Yes, we’re all reading non-stop mashups of images and ideas on Facebook. I like the immediacy of the scroll and the occasional real-time discussions that take place—these days, mostly about politics—but when it comes to viewing art and reading about it, short of the gallery or museum experience, I still prefer blogs. For this installment of Bookmarked, I have selected four blogs I visit regularly, all different from one another in form and content, but each one deeply satisfying.

Henry Samelson’s Buddy of Work has an interesting premise: inviting artists to submit “an example of their primary work alongside an example of their peripheral (buddy) work.” The format allows us to see the connections in an artist’s work, a window that’s pried open a bit wider by the words each artist shares about the pairing. Gelah Penn shows an installation and a work on paper; Lori Ellison, a drawing and a poem; Katherine Bradford, a small oil of a stack of syrupy pancakes and the same subject painted large on a construction wall in DUMBO. The viewing is addictive. Karl Bielik pairs a chromatic gestural abstraction with a moody black-and-white video of his band, Lark, while Emily Auchincloss’s painting and potholder pairing is a lark, sharing an unexpected compositional thread. Over 70 artists have participated since Samuelson started the blog early this year.

A different kind of pairing take place in Chris Ashley’s long-running Look See. The Oakland-based artist alternates his HTML drawings—digital minimalist compositions created by computer code and made for viewing on a monitor—with photographs he has taken in his travels. I find Ashley’s unpretentious views of nature personal and quirky, but truth to tell, it’s the color-saturated HTML drawings I log on to see.

Mira Schor’s A Year of Positive Thinking, now in its second year, is wordier and thinkier than the average blog. Feminism looms large, intertwined with politics and art. To read it properly you need time, but you will be rewarded with long pieces on Louise Bourgeois, for instance, or a three-part consideration of cave paintings inspired by Werner Herzog’s film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams.  Don’t take forever to get there, though; Schor’s “year” may be drawing to a close. “I intend to continue for a while longer,” she writes, “although other writing projects I’ve been germinating may claim my attention.”

With art coverage on the decline in conventional media, Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof’s The Artblog is a model of how to write about a city’s art scene. The city is Philadelphia. Fallon and Rosof, both artists, along with a staff that includes art historian Andrea Kirsh and a number of contributing writers, offer reviews, picks, features, interviews and podcasts. The format, with seven opening-paragraph teasers on the home page, is now more magazine than blog, a testament to the big need this online publication is filling. If you’re planning a trip to Philly, this is your guide. But you may want to log on even if you’re not headed that way, just because it’s a good read—and there’s plenty of international coverage in there, too.

Unlike the rolling queue of social media, blogs offer their content for the long haul, archived and accessible. There’s context. I can linger.

Joanne Mattera is a widely exhibited painter who works in a chromatically resonant and reductive style she calls “lush minimalism.”  She is represented in New York City by DM Contemporary. Her work is in the collections of the New Britain Museum of American Art, (Connecticut), and the Montclair Art Museum (New Jersey); at the latter it can be seen in “Patterns, Systems, Structures:

Abstraction in American Art,” curated by Gail Stavitsky, through early 2013. In her Joanne Mattera Art Blog she reports on exhibitions in New York City and wherever she travels, including the Miami art fairs in December. Mattera divides her time between Manhattan and Massachusetts.

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As an artist I am most drawn these days to reading blogs of other working artists.

In the painter Paul Corio’s “No Hassle at the Castle”, a ‘weblog on painting, horse racing and other subjects’ (the other subjects being mostly jazz and politics) I feel I am in a conversation with an informed and critical mind. Recently, Corio came to grips with Romanticism, in response to Mark Stone’s “Henri Art Magazine”, which has been preoccupied with ‘Romanticism in America” – perhaps the single most enterprising and enlightening analysis I’ve encountered in years on this subject –  one which lurks in the background of every artist’s thinking. Stone writes, for example, about DeKooning, and why he was different, especially at the end, from the other Abstract Expressionists – that his work was both transcendent and physical. More lately, Stone on Courbet is something every painter should read.

I’ve also encountered “Immaterial Culture”, by the pseudonymous d.richmond; this, again, is writing from the heart.  An artist like d. richmond writes out of a need to know, for his work.  Sharon L. Butler’s “Two Coats of Paint” and Joanne Mattera’s “Art Blog” are two others I frequently look at.

What sets apart the artist’s blogs is their earnestness and faith.  Critics analyze and dissect, but do they write from the heart, as artists do?  Artists may wish to promote themselves, but in writing they are usually working, and thinking.

It is the spirit of inquiry that sets the artists apart: they strive to understand, and the blogs give us the conversation, the searching coming to grips that once animated the New York scene when everyone lived below 14th Street.

Artists who write write for a purpose. They may be working out their own trajectories, erratic and capricious, but, mostly, they are writing out of necessity. This is a big part of what now actually moves art along; in my view, we need it.

George Hofmann is a painter who lives and works in Albany, NY.  He grew up in New York, trained at the Akademie der Bildenden Kuenste in Nuremberg, Germany, and taught for many years at Hunter College.  A former director of the Francis J. Greenburger Foundation, Hofmann has served on the board of Art Omi and as a visual arts juror for SUNY/NYFA.  He maintains the website ArtistsResearchGroup.com, on the history of the Hunter College Art Department.

http://georgehofmann.com/

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Kristin Baker is not to be held responsible for what the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston claims on her behalf. I noted this to myself as I read the website copy for Kristin Baker: New Paintings: “This collaged layering of streaked color evokes the acceleration of matter across a surface, light through space, and action over time in ways that blur conventional definitions of painting.”

At the exhibition itself, the wall text put it this way: “[It] is ultimately her painterly attention to making, or facture, that becomes the focus. In these new paintings, Baker continues to stretch conventional definitions of what a painting is—and can be.”

And after my visit, I perused the press release, which promised that an October 21 gallery talk with MFA curator Jen Mergel and conservator Carol T. Henderson would reveal wonders: “They will address how curators appreciate Baker’s work because it stretches one’s understanding of painting (traditionally oil on canvas) in exciting ways… Both perspectives offer new insights into contemporary works that are pushing the limit of conventions with exciting new art.”

I’m sorry I missed that, because I would have liked to ask curator Mergel a question: Did conventions kick her puppy? Every weapon in Baker’s arsenal— squeegee painting, masking, acrylics, plastic supports, and raucous-looking abstraction— had been explored before Baker was born in 1975. She is not defying conventions, but employing them in a particular unison. Conventions are positive and enabling, and shortcomings in choosing them well or using them well are not the fault of the conventions themselves. Anyway, it is not as though anyone is forcing contemporary artists to work in a particular style. I assert further that no one—not a soul—thinks of painting as oil on canvas and only that. Mergel is directing a critique at a stultified, conventional character that exists only in her imagination, for the purpose of making Baker appear to be the revolutionary that she is not.

The MFA show consists of four paintings intended for its new Community Arts and SMFA Gallery, thusly named due to its dedication to School of the Museum of Fine Arts alums like Baker. This cruel revision of the I.M. Pei-designed Museum Road entrance is as dismaying as the new Americas Wing is stunning, but it created more wall space, and her eight- to ten-foot paintings use it well. Until a few years ago, Baker’s masked, smeared acrylics on white PVC depicted race car crashes in a style with precedents in Pop and Futurism. She has discarded the imagery, which must have taken some courage. Now the vertiginous perspectives and the tumbling autos have been sublimated into arrangements of crisp shapes. In the better ones, you can still hear the roar of the engines. Her most handsome effect is the squeegee application of dark colors on the white PVC, which results in a look akin to strips of errantly exposed film. The strongest of the four is Matter Facture, in which blue-black walls, beams, and a mighty triangular slice set up interjections of translucent rose and opaque white.

But Baker’s talents are straining as she attempts to put a painting together without the benefit of imagery. Full Dawn Parallax is a catalog of everything that goes wrong when you’re out of your depth as an abstractionist: fruit salad colors, a composition that doesn’t suggest that any of the four edges should be the top one, and an excessive sameness of component parts that degenerates into clutter. Baker painted it on clear instead of white PVC, and mounted the panel on a framework that lifts it a foot off of the wall. The resulting transparency is enervating, replacing needed bright whites with mousy frosted plastic that doesn’t register as part of the work. Rime Affinity indicates that she should avoid making high-key paintings. She’s better with black at her disposal, creating illusory transparencies instead real ones, such as in Refraction Within. This work looks like it was collaged from enlarged x-rays, and painted over with the same aesthetic and color scheme that inspired Bumblebee the Transformer. It falls short, but it is nonetheless dashing.

There happens to be a lot of noteworthy abstraction on view in Boston at the moment. Joanne Mattera at Arden Gallery, for instance, manipulates encaustic and iridescent pigments to produce luscious surfaces that look like a fusion of stained glass and raku. Across the street at Miller Block Gallery, Imi Hwangbo is showing elegant constructions of cut Mylar, hung on the wall in layers so that the removed pieces form a topographic floral design. Choice of materials, precision of execution, and elements like the vertical cut that runs through the flowers in Sanctuary, gives these works an architectural austerity that counters a certain “girliness.”

Over on Harrison Street, Walker Contemporary is showing work by an artist with a related sensibility: Benicia Gantner, who works with hand- and machine-cut vinyl on Plexiglas or flat paper, forming vistas of biomorphic silhouettes and complicated stencils. They look like Inka Essenhigh run through Thomas Nozkowski. Ruby & Gold Waterweb makes striking use of the vinyl, all sharpness and mechanical flatness, as it depicts an implied forest scene with teeming paisley undergrowth, schematic trees, and fuchsia garlands against a flickering burgundy sky. It lent noticeable warmth to the real sky over Boston, full of crosswinds and the sobriety of November.

Kristin Baker at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, October 2, 2010 – March 27, 2011
Joanne Mattera at Arden Gallery, 129 Newbury Street, Boston, November 2 – 29, 2010
Imi Hwangbo at Miller Block Gallery, 38 Newbury Street, Boston, November 12 to December 23, 2010
Benicia Gantner at Walker Contemporary, 450 Harrison Avenue, Boston, November 5 to December 18, 2010

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