NOV/DEC 2013/JAN 2014 www.galleryandstudiomagazine.com VOL. 16 NO. 2 New York GALLERYSTUDIO At The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Balthus in the Age of Political Correctness pg. 2

Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski) (French, 1908–2001) The Golden Days 1944-1946 Oil on canvas 58 1/4 x 78 3/8 in. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC, Gift of the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation, 1966 ©Balthus

A Prototypical Punk Prodigy’s Progress an excerpt from Ed McCormack’s HOODLUM HEART pg. 12 Ed Brodkin WINTER AT PAINTINGS, COLLAGES AND MUSINGS AGORA GALLERY

“As high as Olympus. . .As deep as Hades” 37"x49" Collage and Acrylic on Fiberboard Nov. 26 through Dec. 21, 2013 Receptions: Saturday, November 30, 3 - 6pm Thursday, December 5, 5 - 8pm 530 W. 25th St., #405, New York, N.Y. 10001 Hrs. Tues.-Sat. 11am-6pm Or by app’t 646 230 0056 www.pleiadesgallery.com Brodkin Studio: 551-804-1833 • [email protected] www.gallerynow/brodkin • edbrodkin.newyorkartists.net *036%.%'3&732 1)(-8%8-:)8,39+,87 'SPPEKIWERH4EMRXMRKW

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GALLERYSTUDIO NOV/DEC 2013/JAN 2014 GS Highlights

On the Cover: Depending on where you stand, Balthus is either art’s answer to Humbert Humbert or one of our greatest modern painters. A show at the Met makes a good case for the latter. –Page 2 Also: Ed McCormack project hallway doo-wop punk in the new excerpt from Hoodlum Heart. –Page 12 Daniel C. Boyer, pg. 28

Sheila Finnigan, pg. 23

Peggy Zehring and group, pg. 6

Michèle Vincent, pg. 22

Bob Cenedella, Silvia Soares Boyer, pg. 28 María de Echevarría, pg. 26 pg. 4

Subscribe to GALLERYSTUDIO GALLERYSTUDIO An International Art Journal $25 Subscription $20 for additional Gift Subscription PUBLISHED BY $47 International $5 Back Issues ©EYE LEVEL, LTD. 2013 Mail check or Money Order to: ALL RIGHTS RESERVEDw GALLERYSTUDIO 217 East 85th Street, PMB 228, New York, NY 10028 217 East 85th St., PMB 228, New York, NY 10028 Phone: 212-861-6814 (212) 861-6814 E-mail: [email protected] Name EDITOR AND PUBLISHER Jeannie McCormack MANAGING EDITOR Ed McCormack Address SPECIAL EDITORIAL ADVISOR Margot Palmer-Poroner DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Karen Mullen City CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Maureen Flynn www.galleryandstudiomagazine.com State/Zip Balthus in the Age of Political Correctness at The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Ed McCormack he cheapest shot among the advance institutional jitters. Robert Hughes Tpublicity for the Balthus exhibition Yet, although it is reproduced in the hailed “The at The Metropolitan Museum of Art was catalogue for historical reasons, not even Guitar Lesson” an anonymous blurb on the “Fall Picks” the qualifying noun added to the end of the as “one of the page of the once-hip Village Voice, which show’s subtitle allowed for the inclusion of few masterpieces began: “Balthus (ne Balthasar Klossowski, “The Guitar Lesson,” which Rewald refers to among erotic 1908––2001) takes the prize for the perviest as “the artist’s most notorious picture.” paintings by European painter of the 20th century....” This large 1934 oil depicts a seated female Western artists in Then as soon as the show opened, musical instructor (curiously modeled on the last fifty years.” there was Roberta Smith sniffing from the Balthus’ mother, Elizabeth, a seductive The accuracy make-it-or-break-it bully pulpit of The New painter manqué better known in Parisian of his assessment Balthus (Balthasar York Times that many of the paintings were bohemian circles as Baladine) with a wispy makes the picture Klossowski) (French, “interesting in one way or another but not young girl sprawled limply across her lap. all the more 1908–2001) The King especially original or even very convincing as From the waist up, the student is modestly disturbingly of Cats 1935 Oil on canvas 30 11/16 x 16 totalities” before concluding “The show is, garbed in a red cardigan sweater and a high fascinating. Which 5/16 in. Fondation Balthus, in some ways, a study in kinds and degrees of collared blouse. But with her dark skirt was obviously Switzerland ©Balthus failure.” bundled above her waist, she is naked from the effect the She could not have been more wrong. her navel down to her white knee-socks. With Balthus intended when, according to Rewald, Balthus’s paintings of pubescent girls –– one hand, the teacher restrains the student he wrote to a friend that he hoped his first whether with feline companions, like most by her long brown hair, adorned with a large exhibition would “ shake up and disturb in this show, or without –– provide an easy pink bow to crown her innocence. With her [the] viewer’s conscience.” target for both the ideological descendants other hand, the molester –– one of whose * * * of those moral police who tried to snuff Born in Paris, into an artistic and Nobokov’s great novel “Lolita” in the intellectual milieu, to a German Jewish Eisenhower era; as well as their opposites: refugee painter and art historian named those hipper-than-thou art wordlings who Erich Klossowski and Baladine, the talent applaud novelty for its own sake and shrug of Balthasar Klossowski (1908-2001) was off as “unoriginal” paintings that, like the recognized early. At age eleven, he created a best ones in this show, eschew trends and sequence of 40 poignant India ink drawings “isms” for “Timeless Realism,” as the painter narrating the heartbreaking loss of a beloved himself defined his style, with its echoes of stray cat he had adopted and named Piero della Francesca, Courbet, and above all “Mitzou,” which foreshadowed his lifelong Poussin, whom he admired above all for his love of felines. classical purity. Once thought to be lost but recently As for the content of his work, it is difficult recovered and included in the show at the to know if Balthus was being disingenuous Met, these drawings, with their bold outlines in 1996, when the then eighty-eight year and impressive graphic dynamism, are clearly old artist told a reporter, “I really don’t influenced by the wordless woodcut “novels” understand why people see the paintings of Franz Masereel. Yet they surpass juvenilia of girls as Lolitas .... You know why I paint and impressed Rainier Maria sufficiently for little girls? Because women, even my own the poet to declare the boy “a near genius” daughter, already belong to this present Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski) (French, and “already a great artist.” world, to fashion. Little girls are the only 1908–2001) Thérèse Dreaming 1938 Oil on A family friend, Rilke became Baladine’s creatures today who can be little Poussins.” canvas 59 x 51 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, lover after she and her husband, the painter By the same token, Balthus did not Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, 1998 ©Balthus and art historian Erich Klossowski separated, go out of his way to discourage salacious as well as a surrogate father to Balthasar and interpretations of his subject matter, in full womanly breasts is bared by the helpless his brother Pierre, three years older. It was compositions such as the 1938 oil “Thérèse child’s hand, as it grasps in ineffectual self- he who arranged for the publication of the Dreaming.” Yet this exquisitely limned defense at the bodice of her aggressor’s gray drawings in a book, titled “Mitsou,” after the study of adolescent insolence offers persons dress –– fondles the girl’s pale, slender upper lost pet. He also wrote a preface for the book of sensibility far subtler delectation than a thigh almost to her hairless pubes, as one and suggested that, rather than the child’s forbidden glimpse of white cotton panties might strum a guitar, while an actual guitar given name, his nickname, “Baltusz,” appear under a bunched-up schoolgirl skirt, or the lies nearby on the floor. on its cover. not-so-subtle erotic symbolism of the cat After being unveiled in Balthus’s first “Then I did not dare to contradict the lapping milk from a saucer near the hassock solo exhibition in 1934 at Galerie Pierre in great poet,” Balthus confessed years later, and upon which one of the girl’s bare, carelessly Paris, and causing a small scandal, it had one continued to sign this name to all his future akimbo legs is propped. The controversy such more showing at Pierre Matisse Gallery in work (with only a slight change in spelling pictures are apt to invite is anticipated in the New York in 1977. When the dealer tried over the years). exhibition’s defensive title “Balthus: Cats and to donate the painting to the Museum of After such a promising start, it had to be Girls –– Paintings and Provocations.” Modern Art, it was returned with a polite disheartening for Balthus to find himself, “Originally I was just going to call it “thanks but no thanks.” And it hasn’t been several years later in his late twenties, still ‘Cats and Girls,’’ Sabine Rewald, the show’s seen in public since. In 1977, after viewing it poor and obscure, with all of the glow curator, remarked at the press preview in New York, the noted art Australian critic of the one-time prodigy gone. Not only with a wry little shrug of acquiescence to and “Shock of the New” TV commentator had his first one-man exhibition been 2 GALLERYSTUDIO NOV/DEC 2013/JAN 2014 trounced by the French critics as “morbid,” epiphany for the painter, transporting him “crude,” “contrived and naive.” He was also back to “the golden days” (to appropriate a recovering from a nervous breakdown and a phrase he used to title one of his paintings) suicide attempt brought on by a failed love when his mother, in one of her many letters affair. to Rilke, wrote, “Pierre lies on the sofa After a period of idleness, he completed reading a book and looking like a young a series of pen and ink illustrations for Russian from about 1830; Balthus chases “Wuthering Heights” begun some years little girls in the garden ...” earlier, designed sets and costumes for a For although Balthus cast his mother as an production by the avant garde playwright adult predator in “The Guitar Lesson,” by all Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski) (French, 1908–2001) Thérèse on a Bench Seat 1939 and actor Antonin Artaud. And in 1935, accounts the impulsive Baladine was childlike Oil on canvas 27 7/8 x 36 in. Dorothy R. and Richard presumably to elevate his spirits after herself; perhaps even a bit feline, spending E. Sherwood Family Collection ©Balthus enduring the most disastrous year in his life, most of her days reading, writing letters, and he painted “The King of Cats,” the regal catnapping. According to some who knew aloft, while balancing with the other hand 1935 full-length self-portrait with a large her, Rewald tells us in her catalogue essay, on the floor, with that coltish combination tiger-cat nuzzling one of his trouser-legs, that she “looked much younger than her age” of awkwardness and slightly gawky grace graces the present exhibition. and often referred to herself and her sons as peculiar to that stage between childhood and For a while afterward, the only other easel “we three children.” Rewald also writes that womanhood, for which Nabokov coined the paintings he attempted, primarily because Baladine “created an unusual environment apt term “nymphet.” they provided his only source of income for her two sons to grow up in .... its remove As far as anyone knows, Thérèse never at the time, were commissioned portraits. from the conventions of ordinary life” posed nude for Balthus and was twenty- These he looked upon as mere drudgery and bringing to mind the atmosphere of youthful one years old and already married by the referred to as “my monsters.” From another fantasy permeating the novel “Les Enfants time Balthus completed “The Victim, 1939 point of view, however, the practice the terribles” by Jean Cocteau (another family –– 46.” Yet, as Rewald points out in her portraits must have given him in capturing friend ), and speculates that household’s notes on the picture, “the oval shape of the a likeness probably enhanced the indivuality cloistered permissiveness may have inspired young woman’s face and her short brown of the more inspired pictures of adolescent Balthus’s depictions of children in “rooms hair match those of Thérèse Blanchard ... girls that were to preoccupy him later in the closed off from the outside world.” Perhaps without her participation or even decade, after Thérèse Blanchard became his * * * her knowledge, Balthus painted her onto this first important model. (As later compositions A companion piece to the aforementioned final, imaginary evocation of her.” from the 1950s at the Met demonstrate, his “Thérèse Dreaming,” in “Thérèse with Cat, The life-size nubile nude body of the pictures became less successful, losing their 1938,” even while assuming an immodest slender girl in the large oil appears almost subtle erotic danger when the figures became position that suggests a younger child’s lack as pale as the white sheet upon which she more generalized formal props in emultation of self-consciousness, the preadolescent lies. Since the title seems to derive from the of Poussin.) model gazes out with remarkable self- novella “La Victime” (dedicated to Balthus Two early commisioned portraits of possession for a twelve-year-old. Thérèse who by its author Pierre Jean Jouve), about a elegant women considerably older than his may not have been Balthus’s prettiest young young girl “drained of life,” as Rewald puts later models, appear less than enthusiastic. model over the years, but from the beginning it, after being seduced and abandoned. Or, One can only wonder, however, if Balthus she personified more than any of the others since the picture was begun and completed thought of his insightful portraits of artistic the moody rebelliousness of preteen and between the time Balthus was drafted and colleagues in the same terms: the dissolute teenage girls, of which Balthus was to completed his military service, the curator 1936 likeness of André Derain, belly bulging become one of art history’s premier maestros. speculates, perhaps it is a reaction to the against an ocher bathrobe, standing like an Thus she is the subject of several of the horrors of war. “Balthus leaves the viewer in arrogant King Farouk, with a disheveled, wild most engaging works in this exhibition, doubt, however, about whether the ‘victim’ is haired blond teenage waif slumped like a used including “Therese on a Bench Seat, 1939.” dead or in a trance,” Rewald concludes. paint-rag in a chair in the background; “Joan Uncharacteristically playful for Thérèse, Given the grief the artist must have felt Miro and His Daughter Delores” (1937 –– whose precocious seriousness was one of over losing his favorite model to adulthood 38), in which the diminutive Catalan painter the qualities that initially attracted Balthus and marriage, it is just as easy to imagine that poses stiffly in a straight-backed chair, poker to her, this major oil evolved from a smaller he might have painted the picture in the hope faced, blue jowelled, looking slightly seedy but more complex oil sketch over graphite of finally burying Thérèse’s memory. in the manner of the French singer Charles on cardboard from the same year. Called Even in adolescence, Balthus was already Aznavour, with one hand on his knee and “Study of Three Figures,” it depicted the nostalgic for childhood. When he was the other around the little girl’s waist, as now fourteen year old model balanced on the fourteen years old, in a letter to a friend of his though attempting to keep the restless seven- bench seat teasing a kitten with a little ball father, he declared, “God knows how happy I year-old from squirming out of the picture. on a string while her sixteen year old brother could be if I could remain a child forever.” In any case, the desire to create more gazes out a window in the background. In If not forever, for most of his long life, in independent works was only revived when this larger oil, the kitten as well as the boy in his “closed off from the outside world” in his Balthus met a girl named Thérèse (whether the background have both disappeared and studio with Thérèse, and then a succession of playing with her brother on a street near his the central figure of the girl has been greatly other youthful models, perhaps he did. studio, or in a local cafe where her father enlarged, and set against a vigorously brushed worked as a waiter, Rewald was not able to plain brown ground. The now slender learn). Perhaps because she was eleven, the adolescent, in her short plaid skirt, white “Balthus: Cats and Girls –– Paintings and very age at which the artist had his biggest knee socks and red sweater, sprawls across Provocations,” The Metropolitan Museum of triumph, Thérèse may have touched off an the bench seat, holding just a length of string Art, 1000 Fifth Ave. through Jan. 12, 2014. NOV/DEC 2013/JAN 2014 GALLERYSTUDIO 3 A Retrospective Survey of Gadfly Barfly Wiseguy Robert Cenedella’s Conceptual Conceits and Deadpan Appropriations of Art World Pretension lthough he’s best known as a satirical mass media. world that overlooked him in favor of Andy Asocial realist and our most pugnacious Probably because Cenedella insisted that Warhol, who was blithely referring to the advocate of figurative painting in the director of photography for Departures Brillo box as his own masterpiece ...” general, Robert Cenedella also pioneered sign a legal agreement to that effect, the Asked why he labeled his own serigraph “Appropriation” at least a decade or more poster appeared (just a little larger than of a can of tomato soup in the manner of before witless full-time image appropriators postage stamp size) in the magazine, but the Warhol “Heinz,” instead of “Campbell’s,” like Mike Bidlo and Richard Long (who, interview with him did not. It isn’t Cenedella said (deadpan) “Because it’s in a more honest era, would have called surprising: better soup.” themselves art forgers) caught on and “At some point someone must have He’s been pushing people’s buttons caught up in the 1980s. realized that the influence on me was that way ever since he got himself expelled “As you know, I did my own four-letter not what he or she thought,” the artist from the High School of Music and Art word as art back in 1965, right after the understates. “I did a very deadpan interview. for writing a satirical article on the school’s Museum of Modern Art made a card of My point was that I never realized a word atom bomb drill policy. Robert Indiana’s ‘LOVE,’ Cenedella said could be a painting. I was a bit jealous of “Although I got into the The High recently in that plainspoken but smart New Indiana for choosing LOVE for his painting, School of Music and Art for the art, I the greatest possible word. But after doing spent most of my time writing because, some research, I realized that more people in my opinion, they never really taught said SHIT in a day than LOVE... I thought art,” he says. “In the mid-fifties, we were this would have been great copy for the in the midst of art for art’s sake. Drawing article, along with the image ... SHIT lives! was no longer deemed necessary for the I always think that when the LOVE image development of one’s ‘creativity.’ It was all is placed next to the SHIT image, SHIT about ‘self-expression, experimentation, WINS!” letting it all hang out. Pollock was king. Any One can’t help but agreeing, perhaps form of representation was out. Anyone because “SHIT” (ART-SHIT, to call it could fake his or her art, because, like today, by its full title, which nails its message there were absolutely no standards.” more fully) was not only an early act of At the Art Students League, where the appropriation but also a very conscious work first thing that greets one inside the door is of conceptual art by the same charismatically the intoxicatingly eternal eau de oil paint, witty art world curmudgeon and cultishly Cenedella was able to practice the basic popular teacher who, in the catalog for skills that struck him as lacking at Music and the 2011 Robert Cenedella Class Show Art. George Grosz was his favorite teacher at The Art Students League, reprinted his and became his mentor. Not only did the own article, originally published in the German émigré Social Realist sharpen the Manhattan Tribune in 1969. blade of his student’s natural sense of satire; Written in his characteristically “deadpan” he also must have passed on some of the (to appropriate his own word) style, it paid political outrage and Dada Attitude that tribute to a fellow artist: “The name James got the older man ousted from Germany Harvey probably means as little to the Art by Nazis, to add to the American’s youthful World as it does to the world of soap-box- rebelliousness. York wiseguy barfly style that always reminds packaging design. Yet if present standards But after leaving the League in 1959, us of a character out of Jimmy Breslin or for judging American art have any validity Cenedella still had to figure out how to Damon Runyon. “All these years later, I at all, James Harvey should be considered make a living as an artist. “The total lack get a call from an art buff with loads of the most important and influential figure in of interest or even acknowledgment of credentials about my “SHIT” print. This is Pop Art sculpture. It was James Harvey who my ‘serious work’ was very frustrating because of the Robert Indiana retrospective created one of the most widely publicized and completely infuriated me,” he recalls, at the Whitney Museum. This woman was works of art in this century, the Brillo “given what the art establishment was intent on getting an interview with me Shipping Carton, and still in spite of this, promoting at the time: soup cans and the about how I was influenced by Indiana. he remains virtually unknown. What is even endless onslaught of isms and other art I didn’t take it seriously. I thought it was more curious about him is that he made movements such as Conceptualism, Op-art, either a put on or that she was simply his living designing shipping cartons from Minimalism, Pop Art, Neo-Expressionism, stupid...” nine to five every day, while with a much and Post-Modernism. To some extent After giving it some thought, Cenedella greater devotion he continued to pursue a I had completely given up the idea of decided to do the interview anyway, second career as an abstract artist. He never surviving as an artist. But I wanted to go just for the hell of it. His only condition gained recognition for either. It would be out swinging, so I decided to beat the Art was that the magazine the interview was too easy to dismiss James Harvey as simply Establishment at its own game by creating going to appear in, the American Express a loser. The real problem with Harvey is my own Art Movement. I called it YES Departures Magazine, had to guarantee that that he was just a painter trying to make a ART, the Cultural Miracle ...Yessism, if you the image would also be published. This go of it without any understanding of the will. My aim was to outdo the ‘enemy’ at was because, like so much of Cenedella’s art of publicity, promotion, or possibly, the every turn –– the enemy being the Gallery, work, his “SHIT” poster became a popular great merit of his own commercial package the Museum, the Dealer, the Critic, the underground classic, selling steadily for design. He died at the age of 36 before Auction house –– and now, even the many years, but was rarely reproduced in the he could come to terms with a confusing artists themselves who were selling out, 4 GALLERYSTUDIO NOV/DEC 2013/JAN 2014 in my opinion, to the marketplace by the the time S&H stamps were highly popular. Murray Kempton wrote, “Yes Art, which thousands. I wanted to put on the most A sales gimmick to buy things they didn’t will burst upon us all at the Fitzgerald widely reviewed exhibition of the 1965 need, S&H would contract with any retailer Gallery tomorrow is one of the most serious season, by employing all the same shock to offer stamps that could later be redeemed expressions possible to the aesthetic impulse, tactics that the art establishment was using for more useless merchandise (much like that is, a joke,” and cited Robert Cenedella –– and it worked!” today’s credit card incentives). While the Jr., as “the YES school’s master painter.” Like a fledgeling P.T. Barnum, Cenedella Pop artists did renderings of S&H green Cenedella’s sensational, much publicized took over a Madison Avenue gallery for six stamps, I actually signed a contract with the debut was both his hello and goodbye to the weeks, and hired other artists to produce company offering actual stamps with the New York art world, which he has largely some of the “detritus” he would show, a sale of a work of art. I also sold art by the snubbed for the past four decades. Why move that was considered almost scandalous pound and featured a live sculpture. Sophia would he need it? He likes to quote one of at the time but has become standard practice Lickman sat nude, unclothed, on a pedestal his early artistic influences, Thomas Hart today by, as he puts it “our current ‘art for six weeks and I was offered $2,300,000 Benton, saying, “I’d rather show my work in heroes’ today who can neither draw nor to match the price the Metropolitan any bar than a museum.” paint, a la Damien Hirst and others of his Museum of Art paid for “Aristotle And over the years, Robert Cenedella’s ilk. YES ART would signal the end of my Contemplating the Bust of Homer” by work has graced many of the best of them, full time painting career for the next 10 Rembrandt. (This was the very first time leading to multiple sales and commissions, years, so I wanted to ‘go out with a bang that a museum used the ‘price’ of a work ranging from artist’s hangouts like the not a whimper,’ emphasizing that YES ART of art to promote itself!) ... And thus began Broome Street bar in Soho, to upscale was a positive movement. It was a seething the commoditization and decline of Art. My uptown Irish pubs like P.J. Carney’s, to comment on the state of contemporary apparent ‘jokes’ went on to be capitalized posh society and celebrity joints like the art as I saw it but I have always found upon by even Warhol himself, more than LeCirque, where his six-by-ten-foot mural humor to be the best weapon to combat ten years later, when he exhibited three live of 142 of its famous patrons is one of the the Establishment in any form. With a people as sculpture.” main attractions. straight face, I managed to convince some In an article in the October 20, 1965 –– Ed McCormack of the largest corporations in America to edition of the Herald Tribune, headlined participate in my movement ––– Brillo was “ART, BUT IS IT YES?” the well known just one willing victim. They provided me journalist Dick Schaap quoted Cenedella with their original cardboard boxes, which deadpanning, “Before I became a Yes Artist, I signed and numbered, selling them for a I did still lifes and social commentary, which “Beyond Shit” and other works by Robert fraction of what the Warhol wooden copies I’ve outgrown as all serious artists must.” Cenedella, can be seen at Central Park were going for. In an attempt to make Great And in the following day’s edition of the Fine Arts, 211 West 57th Street. For Art accessible to the masses, I charged $5.75 New York Post, then still a liberal and information call 212.956.9395 or email for a flat box, and $6.75 if assembled. At literate tabloid, incomparable columnist centralparkfi[email protected]. NOV/DEC 2013/JAN 2014 GALLERYSTUDIO 5 Peggy Zehring and her “Inner Idea” Group are Featured in Two New Exhibitions in Chelsea

“Reiki Zero Point 5,” Peggy Zehring s Hans Hofmann was to second-generation (often texturally augmented with acrylic- “Several of my teachers were so excited AAbstract Expressionists during the postwar based modeling pastes, marble dust, spackle, about it that it felt like a religious fervor had years, so the painter and teacher Peggy weathered wood and other mixed media and taken over the school,” she says, but: “Even Zehring is to a circle of postmodern painters found materials) here has a rugged physical with the hype, I wasn’t sure how these new who have studied with her in Washington palpability that appears to allude to the logs of ideas would look in the years to come or how State and Colorado, known as the “Inner a rustic cabin. This is perhaps a natural enough my teachers’ philosophical excitement could Idea Artists.” Zehring is a charismatic painter, assumption to make about the work of an translate into actual art pieces.” teacher, and mentor whose own work serves artist based in Colorado; however, like all of Shortly after graduation, she moved to as an inspiration and a guidepost for their the references that one can read into Zehring’s Seattle with her family. But: “When I tried to explorations of nonobjective form and color. paintings, this impression remains an allusion, further my education and understanding of “All methods are sacred if they’re internally rather than a literal representation, thus what I had experienced in Chicago, I was met necessary,” stated the great Russian abstract preserving the abstract autonomy so central to with artists and teachers who were mystified pioneer Wassily Kandinsky, and Zehring, who her vision. by most of what I was saying and doing with has taught art for more than thirty years and The central feature of the triptych, however, my art. Since I was unable to find anyone co-founded The La Veta School of the Arts, which spans all three panels, defies specific who was willing to take me on as a student, has adopted that motto as her own guidepost. interpretation. One can only describe it as I decided to teach with the hope that my How Zehring herself applies this principle resembling a huge arabesque-like calligraphic students could further my undrerstandinng is dynamically demonstrated in her majestic character composed of connected serpentine of my Chicago experience. I had no trouble large triptych, “Reiki Zero Point 5,” Her work curves, gracefully linear, yet sculpturally finding a job. Everyone I took my proposal is seen in both of two successive exhibitions substantial. Set, as though floating in midair to wanted to hire me because they had never with several of her former students from the against a vibrantly blue nocturnal sky, with five heard of the kind of approach to art education “Inner Idea” movement (the second of which mysterious orbs glowing through its curves, I was suggesting. . . I’ve now been teaching continues through November 9). this seems a symbol of transcendence over the for over 30 years, and, indeed, my students To begin with, Zehring’s freewheeling and limitations of the material world, albeit arrived have taught me more than I had ever hoped painterly practice observes no self-conscious at through paradoxically physical means or dreamed they would. Their work, like mine, distinction between illusory “deep space” and –– a theme very much at the heart of Peggy has blossomed under the Kandinsky approach, the shallowness of the two-dimensional picture Zehring’s art. which emphasizes Truth over Beauty and plane so sacred to standard modernist dogma. Zehring’s ability to help her students creativity and experimentation over skill- Apparently proceeding on the theory that all discover their own artistic solutions without building. . . . It now seems like the right time such rules are made to be broken, Zehring influencing them unduly comes across in both to put our work out into the world. introduces a sense of depth on the right sides exhibitions. of both outer panels of the long, horizontal Ironically, Zehring became a teacher after First exhibition of Inner Idea Artists was three-panel composition with perspective lines becoming disillusioned by her own experience recently seen at Montserrat Contemporary that direct the eye inward, toward the heart of as a student at the University of IIinois- Art Gallery, 547 West 27th St.; the second the composition. Chicago Circle, where the curriculum struck exhibition can be seen at the same venue Not only do these visual pointers create an her as being inflexibly locked into “carrying through November 9, 2013. illusion of depth, but the thickly pigmented the principles of the Bauhaus forward in Works by Peggy Zehring are in the impasto that the artist applies to her surfaces architecture, design and fine art.” gallery’s year-round salon. 6 GALLERYSTUDIO NOV/DEC 2013/JAN 2014 Cheryl Ann Richey Linda Frederick Maggie MacIndoe Kathy Kimball

Cheryl Telford Lana Thomas Jill Whitmore Mary Jane Rivers Fred Bender

Georgia Quick Lavone Newell-Reim Carolyn Wayland Margo Spellman David Zehring In the first show, Fred Bender’s of Philip Guston’s early lyrical abstractions. composition of flowing vertical skeins By contrast, Maggie Macindoe composes of brilliant red, blue, and green pigment with the broad strokes of classic Abstract suggests a waterfall of rainbow-colored Expressionism in colors that burn and glow molten lava. For while Bender displays a like neon. Mixed within the frothy surface liquid fluidity akin to that of the pioneering of her triptych made up of three horizontal Washington State color field painter Morris canvases are several paint brushes that, rather Louis, his meaty pigmentations lend his work than being intentionally placed, gives the a more physical presence. impression of having been randomly caught Donna Graham Donna Graham combines an earthy, up in the churning energy of her impetuous main form, partially filled in with translucent tactile relief-like ground, with buoyant areas painterly maelstrom. washes of pale primary colors, and of sunny yellow and verdant green, further Mary Jane Rivers combines a whiplash interestingly skips over the empty space enlivened by wiggly lines, and biomorphic black calligraphic line with solid areas of between the two vertically placed canvases. forms vaguely suggesting scurrying insect life. matte red, powder blue, and yellow ocher The tension in Thomas’s composition is These diverse elements are especially effective to create a strong visual tension between enhanced by the mysteriously fragmented in Graham’s fanciful triptych in which the active and stable elements of her quality of the form, which with its linear an abstract form calling to mind a thrice- composition. Rivers’s line has a life of its own, “folds” suggests a detail of a more figurative dissected caterpillar makes its way across the a jotted urgency like that of the India ink line image, yet remains mysteriously abstract by slightly separated panels. with which George Herriman drew the antic virtue of its “interruption” (both graphically Kathy Kimball's consummately refined action of his classic comic strip “Krazy Kat,” and actually). painterly style resembles a species of much admired by Willem de Kooning, Franz Jill Whitmore’s work in a long, narrow sensitively deconstructed Cubism –– only, Kline, e.e. cummings, among other fine scroll-like format appears monochromatic with a more subtly seductive palette of artists and poets. and almost minimalist. But on closer study soft pastel pinks and blues juxtaposed with Lana Thomas employs a vigorous graphic of Whitmore’s brush-caressed surface, subtle luminous orange and yellow hues. Indeed, technique of her own in a diptych with a graffiti-like symbols, painterly strokes, tactile Kimball has an exquisite “touch” reminiscent collage-like effect, as its black-outlined Continued on page 24 NOV/DEC 2013/JAN 2014 GALLERYSTUDIO 7 Some Highlights of The ASCA’s 96th Annual at High Line Loft

Santina Semadar Panetta

Sondra Gold

Barbara Browner Schiller

María de Echevarría

Erin Stuckey Johnson

Jo-Anna Melrose Rose Sigal-Ibsen “ iverse Impressions,” The 96th Annual Estelle Levy DExhibition of the American Society of artistic statements. Contemporary Artists, lives up to its name. Anita Adelman takes a more Although the ASCA was originally called realist view, in her watercolor the Brooklyn Society of Artists and limited “Abandoned Store,” an to artists from that borough when it was atmospheric rendering of an Dario Puccini founded in 1917, in 1963 its members isolated country business gone Lubomir Tomaszewski voted to change its name to the current one, to seed. The artist’s sparkling extending its membership and, consequently, approach to transparent aquarelle elevates her its stylistic variety. Now comprising close to simple subject, bringing the contrast between a hundred members, its group exhibitions the weathered surface of the ramshackle are huge affairs, next to impossible to do structure and the eternal freshness of the full justice in the space allotted her. Rather surrounding landscape to vibrant life by than turning this review into an exhaustive virtue of her luminous evocation of light and –– as well as exhausting! –– list of names, it is subtle sense of color, lending the painting a preferable to suggest the show’s quality and Hopperesque dignity. diversity by selecting a few works to describe Lea Weinberg makes the rigid industrial Olfa Kitt and reproducing images of others, in the material of wire mesh, set against backdrop hope that the reader will be inspiring viewers of black Plexiglas, flow like drifting smoke, to visit the exhibition and discover other forming vaguely anthropomorphic abstract worthy works and artists as well. permutations, in her relief sculpture Marilyn A. Weiss’s mixed-media “Entwined.” Weinberg’s sensually fluid assemblage, a life-size dress fashioned from shapes take on a paradoxical quality that fabric, and gauze on a wooden hanger, has can only be compared to Katsuyo Aoki’s an affect at once nostalgic and eerie. For intricately interwoven porcelain pieces, in although it is formal in design, it is made which configured shapes invariably suggest from raw strips of denim and gauze, and as melting wax skulls. For like that esteemed its title, “Denim Dahlin” suggests a poignant Japanese contemporary sculptor, Lea Cinderella story by a writer like Stephen King Weinberg is a skillful exponent of the Neo- with perhaps gruesome outcome. Could this, Baroque. by any chance, be the dress “Carrie” wore to Mara Szalajda, on the other hand, her high school prom, transfigured by time? translates specific elements of nature into a Harriet FeBland Or an attempt to fit in with a posher set of private language of shapes and signs in her Basha Maryanska teenagers by Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s work in gouache on paper, “Clouds Through Daughter?” Like Claes Oldenburg, Marilyn Trees in a Storm.” Through just the slightest, ASCA’s 96th Annual Exhibition, Weiss has an aesthetic alchemist’s ability most subtle, and gradual chromatic and tonal “Diverse Impressions” the High Line Loft, to transform incongruous materials into variations, as the viewer’s gaze moves 508 W. 26th St., November 5–17, 2013 poignant –– and, in their own way, elegant –– Continued on page 24

8 GALLERYSTUDIO NOV/DEC 2013/JAN 2014 Fame is the New Immortality: Lady Gioconda’s Star-Studded Contemporary Icons ontemporary celebrity portraiture takes Indeed, unlike Andy Warhol, perhaps her copied and Cmany forms, usually photographic, most star struck artistic predecessor (for doubled ranging from the hit-and-run methods of whom the closest thing to a halo was DayGlo the paparazzi like Ron Galella to the elaborate hues), Lady Gioconda often goes so far as to subsidiary and painstaking setup preparations of Annie surround the subjects of her portraits with an figure in Leibovitz, the diva of the genre, who lights honorary nimbus, such as the gold medallion the long and poses her subjects as though filming scene she places strategically behind the head of floral gown in a feature-length film. bonnie Prince William –– on whom she also from the Prince William Few photographers, however, achieve benevolently bestows a full head that makes original anything like the poetic perfection of the the hirsuitely challenged young royal appear picture to create a more formally symmetrical painter Lucien Stilss, known professionally as all the more mythically regal. composition. And naturally, in “Madonna Lady Gioconda, whose oils on canvas are as In her likeness of Scarlett Johansson, the with Angels,” the heavenly beings behind close as we come in an increasingly secular age golden-locked film ingenue is crowned with a the singer look more like voluptuous Vegas to having our own religious icons. laurel of flowers and surrounded by fluttering showgirls. Let’s face it, for better or for worse, putti. Her peaches and cream complexion is For all her Dali-esque posturing for celebrities, for many today, are the only gods complemented by Lady Gioconda’s unique publicity, including her theatrical pseudonym, and goddesses in town (forget the capitol ability to make oil on canvas glow like sunlight Lucien Stilss is an enormously gifted portrait “G”), larger than life, lording over the Mount streaming through a stained glass window. artist in possession of a flawless classical Olympus of the mass media. On the more fetchingly devilish side, Sharon technique and an impeccable conceptual wit. No other artist seems to know or accept Stone is depicted slumping in a throne-like (Both are especially evident in her vision their status more readily as Lady Gioconda gold chair, smiling seductively with one bare- of a radiant Nicole Kidman in a shawl and who works in a studio near Rapallo, Italy. Be to-the-thigh leg raised in a pose recalling the Elizabethan costume standing in front of a they saints, sinners, or in rehab, the artist, who famous scene in “Basic Instinct,” in which she slot machine holding a silver vase filled with seems to love them, states without apparent teasingly distracts the detectives questioning pink roses.) irony, that she seeks to “depict every model in her about a murder mystery. Long live Lady Gioconda! the sweetest most loving expression.” The artist’s namesake Lady Gaga appears –– Maureen Flynn Although she also admires Jean-Michel in the guise of the Botticelli Venus in another Basquiat and Keith Haring, trained at the picture, albeit not entirely nude but striking a Academy in Florence, she looks primarily more bodacious pose and having stepped off Lady Gioconda, Agora Gallery, 530 to the masters of the Italian Renaissance her seashell pedestal as if to sashay to the front West 25th St., Nov. 22 - Dec. 13, 2013. for inspiration, both technical and spiritual. of the stage. Here, too, the artist has skillfully Reception: Thurs., Dec. 5, 6 - 8 pm Different Strokes for Different Artists in WSAC Show ultiMedia MashUp curated for detailed vignettes of Upper West Side shop Barnett in a color print called “Capillaries,” Mthe West Side Arts Coalition by facades in sparkling transparent watercolor where a bold blood red linear maze was laid participating artist Anne Rudder is indeed the washes, arranged within a grid on pebbly- over more intricate digital forms, as well as grab bag of painters and photographers that textured paper, in a format reminiscent of in a black and white calligraphic composition its title promises. But it is more coherent than the Pop painter Oyvind Fahlstrom’s colorful titled “A-Z.” one might expect, due to Rudder’s unfailing diagrammatic comicstrip deconstructions. Departing from her characteristically instinct for putting together works that Versatile image-maker Michelle Ordynans meticulous mystical mode, Silvia Soares complement each other. showed a group of works that included Boyer showed an intriguing group of Still life, for one example, is at its lyrical “Mountaintop,” a colorful, tactile wall relief miniature gestural canvases called “Path to best in Marie Robison’s painterly acrylic of crumpled paper and enamel paint; a surreal the Abstract,” as well as a witty semiabstract composition “Glass Pitcher with White collage, called “Dream,” and “Happy Face,” reworking of a familiar cafe couple from Floral Sprays,” where the transparent vessel a bizarre white papier mache head with Picasso’s blue period in much more brilliant almost vanishes into the pale purple impasto streamers of typed technobabble streaming colors called “The Fauvist Couple.” background, allowing the delicate white from its crown as if from a computer printer. “The Monarch with No Gumption flowers accented with tiny flecks of yellow Coincidentally (one can only assume), Attends the Funeral of the Frisbee” is a title to dominate the picture in the subtlest Amy Rosenfeld presented a mixed media that could only have been drummed up by way. Three exquisitely refined color pencil assemblage called “The Happy Face the offbeat imagination of Daniel C. Boyer, drawings by Pauline Roony Yeargans –– Thingamabob,” featuring a brightly colored who also exhibited a work in acrylic on canvas “Summer Peaches,” “Summer Corn,” and wittily cobbled-together puppet-like figure called “The Memory of Sleeping Cheshire.” “New Leaves” are every bit as striking for with candy hearts for eye-pupils and nostrils Both paintings were energetic examples of their quiet poetry and the artist’s ability to (you just had to be there!). Boyers’ unique brand of semi-surreal abstract create strong abstract compositions from Photography was represented in the black Dadaism, and even the medium of the former everyday subjects closely observed and and white prints of Herb Fogelson: not was poetically evocative: “gouache diluted sensitively delineated. only the natural symmetry of a procession with rainfall.” Landscape and urban subjects are also of ducks on a lake; but the human interest Nathaniel Ladson merged abstraction and contrasted, yet complementary. Rosa Alfaro of a flummoxed cop discovering his patrol fragmented figuration seamlessly in his Carozzi, for example, contributes a luminous car stuck in soft mud; and “Rowboats in Continued on page 24 oil on canvas called “Landscape Autumn,” Central Park,” their convergence in dry-dock in which golden fields, tinged by touches creating intriguing chance patterns, caught MultiMedia MashUp recently seen at of purple light, flow in rivulets toward by virtue of the artist’s selective eye. Cutting Broadway Mall Community Center, the horizon line. Lynn Lieberman paints edge computer art was represented by Sonia 96th Street (center island). NOV/DEC 2013/JAN 2014 GALLERYSTUDIO 9 CLWAC’s 117th Open Annual Pays Tribute to the Eternal Verities

Claudia Seymour

Andrea Stanley

Linda Wesner Maryann Burton

Alicia Ponzio Eun Joo Lee Seward

Viasta Smola

Jill Banks Florence Kaplan Jean T. Kroeber ach year at its Open Exhibition, the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club, named for a prominent 19th Ecentury philanthropist who was the first woman on the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, presents a selection of works by an Honored Member. For its 117th such show this past October, the club chose to honor Claudia Seymour. A recently retired president of the Salmagundi Club, Seymour paints still lifes in oil in the tradition of the 17th century Dutch masters, albeit with a coloristic brilliance that marks her work as refreshingly contemporary. Although of generally modest size, Seymour’s chromatic cornucopia of fruits, flowers, antique ceramics, and other objects in elegant tabletop arrangements immediately cast a warm, welcoming glow, far exceeding their actual dimensions, just inside the main gallery of The National Arts Club as one entered the exhibition. Almost 250 other works were on view as well; far too many, obviously, to be comprehensively covered Lucille Berrill Paulsen here. Mentioning few in each category, however, may whet the reader’s appetite for future CLWAC exhibitions, all of which, for their sheer abundance and variety, are invariably worthy of attention. Andrea Placer employs color pencil with a fluidity that makes it possible to mistake her composition “Nature in the Abstract,” with its natural imagery playing a kind of hide-and-seek within flowing forms for a watercolor from a few feet away. By contrast, Linda Wesner lends to the the same medium a detailed realist meticulousness akin to Andrew Wyeth’s tempera technique, in her woodsy scene, “Birch Flo Kemp Serenade,” where the pale trees appear to soar skyward like arches or organ notes in a cathedral. In her large oil, “Self-Portrait as the Mother of Yi Sun-Shin,” Nam Soon Kim achieves a tour de force of contemporary history painting imaginative projection, donning a silken kimono and employing old The CLWAC 117th Annual Open master chiaroscuro in the manner of Rembrandt to add drama to the legend of a 14th century Korean Exhibition was seen recently navel hero famous for repelling an invasion by the Japanese. at the National Arts Club, A more modern military subject is depicted in Renee Bemis’s “S.C. War Dog Memorial Maquette,” in 15 Gramercy Park South which a soldier bearing a machine gun and his stalwart canine companion are heroically preserved in Continued on page 25

10 GALLERYSTUDIO NOV/DEC 2013/JAN 2014 Henri Guéguen: Pop with a Noble Purpose hile Don Flavin, Forrest Myers and and a life of its own. And here the unusual famous film Wother artists have employed neon tubes material adds to the resonance of the tragic actress Angelina to create light sculptures, the French painter fairy tale legend of the young princess who Jolie. Here too, Henri Guéguen may be the first to use their attempted to escape from the castle and live they seem just unlikely surface as one would a canvas. like a normal person and was hounded to an as appropriate as Guéguen’s enamel portrait tribute to the late early death by the blinding glare of her own in the previous Lady Diana on a row of nineteen such tubes celebrity. painting, also mounted close together is not only a technical The other unusual material that Guéguen being the sort triumph but a conceptual tour de force. For chose to paint on in enamels for his portrait of of instrument, a encountering it is to be reminded how the the adolescent Holocaust martyr Anne Frank simple ballpoint star-crossed Princess was pursued to her death is just as resonant in another way: lacquer on pen, that a “Lady Diana” by car crash through a dark tunnel in Paris by a the white plastic interior refills of Bic Pens; person might horde of paparazzi. many of them lined up in half a dozen rows use to compose a letter confiding very personal The unusual medium, by its very purpose, to create a slightly ridged but more or less news to a close friend; news that the movie makes one immediately wonder how many flat textured surface on which to reproduce star chose to make public: about her recent ignored traffic lights the chase must have by hand in monochrome grisaille the familiar double-mastectomy, which she courageously heedlessly raced through, and imagine all photograph of this courageous young woman, shared with the world in the hope that it the flashbulbs of the rabid photographers who, confined in an attic with her family might influence other women with a genetic popping along the way, and picture the people hiding from the Nazis –– like Princess Diana, predisposition toward breast cancer to make a from the police coroner’s office and the confined with her royal in-laws in Buckingham similar decision to save their own lives. newspaper photographers later documenting Palace –– wrote (presumably in similarly simple Indeed, Guéguen’s entire solo exhibition, the crumpled car in the aftermath of the schoolgirl pens) a diary that, after their tragic which is titled “Femmes a l’honneur,” and terrible wreck. Some will also think of Elton deaths, became a world classic of Holocaust which was inspired by his grandmother, and John’s famous Pop elegy to his friend, Diana, literature. includes portraits of several other outstanding “Candle in the Wind.” Here, again, the artist’s original intention in women, is a moving tribute to the feminine Whether this was the artist’s original choosing his materials is quite beside the point: spirit in materials that transcend mere novelty intention, or whether he chose the neon the work he created, in part because of the to lend their own unique relevance to the tubing simply because of the challenge of poetic appropriateness of those materials, has a work. –– Maureen Flynn painting on its rounded surface rather than life of its own. the more conducive flat surface of a standard Henri Guéguen chose the interiors of Bic Henri Guéguen, Agora Gallery, 530 West artist’s canvas, is really immaterial, so to speak. Pens once again, lined up in the same manner, 25th St., through November 19, 2013. A work of art, once it is completed, has a logic on which to paint his enamel portrait of the Reception: Thursday, November 7, 6 - 8 pm. New DVD Documents the Creative Journey of Fiber Art Innovator Marilyn Henrion or those of us who have long been Cornell at his family home in Queens, Fadmirers of her work, the 24-minute where his mother would bake them DVD, “Marilyn Henrion: The Evolution homemade apple pies.) of a Fiber Artist,” offers a valuable Marilyn Henrion’s own career as an autobiographical overview of the life and artist, known internationally for putting career of one of the most innovative fiber art on a par with the most avant artists in her field since whatever medieval garde contemporary painting, took off genius conceived the Unicorn Tapestries. when her children were grown and she Narrated by the artist, now 80 and at was able to retire from her position at the the top of her form, the DVD takes us Fashion Institute of Technology and work from her childhood in Brooklyn, where in her studio full time. she learned to sew from her mother, the As images of her vibrant fiber pieces daughter of an immigrant tailor; to her from various periods appear on the college days, when she met and married screen, the artist –– who is represented Ed Henrion, a fellow student at Cooper in many museum, corporate, and private Union and a gifted painter and graphic collections worldwide, as well as in the artist in his own right. Smithsonian Institute’s Archives of The couple wasted no time in American Art in Washington, D.C. –– producing four hungry offspring; thus discusses influences ranging from Amish were largely compelled to curtail their quilts to the poetry of T.S. Eliot, and other creative drives for a number of offers enlightening philosophical insights years, while earning a living teaching. into the creative process. All through the 1950s and ‘60s, however, they remained part of the by Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselman, ––The Editors vibrant downtown art scene, attending among other second-generation New York lectures and parties with the Abstract School painters, as well Allen Ginsberg, Expressionists at the Cedar Bar and the Ray Bremser, and other Beat Generation legendary “Club,” and hosting a regular poets. (Often they spent Sundays with For more information, salon in their Village apartment, attended their more retiring artist friend Joseph visit www.marilynhenrion.com.

NOV/DEC 2013/JAN 2014 GALLERYSTUDIO 11 A Prototypical Punk Prodigy’s Progress an excerpt from HOODLUM HEART: Confessions of a Test-Dummy for the Crash and Burn Generation a memoir by Ed McCormack High School of Music and Art. Christine Jorgensen, the first highly “She remembers,” I would say, “because publicized sex change. I remember seeing, the pencil made it an especially painful and initially being puzzled by, a headline birth.” about it on the front page of the New York “Oh stop! Don’t be such a smartass, Daily News: “EX-GI BECOMES BLOND Chumley,” Mama would say, embarrassing BEAUTY.” me further by using my family nickname, It was almost as if this unthinkable thing which made me sound like a British butler had happened to Frankie Falco, the in some old black and white movie. “You badass president of the heroic white gang know you drew constantly from a very called the Mayrose that we all wanted young age.” to join when we became teenagers, a Years before puberty and before I neighborhood hero who told everybody, learned to use sarcasm as a self-conscious don’t worry, he had an arsenal of rifles adolescent defense mechanism against stashed away to defend our turf in the infantalizing maternal pride, the power as coming “spic war.” I figured if it could well as the danger, of language was brought happen to an Ex-GI, it could happen to rudely home to me. I was sitting on a stoop anybody, right? Not only did I use girl on Henry Street on a sweltering summer words, I was probably the worst stickball afternoon with some other little snots, player on the block, the last guy to be when one of them described an especially picked for any game. Could it be that, gory picture he had seen in a comic book somehow against my will, I could grow up Ed McCormack, Lower East Side, 1957 called “The Crypt of Terror.” to be a girl? “He’s been drawing ever since he was just “Jesus!” I said, laughing queasily. Nobody ever tells a nine-year-old the a little thing,” my mother would say when “That’s awful!” whole story about anything, after all. He is she bragged –– or kvelled, as our next “Awful?” a kid named Tommy Grassi forced to construct a reality from fragments door neighbor Esther Goldfein put it in said. “You can’t say awful –– that’s a girl of hearsay: Didn’t it get back to my mother Yiddish –– to her friends on the Lower East word!” from one of the neighborhood yentas that Side about her son the artist. The other boys sniggered, and it the former Dolly Giordano, estranged wife “He was born with a pencil in his occurred to me that “awful” really was of Charlie Coleman, my favorite uncle, was hand.” a girl’s word –– at least on the mean going around telling people that we were By then, a pretentious juvenile streets of the Lower East Side, where “sort of an artsy, queer family?” delinquent with no better ambition than male expression of revulsion demanded I was the only one in the family who to become a Greenwich Village beatnik, I something less prissy, more on the order of drew; so when she said “artsy,” she had a snotty answer when she embarrassed “ Oh shit, that’s fucked up, man!” must have meant me. But who was she me in front of people with that line, as she This was around the time an American referring to when she said “queer?” did repeatedly after I was accepted into the man went to Denmark and became Did she mean queer like Usher, a

12 GALLERYSTUDIO NOV/DEC 2013/JAN 2014 stereotypically effeminate male sob-sister of Years later, at P.S. 12, also called Corlears to “Silhouettes on the Shade,” “In the Still a neighborhood character, who showed up Junior High School, I was proud to be of the Night,” “Earth Angel,” and all the to weep at every wake at Vanella’s Funeral the only whiteguy in a rhythm and blues other great R&B standards. Home on Madison Street, as well as every quartet with three coloredguys. I first heard But I thought we could go further. wedding at St. Mary’s Roman Church on them singing in the 3rd floor Boy’s Room After all, Frankie Lymon wrote his hit Grand Street? where they harmonized on lunch hour song, “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?,” for One day soon after my uncle Charlie’s because the tiles and the high ceiling gave it his group the Teenagers when he was only wedding, when my mother was talking great acoustics. When I joined in uninvited 13. Maybe we should try coming up with outside our tenement with a couple of on the chorus of “Earth Angel,” rather some songs of our own that nobody else other ladies, Usher came over and cracked than “jumping stink,” as we used to say, at had recorded yet. them all up by saying, “Oh Mabel, I must the intrusion, they seemed surprised that a “You the fool, chump,” Earl said in his tell you, I couldn’t get over how gorgeous white boy had the harmony down so tight cynical, sneering way. “Where the fuck we your brother Charlie looked coming down and invited me to smoke a bit of reefer. gon’ get new songs from?” the aisle at Saint Mary’s in his tux last It was the first time for me, but naturally “It just so happens, chump, that I got week.” I wasn’t about to admit it. We stood one right here,” I said, taking a folded (Gorgeous! Now there was a girl’s word if around one of the stalls and when the piece of loose-leaf paper, on which I had anybody ever heard one!) reefer came around I took a toke, then scribbled some lyrics in ballpoint, out of “That’s funny,” my Aunt Emmy, the tossed it suavely into the toilet bowl, as the pocket of my Wrangler jeans. oldest of my mother’s two younger sisters, if it were a burnt-down Marlboro butt. Since it was my own composition, the said when Mama repeated Usher’s remark They stood, stunned, staring down at the others agreed to supply the background to her. “I guess he thought that little bitch still smokable roach floating around in the doo-wops and shoobie-doos while I sang Dolly looked only so-so, in her frilly wop yellow froth and the floating turds that lead this time. It was meant to be one of wedding gown and veil!” nobody ever bothered to flush. Then I got those list-songs along the lines of “My I couldn’t help wondering what Usher called every kind of lame dumb whiteboy Favorite Things,” only with less girl words would have thought about that snapshot ofay motherfucker in the book. and a syrupy-slow R&B melody, in which in our family album of my big badass uncle But once we got past that rough start the singer takes a sentimental inventory of Charlie drunkenly clowning around in my –– maybe because vocal trios were not as his various enthusiasms, always ending with mother’s underwear and Easter hat at one popular as quartets in the music scene of how he loves the girl even more. of the Saturday night card parties at our the ‘50s and they needed a fourth guy But when I got to the part that went, kitchen table. Of course my uncle Charlie with the right kind of voice –– they invited “And I love the flowers, the flowers that was no queer; he was just fooling around. me to sing with them after school. grow/ But most of all darlin,’ I love you Didn’t I once see him punch out my Aunt Two of them, James and Earl Davis, were so-o-o,” the doo-wops and the shoobie- Emmy’s big Polack bully of a husband, brothers. James, who usually sang lead, was doos from the background singers abruptly Elmo, while we were ordering our pastrami skinny and easy going with a smooth tenor stopped, and all that resounded and echoed sandwiches at the takeout counter in Katz’s voice like Johnny Ace, the great rhythm in the stairwell were those raucously Delicatessen? and blues singer who had a hit single with mocking Heckle and Jeckle chuckles, Charlie had just finished warning Elmo his ballad “Pledging My Love” before he guffaws, and “oh shee-its!” at which that he didn’t want to hear that he ever got unlucky playing Russian roulette in his coloredguys excelled when a whiteguy did raised his hands to his sister again, while dressing room and blew his brains out. or said something particularly lame. the big cowardly bum yessed him to death, Earl, who was 14, a year older than the In the general hilarity, we never finished gentle as a lamb, with actual tears in his rest of us, but in the same grade, because running through my song. Still, every eyes, saying, “Yeah, yeah, I’m sorry, Cholly, he got left back the year before, was pudgy, once in awhile afterward, one of my fellow I swear on my mother, I’ll never hit her with a touchy personality and a falsetto that singers –– usually Earl or Tyrone –– would again.” could hit the high notes on the Cadillacs crack a sly smile and say, “Hey Eddie, hows Now Charlie had his back turned, song “Gloria.” about we try that one about how you love talking to the old Jewish guy behind the The third guy, Tyrone, had just the the flowers that grow again?” counter, whose eyes must have widened as wispy beginnings of a goatee and a very Knowing it would only open the door he noticed Elmo grabbing a ketchup bottle deep voice, so he sang bass. Tyrone could to more ridicule, I’d refuse outright, of off one of the tables. Because before I even be very sarcastic when he wanted to. course, and insist that we stick to the had a chance to yell and tip him off, my Sometimes they called him “Country,” standards instead. But the Heckle and uncle spun around on his heel and caught because he was born in Georgia and his Jeckle guffawing and the “oh shee-it” shit Elmer right on the button with a beautiful family had only moved up North three or would would start up all over again anyway, right hand that laid him out flat on the four years earlier. My voice was somewhere at the mere memory of my lame refrain. floor of Katz’s, with his big beer belly in between (I guess you could call it second Admittedly, my song was corny; but no sticking up, like the proverbial beached tenor), and we sounded Boss together. more so, I thought, than some of the whale. Especially when we sang in the hall sentimental R&B ballads I had modeled it It was just like a scene out of “The Quiet stairwell leading to the basement of the on. And I didn’t doubt that had it already Man,” one of the John Wayne movies Alfred E. Smith projects, all the way down been recorded by one of the famous R&B Charlie used to take me to at the Leow’s on their own turf, near Chinatown, where groups like the Cleftones, the Flamingos, Delancey after his marriage to Dolly broke Madison Street begins in the shadow of the or the Moonglows, my friends would have up and he came to live with us for awhile, Brooklyn Bridge. been more than happy to add it to our Mama assigning her “baby brother” to The acoustics in the hallway were even repertoire. move into my room and share my bed better than in the Boy’s Room at P.S. 12, Just another lesson, I suppose, in the because our apartment was so small and reverberating up the whole fifteen or so double-edged power of language to either crowded already. floors of the building, creating a kind of make or break a man –– especially on * * * echo chamber effect when we harmonized the pre-gentrified Lower East Side of the

NOV/DEC 2013/JAN 2014 GALLERYSTUDIO 13 1950s, where any hint of sensitivity was In Tyrone’s story, Father Muthi lived to be until, in the natural course of invariably equated with vulnerability and in a shack near a swamp in Georgia and growing up, the four of us drifted apart. weakness. would slip “silent as a snake” into people’s But I remembered my old friends vividly houses after midnight, hypnotize their one day many years later when my wife After we got tired of singing in the children with his whispery voice and lead and I were having lunch in a Smiler’s deli hallway, we would sometimes hang out, them out into the swamp, never again to on 5th Avenue in midtown. Three African listen to records and bullshit for awhile in be seen. American meter maids at the next table James and Earl’s room in another building Many years later, remembering the story, started harmonizing on those familiar lead of the Smith Houses. (All the buildings I typed “Father Muthi” into my computer notes : Doo-wah, doo-wah, Doo-oo- wha, in the projects were the same, but they and the closest I could come were doo-wha...” I jumped right in with : “Why didn’t want to sing in the hall of their own references to “Muthi Killings” committed Do Foo-ools fall in love ? / Why do birds building in case the neighbors didn’t agree by devotees of a voodoo-like traditional sing so gay / And lovers await/ The break with us about how Boss we sounded, and African religious sect whose members have of day ? / Why do they fall in love...” decided to jump stink about the noise with been known to sacrifice children to use While I sang lead, they backed me up their Moms.) Their Moms, a very quiet their body parts in rites to make “muthi” on background vocals for a full couple of woman who looked old enough to be their (traditional magic). Possibly, Father Mufti choruses, until we all cracked up laughing. Grandma and hardly ever spoke, gave me a was a vague folkloric legend, passed down “Nice work ladies,” I said, when Jeannie suspicious look the first time they brought and embellished by generations of black and I got up to go. “But don’t quit your me in with them; probably because she Americans in the south with no idea of its day job,” and we all cracked up again. wasn’t used to seeing a white boy in the African origins, to entertain their kids or, “I swear, I can’t take you anywhere!” my apartment. But after she got used to it, she possibly, to scare them into behaving –– as wife said, still laughing, as we strolled out ignored me just like she did her two sons Tyrone told us he did with his little cousin into the bright sunlight and dense crowds and Tyrone when we came in and headed Levon, “who came out his Moms’s pussy of Fifth Avenue. straight for the bedroom. already badass.” * * * One night when we were in there “I tellin you, man, that bad boy eyes It must have been a day for time travel, smoking some reefer, Tyrone started bugged out like Buckwheat!” he chuckled. because later in the afternoon, still in fucking around with his Zippo lighter, “Ol’ Fatha Muthi scared shit out that little midtown, when we stopped into the public holding it under his chin to give his face boot.” atrium at Citicorp Center for a cup of tea, an eerie effect with that stringy little Fu “What’s a boot?” I asked. I became aware of an elderly woman at a Manchu goatee hanging down, and telling All three of the other guys looked back nearby table studying me intently as she a creepy story in his deep bass voice about and forth at each other with evil smiles. drew in a large spiral sketchbook. this weird character down South called “You never heard that of a ‘boot’ “Please stay still, young man,” she Father Muthi. I pictured him in my mind before?” Tyrone, asked, all three of them instructed, when I moved, “I’m trying to looking something like the r&b singer now looking at me, smiling slyly. “Where capture a likeness of you.” Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (only much older, the fuck you been, whiteboy? It mean It had been a long time since anyone had almost ancient) when they would wheel cullid –– like us!” flattered me with the term “young man”; him in a coffin out onto the stage at the Up until then, because we had been but still: “I’m an antsy person,” I told her. Apollo and he would climb out in his singing together for some time, I had “I find it hard to sit in one place. Besides, Count Dracula cape holding a cane with a forgotten there was any difference between we’ve almost finished out tea and we have skull on the end to stalk around singing his them and me. Suddenly now I was made somewhere to go.” hit song “I Put a Spell on You.” very much aware of it and would continue There was something vaguely

14 GALLERYSTUDIO NOV/DEC 2013/JAN 2014 familiar about her. Then I looked at her I would later learn, when he first came to taking them out to one of the vacant lots more closely for the first time: “Mrs. New York and started hanging out in the in the neighborhood and burning them. Braverman!?” Village around the same time as me) –– all But then I thought better of it, not only And squinting at me even more closely of whose slim paperback volumes slid easily because of the repellent associations of than when she drew, she said, “Eddie?! For into my leather bomber jacket. book burning by Nazis and blue nosed God’s sake, Eddie McCormack!? I had no Suddenly literature came alive for me in a clergy down through history, but also idea it was you hiding under all that hair way it never had in my high school English because of the unwanted official attention and that awful beard! But I’m glad to see classes (along with Mrs. Braverman’s art that a big smoky bonfire of municipal that you haven’t really changed personality- class, the only other classes I even bothered property might attract. So I packed them wise –– you’re still as uncooperative as to attend). Soon, besides the Beats, I all in boxes, then got a few friends to help ever!” was reading the older writers who had me schlep them down to East Broadway, My old art teacher from Seward Park influenced them: Dostoevsky, Whitman, where we left them in the inner vestibule High School and I both got up and Kafka, Proust, Rimbaud, Baudelaire –– and of the library just before closing time, then hugged each other heartily. And when I especially the doubly gifted British genius ran like hell. introduced her to my wife, Mrs. Braverman William Blake, whose fantastic illuminated What I didn’t tell Mama, though, was told her, “Eddie was the most gifted manuscripts I tried to emulate as a natural that after disguising them in some of those student I ever had. I still have one of his outgrowth of my childhood interest in plain brown paper jackets that she had paintings of a jazz musician hanging on drawing and writing comic strips. When bought at the beginning of each school my wall at home. But he was so difficult –– I couldn’t find the books I wanted at the term to wrap all the textbooks I never used, just impossible!” Seward Park Branch, I hunted them down I kept “On the Road” and several other “I know,” said my wife, smiling in branches all over the city. essential volumes that I didn’t feel I could sympathetically, “he still is.” Thus began the long process of my self- live without. “He wouldn’t go to any classes except education –– or if you prefer, my “library From then on, although I didn’t think it art and English,” Mrs. Braverman went delinquency,” as the NYPL investigators prudent to reveal my identity by trying to on. “Mr. Nanes, the principal was always who periodically showed up to interrogate use my card to borrow books, I sometimes threatening to suspend him. At the end of my mother about my unreturned books stopped into the library to read, and to every term, his English teacher and I had and unpaid fines referred to it. For by a occasionally boost a volume or two. Just to go around to all his other teachers and certain point, I had borrowed dozens upon as often, after checking into homeroom beg them to please pass him on the basis of dozens of books that I could not bring to get counted present, then slipping all the drawing and writing that he did for myself to return, feeling that I needed out a side exit, I would hide out in plain the school year book. ‘Who is this, kid?’ his them around to inspire the poetry I had sight, at the Grand Dairy Restaurant right math teacher asked me, ‘I never even met begun to write under the influence of the across the street from the school. I would him!’” Beats. usually take the same seat, down at the Fortunately, the investigators who end of the counter as far as possible from Apart from Mrs. Braverman, who showed up at my mother’s door didn’t the big plate glass window and the door. coddled me and encouraged my artistic arrive with search warrants, since piles of And there I would sit for hours, drinking talents, I saw Seward, a block-long, six- unreturned books cluttered the floor, the Cokes, smoking Marlboros, already the story gray cement fortress on the corner radiators, the windowsills, the dresser top, most popular teenage cigarette brand, and of Grand and Essex Streets, as a gulag-like and almost every other surface of my small writing and sketching on the lined pages penal colony thinly disguised as a legitimate hovel of a bedroom at the back of our of my virgin loose-leaf binder, otherwise institution of lower learning. Most days, railroad flat. The library dicks had badges, unsullied by anything so mundane and after checking into home room just long however, that they flashed whenever they tedious as class notes. enough to be counted present, instead of showed up, and Mama was petrified that Eventually on the strength of a going to classes, I’d slip out one of the I was going to end up in jail, and that she haphazardly assembled portfolio of some side exits and spend a couple of hours at might also, for being an accessory to all the of my more finished drawings on actual the Seward Park Branch of the The New stolen property, its value estimated at an art paper and a glowing recommendation York Public Library, right around the astronomical several thousand dollars, one from Mrs. Braverman, I was accepted into corner on East Broadway. At first I was of the investigators told her, that I had her the High School of Music and Art. From mainly interested in books on fine art and harboring in our apartment. what I could gather in an essay I only read cartooning. Then one night I saw Jack That all our towels, blankets, silverware recently by Erica Jong, who was there Kerouac interviewed on John Wingate’s and other dry goods had the logo “Grace around the same time, I should have been TV show “Nightbeat,” and borrowed his Line” on them, didn’t count. That was ecstatic. Only, Erica apparently found the novel “On the Road” as soon as the first just “swag” from the docks, and everyone school to be an entirely different place than copy showed up on the New Books shelf. knew that, in the 1950s, before everything I did. I’m tempted to owe it off to our very Kerouac led to Allen Ginsberg, whose epic arrived in the Port of New York in trailor- different backgrounds: mine, Lower East poem “Howl,” I couldn’t yet find at the size containers that were impossible to Side workingclass Irish; hers, Upper West library, probably because it had recently boost without a truck chassis to haul them Side upper middleclass Jewish. But in her been embroiled in a much publicized away, longshoremen stole as much of the essay she dismisses such differences, saying obscenity trial. But I finally boosted a ships’ cargo as they could, and ransacked “It was in high school that I began to find copy at the Eighth Street Book Shop, the the ocean liners of whatever supplies and my true class. Here the competition was most avant garde literary shrine in the fixtures were portable as well. not about money or color or neighborhood Village, where I also discovered books by When poor Mama finally wearied of but how well you drew or played. At Music other Beat Generation personalities such having to claim that I had left home and and Art, new hierarchies were created, as Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, she had no idea where I was, she ordered hierarchies of virtuosity. Was your painting and the truly outlaw poet and armed me to get all those books out of her house in the semiannual exhibition? Were you robber Ray Bremser (Bob Dylan’s favorite, on threat of eviction. At first I considered tapped to perform in the orchestra or on

NOV/DEC 2013/JAN 2014 GALLERYSTUDIO 15 WQXR? By now, we all knew we didn’t students there insufferably square, like the drawing ability and would raise his bushy belong in televisionland America –– and we handful of honors kids at Seward who white eyebrows approvingly, as though were proud of it.” belonged to the Arista Society, rather than I were some goyische equivalent of a She goes on to describe a school that the Blackboard Jungle rabble with whom brilliant Yeshiva student –– especially when should have seemed like heaven to me in I was prouder to be associated–– even he peeked over my shoulder at the zaftig the late fifties, where, “Being outsiders was while smugly aware that my artistic talent female nudes magically forming under my a badge of merit. We had no teams, no set me apart. Besides, I would have told pencil around the borders of one of my cheerleaders, and the cool class uniform you, getting to school in the morning was Blakean poem illuminations. was early beatnik: black stockings, hand a pain in the ass, involving the arduous Now, he welcomed me back warmly made sandals, and black lipstick for the ordeal of waking up a full hour earlier, with, “Hey Pick-ass-io, we missed you! girls; black turtlenecks, black jeans, black taking the subway all the way up to 135th Where you been? Come. Sit. Right here at leather jackets for the boys. Stringy hair was Street and Convent Avenue, then climbing the counter. Ve saved your seat!” requisite for both sexes. We experimented an interminable number of concrete steps, And what of my poor sainted mother with dope. We cruised the Village hoping still half asleep, to a huge stone structure, who finally had to give in and sign the to be mistaken for hipsters. We carried encrusted like a medieval castle with papers giving her permission for my transfer books by Kafka, Genet, Sartre, Allen gargoyles, at the top of a steep hill in a park back to Seward? Ginsberg. We stared existentially into our in Harlem. This was what I told myself, “The apple don’t fall far from the tree,” cappuccino at Rienzi’s or the Peacock. We rather than admitting that I couldn’t Mama ruefully concluded, when I finally wanted to seduce black jazz musicians, but take the competition of finding myself took Mr. Nanes’ advice and dropped out of were afraid to. We had found our true class in a school lousy with other gifted kids high school altogether only a short while at last.” who “shoved it in your face,” and losing later, likening me to my father who, after How did I miss all that? Especially all the unique status I enjoyed at Seward losing the best job he ever had, as a trainer the other girls done up like my 14-year- as resident beatnik and unofficial school for the Brooklyn Dodgers, spent the rest old sexual prodigy of a statutory chicklet pornographer. of his working life shaping the docks, an modern dance student girlfriend, Helen What I told the clerks at the Board of ordinary longshoreman. Aronson? (Erica’s memory, however, may Education was even simpler: “If you don’t * * * be a bit off about the “black lipstick,” a give me my transfer, I’ll quit school the Goth chic touch I never saw in the Village minute I turn sixteen.” –– or anywhere else –– in the late ‘50s; In fact that was what Sidney Nanes, the could she be thinking of her daughter or principal of Seward Park High had been granddaughter, maybe?) recommending that I do for some time, Anyway, the answer to why I only saying, “Since you consistently cut all your attended Music and Art for a few days classes except Art and English, why not before showing up at the Board of stop wasting my time and your own?” Education and demanding to be transferred His welcome back speech was equally back to Seward may lie in the following of to the point: “Do you want to know what Erica’s sentences: “Chosen for their talent I call a boy like you, a boy who has talent to draw or sing or play an instrument, and is given the wonderful opportunity these kids were the most diverse group I’d of attending a school like Music and Art, ever met. Their class was talent. And like but who turns his back on it to come back all insecure people, they shoved it in your here? I call such a boy a meshugener.” face.” I got a more affectionate greeting from Naturally, If you’d asked me at the time, Moishe, the amiable alter cocker of a I would have said I found Music and Art counterman and waiter at the Grand Dairy Next Stop Greenwich Village: academically stifling –– the very idea that Restaurant. Moishe would have chased From Doo-Wop to Cool Beatnik Jazz they actually expected me to attend classes! any other kid who sat for hours smoking, photo by Norman Ross Contrary to Erica’s memory of them, I also nursing one Coke, and drawing in his would have said that I found my fellow notebook. But he was impressed with my

Is your art website getting lost in cyberspace? NYC Community Chorus Contact Join us for our GALLERYSTUDIO Holiday Concert at [email protected] to find out how to attract the attention of collectors, curators, Sunday, Dec. 15, 2013, 4pm. critics, and others who should know about your work. Singing & dancing in the aisles. 296 Ninth Ave. at 28th St. The GALLERYSTUDIO www.nycccah.org advertising deadline for the 212-475-2702 Feb/Mar issue is Jan 6 for color, Jan 13 for black/white. 16 GALLERYSTUDIO NOV/DEC 2013/JAN 2014 Lauren Purje’s Fertile Graphomania ot too long ago, at least in the gallery exhibition at Emoa Space in Chelsea. Purje’s Nscene, the kind of drawing that originated work, however, both her drawings and her in cartoons and comic strips, was merely paintings, first caught the public eye on her something for Pop artists, particularly early website series “End of the Line” (laurenpurje. Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Ronnie com), to which she has committed herself to Cutrone, to parody for some supposedly contributing “a drawing a day.” higher artistic purpose. That kind of work was Some of Purje’s work features cute cartoon invariably an object of, if not naked scorn, characters that strike one as “Peanuts with the mere irony that has run rampant since an edge,” as seen in one macabre drawing Andy painted his first soup can. But in recent of a skeleton holding out an hour glass with seasons, a younger generation of artists who sand trickling down to a grim-faced little take cartoon style seriously for its honest boy in a coonskin cap, captioned “HAPPY expressive possibilities has begun breaking BIRTHDAY JOHN, Enjoy Every Second, down the barriers between so called “High” Love, Lauren.” (This was a birthday greeting and “low” art and showing up not only to a friend, but obviously too good not to be in galleries but in museum surveys as well: shared!) Another is an uncaptioned drawing Richard Pettibon, who worked his way up of a little boy drawn in the same simple from concert poster graphics and album cover linear style, but beset by giant insects in a illustrations for the punk band Black Flag to more realistic, detailed manner as beautifully international Art Star without significantly delineated as an etching by Durer. Yet another changing his style; Zak Smith, whose graphic (perhaps a comment on abstract art with novel-influenced drawings inspired by Thomas which her mentor Cenedella would no doubt youth population. In Purje’s paintings, Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” have made agree!) depicts three monkeys collaborating on however, these cute cartoon figures are often their way into shows at both the Whitney and the same large abstract painting. placed in atmospheric landscape settings MoMA; and Dame Darcy, widely known here The figures in Lauren Purje’s paintings are with dramatic, almost Turneresque cloud and abroad for both her comic books and her similar to those in her line drawings, but more formations, as seen in her scene showing a paintings –– to name just four. worked up in color in a manner that can be little girl solemnly watching a flock of crows Now we can add to that short list of compared to the Japanese Pop painting style picking over the bones of a skeleton half crossover talents the name of Lauren Purje. “kawaii” or “supercute,” influenced by cuddly, Continued on page 25 A former student and protégé of leading big-eyed anime characters, which has made its contemporary Social Realist Robert Cenedella, way from Tokyo to the New York punk scene Lauren Purje she recently had a splendid solo gallery by way of the East Village’s sizeable Japanese www.laurenpurje.com Bill Dixon: Versatility in the Abstract “ e’s all over the place,” some might say of interconnected circles, interspersed with HBill Dixon’s art, and not realize that they sharp straight lines that crisscross within like would be paying this artist, who moves easily luminous rays of cosmic sunlight. between painting by hand in the traditional Another, somewhat more complicated manner and working on a computer, a and formally varied composition in the same compliment. Yes, Dixon is, indeed, all over the medium, “Square One,” is a buoyant vision of place in the best possible way. strategically placed opaque yellow, red and blue For whether working with a brush on squares that establish the primacy of the picture canvas or creating digital abstractions on the plane in a layered field of multicolored strokes computer, Dixon refuses to settle for what is that streak like comets within a self contained “Hair” often referred to as a “signature style.” Which universe of lively shapes and vibrant hues. is to say, he will not settle comfortably into a In another composition called “Dreams,” in the Sun” depicts huge bright yellow particular way of working or repeat a certain big transparent orbs float tither and yon, sunflowers, reminiscent of van Gogh or stylistic formula over and over again, turning suggesting crystal balls filled with luminous Charles Burchfield, in the foreground of the his work into what almost amounts to a hues. Casting metaphysical shadows on thin composition. Their scale gradually diminishes corporate logo, as all too many contemporary air, these circular shapes carom around like in vanishing perspective to reveal a precisely artists have a tendency to do, in their haste billiard balls within a sun-drenched abstract delineated procession of bicyclists peddling to market what collectors expect from landscape further enlivened by vigorous past the field under a pale blue sky, streaked them. Rather, he continues to explore new verdant freehand strokes. Yet another oddly with white linear clouds that emphasize possibilities, always starting out with freehand titled work, “Hair” (unless it refers to the their forward motion. Along with the others drawings in pencil, color markers, and acrylics universe of imagination each of us carries described above, this work could be said to that he will later convert via the giclee process under the follicles in his or her head!) sets two demonstrate Bill Dixon’s own forward motion into works on paper or canvas. such cosmic orbs afloat within the wavering as a developing artist who seems never to look The one constant in all of Dixon’s work, rhythms of elongated forms flowing like back as he continues to, as he puts it, “stay however, is his unique sense of culture, which rainbow-colored ribbons that graduate from true to myself and the way I look at things in permeates and enlivens both his abstract deep blues and purples into luscious light-filled my mind’s eye.” and figurative compositions. One such pinks and yellows with a drama suggesting the And if that means being all over the place, “digital handmade painting on canvas,” as miraculous transition from darkest night to so be it. –– Wilson Wong he calls them, is the composition he calls brightest dawn that heralds the break of each “Time,” with its almost fluorescently brilliant, new day. Bill Dixon, Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th St., translucent rainbow shades of red, yellow, By contrast, a surprising figurative January 14 - February 4, 2014. blue, and purple-violet resounding in infinite composition that Dixon calls “Riding Reception: Thursday, January 16, 6 - 8 pm. NOV/DEC 2013/JAN 2014 GALLERYSTUDIO 17 Cross-cultural Currents Meet and Meld in “El Barrio” “ lights of Fancy,” one of the more lively tubular forms. rugged sculptures created with crumpled car Fand varied group shows this season, came Of special interest, both for its cultural bodies, celebrating and approximating their to us by virtue of a curatorial collaboration significance in relation to “El Barrio,” where demolition derby excitement with an equally between Taller Boricua, a nonprofit artist the exhibition took place, as well as its own rugged approach to painted form. workshop, event space and gallery at the artistic impact was a monumental portrait Then there is Janya Barlow, whose large Julia de Burgos Latino Cultural Center in in oil on canvas by Nitza Tufino titled acrylics on canvas project an almost antic East Harlem and The National League of “Rafael Tufino Way,” honoring her father, energy, with their brilliant carnival of colors American Pen Women. a celebrated Puerto Rican artist who passed and bulbous abstract shapes that hover on the Yoon Cho presented two digital C prints away in 2008 and for whom an area of the edge of morphing into recognizable, cartoon- from her “Desert Walk Series,” combining neighborhood was recently renamed. As like imagery or weird biological matter. Here photographic images of the desert with faithful to his subject as Rafael Tufino’s own Barlow’s “Upward Spiral,” where one of the intricate fine line drawing of human babies, best-known portrait “Goyita,” a dignified main forms suggests a slightly lopsided target, lizards, and other creatures gradually and soulful portrait of a woman representing while others evoke manic Rorschach blots morphing into skeletons as the natural cycles Puerto Rico’s impoverished rural class, it outlined by a white pen-line, is particularly of life and death progressed. Equally full depicts the artist from the shoulders up, engaging. of life and mortality were Tania Alvarez’s smiling broadly under his distinctive gray Rock and roll excess appears to be the ingenious mixed media combine painting of mustache, with the river and the Brooklyn subject of Anastasia Teper’s intriguing oil on a bird morphing into a human skeleton with Bridge and skyline in the background. canvas, “The End,” the title of which alludes an actual working clock ticking like a heart NitzaTufino, a distinguished artist in her to Jim Morrison’s apocalyptic Oedipus and within its ribcage. own right, known particularly for her many incest epic, while the imagery –– a skinny Photo artist Myrna Harrison Changar public murals, as well as for her paintings and blond musician and his guitar lying on was represented by digital prints from her prints, was El Taller Boriqua’s first woman the stage floor behind a trashed drum set “Through a Glass” series: a reaching hand, artist in 1970, and has been involved with the seems to symbolize both the semi-comatose a landscape and other evocatively distorted organization since that time. performance style and ultimate suicide of imagery that, for one viewer, brought to Claudia Miranda, another fine portrait Kurt Cobain. Teper’s “Jimi,” seems a tribute mind the haunting melody of the song “The artist is represented by two large drawings, to Hendrix, even while the flame patterns Days of Wine and Roses.” “Marilu,” a young woman with a vivacious on his shirt as he bends solemnly over his Different postmodern approaches to the smile, and “Angel,” an older man with a instrument suggest his ultimate consumption timeless art of landscape also made a strong pensive expression. Both are executed in ink, by the drugs he consumed to fuel his genius. impression: Anna Soave’s sensitive oils on marker, and paint in a technique which, like “Cat in a Box” is a work in acrylic, painted canvas in a softly poetic neo-impressionistic that of Chuck Close, employs intricate yet on the inside of a shallow box by Hannah style. Julia A. Rogge’s picturesque, crystal freely configured abstract strokes to create an Rogge, in which the black and white patterns clear realist Central Park panoramas of almost photorealist likeness. of a sleeping feline’s coat, placed against an Bethesda Fountain with autumn trees blazing Michele Bonelli merges elements of expanse of smooth, cream-colored pigment, above; miniature sailboats floating along on abstraction and the figurative in two large oils creates an overall effect simultaneously literal the Conservatory pond with tiny tourists on linen from her dynamic yet meticulously and abstract. “Astoria Park,” another work by crowding around the outdoor cafe in the hard-edged “Urban Abstract Series.” In both Rogge in paper and ink, presenting a scenic distance; lovers in the shade of a bower on Bonelli’s “City Concerto” and “Symphony view of two bridges, set between an orange- the rowboat lake. And Maria Lipkin’s vibrant in Steel,” the artist fragments and shuffles ocher sky and a solid blue body of water, with views “Dusk” and “Twilight on the Marsh,” layered elements of urban architecture and silhouetted foliage along the shore, is yet in which pinkly gleaming light on water and rushing traffic like a bright new deck of cards. another tour de force of uninflected imagery. sublimely spacious bodies of water have a Miriam Wills also echoes the shifting “Untitled,” a large, semiabstract diptych chromatic exquisiteness to rival color field planes of Cubism in sharply fragmented in acrylic on canvas by Nancy Miller, takes painting. compositions, albeit in a gestural manner, poetic liberties with natural forms in a Sculpture was also well represented in embellished by the spontaneous flourishes manner suggesting that nothing may be “Chair People” and “Corner Table,” Sybil of Abstract Expressionism. Many colors and quite what it appears to be. Craggy boulders Maimin's squared-off semiabstract figures patterns converge in Wills’s acrylics on canvas crowding along a shoreline take on doughy in fired clay, which, with their earthy patinas like Schnabel’s shards of smashed crockery, softness, as bare tree limbs reach down, suggest the flat cubist planes of Juan Gris verging on a chaos that is skillfully averted by seemingly from, nowhere like sinuous claws. restored to three dimensions. Eleanore the artist’s swift brush. With strong outlines weaving among patchy Capogrosso’s contrastingly realistic untitled Elinore Bucholtz employs a repertoire areas of color, Miller seems to tell us, quite bronze figure of a nude middle-aged man of different strokes and gestures made with convincingly, that it’s all about the sensuous with a strategically draped cloth flowing from either a brush or palette knife that ranges nature of paint itself. his shoulders down over his groin could be from warm, fleshy de Kooning pinks to Like Joseph Cornell, who would appear to either a Roman Senator half out of his toga cool Cezanne greens and blues, in abstract be one of her kindred spirits, Arlene Egelberg or a modern businessman in a Turkish bath, compositions such as her acrylics on canvas fashions her own surreal realm from disparate while her hooded head and shoulders bronze “Monument” and “Destabilization.” She snippets of mixed media imagery, layered suits her title “Saint.” The expressive lines in also often melds crumpled paper with her with exquisite complexity. Peacocks are the faces of both, however, reveal the shared pigments to create the textural effects that are summoned by Egelberg to preen at fountains strain and pain of being human. especially seductive in the latter work. amid lush many-shaped palm fronds at which Then there is Marcia Bernstein, who Leanne Martinson, on the other hand, smaller avians nibble as they flit and frolic in combines the ancient and the modern in combines vigorously brushed color areas Edenic tropical gardens of the artist’s fertile “Aztec #1” and “Aztec #2, a pair of ruggedly with fluid calligraphic gestures in a series imagining. –– Maurice Taplinger tactile mixed media wall reliefs in which titled “Homage to John Chamberlain.” angular designs and shapes suggestive of Martinson’s muscular paint-handling suggests “Flights of Fancy,” recently seen at Taller pre-Columbian symbols jut out from semi- an abstract tribute to the artist known for his Boricua, 1680 Lexington Avenue.

18 GALLERYSTUDIO NOV/DEC 2013/JAN 2014 Color and Emotion in the Visual Music of Francesco Ruspoli ome of our most memorable and of his imagery, describes the experience of Senduring artists are those who evolve creating these compositions as feeling on succinct symbols for our common humanity: “the dynamic frontier between abstraction Jean Dubuffet’s art brut Everymen; Willem and figuration,” while awash in what he calls de Kooning’s monstrous amazons; Leger’s “a music of colour.” robotic steel workers; Francis Bacon’s cold On a strictly visual level, similar sensations meat couplers merging in protoplasmic blobs are conveyed to the responsive viewer as well. on beds as desolate of love as morgue slabs... Along with the considerable aesthetic appeal The contemporary painter Francesco of Ruspoli’s sensuous surfaces, however, Ruspoli appears destined to join their and his bold colors, often emphasized, like company, with his crowds in whose anxious those of Georges Rouault, with thick black faces “The Scream” of Edvard Munch echoes outlines, his work has a raw emotional impact “Divine Destiny” silently in living color. In past series Ruspoli which comes across intensely in the painting has painted faceless lovers, their simplified he calls “Divine Destiny.” primal scream. anatomies entwined, the primary colors of In this vibrant oil on canvas the same Indeed, like his famous Expressionist their flesh reflecting primate heat. In public, cadmium red light hue that projects a sense predecessor, Francesco Ruspoli comes across the painter arms his personages with faces “to of livid rage in the large, heavy-browed, in this series as a maestro of human angst. face the faces that you meet,” as Eliot put it glowering profile on the left foreground Witness in yet another powerful oil on canvas in “Prufrock.” But these masklike faces rarely of the picture, reflects the warm glow of in which a crowd of huddled figures –– meet, as they mill among other alienated motherly love in the child cradled in the some with their heads lowered so that their souls in city streets where neon signs swirl like protective arms of the gently curved golden features are hidden, others cloaked in blue van Gogh’s schizoid stars or form cathedral- yellow maternal figure on the right side of veils through which only their eyes can be like spires suggesting the ornate Towers of the composition, as other, smaller simplified seen –– walk warily toward the viewer against Mammon in Las Vegas. figures rush about behind them with the a backdrop of brightly brushed domes and Color, in Ruspoli’s paintings may signify scurrying obliviousness of the harried arches suggesting churches and mosques. raw emotion: “red with rage”; “green with urban citizen, against the swiftly brushed In every respect, it is a painting as ominous envy”; blue as can be”; or, it may symbolize impressionistic cityscape. Meanwhile, the as its title: “Unsettled Times.” a universal desire to transcend all limitations timid, skeletal blue-faced figure caught in the –– Marie R. Pagano and fly over the rainbow into a new world of middle, between the hugely glowering red boundless aspiration and possibility. Ruspoli profile and the mother protectively cradling himself, concentrating, as all serious painters her child, wears a woeful expression, as Francesco Ruspoli, Agora Gallery, 530 must, on the painterly process, rather than though like the character in Munch’s famous West 25th Street, through Nov. 19, 2013. consciously plotting the possible meaning painting, he is on the verge of letting out a Reception: Thursday, Nov. 7, 2013 6 - 9 pm G&S Classifieds opportunities WEST SIDE ARTS COALITION (WSAC) established 1979, welcomes new members from all MONTSERRAT CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY is reviewing artist geographic areas. There are approximately 14 exhibits per year for Fine Arts, Photography, and Craft Arts. portofolios for its new Chelsea Gallery. National and International artists are invited to submit. Sase, slides, Music, Poetry, Theater and Dance programs available. Contact info: Tel. 212-316-6024, photos and brief artist bio. Send to: Montserrat Contemporary Art Gallery, 547 W. 27 St., NYC 10001 email- [email protected] or website- www.wsacny.org. Or send SASE to the West Side Arts Coalition, PO Box 527, Cathedral Station, New York, NY 10025. Visit our ground floor gallery at 96th Street & THE ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE Broadway (on the center island) New York City. Open: Wed. 6-8pm, Sat. & Sun., 12-6pm. •Learn how to use your body corrrectly. •Improve your posture. CUSTOM PICTURE FRAMING for artists and galleries. Museum quality, selected •Achieve lasting results. frames & mats. Float & dry mounting, canvas stretching. Jadite Galleries, 662 10th Ave. (betw. 46/47 A hands-on redirecting of the mind and body that has been used successfuly for over a century. Learn Sts.) Hours: 12 - 6 pm, Free delivery in Manhattan. 212-977-6190 [email protected] how to use your body in a more efficient way which will have far-reaching benefits. It involves changing old habits and learning new ones to last a lifetime. Please call for a private consultation and introductory NOHO GALLERY is viewing portfolios in all media for our Chelsea location. Visit lesson. Union Square studio, or house and office calls available. Limited Introductory Offer: Consultation, nohogallery.com for application form, or send SASE to Noho Gallery, 530 photo analysis, intro lesson plus free additional lesson. Sliding scale available. West 25th Street, NY, NY 10011. DIANA MULLMAN, AmSAT. 212-734-7875

Michael R. Horenstein $6,$1$576 &5$)76 Attorney & Counsellor at Law ± Arts Law, Provenance Concerns ± General Business Law ± Contract Drafting & Review 2IIHULQJDYDULHW\ 9LVLWRXUVWRUH ± Corporate Law & Company Formation RIDUWLIDFWV 0$,/%2;(6  ± Commercial Litigation GHSLFWLQJ %(<21',1& 437 East 80th Street, No. 27, New York NY 10075 /RUG*DQHVK $IXOOVXSSO\RI Ph: (212) 517-7340 Email: [email protected] DQGDULFK VKLSSLQJQHHGVDQG DVVRUWPHQWRI VHUYLFHVLQFOXGLQJ For health care information please contact $VLDQVSHFLDOW\ )LQH$UW3DFNDJLQJ LWHPVDQG (DVWWK6W New York Artists Equity Association, Inc. (NYAEA) at 212-941-0130. DQWLTXHV 1HZ

NOV/DEC 2013/JAN 2014 GALLERYSTUDIO 19 Italian Curator Stefania Carrozzini Presents the Artist as “Wounded Healer” “ he Artist is the Greatest Healer,” is a Mexico City-born sculptor Josefina Ttitle that might lead one to expect some Temin expresses both the dynamic of the sort of “New Age” exhibition, if its curator feminine and masculine eternal beauty of Stefania Carrozzini did not point out that it’s nature and the beauty as well as the fragile actually a quote from Joseph Beuys. transience of all living things with her works “For this exhibition I chose artists that in paper and steel. Here she is represented by have something to do with healing,” she told “Trompetas” an especially poignant work in us. “Either by profession or personal artistic paper and eucalito wood, in which delicate inclination.” floral forms perch like albino butterflies on Dr. Enzo Trapani, for example, is a former what appears to be the sawed up stump of a general practitioner born in Argentina, now tree. specializing in neurology. He is represented Milanese painter Silva Pisani is a co- by “Deep,” a dynamic undersea scene in founder of Neo-Relationist art movement acrylic on canvas, employing an abstract which, as one understands it, encourages a Silva Pisani expressionist technique to capture the the personal transformation through art rather Susi Lamarca, born in Italy, focused in liquidic explosion of a dive. than the distancing encounter of an “object” her collage studies on the potential use of Michela Valenti, on the other hand, went and a “viewer”. Pisani’s acrylic painting, imagery to enhance learning. She continues through a period of self healing when she “Past, Present, and Future,” depicting those interests in her artistic practice with lost her eyesight after a cerebral accident in a symmetrical pyramidal form within a works such as her digital photo “Untitled,” 1992. After several months of introspective circularly swirling painterly whirlwind, also in which a peach-colored circular shape set reflection in darkness, Valenti regained the appears related to the “new naturist” works against a plain white background possesses a ability to capture the basic nature of objects of artists such as Gregory Amenoff. sensual vertical portal. expressed through tactile mixed media Serbian painter Darko Malenica, who Earlier in her career, another Italian artist, works such “L’Aquilone,” with its subtle sees art as “medicine for the soul,” shows a Continued on page 25 chromatic modulations, tactile swatches of neosurrealist oil on canvas titled “Liberation,” fabric collage, suggesting the movement of in which rusty broken chains dance kites twirling in the air, and the single word triumphantly in the air, while the silhouetted “The Greatest Artist is the Healer,” curated “Respira” scratched into the paint surface figures rejoice and floral bulbs shower down by Stefania Carrozzini, Onishi Project, near the top of the composition. like benign bombs. 521 West 26th St., Nov. 27 - Dec. 11, 2013 Felix Semper’s Dynamic Humanist Vision elix Semper, who was born in Havana art brut compositions, as well as the Berlin be suffering for all of FCuba, has lived in both Spain and the Street scenes of George Grosz. humanity. United States, and now resides in north One can only venture a guess that the large Another Carolina, is an artist with remarkably fluid numeral “11” near the top of the canvas may strong large draftsmanly abilities, which shine through his refer to September eleven, which makes one monochromatic paintings as well as his drawings. Line is his flash back to films and photos one has seen painting in a natural instrument, regardless of what medium of the crowds in downtown New York fleeing perfectly square 50" he may be employing in any given work. Yet through the streets in the wake of the terrorist X 50" format, simply he is also a fine painter, with an oil on canvas attack on the Twin Towers of the World titled “Heads” technique that at its most richly embellished Trade Center. Thus this composition can consists mainly of “Eleven” can recall the Art Nouveau of Gustav Klimpt be interpreted as a powerful contemporary nude figures set by way of the Abstract Expressionists. history painting. against a black ground. Some stand, others Although this could sound like a Another large work in acrylic and oil on recline. Some have additional heads looking contraction in terms, the combination comes canvas by Semper called “Seventeen” does not out from where their genitals would normally across elegantly in “Into the Mist,” with lend itself as easily to historical interpretation. be. The most obvious, (if not necessarily most its sense of figures partially concealed and This one is nearly monochromatic, except for correct) interpretation of this image might be fragmented within a veritable forest of jewel- the addition of blue accents to the black and that so much that occurs in sex resonates more like hues, and “Arbol de Vine,” where slightly white palette. It features many smaller figures in the head than in the body. less obscured female nudes play hide and seek swirling around a large head at the center of At the same time, Felix Semper does the amid a show of pale blue rivulets. the composition. The head looks agonized, beauty of the human female body much By contrast, in “Eleven,” a large Christlike, albeit with more ethnic features justice in his Egon Schiele-like ink drawing monochromatic composition in acrylic and oil than the images of a Waspish Caucasian Jesus “Mascara,” as well as “Four,” a large acrylic on canvas, the Abstract Expressionist element that one is accustomed to encountering in and oil on canvas, in which a contemporary in Semper’s work comes across most forcefully. most official Christian representations of The Lady Godiva on a suitably comely white steed For from a distance, this jam-packed painting Savior. This head is boldly outlined in a drippy gathers an admiring crowd (one of whom has an intricacy and an energy comparable to Abstract Expressionist manner, in contrast to stands out for being a dead ringer for Che Jackson Pollock’s compositions in black and the smaller surrounding figures and heads, Guevara in his iconic beard and beret), even white enamel. On closer viewing, however, which are all nude and comporting themselves though she is wearing black rimmed glasses rather than abstract swirls a multitude of in various ways, albeit not quite orgiastically and holding a briefcase. –– Peter Wiley slightly distorted figures comes into focus, –– since each appears set apart in its nakedness each one with individually delineated features. from the others. Yet all seen aware of the Felix Semper, Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th They are all crammed together in a manner monolithic power, of this large central head St., November 22 - December 13, 2013. that can also remind one of Jean Dubuffet’s which, in its grimacing agony, could appear to Reception: Thursday, December 5, 6 -8 pm. 20 GALLERYSTUDIO NOV/DEC 2013/JAN 2014

Open 2013 photography exhibit Curator: Robyn Gecht FREE EXPRESSION 2013 Curator: Sonia Barnett Oct. 30, - Nov. 17, 2013 Opening reception: Nov. 2, 2013, 2:30 pm- 5:30 pm November 20 - December 8, 2013 Closing reception: Nov. 17, 2013, 2:30- 5:30 pm Sonia Barnett • Herbert Evans • Arlene Finger Arthur Cajigas • Celia Cruzado • Robyn Gecht Nancy Johnson • Valerie Kirk • Lula Ladson Paul Margolis • JD Morrison • Jean Prytyskacz Nate Ladson • Lynn Lieberman • Pilar Malley Carolyn Reus • Len Speier • Thom Taylor Amy Rosenfeld • Emily Rich • Anne Rudder Sondra Weiner • Deena Weintraub et al. Robert Scott

%URDGZD\0DOO&RPPXQLW\&HQWHU %URDGZD\0DOO&RPPXQLW\&HQWHU %URDGZD\#6W 1<& &HQWHU,VODQG %URDGZD\#6W 1<& &HQWHU,VODQG *DOOHU\+RXUV:HGSP6DW6XQSP *DOOHU\+RXUV:HGSP6DW6XQSP [email protected] 212-316-6024 www.wsacny.org [email protected] 212-316-6024 www.wsacny.org

SÍLVIA SOARES BOYER

A Gift of Art 2013 Curator: Linda Lessner December 11 - 29, 2013 Reception: Dec. 14, 2:30 - 5:30pm Jutta Filippelli • Jennifer Lenn Linda Lessner • Lynn Lieberman Danguole Raudonikiene et al.

%URDGZD\0DOO&RPPXQLW\&HQWHU %URDGZD\#6W 1<& &HQWHU,VODQG *DOOHU\+RXUV:HGSP6DW6XQSP [email protected] 212-316-6024 www.wsacny.org http://www.silviasoares.home.sapo.pt

DANIEL C. BOYER

New Year, New Art 2014 Curator: Margo Mead

January 1-19, 2014 Reception: January 4, 2:30 - 5:30pm Lynne Lieberman • Margo Mead et al.

%URDGZD\0DOO&RPPXQLW\&HQWHU %URDGZD\#6W 1<& &HQWHU,VODQG *DOOHU\+RXUV:HGSP6DW6XQSP http://www.artbreak.com/danielcboyer [email protected] 212-316-6024 www.wsacny.org

NOV/DEC 2013/JAN 2014 GALLERYSTUDIO 21 Michèle Vincent: Surrealism for a New Age ew true innovators in the rarified realm Fof surrealism remain, although many still rummage in the movement’s dusty attic for timeworn props. One of the most gifted exceptions is the contemporary French painter Michèle Vincent, who not only keeps the faith but continues to command our attention with her dreamy visions of an alternate universe in which the most incongruous imaginative elements are evoked and merged with a fresh and startling verisimilitude. Perhaps the secret of Vincent’s success lies in her ability to bring into play a variety of qualities that hark back several centuries further than the movement in question, to the gothic tradition, as well as to the great-great grandfather of surrealism, Hieronymus Bosch. For Vincent’s technique has a flawless clarity reminiscent of that Netherlandish master of fantasy, even while being informed by a refreshingly contemporary New Age sensibility free from the superstitious moral residue of the medieval church, which still held sway in Bosch’s 15th century milieu. Especially fantastic among Vincent’s recent paintings is the work entitled “The Human Islet.” Although the term “islet” usually refers “The Cabbage Which Gives Again the Life” to a small, rocky island off the coat of a larger long white gown. comes across in another painting called “The land mass, here it takes an anthropomorphic Another cavity, this one most obviously Insane Bed and Street.” In this antic scene form. The upper torso of a youthful yet godly resembling the outer opening of a vagina, picturesque buildings, as intricately delineated being with his eyes closed blissfully and his interrupts a sky flecked with dense flocks of as the architectural elements of the mazes head thrown back in apparent ecstasy emerges birds in flight, even its vertically elongated in the etchings of M.C. Escher, appear to from the surrounding mass of water. His shape serves as the baroque, brass-colored be collapsing or molecularly decomposing bare chest opens into three portals, within frame around a cameo portrait of a figure in all around a couple in a bed whose calm which stone steps suggesting the winding a silken blue robe. Here, as in all of Vincent’s –– indeed, blissfully smug –– smiles seem to staircases in a flesh-colored castle, can be seen. paintings, natural anomalies abound: watery suggest that the apparent earthquake may have His long heavy metal mane merges with the blue waves, stylized as in chinoiserie, pour been brought about by seismic shocks and white rivulets of cloud enlivening a clear blue out of a kind of porthole in an object that vibrations emanating from the strenuousness sky above, while in the equally luminous resembles a magic carpet transporting of their very own honeymoon exertions! blue water below, a mermaid and a mermale a handsome young couple bearing gift Also spotlighting the artist’s classic canvas are locked in a romantic embrace, their bouquets. (To whom or what they make these “Rebirth” (a highlight of a previous exhibition long fishtails entwined in ornate arabesque, offerings remains unknown; but what British at Montserrat), comprised of multiple suggesting some unearthly erotic coupling or artist David Harrison said of the similarly square panels of luminous nature imagery heretofore unseen exotic subterranean species. elusive meanings in the paintings of his surrounding a characteristically mysterious Such mixed visual metaphors enhance the Scottish colleague Peter Doig on the occasion romantic scene like a Tiffany window-vista of complexity of Vincent’s paintings, which pile of Doig’s exhibition at the Scottish National a fairy tale realm; and introducing a dramatic symbol upon symbol, one visual metaphor Galleries, can just as easily apply to Michelle new work called “The Ship and the Sea,” upon another, with rich suggestive abundance, Vincent: “There is always a narrative, and that this solo show promises to be the most providing the closest perceptual equivalent to fact is good enough. You don’t have to know comprehensive survey of Michelle Vincent’s an actual psychedelic experience in recent art. what the narrative is.”) While some of the blue oeûvre to date. –– Peter Wiley A consciousness expanding quality is also waves behave like gas-tinted pilot-light flames, immediately apparent in “The Cabbage rising in low triangular shapes, one flares Michèle Vincent, whose solo show will Which Gives Again the Life,” another intricate far higher, like a waterfall that has reversed run from November 12 -30, 2013, can be composition where an equally fertile plethora direction and now appears to trickle down in a seen in the year-round salon at Montserrat of imagery appears. In this airy picture, narrow stream that widens toward the bottom Contemporary Art, 547 West 27th Street. Vincent most closely approaches Salvador Dali from the silken blue robe of the figure in the Montserratgallery.com for her ability to create a magical terrain with cameo portrait within the airborne, vulva- its own peculiar logic, where metaphysical shaped frame. Apart from these blue ripples, the water surrounding the mysterious island of EDITOR’S NOTE: phenomena take on the nature of everyday We were saddened to learn just before events. At the veiny heart of a huge cabbage “The Cabbage Which Gives Again the Life” is as pink and translucent as mists at twilight, going to press with this issue that on the left-hand side of the composition, Michèle Vincent (1952 - 2013) had which resembles the opening in a cave on enhancing the atmospheric subtlety that is yet another aspect of Vincent’s alternate universe. passed away of a long illness, as she the shore of an island on left-hand side of the completed her recent paintings. composition, an ethereal being of the title Yet that she is an artist who can also evoke contrastingly solid matter convincingly, and A memorial article will appear inhabits what appears to be a decidedly phallic- in an upcoming issue. shaped sheath of light that also doubles as her add a hint of humor to the bargain, also

22 GALLERYSTUDIO NOV/DEC 2013/JAN 2014 Sheila Finnigan Bursts Forth in Living Color nce the paintings of Sheila Finnigan, head surrounded by a vigorously gestural Oa former student of Ed Paschke and yellow halo, slumps at a soup can cum desk, heir apparent to the mantle of “Chicago holding a paint brush limply in one hand, Imagism,” were nearly monochromatic, just as the murdered French Revolution with scraped and scratched textures as martyr and crusading journalist still holds bone-dry as Leon Golub’s heroic images of his pen in David’s masterpiece. Despite warriors from antiquity inspired by eroded its elegiac title, with its boldly brushed classical sculpture. To those of us who visceral red and orange background further admired her work, her raison d’être was enlivened by sinuous drips of thinned expressive draftspersonship, coupled with pigment, this is one of most coloristically an equal gift for line and tone, which she dazzling works in the show, suggesting that employed to create intriguing, sometimes Sheila Finnigan has finally shaken Andy surreal, commentary on human existence. Warhol’s ghost and is ready to move on. In her most recent New York solo show It seems a logical move, since despite in Chelsea, however, which addressed her tempestuous on and off again love- a variety of subjects ranging from The hate relationship with Pop over the years, Unicorn Tapestry to contemporary art Finnigan’s heart clearly belongs to Dada, and film (with a special emphasis on Andy the wiser, more pugnaciously provocative Warhol, a recurring figure in her paintings), great grandfather of Conceptualism. Witness Finnigan unexpectedly flowered into a her ruefully satirical brand new painting sublime colorist. Indeed, even before the of the mythical beast from “The Unicorn exhibition opened, one savvy collector Tapestry” being overcome, as if by a bloated seized this seminal moment in the artist’s boa constrictor, by Jeff Koons’ banal artistic career, snatching up a large (48" X 60") travesty “Balloon Dog,” estimated at $55 gouache called “Drum Beat.” “The Death of Warhol (after David’s ‘Death million in today’s art market. Finnigan calls It features a stately figure in a blue, gold- of Marat’)” her painting “The History of Art.” Could buttoned drum major uniform, standing head) is seen reclining on an old-fashioned any title deliver a more succinct pinprick at attention with drumsticks crossed over divan of the type Sigmund Freud used to to our century’s cynical, self-promoting its groin. Instead of a head, a Campbell’s “shrink” his patients, suggesting a world cultural pretensions? Tomato Soup can emerges from the of hidden turmoil and torment behind Conversely, in a pair of large works uniform’s stiff blue collar. Another, much the deadpan facade of the man Truman on appropriately unstretched canvas she larger Campbell’s can, garlanded with coils Capote once called “a Sphinx without presents more victorious visions of the of celluloid, serves as a drum. Emerging a secret.” In this case, the painting that Unicorn. Although legend makes the beast a from the smoky red background, the Finnigan sacrificed to the new one was itself magical vehicle of male power that can only disembodied, straw-wigged head of Warhol, a splendid work from her 2005 solo show be tamed by a virgin woman, in “Tapestry looking as ghostly as it did when he was called “American Dream: Marilyn Monroe,” Deconstruction I,” the artist endows the still alive, hovers over the drum like one of depicting the actress (one of Andy’s Unicorn with an impressive set of udders, the spirits that haunted Ebenezer Scrooge favorite subjects) lounging somewhat more rendering it female –– thus presumably in “A Christmas Carol.” Here, as always, languorously on the same divan as Andy in altogether unconquerable! In “Tapestry Finnigan’s symbols and allusions are many- the later work. Deconstruction II,” an exhausted-looking layered, challenging the viewer to interpret An act as existentially anarchic, albeit male knight who made the attempt to tame her complex visual conundrums. more aesthetically appealing, as Robert the creature and failed, slumps impotently in Andy also appears in yet another guise Rauschenberg’s destruction of a drawing a bed of flowers as the rambunctious animal in a companion piece the same size as the that Willem de Kooning had given him to triumphantly kicks up its its rear hooves. picture just described, that fortunately for create a work of his own called “Erased de To approximate, the textural opulence of the rest of us, escaped acquisition prior Kooning,” Finnigan’s “remastering” of the original tapestry, the artist decorates her to the exhibition. Here, even though some of her own paintings is altogether in versions with snippets of colorful twine, coils his famous face is hidden beneath the keeping with her adventurous belief in art of filmic celluloid, and artificial flowers. ubiquitous soup can like that of The as being more about process and flux than Along with painting, Finnigan often Unknown Comic masked by his paper the safe manufacture of a “product.” In includes sculpture and elements of mixed bag, it seems obvious that Andy is the one this way she differs radically from the man media installation in her exhibitions. This wearing the drum major uniform. For who referred to his studio as The Factory one featured an especially witty neo- Finnigan has pointedly titled this painting, and hired silkscreen assistants to handle dadaistic found object piece called “Don in which the sumptuous red, orange, the “messy and boring” part of painting, Quixote and Sancho Panza,” in which yellow, and blue hues temper the gaudy before he added a few freehand flourishes to rusted iron detritus, old film projector fluorescence of Warholian DayGlos with a complete the assembly-line procedure. spools, and discarded garden tools, among Matisse-like chromatic elegance, “Divining Like Larry Rivers, another artist who other orphaned objects, morph into robotic the Future of Art.” at times flirted with Pop ideas but always representations of the romantic hidalgo So happy is Finnigan with her recently maintained that the Old Masters were knight and his rotund sidekick. developed, or perhaps one should say his primary inspiration, Finnigan, who But they could have tilted their lances at recently discovered, coloristic capabilities obviously relishes the “messy” act of balloon dogs instead of windmills! that she has taken to “remastering” ( her painting, again makes her own allegiances –– Ed McCormack term for painting over) some of her earlier clear in “The Death of Warhol (after compositions. One brilliant example is David’s ‘Death of Marat’).” In this work, Sheila Finnigan, “Post-Constructions,” “The Lives of Kings,” a large horizontal “remastered” from a 2004 composition was recently seen at Pleiades Gallery, composition in which the King of Pop called “Homage,” Warhol with his face 530 West 25th Street. (again with a Campbell’s can covering his partially erased by textural streaks and his [email protected]. sheilafinnigan.com NOV/DEC 2013/JAN 2014 GALLERYSTUDIO 23 ZEHRING painting in which a semicircular shape, laid delicate, graceful female figure emerges from Continued from page 7 down as if by a single stroke of a paint-loaded the center of a large flower with sinuous textures, and glimmering gem-bright colors brush emerges from luminous orange and petals in nocturnal blues, greens and other emerge, along with a bas relief bulge near the red color, suggests the Zen symbol for hues that gleam like stained glass. With its bottom of the composition that imbues it infinity. Wayland, however, combines it with central image surrounded by a lunar orb, with an intriguing pregnancy. a chromatic intensity reminiscent of Emil lined by light, and set against a dark blue Georgia Quick’s painting has the opposite Nolde’s German Expressionist watercolors. ground, this painting positions Millman as a appeal of spontaneity and immediacy. With its Cheryl A. Richey also merges elements latter-day Symbolist. splashy yellow, blue, and white brushstrokes of East and West in her paintings, here with Georgiana Cray Bart is represented by a dancing over a plush bubblegum pink a composition in which forms seemingly classical still-life composition in pastel, titled, ground, Rorschach-Black blots, and derived from Asian characters take on a “Arrangement with Napkins and Pears.” contrastingly precise staccato vertical white painterly quality not unlike the craggy, While Bart’s style is realistic, with surfaces lines like stylized symbols for raindrops, it thickly trowled-on shapes in the paintings of modeled by light and shadow and the folds suggests a Zen literati ink painter’s response Clyfford Still. Richey, like others artists in this in classical draperies and shadows faithfully upon descending from his mountain retreat exhibition, appears to unite cultural twains delineated, her heightened, near Fauvist, and encountering the sensory overload of the once believed to be irreconcilable. color sense, lends her pictures an almost modern world. (Also included here are the following metaphysical intensity. Here, the vibrant blue By contrast, David Zehring builds a artists also featured in the first exhibition: napkin and the red cloth that extends from composition with bold, irregularly shaped Linda Frederick, Georgia Quick, Peggy the paler blue wall creates a perfect chromatic and spaced blocks of color as definite and Zehring, and David Zehring.) backdrop for the brown liquor bottle, the authoritative as the Irish painter Sean Scully’s –– Marie R. Pagano transparent wine glasses, and above all, the famous stripes. Zehring superimposes brilliant green and yellows of the pears. these forms on the armature of networks ASCA All too often sculpture gets short shrift of narrower horizontal lines that function Continued from page 8 in many group shows; but not here, where like a grid, fastening them securely to the down an intricate hard-edged composition several innovative approaches to three picture-plane to introduce a personal note of made up of tiny yellow, pink, blue, and green dimensional art come boldly to the forefront: modernist formalism to the postmodern mix. rectangular and triangular shapes, Szalajda in Marcia Bernstein’s black and white mixed Then there is Linda Frederick, who evokes the subtle atmospheric changes of media piece “Unnamed 40,” several tubular practices what one might term a neo-baroque light, color, and mood (if not the literal protrusions, white on the outside, black on mode of abstract expression in two adjoining subject), that her title describes. the inside, jut up from a pure white base like canvases filled with energetic multicolored Neva Setlow takes a more decorative a grove phallic mushrooms. Sachie Hayashi’s shapes set against a creamy white ground. approach, akin to the cut-paper series flowing form in aqua resin “Spirit,” does Like sections of a jigsaw puzzle in the process of Matisse’s “Jazz,” in her colorful and indeed possess a unique grace, suggesting of being assembled, Frederick’s forms suggest upbeat collage “Summer Garden.” Setting an ethereal being in flight, albeit in a a plethora of lively imagery ranging from semiabstract floral-influenced shapes in solid material that lends it an interestingly flora and fauna to details of human anatomy yellow, red, blue, and green forms afloat on contradictory tension between the tactile while remaining nonobjective, and therefore a solid deep pink ground, Setlow creates her and the visual. Bonnie Rothchild’s piece in open-ended. own graceful visual music –– perhaps more in terra-cotta with a gold and jade green patina In the second exhibition in the same tune with Ravel than Louis Armstrong for its suggests an archaeological symbol, perhaps a venue by the “Inner Idea Artists,” Lavone lively evocation of nature transformed. religious amulet or other sacred object from a Newell-Reim shows works featuring sensually Hank Rondina’s composition in acrylic and lost culture. Raymond Shanfeld’s sculpture in rounded, clustered forms and fiery hues. cut mat board, “Monk’s Dream,” however, white marble veined with delicate pink, “Pink Newell-Reim’s work, although adamantly seemed less evocative of a Zen monk than of Lady,” melds a gracefully simplified classical abstract, is richly allusive, in that a single the great jazz pianist Theolonius Monk. For profile with a freestanding abstract form in composition can evoke multiple associations not only does the title echo that of one of the harmonious synthesis. Sally Pitt’s piece in –– in this case: fruits on a vine and entangled musician’s best known record albums, but Bronze and Steel, “Arc Dejoueurs,” presents emotional relationships. the forms, at once sprightly and architectonic, a delicate acrobatic balance act between two Asian philosophy, art, and calligraphy in the manner of imaginary hieroglyphics, exquisitely simplified female and male figures appear to have an important influence on suggest Monk’s rhythmic approach. that suggests both the delicate physical and Inner Idea artists as seen in the sinuously Rondina’s intimate formal inventiveness, psychological acrobatics required of any fluent brushwork of Margo Spellman, where in the modernist tradition but refreshingly couple in a relationship. –– Marie R. Pagano a black calligraphic form merges with abstract contemporary, makes him seem a kindred expressionist atmospheric paint handling. spirit of Kandinsky and Klee. WSAC In Spellman’s work, as well as that of some Linda Butti walks a fine line between Continued from page 9 of her colleagues in the group, a splendid realism and abstraction. In her oil “Cherry moody, glowing composition, “Mystical,” Synthesis of Western and Eastern techniques Tree,” the subject takes on a fiery energy while succeeding in capturing the nearly results. with gestural brushstrokes that carry the invisible in a mixed media composition called Cheryl Telford, for example, who in a energy of Expressionism and a light-evoking “Chasing the Wind.” Beatrice Rubell applied previous exhibition, displayed brushwork palette apparently inspired by Impressionism. the vibrant palette and flowing rhythms akin to Mark Tobey’s “white writing,” has It makes for a happy marriage in this of Cubism’s more chromatically luminous incorporated elements of Color Field painting composition, where both the trunk of the distant cousin Orphism to a contemporary into her work this time out. Telford’s tree and the leaves above writhe rhythmically, abstraction alluding to landscape, in a imagistic spareness evokes cosmic spaces in as the yellow grass below and the body of composition in color pencil and graphite her composition of spattered ethereal forms water glow like mirrors filled with sunlight. called “Color Swells.” set within a brilliant red expanse. Then there is Roberta Millman-Ide’s Just as colorful in its own more figurative Then there is Carolyn Wayland, whose meticulous oil, “Ide Destiny,” in which a manner is Joseph Healy’s “Bird #1,”in

24 GALLERYSTUDIO NOV/DEC 2013/JAN 2014 which the colorful creature is surrounded nursing a baby whose head a little girl leans individual vision all too often overlooked in by semiabstract foliage forms reminiscent of over the arm of her rocker to kiss as daylight the novelty-hungry commercial gallery scene. both Art Nouveau and the 1970s Pattern floods in through a nearby window, further –– Maurice Taplinger Painting of artists like Robert Kushner. illuminating the warm trinity. The sculptor Anne Rudder the shows doubly gifted Priscilla Heep-Coll appears to convey the LAUREN PURJE painter-poet curator revealed a less familiar spirit of maternal love in another manner Continued from page 17 aspect of her art than her vibrantly colorful with two cartoon-like cuddling creatures buried in the sand on a desert. In another watercolor illuminations: A detailed drawing that resemble prehistoric birds in her work in painting by Purje, several children riding of a tiny embracing couple set against a stoneware clay, “Touching Your Heart.” merry-go-round horses and sleds are awash detailed computer keyboard with a verse Landscapes and cityscapes also make a in a thickly painted sea, suggesting a vibrant handwritten on the screen celebrating the strong showing in the work of several artists: contemporary synthesis of Hokasai’s ukiyo-e warmth of romantic love after a tedious day One is Rae Smith, whose misty pastel, “After masterpiece “The Wave” and Turner’s most of cold technical texting. –– Peter Wylie the Storm,” sets somewhat ravished looking tumultuous marine scenes. In yet another, a trees against a dark, moodily atmospheric little girl sits on a boulder wistfully watching CLWAC sky. Another is Florence Kaplan, whose while other children appear to be drowning in Continued from page 10 “Weber Farm” is an evocation of a perfect churlish waters amid large, fang-baring fish. bronze. Another skillfully realized work day in a rustic setting, where the leaves are Combining a graphic vision as macabre in bronze, conceived as a study for a turning from green to gold, vividly captured as that of Edward Gorey with formidable monument, is “Freedom Crossing Concept in juicy oil pigments. Another is Johanna painterly gifts, Lauren Purje is a uniquely Maquette” by Susan Geissler, depicting the McKenzie, whose oil “Sunset, Almy’s Marsh” gifted young contender in the contemporary figures of several refugees debarking from a is a sublimely limned panorama of grassy art scene whose progress will be well small boat onto a rocky shore. Then there wetlands stretching out over several acres worth following, not only in future gallery is Alicia Ponzio’s bronze sculpture, “The to a flat mirror-clear body of water under exhibitions, but on her constantly evolving Lingering Shadows,” in which three symbolic a luminous early evening sky tinged with web site as well. –– Ed McCormack female nudes as comely as The Three Graces, pink and violet light. Equally atmospheric yet clearly involved in a divisive emotional in another manner, Maryann Burton’s CARROZZINI conflict, rather than harmoniously dancing watercolor, “Flatiron Building” presents Continued from page 20 together, appear to be out on a vision of that New York City landmark, Tina Parotti, was a painter of figurative a literal limb of some sort. Yet another viewed through budding tree limbs, its protests on themes such as Dying Nature. beautiful realist depiction of the feminine distinctive thin wedge of a facade hovering More recently, however, she has turned to form is “Early Morning,” a single standing like the prow of a huge ship, dwarfing more abstract style merging elements of figure in bronze by Gwen Marcus, of a lithe silhouetted pedestrians and passing traffic. minimal and color field painting, as seen young woman, nude under an open robe, An evocative etching, “Lantern Hill Pond,” in her oil on canvas “Moon nr. 50,” which which has a green patina that contrasts with by Flo Kemp, preserves a view of pine trees, appears more in keeping with her present the tan tone of her skin, as she raises her mountains, and water with the graceful feeling that “Art is nourishment for the arms, throws back her head, and stretches brevity of a tonal haiku. In her oil “Seat by spirit” and “like good food for the physical languorously to “shake the sleep off.” the Window –– Montmarte,” Jill Banks body, also becomes healing” and can “lift us Abstract and semiabstract sculpture is also eschews the bohemian image of that storied above pain and human mediocrity.” well represented here as well in pieces such area of Paris for an elegant interior suggesting London based Turkish artist Yonca as “Euclidian,” a minimalist composition gentrification of its legend (a vestige of which Yucemen believes that “art heals by of melding circular and rectangular forms only survives in the view through the window Maximizing its ‘semiotic freedom.’ ” in white stone by Jinx Lindenauer; Lee of the sidewalk cafe). Yucemen demonstrates the freedom of her Apt’s contrastingly complex mixed media Portraiture is always plentiful in CLWAC own personal sign-language with a mixed sculpture “A Lot of White,” suggesting a group shows. This one includes Eun Joo media composition called “Chance and futuristic amusement park of shifting planes Lee Seward’s portrait “Holstein,” a lifelike Continuity,” in which a fanciful giraffe-like ; Georgene McGonagle’s Halcyon II,” a oil of a placid cow posed in profile; as well as creature with sawhorses and ladders for legs, gracefully simplified avian figure in bronze; the Gail Snow Gibbs’s affectionate shaggy completely covered with semi-translucent and “Origins,” a stylized black marble Venus dog picture, “Where’s Caleb’s Cookie?” paper “bandages,” ambles past what appears by Jean T. Kroeber. Then there are Jacqueline –– to which the real dog biscuit affixed like to be a misty stage-set depicting a jungle. Lorieo’s “Layla,” a voluptuous bronze Earth an exclamation point to the bottom of the Yet another Italian artist, Fiorenza Bertelli Mother literally rising out of the roughly picture’s frame provides the answer. Animal sees painting as “vis medicatrix” and shows textured firmament, and “Cybéle: Déesse of and human portraits are combined in a large oil on wood titled “Goal achieved/ Fertility,” a rotundly pregnant torso in yellow “Barnevelder,” Vlasta Smola’s acrylic painting obiettivo raggiunjto,” in which authoritatively limestone by Jocelyne Dodier. of an elegant blond fashionista posing with a laid down black vertical gestural strokes are Intimate moments between mothers and much less self-conscious looking rooster. The laid over swirling whiplash lines and rugged children come alive in two oils. In “Summer title of Luciille Berrill Paulsen’s oil “St. Lu,” areas of white and blue. at Paradise Cove,” Andrea Stanley depicts in in which a woman stares straight out at the Then there is the much exhibited a slightly idealized style, as though through viewer with both a pair of eyeglasses propped American artist Amy Cohen Banker, one mists of memory, a woman in a long white up on her graying bangs and a not-quite-halo of the most energetic practitioners of shift with folds like the drapery in classical decorated with Roman numerals apparently New York School aesthetics, whose mixed sculpture, holding a little girl in her arms on suspended in thin air just below them appears media composition, “Twerking,” like the the shoreline of a beach where the blue- from its title to be an ironic self portrait. transformed figuration of her predecessor green surf rolling in rhymes visually with the Other excellent portrait subjects far too Grace Hartigan, offers a rugged home golden waves of the woman’s hair. In another numerous to mention are also included remedy to contemporary art’s trendy realist oil by Anna Bain, the currents of love in an exhibition that reminds us to value doldrums. flow through three figures: that of a mother certain eternal verities of skill, technique, and –– Peter Wiley

NOV/DEC 2013/JAN 2014 GALLERYSTUDIO 25 María de Echevarría Seeks Sublimity in Nature urated by Frank DeGregorie for The hints of red and yellow at the center of the at the Consulate General of Argentina CInterchurch Center, “Impressions from composition conjures up a vast wheat field as Art Gallery in 2004, when she included Nature,” María de Echevarría ’s sixteenth tangible, if less delineated, than one in a van spectral figures in some of her most ethereal solo exhibition, features the most recent Gogh landscape. And an irregular stripe of landscapes to date. oil and acrylic paintings of an artist whose green along the bottom of the canvas adds In the present exhibition, however, the work is constantly evolving. “Impressions” foliage in the foreground to complete the suggestion of the metaphysical forces and is the key word here, for over the years, the composition. essences underlying the lay of the land take compositions of this gifted Argentinean- Then there is “Fields #14,”in which only more subtle form in paintings such as one born painter, who has made her home in the a blurrily defined whitish horizontal line titled “Source #2.” In this large (60" by United States since 1969, have 48") work in oil and acrylic on progressed from atmospheric canvas, the only metaphysically metaphysical landscapes to a suggestive element is a large more abstract style in which deep orange rectangular shape the impression, as well as the suspended like an enormous inspiration, of nature is still very monolithic gold bar against an much present. area of lighter orange near the top In conversation with a writer, of the composition. From there Willem de Kooning once said down (although incongruously that all abstract painting begins colored in graduating shades of from landscape, and while that green), the horizontal divisions blanket statement may not be true below can be read as strata of sky, of some of the more geometric descending logically to a more styles of abstraction, it is certainly loosely brushed blue-green strip true of de Echevarría ’s present of cloud-cover hovering over the show. In fact, some of the horizon of a deeper blue body paintings still retain more than a of water near the bottom of the mere impression or suggestion of composition. natural elements, as seen in the For all its imagistic and work that the artist calls “Lyrical coloristic inventiveness, however, Landscape,” where a line of trees “The Source #2” is a masterful is set against a backdrop of blue- panoramic evocation of natural green mountains under a vibrant beauty as convincing in its golden orange, red, and yellow own manner as the Hudson sky, in which the forms of the hills River School painter Frederick are mirrored in the slightly lighter Edwin Church’s monumental blue hue of a passing cloud. Here, 1860 canvas “Twilight in the the landscape shapes are as clearly Wilderness.” For like that group defined as those in a canvas by of painters and their successors in Matisse or his main American the Luminist movement, María disciple Milton Avery; they are de Echevarría is an artist forever suffused by a luminosity that owes in search of sublimity. For her, more of its glow to nature than to as for them, the sublime most Fauvism. “Source #2,” acrylic and oil on canvas, 60 x 48 inches often manifests most clearly in “Summer Storm” is another of observing and apprehending what de Echevarría’s more literal images, with its separates a large expanse of an olive green the great Englishman Turner termed “light dramatic definition of light and shadow on (actually quite unlike any sky one has ever as color”; which is to say: trapping one of moody clouds in a vibrant cerulean blue sky. gazed upon!) from an even larger area, nature’s most ethereal and elusive elements in Here the artist’s masterful use of chiaroscuro saturated with a rusty red hue, covering the the contradictory materiality of pigment. is combined with a strong, almost sculptural, entire lower part of the composition. Yet For all the liberties that she takes with sense of form to create one of the most literal through some peculiar coloristic alchemy both form and color as a quintessentially transcriptions of a natural phenomenon in known only to the artist, these three simple postmodern artist interested in achieving the the exhibition. Her less specifically allusive components suffice to make the composition perfect balance between the representational pictures, however, are no less evocative, cohere as a concrete representation of light and abstract elements in her work, Echevarría even when they combine the compositional glowing on the horizon in an arid, perhaps obviously has made a close study of how reductiveness of Minimalism and the southwestern landscape, such as that of light creates color and how color can create heightened chromatic intensity of Color Field New Mexico, where de Echevarría keeps a the illusion of light. In this regard, she may painting, as seen in her numbered series of studio. Here, the painter appears to transcend well be one of the few contemporary painters “Field” paintings. optical actuality to trigger a kind of chromatic working today who still, in her own unique In “Fields #7,” for example, a sense of a synesthesia in the viewer, an almost unsettling manner, heeds John Ruskin’s axiom “To very particular landscape location is conjured cognitive state in which totally dissimilar observe nature closely is to follow the finger up with a mere three color areas of color: colors approximate the effect of the more of God.” a luminous blue expanse interrupted by expected ones! –– J. Sanders Eaton just a wisp of white strokes at the top of Along with the inspiration of nature, de the composition are all the artist requires Echevarría has always acknowledged the María de Echevarría, The Interchurch Center, to evoke a vibrant summer sky. A mass spiritual inspiration in her work, culminating Treasure Room Gallery, 475 Riverside Drive of golden ocher interpolated with subtle in “Toward Another Dimension” her solo (at 120th Street), through Nov. 22, 2013

26 GALLERYSTUDIO NOV/DEC 2013/JAN 2014

The Boyers: Intimate Conversations in Art rtist couples often influence and mirror Nautilus Shell of Aeach other’s styles; think Pollock- the Ambulatory Krasner and Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Prince.” Both are among numerous other examples. Daniel works in acrylic C. Boyer and Silvia Soares Boyer, presented with and mixed striking contrasts in just about every aspect media on canvas in of technique and imagery, in their recent which linear forms two-artist exhibition “Ex Superrealismus ad and areas of color Mystica.” interact and overlap, Michigan-born Daniel C. Boyer’s work is a filling the entire very personal species of Surrealism, not of the composition with an Dali or Magritte variety, but in the manner antic Art Brut energy that it was defined by Andre Breton “as pure counterbalanced psychic automatism” and exemplified in by a conceptual Andre Masson’s “automatic writing.” Boyer’s sophistication version combines subconscious imagery, that transcends elements of memory, visual puns, and graphic the obsessive spontaneity to create his own distinctive graphomania of so- semiabstract ecriture. called “outsider” art. Working in a precise, often hard-edged On the other style, his wife Silvia Soares Boyer, born in hand, Daniel C. Daniel C. Boyer Portugal, combines the formal and the Boyer’s paintings rendered compositions in golden pen and mystical with occasional forays into fragments defy facile rational annotation by virtue crystals on black canvas called “On the of figuration to translate occult symbols of the deliberately dissociative nature of Science of Pentagrams” and “On the science and other esoteric elements of ancient his exuberant drawing style, which takes of Pentagrams II,” Silvia Soares Boyer pays belief systems into a private iconography Paul Klee’s idea of “taking a line for a little tribute to a magic symbol dating back to comparable to Alfred Jensen’s chartlike walk” for a breathtaking marathon run. the Babylonians and the Pythagoreans, paintings inspired by Mayan hieroglyphics, Consider his intricately convoluted and wittily transforming its squares, triangles, and Pythagorean numerology and other such titled work in pen and ink on paper “The weblike networks of lines into a striking subjects. Orientalizing Influence of Ice Hockey on postmodern abstraction in black, white, and Both artists are also poets and prose Winnipeg.” Here, as in another complex ink gold, even while adorning the tips of its five- writers, and their literary side is perhaps drawing called “Lennon Arrives at Grand pointed stars with tiny crystals that suggest most evident in their use of pens (albeit in Central Station,” the line flows endlessly, their spiritual origin. distinctly different ways) in their paintings. It lassoing in its course ghostly faces, simplified In yet another series of three paintings also manifests in Daniel’s preference for long figurative silhouettes, floral shapes, birds, in acrylic, gold pen, and crystals on canvas, titles that almost amount to autonomous insects biomorphic abstract arabesques, Silvia Soares Boyer celebrates the legend unpunctuated avant garde poems, such black serpentine spirals and a richly animated of Pandora, the goddess who according as: “The Arched Horizon for the Antique plethora of tiny other freely associated images to Classic Greek mythology “bestowed Marquis Deflects the Suicide of the Damsel amounting to a richly fertile personal cosmos bounteous gifts” and to Hesoid mythology Like the Bullied Diamond the Authentic that inexhaustibly reinvents itself in each new was the opener of the box (again the womb, History of the Kosovars,” or “The Course picture. since “box” is but one of the crude male in Pre-Columbian Basketry (in Kalamazoo By contrast, Silvia Soares Boyer’s paintings slang words for the vessel of our birth?) that and Latin America) Confounds the Relict in acrylic and metallic gold and silver pen unleashed every known evil on the world. are exquisitely refined meditations on form, The artist’s playful interpretation of this line, Borgesian metaphysics, and mandala- typically ambivalent way in which the female like geometry, accented by spare areas of sex seems to be viewed down through history meticulously applied color. One of her most is hinted at in the more luridly-colored female compelling compositions is the work in faces, with alternately angelic and demonic acrylic and gold pen with the evocatively expressions, that appear within square areas poetic title, “Underneath the Rose.” Boyer’s amid her more subdued shapes, symbols, five painting, in which a single red rose hovers in pointed stars, and golden linear spiderwebs in a solid black stratospheric expanse, beautifully her Pandora paintings. balanced and partially fragmented by an Anyone who as ever observed the always angular spiderweb of precise gold lines, artfully dressed Boyers in public may against a large area of red area dominating have noticed that, like most harmonious the bottom of the canvas is, in its own intellectual and artistic couples, they emblematic way, as dynamic a feminine constantly amuse themselves and each other, symbol as the legendary Beat Generation even among others, with lively conversation. painter Jay DeFeo’s massive 2,500 pound oil, In this fascinating dual exhibition, they let the the latter’s sole project for eight years. rest of us in on their intimate discourse. (In fact, the title of Boyer’s painting adds yet –– Ed McCormack another dimension of meaning to the symbol, if one interprets it to mean that underneath Dual exhibition: the “rose” is the womb, from which all Silvia Soares Boyer and Daniel C. Boyer human life springs.) recently seen at Broadway Mall Community Silvia Soares Boyer In two more intricate but no less precisely Center, 96th St. (center island).

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:HVWWK6W1<& ASCA’s 96th Annual Exhibition 7XHV²6DW²SP “Diverse Impressions” ZZZQRKRJDOOHU\FRP November 5 - 16, 2013 Opening Reception: Sat., Nov. 9, 2:00–4:30 pm The High Line Loft • 508 West 26th Street #810''9'..'+/ Tues.-Sat. 11 am–6 pm, Thurs. 11 am–8 pm • Closed Sun. & Mon.

Anita Adelman Georgiana Cray Bart Esther Berman Marcia Bernstein Dominick Botticelli Nikolai Buglaj Linda Butti Mihai Caranica Rose-Marie Cherundolo Lisa Collado Maria de Echevarria Elvira Dimitrij Harriet FeBland Sondra Gold Eleanor Goldstein Sachie Hayashi Helen Henry Esther Ibishc Rose Sigal-Ibsen Janet Indick Erin Stuckey Johnson Richard Karp Fumiko Kashiwagi Kitada Olga Kitt Olivia Koopalethes Kenol Lamour Annette Lieblein Estelle Levy Frank Mann Leanne Martinson Basha Maryanska Jo-Anna Melrose Roberta Millman-Ide Marie Mutz Minna Myar Hedy O’Beil Marian Oken Santina Semadar Panetta Gilbert Passarella Sally Pitt Dario Puccini Lisa Robbins Alan Roland Hank Rondina Bonnie Rothchild Gerda Roze Larry Scaturro Barbara Browner Schiller Neva Setlow '$+46*+6*+0vE Raymond Shanfeld Isabel Shaw Uri Shulevitz Allan Simpson Sonia Stark Mara Szalajda Salvatore Tagliarino Amie IIva Tatem Lubomir Tomaszewski Gabe Turow Lea Weinberg Marilyn A. Weiss Miriam Wills Doris Wyman ASCA has an on-going exhibit at the Berkeley College exhibition space, 255 Duffield St., Brooklyn, N.Y. 11201 through December 30th, 2013. .#810'5#46T%1/

NOV/DEC 2013/JAN 2014 GALLERYSTUDIO ROBERT CENEDELLA BEYOND SHIT

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