152.4 cm
Filed under: DC, Features, Q&A | Tags: Britton Toliver, Bronx River Arts Center, Cordy Ryman, Culture Hall, David Reed, Furthermore, Gary Petersen, Halsey Hathaway, HKJB, Inna Babaeva, Ivin Ballen, Jered Sprecher, Jose Ruiz, Joshua Abelow, Keltie Ferris, Kris Chatterson, Matthew Smith, Milton Resnick, Pamela Jorden, Progress Report, Stacy Fischer, Stacy Fisher, The Working Title, Tompkins Projects, Vince Contarino
Give it time and the Internet will mobilize for change in just about any arena. So it’s not surprising that artist-run exhibition spaces — always bastions of change — are increasingly striving for a stronger online presence, sometimes even eschewing fixed brick-and-mortar locales all together. And it’s not just exhibition spaces. Artist-run curatorial projects like HKJB, Culture hall, and Progress Report exist mainly on the web, producing information that’s decentralized and disseminated horizontally, peer-to-peer. All of which is relatively new.
One of these projects, Progress Report, is designed as an online curatorial resource centered on visual content and studio visits. Co-founded by Brooklyn-based painters Kris Chatterson and Vince Contarino, their project is particularly keen on abstraction and focuses on the creative process from the perspective of working artists. This is noteworthy not only because Chatterson and Contarino are a couple of accomplished abstract painters in their own right, but also because they prove to have an expansive grasp for what their contemporaries are up to. -
More about Progress Report and our conversation after the jump. -Matthew Smith, D.C. Contributor
Installation view of The Working Title, a group show on abstraction curated by Progress Report and exhibited at the Bronx River Arts Center, March 25 through April 29, 2011.
Filed under: Review, San Francisco | Tags: Hosfelt Gallery, Jay DeFeo, Jess Collins, Joan Brown, Manuel Neri, Nadiah Fellah, Rat Bastard Protective Association, San Francisco
In 1959 Jay DeFeo and her then-husband Wally Hedrick received a letter from Bruce Conner, inducting them into the Rat Bastard Protective Association, of which he was the President, and suggesting that they start paying dues. Other original members included Joan Brown, Manuel Neri, and Jess Collins. The group of about eight artists exhibited together in San Francisco throughout the 50s and 60s, meeting every couple of weeks at each other’s apartments and studios. They formed at a time when the Beat artists were gaining prominence in San Francisco, and began to be somewhat of a spectacle. Visitors to the city could take tour buses through the North Beach neighborhood to see the ‘Beat Scene’, and Hedrick himself capitalized on the hysteria as a paid window painter at Vesuvio cafe. Dressed in all black, he sat in the popular North Beach bar’s window and created improvisational paintings and drawings each night, performing along with the jazz band. - More from San Francisco contributor, Nadiah Fellah, after the jump!
