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For great posts about the business of art, check out The Artsy Shark HERE!
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Some inspiring art to encourage, and to remind us that the spirit of creativity is always looking for someone to express itself through… #gallery-73594-1-slideshow .slideshow-slide img { max-height: 410px; /* Emulate max-height in IE 6 */ _height: expression(this.scrollHeight >= 410 ? ’410px’ : ‘auto’); } 
I know so many new babies and babies that will soon be here and the last few months I’ve been going nuts making baby dresses. Not the kind of creating I usually do, a great obsession for the evenings. Here are just a few things for my new niece who will be born in about […] 
The Basilica di San Francesco is a distinctive landmark that can be seen from miles away as you approach Assisi. As you draw nearer you can appreciate the huge supporting arcades. The Basilica of St. Francis is considered one of the … Continue reading → As part of his In Process series, Paul Behnke posts a photo-blog about the development of painter James Erikson’s Slow Morning (2012). Of his work Erikson says: “My paintings are abstractions in the sense that at some point in the painting process I’m abstracting from nature, whether consciously at the beginning or through some experience or memory I bring into the studio during the evolution of the painting. Sometimes the painting reminds me of something, a particular mood or memory of a place and it won’t go away — that becomes the subject of the painting for me.” Michael Bise interviews Emma Biggs & Matthew Collings on the occasion of the exhibition Biggs and Collings: Suspicious Utopias at Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, on view through May 11, 2013. Biggs and Collings comment: “At the moment in art culture, any proposal to do with “form” is considered bad. As something transcendent, it is automatically linked with considerations of ideology and hegemony, and is seen as an illusion that allows the viewer to remain blind to social realities. Hot contemporary art is interested in plugging in directly to those, and in this kind of art, form can be anything so long as it is explicable in terms of that connection. We, on the other hand, believe that plugging-in to social realities is often an illusion. We think institutional critique, for example, has become formulaic. We address this problem in the textual component of our show in Fort Worth. Our paintings don’t avoid difficult issues but neither do they spell them out as directly readable propaganda. We look at the material and the tangible. Things have to work: the colour has to be objective, it has to be meaningful on colour terms – the same with shape, line, tone – all the elements we use. We attack mystification ruthlessly. If there are comfortable illusions, we see our work as a blow against them.” Continue reading Emma Biggs & Matthew Collings: Suspicious Utopias Colony, 12”x12”, oil on canvas This particular skull features a bouquet of zooids which are independently functioning life forms which come together to make an organized body. Continue reading Colony, 12”x12”, oil on canvas “I am entitled to say, if I like, that awareness exists in all the individual creatures on the planet—worms, sea urchins, gnats, whales, subhuman primates, superprimate humans, the lot. I can say this because we do not know what we are talking about: consciousness is so much a total mystery for our own species that we cannot begin to guess about its existence in others.” – Lewis Thomas {Late Night Thoughts in Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony} Julia Schwartz interviews painter Rebecca Campbell. Campbell remarks: “There is no illusion I have that I’m inventing anything. I’m returning to something that exists for all of us, so for me, things like death, things like light, because they have happened always does not make them rote or irrelevant. We each have to face death. We don’t get out of that. Nobody gets a free pass. Does that make it not meaningful, like there’s nothing new? The idea of being avant garde or new—Great poetry uses the same set of words, it simply reconfigures them into a way that allows us to be present again with the words. I think that about painting often. People do wonderfully inventive things with form, but there is sort of a finite system that we work within, and I don’t find that to be a downfall.” Arthur Peña interviews artist Cordy Ryman on the occasion of the exhibition Cordy Ryman: Adaptive Radiation at Dodge Gallery, New York, on view through May 12, 2013. Ryman comments: ” I can say that I’m aware that I’m working with a certain visual language which is shared and not mine exclusively. As I’ve used this language over the last 20 years or so I’ve been amazed that this language has a sort of innate flexibility and infinite scope. It can fit any mood, time, and place and always find its own honest cords without being overly contrived. Over time my own personal vocabulary within that language continues to expand. I’ve gotten technically better at some things, probably. My comfort zone shifts from time to time and I get seduced periodically by certain solutions which is always a danger if I stay too long. But as I continue, more and more solutions come up leaving me with a deeper bag of tricks so to speak. Some moves are like old friends and will ALWAYS look and feel right to me. Other moves are like exciting new acquaintances which I want to see again but don’t know exactly what I think of yet.” |
    
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Josephine Halvorson: The Painting that Got Away
A new essay by Josephine Halvorson examines how sometimes a seemingly ideal subject resists the artist’s efforts to capture it, receding into memory before it can be, or should be, realized in paint.
Halvorson tells the story of her “attempt to make a painting of a large diesel compressor next to a mine shaft on a ridge along the California-Nevada border. Its base showed the recent shine of a grinder, as if its ankles had been gnawed, its tendons sliced. It had been pushed on its side, an effort requiring considerable force, revealing the concrete foundation on which it had been secured for decades. Thousands of dried black insect carapaces were exposed in a dense layer. Looking at the machine askew, it was suddenly a severed head, its facade transformed into a face: a bolted plate resembled a shut eye, a dark recess became an open mouth, and a heavy steel shaft protruded, suggesting Pinocchio’s telescoping nose. On its rusted side, in white spray paint, someone had written ‘Shame.’”
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Continue reading Josephine Halvorson: The Painting that Got Away