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.

September 10 to October 29, 2016
537B West 23rd Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 675 7525

Pimples, cinnamon rolls, and a mountain man making paintings in the nude are some of the kinds of imagery found at Rebecca Morgan’s exhibition of recent paintings, ceramics, and works on paper at Asya Geisberg Gallery. The exhibition is titled “In The Pines,” and that is the exact feeling you get when viewing Morgan’s work since all the pieces seem to come out of an off the grid culture. Purposely made to be humorous and grotesque, Morgan presents hyper-detailed representations of stereotypical Appalachian Americans.

The ceramics included here expand on her earlier work in the medium, which she previously exhibited at the gallery in 2014. Her raku sculpture Pajama Jug (2015), with its elaborate and intricate caricature of a head, and its gonzo look, echoes the two-dimensional media. All of the dozen ceramic jugs are figurative with similar anthropomorphic appearance, splayed teeth, and bulging eyes but are individuated too. Each one’s uniqueness leads one to wonder what their backstory is and how they came to be. Moreover, their reference to alcohol and its effects makes a veiled reference to promiscuity and licentious behavior found throughout the exhibition’s images.

Drawing on influences such as R. Crumb, Francisco Goya, and MAD Magazine, with an ice-cold splash of Dutch style — e.g. Pieter Brueghel, Hans Memling, and the Van Eycks — Morgan shakes the bottle and pours out a delicious mixture of exaggerated bumpkin-looking characters. This is evident in Family Reunion (2016), which depicts a trio of all-American country folk indulging in a buffet of cake, soda, corn, and Cheezies Puffs snacks, some of which are served on a matriarch’s saggy, bra-less breasts — yummy!

All of the manically detailed complexity and bright color of Morgan’s work may make viewers envy the pair of awesome shades worn by a stoned young man in After Work Sunset (2016). Although the characters are made comically freakish, Morgan’s cartoonish renderings are imbued with a proud sense of charming guilelessness and self-acceptance. In a 2015 interview with Priscilla Frank for The Huffington Post Morgan says, “These characters are blissfully unaware, unruly, wild, and untamed. They are off the grid and free and not affected by anyone or anything’s influence and I’m very attracted to that concept.”

Morgan uses her crazy bunch as models to show what life could be when guilty of sin. Wandering Smoker (2016), a beautiful drawing, shows a close-up portrait of a strabismus man puffing on a corncob pipe. Rendered in graphite on paper, it’s tame compared to the bright paintings, with its precise hard lines and features, but is wildly drawn to give it virility and ferality. This picture is a break when trying to figure out exactly where Morgan was coming from. It is the perfect portrait of a normal man from the country enjoying a nice unhealthy smoke from a handmade pipe.

Viewers may wonder, however, if these works are too grotesque and belittling of America’s rural citizens. The imagery has the superficial appearance of objectifying and stereotyping country folk as brutish, over-sexualized, and drug-addled lunatics whose lives include a surplus of over indulgence. Nonetheless, most of her characters could easily be transferred to a stereotypical depiction of Brooklyn: beards, beer, anachronistic clothing, promiscuity, self-indulgence.

In the painting Plan B on Easter Sunday (2016), a woman with garish turquoise eye makeup, extends her tongue lasciviously, taking a birth control tablet on it in the manner of a sacrament. Elsewhere, in Creeper in the Grass (2016), a maniacal perverse man voyeuristically spies on a full-breasted blonde woman passed out in a field of daisies. Between the two of them, which join the narrative and portrait aspects of the show, and serve as bookends in its organization, Morgan provides a host of interesting characters for viewers to contend with. Her work is funny, exciting, crude, and skillfully made. Although it may make the viewer feel wrong, it is totally right — a guilty pleasure.

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In the beginning was the Word; but after that came a whole lot of little tiny carefully cut-out-and-collaged pictures. Josh Dorman’s work, and his most recent cycle of paintings/collages in his solo exhibition, “Whorled” at Ryan Lee, seem initially to be about dainty narratives set up on some kind of floating Pollock’s Toy Theatre stage, but his fantasies are more about moving words: typologies, taxonomies and nuance. Because of this, Dorman has bridged the gap between the Word made flesh — via the excised bits of numerous catalogs, dictionaries and manuals — and evolution in all its forms: natural evolution, as well as industrial and architectural, though perhaps the point here is there is little difference. In the background of all the paintings (save one) Dorman has laminated the monotonous and regular, yet ever-changing pattern of a player piano roll, a visual metaphor of the flexible inclusiveness of his visual framework.

Scouring antique books to appropriate their diagrams and illustrations, Dorman tricks the viewer into thinking that his work is about images, but the proof is in the democratic way in which he weighs the individual collaged entities in expansive, landscape-format paintings, such as Memento Mori (all 2014). The collage depicts a wide variety of apes and monkeys frolic on the shores of a lake with a similarly variegated collection of architectural diagrams. There is the all around equanimity of man and nature that marks a Bierstadt-like sensibility, despite the gross-disparities if scale and rendering techniques.

In Memento Mori there are also machine parts such as cams and cogs. The unit within these paintings is not the organism, but the cut-out. Much like a Joseph Cornell box, Dorman creates his drama via an assortment of things. The artist reminds us of the origin of his search by including several entries from a dictionary: “myrrh,” “myrtle,” “myself,” “mysterious.” Past all the smoke and mirrors of feathers, antlers, gears and spots, all of this mess neatly falls into the space between A and Z — the fundamental logic of why everything is there in the first place is irrefutable. Though he flirts between the almighty and Darwin, Dorman plays it safe as a something of a technocrat, or perhaps an encyclopédiste.

He is definitely partial to images of the natural world and this is echoed in the themes of the pieces Unintelligible Design and Natural Selection. But there is a latent criticism of the human need to find a narrative direction in scientific law: the climax, so to speak, of Unitelligible Design is a de-railed locomotive in mid-air over a body of water. The march forward, which begins on the left side of the painting with a horse, ends in a steam-powered disaster. Similarly, in Memento Mori an otherwise innocent-looking primate is munching on the bloody wing of an unfortunate avian. The images are meticulously sliced from the yellowed pages of old books and prints — they are inky and decisive, crosshatched and precisely detailed in the way that only an etching can be. Dorman places his cutouts with fantastical natural backgrounds or dystopian urban/industrial nightmares of elevated bridges and walkways — within a stage set too wild to be real, ironically enough his characters/actors take on an increased individuality, often heightened with touches of color.

Book of Hours is the most didactic and ambitious of the pieces, where Dorman posits a narrative on par with his method. The triptych relies heavily on a series of painting tropes to get a message across of the inevitability of ruin; anthropocentric or otherwise. The first panel depicts a Hicks-like Peaceable Kingdom; in the middle, he pauses for breath in an inky and etched purgatory of a Piranesian Carceri; and comes to rest with a Pieter Breughel-like hell. Predictability is not an issue here; as a painter, Dorman has free access to use many of the time-worn images that his predecessors have used again and again, but is more concerned with contemporary questions of what these tropes mean for us now, and do they still mean at all? More poignant is the video piece Sometimes We Find a Broken Cup. As with Book of Hours it has a message, but similar to several of the collages, it moves in a circular motion, presenting good and bad within the context of the natural world where such moral and aesthetic judgments do not apply. It bears a lovely similarity to Tacita Dean’s gorgeous, nihilistic 2010 film The Friar’s Doodle, and in fact, paired with Dorman’s folded Chinese book A Clawfoot Lamp, the video shows his thoughtful drawing technique to great advantage.

In the end, Dorman’s message seems to be both anarchic and deeply rational, much like the expanse of ideology he encompasses in the work. The paintings are chaotic; streams of illustrations and diagrams act as stand-ins for a series of historical and art historical pantomimes, but there is such a profusion of actors that it almost seems the director has lost control of his set. The joy in looking at the works is getting lost in the detail — but as with evolution itself, the detail is so multitudinous that missing links are hard to find and it can all seem very haphazard and miraculous even. But here is where the methodology brings comfort even if it doesn’t make sense of the disorder (which it does not). Process at least allows the viewer some comfort — Dorman’s alliterative categorical practice reminds us that no matter what scene these actors are playing or how they overlap or distract from each other, they are merely taking a brief vacation from the pages from which they were liberated, and one merely needs to pull a book from the shelf, or google a few letters of their name in order to return them to their epistemological safe haven.

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Comics With Still Life: Finding The Inevitable Place at galleryHOMELAND
September 5 through October 17, 2014
2505 SE 11th #136
Portland, OR, 402 936 1379

Will Bruno’s new art exhibition launched at galleryHOMELAND early this month to a roomful of guests. Having quit his job to head out on the road, Bruno has returned to Portland from a residency at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. The Center is located on the banks of the Salmon River Estuary at the base of Oregon’s Cascade Head. Created away from smog-choked corners and cosmopolitan saloons, Bruno’s new works suggest keen effect of setting and season where south winds blow cool and flowers perfume the air. Made in flashe, oil, watercolor, acrylic, ink, graphite, colored pencil, and variously mixed media (wood, beach wood, flowers) the works evoke a clear sense of the artist amid deserts, beaches and untamable lands, open to the daily variations of light and landscape, engendering at all times the potential for revelation.

This exhibition of light-filled landscapes, interiors, portraits and still lifes is not without its avant-garde turns, with traditional painterly qualities augmented by wilder intervening abstractions and use of different media (even video). The show’s presentation adds to its variance, with canvas works hung on nails and dispersed, watercolors tacked in rows, comic works set behind glass, and spaces fashioned keenly to showcase installation pieces, both upon floored pedestals and dedicated wall-abutting shelves. GalleryHOMELAND curator Reese Kruse did a marvelous job of leading the viewers through, from work to work, with variations spread about the space.

A cataract of three diminutive dusky aquarelles with a fragmented comic aspect begins the show; entitled Wendy (2014), they share page-space with naturalistic paintings of burnished and slung fruits. Set to deckle-edged off-white papers and behind glass, the latter still lifes are situated below highly finished ink compositions — comic scenes of a people Bruno has named “The Oogleheads.” The recurring characters are a fictive “band of roguish villains that had nowhere to turn after all else in their lives went sour from thievery and inbreeding.” The en plein air elements of these works are wrought in gouache with opaque layers that give a sense of unrestraint and presage the exhibition’s abstraction.

At 42-by-44 inches, the show’s largest painting is Beach Comber With Still Life (2014), hung near the gallery’s entrance. At the center of the composition is a still life of a succulent on a table covered with a patterned yellow cloth, while a candy-striped mock drapery hangs behind it. This flashe-and-oil painting on canvas features the comic figure “The Beach Comber,” who furtively lurks behind the drape with his stylized silhouette repeating in orange upon the yellow tablecloth. The large striped curtain is modeled from a simple, iconic dishcloth Bruno had been using at Sitka. This elemental juxtaposition, with its muted green and white as the perfect backdrop for the brighter paint of the succulent and table, calls to mind the summerhouses and figures of Fairfield Porter, but more sinister, and with none of their pastiche, These are examples of the confluence of mundanity and grandeur, silliness and beauty seen throughout Bruno’s art. The tablecloth and its reappearance have little deeper meaning (a simple texture) but one could discern a deliberate nod to ordinary life in lieu of sophistication.

The still lifes, discursive comic narrative elements, warped landscapes, and mixed media works give impressions of locales found during Bruno’s journeying in Oregon, the Olympic Peninsula, Canada, Glacier National Park, Moab, and a stay in a straw-bale lean-to off the grid in Taos. There are painted dreamscapes that abandon hierarchies of nature, self, and other. There’s the 20-by-16-inch Windows (2014), an iconic three-window oil painting on canvas depiction of, in Bruno’s words, “the perfect gradient sunset,” with which Bruno realized the power of memory to augment the work “when paint’s not working the way I need it to.” This painting is unlike the rest, in that it has the sunset light seen in certain of his aquarelles but instead of a human figure, the architectural triptych of windows serves as the figures, and finely so.

Inspired by Porter, Andrew Wyeth, David Hockney, Bruno’s greatest influence was the land and working or wandering through it; his signature is the recurrent objects, figures, and combinations of detail seen throughout his career to date. Bruno’s work, while possessing the spiritual sublimity of natural landscapes, resolutely flips the hitherto precious and othering view of nature on its head, with a declaration that “we are the Earth; it’s not a separate thing.” His painted works playfully poke fun at astonished reverence seen in the work of earlier artists, with what he describes as a practice of “ironic sincerity.”

His view of the everyday amid the majestic intends, Bruno says, “to decode life around me.” He asserts that “creating confirms existence, and drawing things I see every day helps to see how they fit together, to reconnect patterns.” On the Pacific Crest Trail in 2007, Bruno found and re-enlivened the old world and common object: a boot, a truck, and a port-a-john, amid astonishing sunrises and a lushness that is quintessentially Western. Such images and objects are found in his new show, but with more of the surprising juxtaposition seen in works like Beach Comber, and the restrained continuity of the comic fragments, all of which differentiates the old-fashioned Impressionistic handling seen here, from the experimental flourishes of the avant-garde.

Correspondences throughout the exhibition offer strange (never weird-for-the-sake-of-weird) juxtapositions and splintered narratives, populating the paintings in the way many of us inhabit our dreams. To Bruno, the fragments are “more like life than linear ones ” seen in naturalistic narratives and history paintings. There’s In The Field (2014), an en media res dog’s-eye view of an old janitor in very large trousers, inexplicably mopping up a fallow, sloping field. There’s no context here but a figure (one who never reappears) in the landscape, and no perceptible reason for the mopping of earth, but the effects are both equanimity and disquietude: the mopping man seems calm in aspect and activity, but the perspective of him and the land are absolutely warped. The acrylic and oil brushstrokes look both fast and slow; and the light is distinctly thunderstorm, rumbling with doomy purples and grays and the chill of a haunting tale.

Images appear throughout this exhibition, and gather the way people do: often spontaneously. There are, visible in the works of Comics With Still Life: crustacean leitmotifs, collections of ephemera set in windowsills, architectural forms, geometric shapes, and old philosopher types fitted together with no reason but surprise. For Bruno, emblems are frequent but remain unconscious and sometimes unnoticed.

A final set of seven watercolors in purple with ink, Windowsill (2014), fills a large portion of a wall at the end of the show, with the white of the canvases furnishing their lights. Figures reappear in this abstract series, with portions painted with the sureness of ink-stroke seen in hanging scrolls by Japanese artists from past centuries. A magnificently plain ping-pong player seen from behind hangs below a still-life canvas with a giant rabbit. Another of the sequence sees the reappearance of a mustachioed giant peering beneath a magic rock: its magic is the addition of salt set into wet pigment to make it glimmer, a technique put into practice a handful of times in this series. Other watercolor-ink paintings in this cycle include a patinated arabesque and a series of abstract grisailles, which, like other works of the exhibition, supremely compliment the consummately diverse mood of the show.

Toward the exhibition’s end are more watercolors of snow-covered peaks, painted during Bruno’s time in Banff. He and his companion visited Canada to backpack along Lake Minnewanka, where “we heard a bear grunting outside our tent and ran the five miles back to the car in the middle of the night.” His ideas about man and nature are by no means spelled out plainly, but a study of the works within galleryHOMELAND show an artist with a congenial place in, and understanding of, nature. Bruno’s plan was to spend concentrated intervals in practice, and carry his tiny still lifes and sketches into new lands. The fruit of his adventuring is a collection emblematic of an inner, as well as outer, exploration.

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Before you catch Magritte at the Museum of Modern Art this month, take a look at the contemporary version of Surrealist painting: Gladys Nilsson and Julia Benjamin. Gladys Nilsson (born 1940) has long been associated with a group of artists known as the Chicago Imagists, a moniker that belies the utter goofy-strangeness of her work, and that of her husband, Jim Nutt. Her watercolor and gouaches introduce a cast of characters from a pre-modern village, embedded within densely-realized landscapes of preening trees and tottering flowers. The gooey-lyrical abstract oil paintings of Julia Benjamin (born 1984) share Nilsson’s obsession with figures in space. In Benjamin’s case, strokes and dabs of color people the canvas and oddly mirror Nilsson’s skewered compositional style. Installed side-by-side, the paintings speak to each other as two-sides of the same story.

Gladys Nilsson / Julia Benjamin is on view until October 20, 2013 at the National Exemplar. The gallery is located at 381 Broadway at White Street, 2nd Floor, and is open Thursday to Sunday, 2 to 7 PM. Contact: thenationalexemplar@gmail.com

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