When, earlier this fall, I had the chance to examine an extensive group of recent paintings in Lois Dickson’s Columbia County studio something that became very clear was the particular nature of development in her work, whether within a given canvas or from picture to picture or across this segment of her mature oeuvre. Ludic improvisation is the dominant vibe, and yet the progress within and between canvases suggests its own logic. What struck me quite forcibly was the modernity of Dickson’s progress—modernity, that is, as opposed to postmodernity. OK, there’s a leading role for the Pixar/Disney fish character Nemo in her almost George Condo-like painting of that title from 2016, and a jocular sense of Mike Kelley run amok within the pictorial space of Las Meninas in Procession (2015). But the accumulating jumble of Dickson’s imagery is irony free. She lets forms and feelings dictate a scene, but there is always clarity and rigor in the direction.

Lois Dickson, Nemo, 2016. Oil on linen, 64-x-64 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and John Davis Gallery

John Davis Gallery, until October 9, 2016. 362-1/2 Warren Street, Hudson, NY 12534, (518) 828-5907
Painting Center, from October 6, 2016. 547 W 27th St #500, New York, NY 10001,

 (212) 343-1060

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July 22 to August 15 2010
362½ Warren Street
Hudson, New York 12534
518 828 5907

This exhibition of oil paintings from the last two decades makes the discerning viewer long for a proper retrospective of Brenda Goodman’s oeuvre. The Detroit-born artist uses events, often painful and psychologically scarring, from her personal life, such as the tragic death of her partner’s son, the loss of a beloved pet, childhood ostracization and lifelong health issues, to influence her abstract inventions. Her combination of figuration and abstraction works seamlessly on conceptual and formal levels, and even when she focuses a specific composition on one or the other, the two stylistic approaches are never separate. The abstractness of the work is cohesive and consistent even in her more figural works and you will find surrogates for the human figure in all of the wholly abstract paintings in this exhibition. When Goodman is making paintings that have easily discernible forms in them, such as the artist sitting or standing naked in her studio studying and absorbed in the act of looking at her own paintings, as in her Self Portrait series, or the figures and weirdly illuminated environments found in her Singing series, we always feel as if the artist’s subjectivity is present in her layered and dense colors, carefully and subtly worked surfaces, and the distortions of space, perspective and form she utilizes.

Goodman creates imagery that is archetypal in the classic Jungian sense, without any literary pretensions or irony. Although her paintings are filled with specific references they are in no way obscure, uncommunicative or a form of therapy. The core experiences of all of our lives are still worth making art about, without resorting to ahistorical pastiche. Goodman’s art proves that if we excavate our emotional experiences by making a serious attempt to master tools and materials of one form or another through time, art works will emerge that will resonate with meaning for a wide swathe of viewers.

Goodman’s paintings are testament to the fact that all space, time, and events in paintings are virtual, that they exist in the mind and in imagination. The abstract forms and masses of lines she invents always suggest a figure or a head, and these appear to be resigned to whatever state of being they are in, be it sad or happy, or experiencing some transformation or tumultuous emotional upheaval. In her Troubled Waters series, for instance, an abstract blobby rock-cloud shape is a surrogate for the artist and other important people in her life, with disturbing stitches in the place of mouth or orifice to denote a face. Goodman’s work is a strong and individual member of a long line of paintings and sculptures that include anthropomorphized abstract shapes. Artists that Goodman has a kinship with include Arshile Gorky, Adolf Gottlieb, and Henry Moore.

Four large, wonderful paintings from 2009-10 included here, Crossing Over, Burial, Loss, and Hard Choice, are abstract environments which could read either as interiors or exteriors. They are maps of painful emotions. In three of them, a large and dark looming shape commands the viewer’s attention, but the small figures, whether cat and human, which are positioned atop, beneath, or within them, are the driving forces of the images. The figures in these battered but not hopeless landscapes must contend with events and forces beyond their control. The subjectivity of the artist is mediated and not necessarily in charge. Accident and a lack of preliminary sketches on the part of the artist allow the process of painting itself to reveal things. But the triumph of expression is always clear in the sense that the humanoid forms have a dignity to them. There is no narrative element in these paintings, but the artist confronts herself again and again, and through the details of her life she reveals the struggles of human consciousness.

The light-filled and layered surfaces of her paintings make apparent how deeply the craft foundations of painting matter to Goodman. She loves to use a variety of traditional and non-traditional tools to achieve the perpetually revealing painterly terrains in which to immerse our eyes. She uses ice picks, Q-tips, metal spatulas, brushes and palette knives, and cake decorating tubes, as well as admixtures of wood ash of varying coarseness and oil paint to make the final images mysterious. The interplay of translucent washes and opaque smears leaves the viewer wondering how the paintings were made.

Goodman manages to create profound and moving worlds that touch on the core themes of death, loss, pain and longing, joy and celebration, self exploration and self discovery. Her depictions of ritualistic events, as found in paintings like Troubled Waters 4, 2009, often include processions of invented beings. Without being pretentiously philosophical or heavy-handedly literary, and avoiding clichés through sheer inventiveness, Goodman’s compositions tap into a collective consciousness that all of us can relate to. And it isn’t only the abstract forms in her paintings that appear animated or alive; each brushstroke and scrape and drip is infused with an animistic energy.

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On the occasion of his show of small paintings at John Davis Gallery in Hudson, N.Y. [in 2010] I took the opportunity to pay Roberto Juarez a studio visit in nearby Canaan.  This found him at work on a design for a domed wind tunnel for the University of Michigan School of Engineering. Juarez, who has been exhibiting in New York City since the early eighties, was represented by the Robert Miller Gallery for over twenty years, parting with them once Robert Miller himself had left the gallery, and then had two solo exhibitions at the Charles Cowles Gallery, only for Mr. Cowles to retire and shut up shop. He has been active with public commissions, meanwhile, since 1990. Public commissions, for Juarez, “are a way to continue to develop ideas that differ from my studio work such as nature based imagery that I used in the eighties”. They also “keep him going” when gains made through gallery representation are thin.

Michigan owns works by Juarez, which led to the commission. The artist plans on using the actual surface of the dome to create his design, which will include alternating bands of special high gloss and non-gloss paints and his trademark bisected circle forms.  The circles, he points out, actually relate to the symbology used by engineers when measuring wind currents. Juarez exudes excitement about the project.

His show at Davis of small oils on cardboard and canvas was a welcomed opportunity to exhibit more intimately scaled works. New York City galleries typically want big work for exhibitions, making this the first opportunity to show small works, which he has made since childhood. “I think that’s why I’m an artist, because I really love painting. It something I experienced very young as a child. At the Art Institute of Chicago I remember going and seeing a Van Gogh exhibition during my very first visit to the museum and buying a book of the Sunflower paintings. Taking that home was just unbelievable. I remember thinking that this was what I really care about. Not even knowing what that meant, but knowing that everything else that was going on in my life wasn’t as important as that experience I had in front of those paintings.”

Juarez arrived in New York City over three decades ago from Paris, where he completed his thesis for UCLA and decided to not return to L.A. “It was the end of the seventies. My first show there was in 1981. I had been aware of what was going on in New York when studying filmmaking at UCLA as a graduate student. There was a resurgence of painting in the early eighties because of things that were happening in Europe and the response by American artists such as Julian Schnabel and David Salle. It was fun to be in New York in that period when all of a sudden people were looking at, and appreciating, painting, because the kind of painting I was doing was very lively, very expressionistic. It was not neo-expressionist. I think it was actual expressionism. I wasn’t trying to be ironic.”

Juarez began using tree and flower imagery in his work around then. He was trying to engage subject matter that he felt was stereotypical for a Hispanic and homosexual artist, adding lightness and humor to the mix. “There was a cultural aspect involved with using certain subject matter. I thought that because I was Hispanic to do tropical imagery was kind of funny. It was expected in a way even though it had nothing to do with what my culture was at that time, because I grew up in Chicago. It had nothing to do with this lush tropical experience. It was not what I knew about.

Juarez used this organic imagery because of its formal qualities. He wanted to discover a new way to paint abstractly. “People said you must study flowers; spend a lot of time looking at flowers. But I didn’t. I went to books. I was drawn to older books that had faded images of flowers. It was more about the form than the realism of the flower. There was a kind of humor that I enjoyed in going towards something that I thought was cliché–ethnic cliché. And that came from being a student in San Francisco and going to the Galería de la Raza, which was a Mexican/American gallery in the Mission District of San Francisco. There were certain prescribed things that were of the moment. And I remember showing my work, which consisted of drawings and paintings of televisions at the time, and they were like, Well! This isn’t Hispanic Art. I was using culture in a humorous way. I think it was a continuation of trying to understand what my place was in culture and to take the obvious and to use it to say something different, to say something about formal abstract issues that I really cared about. So I was working with the idea of expectations and also having fun with not fulfilling those expectations even though it seemed like I was setting it up as that.”

His interest in trees and flowers, which he explored throughout the eighties and nineties stemmed primarily from the formal qualities of these things, the branching forms. “When I did put in a branch it was as much about the diagonal or the line that the branch made and the connection it made in this kind of visual network, which has now kind of been stripped bare to just the network becoming this geometry of circles and overlapping forms.” His goal was to explore abstraction and form by focusing on these shapes and he was not interested in making representational or descriptive art even when he used recognizable imagery in his work. He was seduced by the beauty of the wildflower illustrations of Homer. D. House, which he used as a catalyst for his own explorations of space and form for a while.

Over the years Juarez’s imagery pared down. Although he does return to tree and flower forms on occasion, he now more typically works with networks of geometric forms: triangles, rectangles, circles. These invented compositions are filled with light and color, but they all suggest weightlessness and movement. All but one of the paintings in his Davis show included bisected circles. “They are intimate in scale. I was interested in showing my thinking process through oil sketches on cardboard instead of completed paintings. The purpose of the circles is to integrate and dissect the multilayered compositions. The color, due to the oil paint, is much more saturated and liquid in appearance, where it used to be dry. The casual format also allows for a new level of invigorated brushwork.”

Juarez noticed that he is once again playing with expectations about gender and sexuality in these small paintings, by using a lot of bright pinks and oranges. They have a sketchy quality to them, with bold brushwork that resists describing specific surfaces. In the bisected circle shapes Juarez traces various tubular forms, playing the crisp edged circles against the scratchy, hatched brushwork found in the back- and middle-ground planes. Many of the bisected circles are transparent allowing this brushwork to show through undermining the viewer’s ability to decide what goes in front of what, maintaining a constant state of motion and state of emergence and reconfiguration.

Juarez’s abstraction defies categorization as it is neither landscape, portrait, nor still-life. He says that his successful paintings, which exude a sense of elemental force, are “filled with wind”. They also suggest microscopic life forms, planets and astronomical imagery. So the wind in these paintings can be either terrestrial breezes or solar winds. Juarez has created spaces that allow him to experiment with shapes, colors, and lines in new ways over and over again. But his abstraction is not abstruse in any way, because it comes so persuasively from the artist’s direct experiences. His abstraction never feels noumenal, but is clearly the product, in each painting, of sensory perceptions.

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on view in the exhibition, Jon Isherwood: Sculpture, at John Davis Gallery, 362-1/2 Warren Street, Hudson, New York

through September 13

This was an artcritical PIC in September 2009.

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Fran O’Neill, subject of her second solo show at the John Davis Gallery in Hudson, New York, was a recent recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant.  Her latest series is a breakthrough: these sumptuous, all-over abstractions built of mind-bogglingly intricate details are oceanic in their fusion of decorative and labor intensity.  Like the ocean, there is slow evolution and constant undulation.  The little teeth-like tessarae in Reel are negative shapes, revealing the white ground of the canvas exposed from the painstakingly filled-in spaces between.  The impact is somewhere between the aboriginal painting of O’Neill’s native Australia and Gustav Klimt.  Mitchell, one feels, would have approved.

This was an artcritical CAPSULE in April 2009.

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February 3 – February 26, 2005

According to F. David Martin, in his great book “Sculpture & Enlivened Space,” haptic perceptions are “feelings of things and events inside the skin.” On one level John Cross wants the viewer to discover the lovely patterns and shapes that exist beneath the bark of the tree or to appreciate the curvature of a tree trunk or branch. On another level he wants us to realize the potentiality of his chosen medium, wood.

“Twist,” 2004, “Squeeze,” 2005, and “Skirt,” 2001, are not meant to be viewed in the round. The creamy white surfaces of these sculptures reveal a state of becoming. These bark-less, chiseled and sanded tree trunks are stained with watered down, white latex paint. The layer of white paint is not opaque, so we can still make out the patterns and irregularities in the sapwood layer of the white pines that were used. Cross is a meticulous craftsman. The surfaces of these sculptures are translucent, similar to a face that has make-up applied to it. The burls and squiggly wood grain maintain a ghostly presence. The latex paint does transform the wood in the sense that the viewer can read it as paper or cloth or even marble. The thin rods these sculptures are supported by emphasize their classicism, but the references to Greek columns, torsos and busts linger in the viewer’s mind only briefly, until the abstract qualities of the work dominate our vision.

Cross enunciates the inner beauty of the tree, by carving rows of lines into the wood, which create concave or convex strips. These lines set up a fluidic and direct rhythm that emphasizes the flow of the wood grain. Because of their flat tops and the linear patterns, which are uninterrupted from top to bottom of the sculptures, these tree fragments project into the empty space directly above them. As ghostly or otherworldly as these sculptures seem, the viewer can’t forget the presence of the wood. Cross’ modifications suppress as much as they enhance the accidents of nature, and his delicate chisel work activates the surface by setting up a dialogue between his modifications and the word grain submerged beneath the paint. Cross honors the origins of the material by forcing us to study these surfaces as if they were paintings. The merging of artifice and nature is never awkward, and generates ambiguities. Are we looking at architectural forms or the clothed/unclothed human form? These white sculptures celebrate the mutability of wood.

To make the sculpture “Crossing,” 2001, Cross cut out the interior of a curved branch, put the hollowed out branch back together, and then connected interior and exterior to form an X. The X is raised at the center and the four arms of the X rest directly on the floor. Very few natural materials would allow for this type of manipulation. The interior is just as strong as the exterior. The contrast between the blocky edges of the interior of the branch and the more raw looking exterior section makes us think about the origin of the form, the ways in which inside relates to outside, and how the final curvature of the branch came into being.

“Dissected Burl,” 2004, consists of four thin slices of a tree trunk with a pronounced burl arranged like compass points and held together with crisscrossing pieces of planed 2x4s that have been screwed together and form a sort of lattice work. So again there is a strong contrast between wood that has been shaped by humans, and wood that has been unmodified, with its impurities intact. This process of making visible what is normally invisible, is a revelation, an opportunity for us to examine the circulatory system of a tree that has been lodged into a sculptural whole. The inside of the tree becomes the inside of the sculpture. Cross lets us see the weird light and dark brown blossoms and streaks in the light colored meat of the tree in a purely graphic sense. These streaks reveal the path water took when traveling from the ground to the crown of the tree. Even though we are presented with four individual slices of the tree trunk, these irregularities are repeated, with slight variation, in each slice. A whole is divided and then brought together again within the unity of the sculptural whole. In this sculpture Cross preserves a part of each layer of the tree, from outer bark to heartwood.

With “Hogan,” 2004, Cross uses the curvature of a trunk that has been sliced into four thin sections to suggest a Navajo Indian dwelling. This time the horizontal supports which hold the four trunk sections in place are more prominent and the four sections of trunk are close in tone to the 2×4 supports, so the support system and legs are unified. The four legs or sections of tree trunk converge towards a central point but never meet, and this is a symbol of protection and shelter. The horizontal supports block off the empty space between the legs, and only allow thin slits of open space to be visible in its center. In this sculpture Cross preserves, and was inspired by, the curvature of the trunk.

Cross lives on a farm in a rural setting, and through his empathy for the materials, he changes the interiors of trees into the personal inner spaces of his sculptures. These sculptures equate the inner workings of the natural world with the inner workings of the artist’s psyche.

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January 6 – January 29

Lois Dickson paints what Cézanne called the “bones of nature.” Her primary subject matter here is bracket fungus, or asymmetrical rows of scalloped spores that grow on fallen trees, and other types of fungi with differently shaped and colored caps, gills, and stipes.

“Lost,” (2004), a large square painting, is a barely contained mass of tangled brush and leaves, with the suggestion of shadowy tree trunks in the background. The wall of entangled twigs, leaves and branches boldly takes up two thirds of the canvas and the dark verticals of tree trunk are placed in the top third. The reworking of contours, based on numerous observations of photographs or actual locales, keeps the pictorial space shallow. Shapes are repeated and the linear activity spreads out towards the edges of the canvas. This diffusion of linear marks is not contained by a tight architectural structure. The interplay of many different shades of brown and green, the harmonization of mid-tomes, is wonderful to look at.

In “Commencement,” (2004), we see a fine display of the artist’s preference for small to medium sized hatches. The tension between the independent life of the brushstroke and the descriptive power of the mark is never fully resolved. The small almost rectangular scribbles which form the main imagery are reminiscent of Cézanne. The artist looks at the subject and modifies the contours again and again through careful reiterations. Forms are defined by the counterbalancing of horizontal and vertical strokes of paint. We see a preponderance of dash like brushstrokes, which are almost straight lines, miraculously form into curved edges. The central fungus shape is like a diamond placed in a deep blue velvet ring box. It is articulated towards us by a structure which echoes it. In many of the canvases in this show the fungus or main focus of the composition consists of lighter and brighter hatches of color, mainly off whites, tans, ochres, and red oranges. The backdrops supporting these meaty funguses are diffuse darker tones. The artist’s fascination with these unique objects, the warts or tumors of the earth, emphasizes the humble and focused and intense task she has set herself, to make a new object that is a record of the interconnectivity between mind, hand and eyes.

The “Dunderawe” series of small paintings probably has nothing to do with the castle Dunderawe, located on the Scottish Island known as Fraoch Eilean, or Isle of Heather, but does include some beautiful paintings. The most successful paintings in this series have a thick impasto, not unlike Monet’s late water lily paintings. The crusted pigment, layers of deep violets, greens and browns, surround the pale white, orange, and yellow meat of the enthroned fungus. The busier small canvases in this series are not as impressive as the larger busy compositions, because the visible revisions and implied sense of movement through use of repetition are stunted by the format. It would be interesting to see the artist use large areas of thick impasto in larger works. Like Monet did with his water lilies, Dickson creates objects that reek of the real but inevitably affirm an abstract concept.

Lois Dickson creates interesting pictorial spaces because they are ambiguous. This is due to the mix of natural and unnatural light sources and coloration. She revisits the subject whether it’s a specific location outdoors or fungi placed on a table, over and over again, and this re-looking is the true subject matter of the work.

One wonders if a more exacting realism or a complete surrender to the abstract would push the artist in an interesting direction. Through her worship of natural forms, her ability to rediscover some new nuance every time she re-looks at her subject and her overlaying of one set of observations over another, Dickson creates a new abstract concept of the natural world.

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