The loudest, most boisterous among us often garner the attention. But sometimes it is the quiet, unseen, yet powerful, undercurrent that most profoundly shapes us.

Much of Marc Zimetbaum’s life was under the radar. But his impact on others, whether they realize it or not, was enormous. Some may remember him for his major role in the foundation of the New York Studio School, which for more than half a century has impacted the lives of so many. Others experienced his love for sculpture during the summers he taught at Chautauqua. Or perhaps you knew him and didn’t realize it, simply through the many years he worked as the third floor manager of that mecca for artists, Pearl Paint on Canal Street.

On December 20th, 2020, Marc Zimetbaum passed away peacefully in Eger Nursing Home from Covid-19. Fifty-seven years earlier Marc, then a junior at Pratt Institute, read a 1963 ArtNews article written by Mercedes Matter entitled “What’s Wrong with U.S. Art Schools”.  Years later he wrote, in an unpublished manuscript:

We didn’t want a degree. We didn’t want grades. We only wanted to study with artists we respected, to spend eight to twelve hours a day in the studio, to have time to grow individually and stylistically without an instructor hovering over us, to be in a place where there was art talk, intelligent visiting faculty and lectures. We wanted to look long and hard at ourselves and our relationship with the history of art and the art world of today.

Along with his friend Chuck O’Connor, Marc met with Matter. Leading a group of disgruntled students, they decided to start an alternative kind of art school with no grades or distractions, only a powerful ambition for their work as artists. There were several meetings in the Chelsea apartment of Louis Finkelstein and Gretna Campbell. After talking with Mercedes they named it “The New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture”. The Dean at Pratt said their new school wouldn’t last six months. In the Fall of 1964 the school opened. The original faculty included Matter, Charles Cajori, Sydney Geist, George Spaventa, and Meyer Schapiro. Their visiting faculty included Edwin Dickinson, Philip Guston, Alex Katz, Earl Kerkam, and John Heliker. Many of us who know and love the Studio School may not know this, but without the faith and Herculean efforts of Marc and Chuck at the beginning, that article written by Mercedes would have remained no more than a critique in an art magazine.

Mercedes told me many times that she adored Marc, that he was a critical backbone keeping the school alive in its early years. Marc had been a straight A student in high school, third in his class of 500 at Weequahic High School (then ranked the top high school in New Jersey). He was elected Senior Class President and became Editor in Chief of their literary publication, Ergo. Marc’s mother wanted him to go to an Ivy League School. Instead he chose the struggles implicit in the life of an artist. He would have remained closely involved with the Studio School, but life had other plans. In his twenties he suffered the first of what were then called “nervous breakdowns”. These would periodically haunt him for the remainder of his life, interrupting his long stretches of stability. Despite that enormous obstacle, Marc always remained passionately optimistic, and repeatedly pulled himself back in unexpected ways. There is a lump in my throat as I write that there is a lesson in that for all of us. He never gave up.

Recovering from one of these episodes he became well known as the third floor manager at Pearl Paint for many years. Later he managed the Studio School’s art store, Manet On Eighth. For eighteen years, Marc worked as a sculpture instructor at The Art Lab School at Snug Harbor and at Wagner College he was most proud of a group he created for sculptors who shared the cost of a live model. They met on Saturday mornings and he always looked forward to working and talking about art with his friends there.

In the early years of the new millennium, I invited Marc to teach figure sculpture in the renowned Chautauqua Institution summer program. He taught there until 2014. He collaborated with other faculty and students, exhibited his work, and made work in his studio. He was proud to be a part of the 100th Anniversary Chautauqua School of Art exhibition at Denise Bibro Gallery in 2010. A mutual friend, the potter Polly Ann Martin, summarized the shared experience that many of us had with Marc in this latter phase of his life by saying In distant memory, it was a divine summer shared in collaboration with my throwing vessels and his endless passion for drawing on them with many a raku firing. Polly shared the image of a piece on which he drew and gave to her, going on to say simply I have never found myself tired of looking at this work as it has…become part of our home.

Zimetbaum was the recipient of a grant from the Rothko Foundation in 1974, and the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2001. In 2005, at the suggestion of his dear friend Harriet Vicente, he applied and received a grant from The Harriet & Esteban Vicente Trust in order to write a book about his experience during the early years of The New York Studio School. Although left in manuscript form there are plans in place for its completion.

A biographical film entitled Marc Zimetbaum: Journey of An American Artist,  by Mark Ozz and Erick Emerick (available at Amazon)  offers a lesson to all of us who have faced what we may think are impassable obstacles. He was a living example revealing that it isn’t what happens to us that defines us. Instead, it is how we respond to what happens to us that defines who we become. A few years ago Marc wrote “I’ve been involved, all my artistic life, with the figure, with trying to create an image that grows out of perception, in an attempt to capture a particular model in a particular pose, without slavish preconceptions or reliance on anatomy that tends to dehumanize, rather than bring a figure to life.” Marc didn’t just bring a figure to life. For many of us he made our own lives richer through what he gave of himself.

Marc is survived by his sister, Lisa Max Zimetbaum and her husband Philip Popkin, his former wives Nancy Lewis, Eve LeBer and Janet Rispoli, his daughter Erica Zimetbaum and her husband Guy Johnson, his daughter Ruby Zimetbaum Oyola, his son Red LeBer, his niece Rebecca Royen, and granddaughters Sylvia Johnson and Sienna Oyola.

The post Bringing Ideas to Life: Marc Zimetbaum, 1943-2020 appeared first on artcritical.

“Liminal” is the word that best sums up the work of Ewelina Bochenska. Neither strictly painting nor fiber work nor sculpture, her objects encompass elements of all three. They are intimately sized, wrapped with yarn, painted, layered with wooden objects or leather or lace, and painted again. The range of textures and breadth of palette imbues each work with unique, almost undefinable, energy which Ewalina herself describes as an “alien substance” with “otherworldly” characteristics.

Similar qualities are to be found in the artist herself – a globetrotter who draws influence from sources as diverse as folk art and music from her native Poland, to the indigenous Aymara people of the Andes highlands of Bolivia, Peru, and Chile. As Ewelina describes it, for these people “time flows backwards, front to back,” and in her own work the artist often moves between as many as 10 projects at once, listening for them to invite more work or demand to be left alone. She seems to thrill in occupying these thresholds of time and material, acting as the sorcerer for her “alchemical” objects: “I manage to freeze a moment of awkwardness of materials and color and shape and that maybe is when the work is ready – until I break it up again.” She intermittently pauses, listens, adding a new layer, perhaps, to an older piece, playing with their sense of time in creation. She even calls them “artifacts from the future” (artifact, she said, is one of her favorite words).

On the day that I visited Ewelina at M. David Studios in Brooklyn, she was preparing for a group exhibition to be titled “A Montage of Heck” (it was on view from October 12 to November 4th). Little canvases and paper works that she had recently brought from Poland were strewn around the floor, and as we talked about them and her process she began to lift them, one by one. I was surprised to see that the artworks were crafted all the way through – by which I mean that not only do they involve layers on top of the substrate, but that the base material (be it canvas or found thrift shop picture frame) is often covered on its sides and even back. She talked about the looping of yarn and the carving of wooden bits hidden beneath layers of paint – visible only in faint relief when you look closely – and manipulated her work to show me examples of these multitudinous processes. With every new piece handled the works became more sensual and bodily – I was entrapped in Ewelina’s hourglass, my own experience of her work seeming to slow down the pace of the outside world and transport us both away from the noise of neighboring gallery spaces. She continued to turn the objects over – revealing some with secret undersides: lace, embroidery, weaving, a bold signature. “I always want the work to surprise me,” she said, recognizing her process of reworking as well as the experience of others who discover the surprise side to the work, “but it can be subtle, like a whisper.”

She let me handle the objects as well, and I was shocked at their heft. Though some of them were no larger than a sheet of paper, their intricate layering gave them unexpected weight. I found myself holding one work close to my chest, cradling it almost as one would an infant. As I looked around at the abstracted forms – some resembling landscapes, others with sensual curvature that actually seemed bodily – I again thought of their ethereal liminality. Meanwhile, Ewelina talked about color: “The way I experience color – the way I paint – I kind of hear the color or the quality of the material, I kind of feel it, rather than through my other senses, rather than through just sight. So in a sense the color and the texture and all, they become, for me, another dimension.”

This synesthesia was something that I experienced when I first encountered Ewelina’s work at the New York Studio School alumni exhibition this summer, “X Marks the Spot.” Her contribution to this all-female show – a small painting of bright pinks and blues over a maroon carpet, bordered by yellow woven yarn – exemplifies the warm intimacy of Ewelina’s work. The red background implied heat, and the near-neon colored paint strokes drew the eye in a circular motion. I almost felt as though I were watching the Northern Lights from a comfortable old chair, forgetting the white walls of the gallery space in Manhattan.

When I asked about the development of her work, and where she might be going next, she talked about her history: first studying business, living in Ireland and then London, and eventually satisfying her lifelong fascination with art by pursuing a career as an artist. She stressed the word courage – a trait which not only comes through biographically, but also in her  uninhibited play with materials. She said that she has found herself in a moment of transition, and was thinking of heading somewhere in South America for rest and a new spark of inspiration. “I am using the energy of change to catapult myself.”

The post Otherworldly Objects: Ewelina Bochenska discusses her work with Natalie Sandstrom appeared first on artcritical.

Graham Nickson: Cumulus, Monumental Trees and Transient Skies at the New York Studio School

September 4 to October 21, 2018
8 West 8th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City, nyss.org

Although Graham Nickson has been Dean of the New York Studio School since 1988, it has taken this long for the institution to persuade this beloved teacher and leader to agree to allow an exhibition of his own work to grace the walls of this historic institution. Karen Wilkin and Rachel Rickert, the curators of the exhibition, have drawn works exclusively from the indepth collection of Nickson formed by the late William Louis-Drefus, with watercolors and one related oil painting spanning the period 1999 to 2013. Nickson is perhaps better known, or is at least equally known, for monumental figurative compositions of bathers by the sea, as seen recently in exhibitions at Betty Cuningham Gallery as well on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. But sunrises and sunsets have been an important interest from the outset of his career.

I vividly recall, from a talk he gave at the school about his work almost two decades ago, him discussing the formative experience of painting the skies morning and evening, each day for weeks on end, at the British Academy in Rome where he had won a scholarship from the Royal College of Art in London where he studied. This discipline fed his passion for light, color and nature. The discipline and the passion go hand in hand with Nickson. As he explained in his Beer with a Painter interview with Jennifer Samet in July 2014:

I’m interested in things that are opposites — dichotomies. Obsession, and what you do with it, is part of that double thing: it is obsessive, but it is good for you. How can you paint bathers for thirty years? How can you paint sunsets for such a long time? Well, you can if you feel that they are still as thrilling and challenging as they were from the first.

Another dichotomy is trying to make something monumental out of something transient, trying to make something transient out of the monumental.

From Tuscany to Cape Cod, Australia to Hawaii, the force of Nickson’s look into nature, the rapid yet meticulously built up rush of light, water and paint, is deliciously bracing. Sensual, wild, almost outlandish combinations of color and bold contrasts are balanced by a deep dark internal sense of structure.

Particularly powerful in this exhibition is the way the dual themes in the show’s title – trees and skies – are arranged in two large wall installations comprised of individually framed watercolor paintings: . Eighteen dramatic skyscapes dominate the first room, while in the second, each composition depicts a single “monumental” tree in different seasons exalting in shifts of growth, light and color. For me, these installations bring to mind associations and contexts likely very far from the artist’s intentions that nonetheless serve, through contrast, to bring out what I think is the true spirit of these works.

For example, in viewing the Skies wall it hit me—after beholding the beauty and intensity of hue and texture, light and clouds folding about one another in rich, almost dizzying color–how our iPhone world has us living in snapshots, scrolling through image walls and timelines on social media: Our clichéd desire for the sentimental landscape, the romantic sunset- shot over and over, used endlessly to express a sense of nostalgia, what Karen Wilkin, in her catalogue essay, refers to as “forbidden subjects…for contemporary artists”. But Nickson’s paintings could not be further from the snaphot. Sensation here for the viewer is immediate and yet wonderfully slow: The images demand real looking, as the artist so passionately yet with full control of his paintbrush, looks, using hue, value, opacity and fluidity to full effect. The accumulation of form and movement, from image to image, resonates as musical interludes, riffing off one another with saturated color and subtle harmonies, while each painting remains an entirety. In Black Hush: Dawn, Luciano d”Asso, (2005) purples and grays layer atop one another as darkness presses down into land, leaving the gold of light like a razor’s edge across the earth. Red Stream Sky (2005) unfolds upward from reds through deep oranges, slashed with violets and rising toward a soft yellow patch in the painting’s upper left corner. One is reminded that while experiencing nature, we soak it in all around us, looking left, right, up, and down – often the beauty is so strong it is hard to bear. Nature, through paint, occupies us wholly.

The second wall installation presents 15 watercolor images in which a single monumental tree motif is central to each composition. At first impact there is strong sensation of repetition. One, another, then another tree, painted through seasons, growth, change and stability. Each image contains a principal color contrast, or opposition, such as the pale yellow sky against green black tree in Serena’s Tree: Yellow Sky, (2000) or the orange-green clash of light to shadow in Serena’s Tree (2000).

Thanks to the massed installation, I could not help thinking about Andy Warhol, though it is hard to think of two artists who have as little in common conceptually or aesthetically. Why does the artist choose to come back again and again to a subject? In the Pop aesthetic, Warhol’s subjects lost a sense of individual meaning through multiple repetitions, photographic mediation and screen printing process. Irony prevailed, and the artistic temperament and hand were of little value. For Nickson, repetition serves to see more deeply into the subject, to create metaphors between nature and art, to question vision itself in the seeing and re-seeing of a single subject as a vehicle for color expression. His concept of repetition says that vision is endlessly changing, not static. Personal sensibility prevails, even though there is a determined detachment capable of maintaining close observation while painting en plein air. While in substance and intent Nickson’s work reveals quite opposite or contrasting meanings to that of Warhol, I believe these meanings stand out all the more because of the veil of similarity.

This show is a tour de force for Nickson, after decades of dedication to building a history through his powerful body of work. We stand before this devotion, rich in feeling, memory and sensation.

The post Saturated Color and Subtle Harmonies: Graham Nickson’s Watercolors appeared first on artcritical.

March 9 to April 15, 2018
8 West 8th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City, nyss.org

“BICYCLE LANE CLOSED PROCEED WITH CAUTION” is emblazoned on a firehouse red police placard flexible enough to buckle slightly at the point at which it’s fastened to a similarly hued plastic barricade. The signage and street furniture are off duty, variously nested, falling over each other or willy-nilly abandoned, cordoned off by more orange in the form of trestles and cones. Huddling up to this scrum is an alien, though still color coordinated object that takes its chances in the street like a parked vehicle. It is, in fact, something familiar to aficionados of the author of the photograph being described, Diana Cooper: one of her few freestanding sculptures, Speedway (2000-03). At its reverse the sculpture is also furniture-like, albeit with warped functionality, exposing a dollhouse grid of cubbyholes, but on the side visible in this photograph it is a veritable Mappa Mundi of circuitry and squiggles that encourages the illusion of a vortex at its center. As if all this perspectival overload were not enough, in the distance a fantastical mural can be spied in which gnarled tree roots frame a naively rendered cityscape intimating streets beyond the street.

Packing a semiotic punch, this photograph marks the bottom right corner of a salon hang of over four dozen disparate smallish pieces in two and three dimensions (vents and meshes being popular starting points for the sculptural objects) to constitute Wall Piece (2018). This show-within-a-show aggregate (something Cooper has done before, incidentally, in an accumulator piece titled “Watch Your Step,” 2012) Wall Piece is the most recent of the 13 works in “Gleanings”, a 21-year overview of this intrepid “explorer of situational geometry,” as the critic Barbara Pollack has described the artist. Pulling back to reveal a contained scene that is, itself, but a microscopic detail of a larger picture could, indeed, be deemed Cooper’s trademark idiom. Such micro-macro progression, now familiar from the periodic repixilating of Google Maps, proceeds within and between works such that a given Diana Cooper exhibition is a teeming matrix of focal points, layers, associations.

Photography, with its clean, mechanical precision, is very much in a minority among Cooper’s mediums: Most of her work, in this show and beyond, is resolutely handmade in a way that refuses to disguise the human agency of the maker, although there is no effort, either, to achieve expressivity or a projection of selfhood. Her touch has the casual obsessiveness of a visionary – nerdy, dutiful, sometimes urgent, other times repetitive, always matter of fact. Her vision, on the other hand, is systematizing, committed in earnest to taxonomies of form and function. There is something almost unnerving about the way the found and the fabricated cohabit within this artist’s soul: It is as if she operates within one mode for organization and another for execution, to produce something simultaneously neat and ambiguous, clean cut and mushy, scientific and craftsy.

She is not alone in the contemporary landscape in the pursuit of either mode. Born in 1964, she is five years junior to Jessica Stockholder, with whom she shares a formalist willingness to misread, color code and otherwise redesignate as raw things cooked already by the culture that produced them; and senior by the same number of years to Sarah Sze who plays similar games with scale within exquisitely precarious ecologies. Cooper stands alone, however, in the starkness of her split.

One way of making sense of this divided sensibility is to think of everything she makes, regardless of size or resolution, as a sketch. It is as if she didn’t get the memo that drawing has an end, in both the sense of a place where it ought to stop and in the sense of a preparatory function. Whatever medium a work of hers seems to inhabit – in terms of dimensions or impact or scale – it remains within the orbit of drawing. Recalling Jean Baudrillard’s fable so popular at the time of Cooper’s education, it is as if she is mapping the world to scale. Even in the earliest piece in the show, The Black One (1997), a painterly work executed on canvas, the support expressively activated in areas of tearing and lacing, with a metastasizing sculptural protrusion in black pipe cleaner, the quality of line is insistently graphic. This is equally true of the cutout or taped lines in reduction works like Façade (2016) or Silver City (2010-13). Drawing, it would seem, is Cooper’s way of being in the world.

But drawing would seem to occupy a spectrum in Cooper, the axes of which are collage and doodle. The street scene with which we started extends to photography a collage mentality, one that juxtaposes environmentally encountered banalities and personally generated marks in a string of associations. The doodle, on the other hand, pulls back – at least in its moment of becoming – from the clarity and purposiveness with which the artist organizes and orders materials, amongst which, ultimately, the doodle will be one more. Nonchalant, resigned to a state of semi-consciousness, fiddled but unfussed, the doodle is yarn from which imagery is spun.

Overdrive (2007) a mammoth double-sheeted framed drawing 80 inches wide in ink, colored pencil and marker, is a tour de force of doodling, reveling in the oxymoron of that designation. Recalling Mark Bradford in its cartographic density, it reads like a stack of maps on transparent pages where somehow lines and patches bleed between layers, the choice of red abetting such sanguinary, cellular associations. The drawing relates to an important sculpture/installation in Cooper’s career, All Our Wandering (2007), a telescoping ziggurat of red cubes whose exposed interior physically literalizes the receding planes suggested by Overdrive. Addressing her love of maps, systems, color coding and the like, Copper has said (in interview):

Systems are a way people try to make sense of things or create order. They also are all around us, in the natural world and in the man-made world, and I am intrigued by how they intersect, echo one another, or come into conflict. But I am less drawn to the specific content or narrative of a given system, which for me is just raw material. In fact, I am interested when something like a diagram or a graph disassociates itself from its origins and becomes something else entirely.

Some commentators have argued that, by hand rendering complex systems, Cooper re-humanizes them, both mitigating their oppressive impersonality and exposing their fragility, and thus the vulnerability of those who depend on them. This is a valid though somewhat reductive interpretation as it detracts from the inner logic of drawing. A more compelling way to view the relationship of the handmade and the systemic that incorporates the seismographic aspect of the artist’s hand is to think of the doodling, sifting, categorizing artist as a cog within a bigger machine, a cell within a pulsating organism, a spider in her web.

The post Mappa Mundi: Diana Cooper at the Studio School appeared first on artcritical.

January 29 to March 4, 2018
8 West 8th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City, nyss.org

Let’s blame it on the constant digital barrage. Lately, news about artists has threatened to distract us from actually examining their art. Some of the most captivating stories are about artists tagged as outlier, outsider, or self-taught—stories of, say, an eccentric mystic creating prescient abstract paintings; of a reclusive janitor secretly making comic strips of gender ambiguous children. And then there’s James Castle.

Who can look at his eked out dark little interiors without wanting to learn Castle’s story? Born profoundly deaf, mute and dirt poor in Idaho in 1899, his desire to make art was so urgent that he drew using soot scraped from a wood stove, moistened with saliva and applied with sharpened sticks on discarded scrap paper or unfolded cardboard containers. But let’s put aside the story and look intently at his work. James Castle: People Places & Things, curated by Karen Wilkin at the New York Studio School, gives us a new opportunity to reassess what really makes his work so fascinating.

Although it may seem incredible, when we look closely it becomes apparent that in these drawings we see a mind making a systematic inquiry into the expressive and formal possibilities of representation. Meaning that we see someone, though unschooled, not just dutifully trying to replicate his surroundings in a drawing, but doing it with an awareness of just how he is structurally recreating his world and endowing it with feeling. What he chooses to depict and with how much detail indicates where his attention was fixed. His ubiquitous rectangles, for example, not only serve as building blocks of figuration, but are meaning-filled vessels: Pictures, doorways, windows and the drawing itself exist on an equivalent level with other rectangular objects. Tabletops are rectangles strewn with marks representing objects.

In series of works in this exhibition Castle is seen building his understanding of pictorial structure. Several drawings of the same scene change his point of view: more to the right side, or from a slightly lower vantage point. These shifts affect the representations in the picture. A window seen from the side can go from a dark rectangle in one drawing to open up to the landscape in another. A strange face haunting a little interior turns out to be a doorway containing a sliver of patterned wall hung with eye-like pictures.

From an early age he intently, privately, and with no knowledge of art or how it is made, produced hundreds of small works. A former chicken coop and then a trailer became his studio on his parents’ small subsistence farm in Idaho. After they died, it was willed to his sister and he lived there with her family his entire adult life. But we shouldn’t overly romanticize this vision of a little deaf mute boy spitting into soot, and scratching out drawings on materials he scavenged from the trash. It’s not as if they were so poor they couldn’t afford pencils and paper. In fact he was eventually supplied with oil sticks and watercolors. The way he used materials indicated something much deeper than mere penurious ingenuity.

The use of found materials was a way to own his surroundings. He could barely communicate beyond basic gestures and he refused to do farm chores, but the alchemical transformation of the byproducts of his immediate environment into depictions of it, became a way of understanding and laying possession to surroundings to which he probably felt excluded.

He attended a school for the deaf for five years when he was ten, and what occurred there is a mystery. He left at what must have been the middle of puberty, but sexualized bodies do not make an appearance in his work, and because he was not able to use what he learned to communicate beyond basic signing, the possibilities of human relationships seem to have been limited. Instead, like many artists, he used drawing to understand his relationship to his world. Though interiorized in feeling, his work was not about a rich fantasy life like many outliers, and unlike most mainstream artists, his explorations were of necessity more urgent. Looking closely one can see that through his work he began to study how his physical reality was put together.

Nothing is dated here and any ideas of chronology can only be speculative. Nevertheless it is not hard to sense a progression from detailed drawings of his immediate environment—a kitchen, a bedroom, the side of a house, or a view of a field—to a more sophisticated deconstruction of pictures, where abstract form is understood as meaning. Several drawings are devoted to iconic house forms that register as ambiguous symbols.

One of the great strengths of Wilkin’s exhibit is how the drawings are often augmented with James Castle’s source material, which he had carefully preserved. Castle drew inspiration from sources that at first seem so random that it is only when we look to their transformation that we see what might have attracted him. It is usually a fascination with the way a form conveys feeling.

A panel from the comic strip “Henry“ is transformed from a silly scene of the dopy overgrown boy. He has fallen asleep as he digs a pitchfork into a garden plot, a trail of Z’s rising from his head as his perturbed mother looks out at him through a window. Castle turns this, like much of his work, into a dark existential moment. The Z’s are gone, but the strings connecting the stakes demarcating the garden plot are carefully reproduced, as is the side of the house with the window and a shrub in the background. But his mother is barely limned in the window, and Henry becomes a misshapen homunculus with a pitchfork. The shrub in the background goes from a cheery bush to a harbinger of something gray and ominous. Is Castle’s Henry digging his own grave? While the white picket fence in the background is preserved as merely a white shape, Castle amusingly reproduces an anomaly in the newsprint as a strange ellipse. Castle very diligently constructed the black outline that frames the original panel, thus emphasizing the successive rectangles of garden plot, house, and window.

At what point Castle starts to recreate actual objects from the world is unknown, but it seems to come from a more confident and sophisticated understanding of representation. Pieced together drawings are constructed into simulacra of articles of clothing. Or a drawing of a typographic word like “plays” will become the subject of an entire piece. The font is carefully delineated, but the letters become individual calligraphic personae, each serif endowed with unique expressive qualities. He may have been unable to read, but it seems deliberate to represent that word “plays” so evocatively.

He had also created whole hand-bound volumes of images. Apparently one of the few things he did learn at the school for the deaf was how to bind sheets of paper into books. The books are strange amalgams of pages of little rectangles, sometimes twelve to a page, mostly containing portraits, but some are strange symbols or objects, and the images are surrounded by scribbly lines to indicate print. They resemble high school yearbooks or product catalogues. It is this eerie cataloguing aspect that exemplifies the systematic quality of Castle’s work. Having lived until the late 70s, he must have encountered television, and it is notable that some of the portraits look as if their heads are TV sets with faces appearing on screen.

While Castle’s story is compelling, unlike many outliers he was acknowledged as an artist during his life. When he was fifty, Castle’s nephew attending art school in Portland, Oregon brought a few of his drawings to the attention of a professor and his talent was immediately recognized. For the next 20 years until his death in 1977 he became celebrated in the Pacific Northwest with eight one man shows, only to lapse back into obscurity until 1998, when twenty years after his death, his family finally allowed access to the work. Its appearance at New York’s Outsider Art Fair reignited national interest, followed by a retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2008, museum accessions, and a presence at the Venice Biennale in 2013.

Examining the pictorial thinking of “outsiders” often takes a back seat to the thrill of rescuing overlooked objects from the trash bin of history. An excitement that is fueled by a perhaps unconscious nostalgia for artistic sincerity is elicited by work that often bears a coincidental visual relationship to modernism but is untainted by modernism’s worldly ambition. This is not really the case with James Castle. The correspondence to mainstream art in Castle’s work, while unwitting, is not superficial. Though it appeared he was indifferent to his “success,” the diligence and concentration that he brought to his work are qualities of many mainstream artists, and tells us a lot about what it means to be an artist. As an artist, he exists on a twentieth century continuum somewhere between Albert Pinkham Ryder and Agnes Martin. And though isolated, James Castle lived in our time and was certainly touched by it. Art has historically been forged in solitude, and though it is tempting to romanticize it, his solitude, while deeper than that of most artists, fueled a quiet passion that is evident in the mood and intensity of the work.

The post Beyond Soot and Spit: Rethinking James Castle appeared first on artcritical.

December 11, 2017 to January 21, 2018
8 West 8th Street, between 5th and 6th avenues
New York City, nyss.org

At first glance, the bold patterns in John Walker’s recent paintings and drawings appear to mark a change in direction from the large gritty paintings of tidal pools of Maine that were his last body of work. On further viewing, it becomes apparent that his familiar landscapes of mud, water, fire and tides have become compressed into signs or ideograms. These perhaps reflect time spent in Australia during the1980s when he made a study of boriginal bark and cave paintings as well as the abstract lineage of modernism.

The intimate, explorative exhibition at the New York Studio School exposes his complex interaction with a particular place and its shifting transient nature. Walker has often spoken about rejecting the picturesque in favor of primordial nature as represented by mud, dirt and water. In the region of Maine’s Seal Point and John’s Bay, he has found these necessary elemental motifs. At the edge of land and water, he has become immersed in the visceral experience of light, space and motion. There he has sought to bridge the atmospheric, volumetric world of matter and its equivalence in signs. Landscape thus becomes an arena not only to view the fleeting nature of the elements with its seasonal and biological cycles but also a vessel for thought and process within the context of various pictorial languages.

In Fire and Tide and Two Brush Fires, some of his former complex spatial panoramas with their diverse vantage points and horizon lines remain. Walker, however, has often changed his viewing perspective. At times, he has vicariously crawled along the surface of the earth or seen things as a fish traversing water or as a bird from above or a combination of different vantage points in the same painting. In Two Brush Fires a vertical panoramic space is grounded by two trees uniting land, fire, water and sky seen both from above and at the horizon. By contrast, John’s Bay Pollution” reveals a flatter, condensed spatial world of water patterns containing floating interactive shapes. Viewed from above, a brown form hovers over incoming and outgoing tides acting as a magnifying glass revealing particles of pollution. This pivotal form compresses the action of the bird/fish and shield shapes reminiscent of the mapping of animal and water trails found in Australian aboriginal painting.

Sign language becomes even more evident in black and white drawings that evoke musical exercises with their motifs and recapitulations of the ebb and flow of tides: times of day amidst floating objects pulled by currents. Walker has stated that all his abbreviations of shapes and forms come from acute observation of particular sites. His drawings reflect these observations of a sea world with undulating patterns, horizontal and vertical lines that act as cross currents creating pulsating tensions. Fish, ice cakes, detritus, clam markings, and fragments of land intermesh with the tides.

Walker’s quest to reassemble pictorial language from a diverse painting vocabulary is no easy task. Throughout his long career he has searched for ways to meld the painterly traditions of Goya, Constable, Turner and Abstract Expressionism with the more formal language of Matisse, Malevich and Ethnographic Art. Over the past decades he has been moving back and forth between both pictorial concepts, sometimes emphasizing his love of light and expressive painterly forms, other times using abbreviated signs, and sometimes managing to simultaneously employ both modes. In his painting series, “A Theater of Recollections” (about his father in the muddy trenches of World War I) he combined ideograms, patterns, and words from poems that interact with volumetric shapes and atmospheric moods. The Studio School show is a good introduction to his innovative merging of the physical tactile world with a formal language of signs, ideograms and pictographs, expanding the painter’s language in this time.

The post At the Edge of Land and Water: John Walker’s Landscapes appeared first on artcritical.

In one respect, it might have been better to send a painter. Talking about Steed the other day with my associate Suzy Spence, who by coincidence also visited his studio recently, I heard second hand about his conviction that there is no such thing as muddy color, that arresting color can, and should, sometimes be found from the erratic mixture of what is at hand. Instead, a different kind of color dominated our discussion, as “Danagate” (controversy surrounding Dana Schutz and her painting at the Whitney Biennial, Open Casket, discussed at length here at artcritical earlier this year) was just then erupting again, in Boston. Some black artists there had called for the ICA to withdraw their exhibition of Schutz. Clintel Steed’s perspective as an impassioned, driven, truly independent African American painter is equally enriching, however, whether he is addressing his own dense, lively, intriguing paintings or broader issues of politics, history and subject matter.

We met at his Sunset Park studio and began by looking at large pictures of an Olympic swimming event, part of the series that includes his piece in the Alumni Exhibition. The painting captures the swimmers just as they take their dive.

CLINTEL STEED: I think there is something about that feeling of letting the body go that is pretty amazing, they can totally trust that. I wanted to paint this subject because I felt, watching the Olympics, that all the athletes are so in tune with themselves: it is the most Zen moment there can ever be. I just think there is something magical about that. I like that philosophy of trying to live your life everyday, in the moment, and trusting.

Everything depends on the moment: in one they are about to dive into the water, in another they are frozen mid-air. There’s a different kind of painting space, a different intensity: the figure floating on a plane. So each time you paint it, there is a different kind of time. You know the way time can exist in paintings? I watched the Olympics and took pictures with my phone of the TV screen, and then from those images I have made the paintings. I wanted to take the pictures with my own phone because that made it personal. My way of taking ownership of that moment. I didn’t want to go with the image that comes out later, taken by other photographers.

DAVID COHEN: When you look at these images do you feel that you are in the room or do you sense the artifice of the screen? Do you want the remoteness or intimacy? What is our viewing connection to this space?

I think as an image-maker I am always searching for an image that will be challenging that will have some of the elements that I find exciting in painting. When you find these moments, there’s the rhythm in the figures, right? I always liked Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie and the way that kind of moves around the rectangle. In my way, too, I’m always trying to get some sense of movement, some sense of time, some sense of rhythm. And these things allow me to make it in an observational way. I always need that sense of nature, and this is a part of nature in a way, these sports: human beings, in this coliseum, and I like it because it sometimes borderlines on some kind of abstraction, too. But it is not abstraction, it is something that always excites me.

We are looking now at a painting of a Taekwondo match: The fighters are like a readymade abstraction, because of the uniforms and the way they are blocked in, the cube-like nature of their moves.

That is the thing that is magic about the visual world, when you pay attention to things, that you don’t have to fight hard, all you have to do is pay attention and things kind of happen naturally. Shapes and forms interacting with each other. The thing is to be able to be open enough or aware enough.

Did you feel, in any way, that the exuberance of the Olympics and its appeal across boundaries took you away from the darker imagery you have explored in your work? 

I think there is something about it, the way all cultures come together for this event; countries that wouldn’t ordinarily socialize or integrate are doing so through this thing. I am always trying to find some kind of subject matter. Sometimes I am just filling up the time, but with this, I just knew that I wanted to paint it.

That figure walking along there, a judge or an official, almost becomes a dominant figure in this composition. He is no less interesting than the fighters. There does seem to be a strong democracy across your surfaces: not so much of a figure-ground relationship. The way the background is fissured or broken up can make other kinds of figures out of things that aren’t figures.

I think about surface a lot. Relationships: relationship to the rectangle, for instance. I want these areas to be activated, to somehow have their say, too. Everything has to have an impact, and that gives it its all-overness. There is no hierarchy to me. It is how that dynamic symmetry or whatever starts to happen. You are being pushed or pulled. Even though this is a dead moment in the painting somehow it has weight to it; it is reacting to those figures; that yellow and that black are communicating to each other. This is something that makes the work dynamic, just visually.

I’ve known you since we ran into each other at the New York Studio School; there was almost a mythology around you. You already had all your degrees; you’d been a guard at the Met; some facts and fictions got mixed up in my mind. Run through your story.

I was born in Salt Lake City. I went to undergrad right out of high school, moving to Chicago, that’s where I got my BFA, and went to the Studio School right after that for the summer marathon and that’s when I met Graham. He offered for me to stay for the year but Susanna Coffey told me I needed to go to grad school, to get my degree, so I went to Indiana University. Then I came back to New York and applied for a Fulbright but I didn’t get it. I was working at the Met and I saw Graham and he said, come back to the School for a year and apply for it again, as they were exploring the idea of a PhD program. That never really happened but I ended up going back to school for four years.

It sounds like an addiction to education!

I had been challenged at IU, I’d been challenged through my whole education, but I think there was something special about being able to go back to the Studio School and study with Graham, with Stanley Lewis, Paul Resika, meeting Bill Jensen. These were great opportunities for me. It made me grow as a person and as an artist. I was able to revaluate what I had learned for those six years [BFA, MFA]. It is kind of intense to think about that stuff, but the PhD? People hated that idea. Somehow it was against the gods. I really respected Graham, so if he had asked me to do it, I would have done it anyway. He is a real hard worker and he respects hard workers. I think painting really is just about hard work and being consistent.

Much of your imagery before the Olympic series had to do with politics. 

No, before the Olympics I was doing the boxers. Before that I had done the bills, and the Somali pirates. And then I hit this moment where I wanted to get rid of all that stuff. I got into the Beijing smog series: that’s the CCTV building.  I painted it more than once. I just liked it as an idea.  As for politics, being African American it is hard not to paint about that experience. But there are other times when I just want to paint for painting’s sake, to see a stroke next to a stroke or a color next to a color. Paint the landscape. Different subjects, not just politics. But as a painter you are always trying to find some kind of a subject. You are always looking for something.

I find your painting intriguing because it has amazing sophistication and awareness of what painting can do and the history of painting but it also has a very raw immediacy; an instinctive, “street” feeling as well. Are you conscious of that as a dichotomy?

Not all the time. I fight to stay myself. I do paint a lot of motifs sometimes, I do have a lot of things going on, but I’m always just searching for that purity. I am always trying to be affected by where I am at, where I am standing at the moment. I am using history, I am using my moment. I want to be a sponge in that way. So if it comes out, it comes out. Thinking about Van Gogh: when he was painting those paintings he didn’t know what they were going to be for us in a hundred years, but that constant searching, looking, making is what made him, so somehow that’s the way I want to be, constantly acting and making. Talking about things that are important to me.

What do you think of the Dana Schutz affair, in Boston?

I think it’s terrible. It is hard to exclude ourselves from race and stuff, but it is 2017. We have to drop some of these mental constraints that stop us from mixing and telling stories and sharing stories. I fall prey to that a lot because I feel at times the black community doesn’t pay attention because if you look at my paintings they don’t feel like they are made by an African American artist, it is not black subject matter. If I painted more of it, would people pay attention to me more?  But I’m also human. I’m born and raised in this country, and I know there is a lot to offer in the world, more than just this burden of Twelve Years a Slave. As long as we are trying to fight these battles like this we are not going to make an evolution.  For her, I think it is something that she did innocently. And that is what painters do, we look for subject matter. Her explanation of why she did it, that she can imagine it happening to her own child, rings true. And I didn’t even know the story of Emmet Till until this all happened.

Really? That’s fascinating because I have been on a panel where a black critic stated that there is no African American who didn’t have this story drummed into them as a child.

That’s the thing: The history that we talk about that we share sometimes is very limited. We don’t always know about our own past. That’s why they keep telling these stories, like Twelve Years A Slave, because the more you find out, the brutality of it, or you could walk down the field and there’s five black guys being hung, that’s kind of crazy, but at the same time when we are telling these stories it can’t be an isolated thing; the more people share and talk about it, the more the pain become real for other people. MLK wouldn’t have been MLK without Caucasian or white people standing next to him and marching on the front line. We need each other. Our stories need to be told. Look at Hollywood. The Color Purple was made by Spielberg. That’s one of the greatest black, African American films of that period but that wasn’t made by an African American. I would be more mad about the fact that we don’t tell our own stories. African Americans can be very ashamed of their histories, their family histories, their grandmother’s history, so things got buried up.

Did you grow up in a household that was very proud of its heritage.

We were very religious, so sometimes there is no space for history. The stories we told were sad stories about people, basically about the Devil lurking after you; they would talk about bars out in the woods with people drinking, very scary places, you didn’t feel like a good time was happening, people walking around with guns, getting shot. Religion is good, but it also makes you blind to certain truths. Talking about race, especially right now, is very intense. The sad thing about some of these people with Dana Schutz is that they should be uplifting African American artists, championing people who have gone to that other level. Why don’t they talk about Henry Taylor? I love his work. Nobody said anything about him. And that’s a problem. As long as we are fighting this battle, how are we going to give our own people that limelight? We need to be supporting each other. I think there was a fairly big amount of African Americans in that show; it was certainly very diverse. When we fight these battles we lose.

I mean, what would black people think about my paintings, I don’t even know. I don’t know what my own people would think if they saw these paintings. Because they are not like Kara Walker. I’m not putting black in their face. I’m not making a picture of a black male and pouring honey on it. If I did that would it be stronger? If I made black face work? [laughs]

But there are a fair number of black figures in your painting. I don’t know, because, I know you, I know you are black, and I look at your paintings. If someone showed them to me and said they were by a young African American it would make sense. because it does have a quality of rawness, energy, speed, a little bit of (in a positive way) aggression, physicality, athleticism. Athleticism is a better word than aggression. They are athletic paintings, they dance, they sing. Okay, maybe these are cultural clichés. (Actually, they are definitely clichés [laughs].) but these are of course black accomplishments.

That’s something we can’t deny. It has been there since the beginning of time. I don’t think you have to run from it. You have to embrace it.

But it is not that you are consciously cultivating a language that would feel in any way black, it is just that you are being yourself and you are black and it comes through.

Exactly. But if I tried to express my blackness all the time I would lose a sense of myself because there is that part of me where I just want to be able to experience the Olympics void my color just as a human being watching another human being doing something exciting and challenging at the same time without this cloak, without this war. Other people can use it as power and I understand that but I am searching for this very intellectual thing, I want to express this side of the mind that creates things, that makes stuff. To me the idea of Tesla is incredible. How can the human mind design such a car? That fascinates me, about being human. when you use your mind it can do great and beautiful things. [laughs]

You mentioned that you wonder how a black audience would view your work. Do you show in black contexts? 

Most of the time I guess my work isn’t black enough. I went to the Studio Museum in Harlem and saw Rico Gatson, who does those halos of color around the heads of artists and musicians. He is a friend and I respect his work and other African American artists but I think, I’m not talking about what they are talking about. But I’d really like to have the opportunity to see what my own culture would think about. I know what my family thinks: they think it is just a bunch of abstraction. They believe if you can draw and it looks like something then you are talented. They don’t believe that red next to that yellow can be a thing. [laughs]

The post “That is What Painters Do. We Look for Subject Matter”: Clintel Steed in conversation with David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

Who got to decide that musicians play and painters work? Instrumentalists have to practice alone for hours, and then perform under nerve-racking scrutiny, slaves to the beat. We can all picture the perspiring face of a rock guitarist or classical pianist screwed up in paroxysms of concentration. Painters, on the other hand, can take their time in the serenity of their studios, perfecting what they want us to see. And even when angst or indecision is their expressive mode, these choices are “performed” at leisure—recollected in tranquility, as the poet puts it.

Lois Dickson makes us think a lot about time and space, work and play. Her compositions are rich, dense and busy. Form and color work double-time to denote depth while exuding no-sweat exuberance, the brush dancing on the plane. This summer [2016] saw the culmination of a sustained trajectory in her painting journey from which no less than two solo exhibitions were to be selected, opening in as many months, first at John Davis Gallery in Hudson, NY and then at the Painting Center in New York City. A woman in her 80s whose paintings routinely stretch to six feet or more in a given direction, the sheer physicality of her output is prodigious. But adding to this, and what truly inspires awe, is the sense of progress—a striving for clarity while maintaining complexity—that characterizes her oeuvre.

A ludic morphology lies at the heart of Dickson’s endeavor. Elaborations of shape and excavations of depth animate her pictorial intelligence in ways that are at once playful and earnest. Intelligence is the operative word here, for Dickson always presents us with both a plethora of information and persuasive principles regarding its organization. Singularity and multiplicity cohabit in scenes imagined and observed. Her brushstrokes are at once measured and fresh. Surfaces are lively but form has definitiveness and weight.

When, earlier this fall, I had the chance to examine an extensive group of recent paintings in her 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. Work and play are equally and powerfully in operation. Unprogrammed improvisation is the dominant vibe, and yet the progress within and between canvases suggests its own logic. You can read the story of her thoughts in a body of canvases; stop that narrative at any given picture and formal and thematic teleologies thread their way through its immediate predecessors. But jump from the first to the last within a sequence, and even though recurring motifs are unmistakably Dicksonian and each picture carries the DNA of her touch and palette, an aesthetic gulf opens up, suggestive of fearless experimentation, of unbound formal curiosity, of an artist who refuses the straightjacket of a “trademark” style.

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, and yet there is always direction. It seems, therefore, not a coincidence that – contemporary references inferred above notwithstanding – the formal touchstones for Dickson’s style are firmly rooted in the canon of early and mid-20th century modernism. The plasticity of her facture can recall Marsden Hartley, George Beckmann, or Philip Guston in Tough Guy (2016), What Happened (2016) and Over Easy (2015) respectively, or the smooth impasto of phases in the 1930s paintings of Arshile Gorky, de Kooning or Stuart Davis in cleaner surfaced pictures like Glimpse or Citrus Pull (both 2016). In a singingly crisp, almost hard-edged canvas like the admittedly unfinished Pas de Deux (2016) the Orphism of the Delaunays or the Suprematist phase of Liubov Popova come to mind. And, of course, Matisse, Picasso and Bonnard are frequent associates of her brush.

All this is not just, to my mind, a question of taste, of her sensibility gravitating to this lush extended revel in the art history of painterly experimentation. Rather, it suggests that her painting agenda is motored by modernist purposiveness. Think of the number of images in Dickson where it almost literally seems like a machine is driving the forms in some kind of vortex or oscillation. Roundabout (2016), a delicious little painting of 10 x 10 inches, has a Futurist feel in the frenzied spin of wayward blades. In Over Easy it seems like engine parts are extruded from rotating giant screws chugging away in the center of the composition. But I’m not suggesting Dickson as some kind of neo-Futurist: the mechanical is always offset by the organic in her shape vocabulary, recalling the primary role of plein air landscape and surreally improvised but botanically exact explorations of plant life in her evolution as a painter. In fact, a dialectics of the organic and the geometric is itself an active current within modernism, one that allows an artist of the next century (ours) to continue the great experiment, in earnest, without recourse to irony.

In the spirit of this dialectic, I see the quarry of Dickson’s quest as a kind of biomorphic cubism. Biomorphic in that shapes follow internal laws of growth in their abstraction and reinvention. Cubist in that time and space are facetted in multiplicities of perspective, in that forms are seen from different directions simultaneously, in that deep pockets of space cohabit with insistent formal flatness. Another smaller canvas, Gallery, is almost a dramatization of this kind of play. A Prussian blue form is seen in duplicate on what almost reads like an Expressionist stage set with intimations of mirroring or a receding back stage space hidden behind flaps. The shape can read variously as an extending hand and forearm or a fetal form. This is one of those “clue” paintings that empowers the viewer to find similar instances of pockets and facets in more ambitiously abstracted and complex larger compositions—and they abound. The triumphs in Dickson come in moments of “push-pull” in Hans Hofmann’s famous phrase, in which credible, emotionally resonant depths are struck within the necessary-seeming literal flattening of the picture surface, in which illusion and actuality arrive at a state of détente in their perennial struggle—a playpen within a battlefield.

The post A Playpen Within A Battlefield: The Paintings of Lois Dickson appeared first on artcritical.

Video (c) New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture

The World New Made: Figurative Painting in the Twentieth Century by Timothy Hyman. (London: Thames & Hudson, Ltd., 2016) ISBN 9780500239452. Hardcover, 256pp, 142 color illustrations, $50

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May 31 to July 10, 2016
8 West 8th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City (212) 673-6466

Driving on winding country roads one often sees the cautionary yet poetic sounding sign “Bridge Freezes Before the Road”. You know to check your speed, pay attention to the surface and be warned for vehicles to spontaneously spin out of control on black ice or hidden pockets of slush in otherwise apparently normal circumstances. As a show title, “Bridge Freezes Before the Road” alerts us to slippery conditions and challenging possibilities of Cora Cohen’s paper surface.

Cohen is a formidable abstract painter who is known for deploying several different mediums and approaches within a single work. Recent bodies of work strive to make the act of perceiving or making the major preoccupation of the work. There are hints of her historical influences, whether Jean Fautrier, Henri Michaux, Wols, art brut, art informel, New York School painting or Far Eastern art, to name a few, but her subjects, choice of materials and themes come from her own reserves.

This show, which was curated by Karen Wilkin, is a perfect opportunity to glimpse at how the artist might see drawings as they are being made in her studio, as, unframed, they are informally pinned up and hung in groups that may or may not relate to a larger painting or signal a nascent theme. The show comprises 27 works from the last decade made on synthetic and natural papers, in sizes ranging from 9 by 12 to 22 by 30 inches with titles such as “Hybrid Indexical Adventure Series” or named according to dates in action or completion. The titles are unambiguous despite the somewhat generic dating. They underscore, as does the title of the exhibition that the artist works from her experiences of first sight, combined with a very wide range of influences that she draws away from as the works themselves develop. I list the materials: graphite, acrylic gesso, acrylic medium, watercolor, crayon, colored pencil, pastel, Flashe, archival ink-jet, wood-veneer, pigment – not because the amount of them is so extraordinary by today’s standards, but because of how well she knows them and in turn coaxes freshness out of them in drawings of delightfully unexpected combinations and poetic compositions.

In 08-15, (2015) fragmented sinewy crayon lines meander over a richly developed whitish surface. Traces of lines can be found below areas of added colors of minty green, blue, yellow and coral. At a glance an image of a figure in a squatting position with a large right foot at the bottom of the page might be found but as your eye slows and the upper half of the page is explored, now an aerial view of land in which solid forms begin to appear as pattern. Maps, seasons, climate changes and such seem to be collecting on the page. Washes of grey have the effect of toning down clacking yellows, while dry pastel seems to be blanketing the lower portion. Something that is very powerful in this particular work is the way it can make us feel engaged in discovery as we look. The surprise of seeing entire worlds encircled below certain areas with marks and textural shifts keep us searching for more. It is as if the sounds of a full orchestra are made by just a clutch of instruments. And as in a concert hall, the worlds one viewer finds won’t necessarily correspond to the discoveries of another.

In 015-11, (2011) veils of delicately hued liquid cover much of the off-square format. Brushstrokes sink into the creamy paper: successive layers lighten some areas while in other places pigments bleed and pool to make natural edges for new shapes. Drips and splatters become attributes or relationships rather than signifiers of process because in Cohen’s work, everything gets worked into the image. A big swath of a cloudy medium collects and dries in the lower left half of the page forming crystalline shapes like those found on freezing windows. Four or five biomorphic forms, hovering atop it all, are significantly more densely colored than the environment they occupy. Their edges are circumnavigated by colored pencil and graphite in repeated routes that frequently slip away from the forms they describe, to instead create areas that invite the viewer to mentally fill them in. There is a smoldering awareness that as these floating things resolve into one form or object then like a cloud they can becomes another. It is something of this world, with its allusions to atmosphere, lichen, algae, crystalline forms and geological peaks and something of an altogether alien plane, a hybrid existence.

The post Slippery Conditions: A Show of Drawings by Cora Cohen appeared first on artcritical.