APRIL–MAY 2013 www.galleryandstudiomagazine.com VOL. 15 NO. 4 New York GALLERYSTUDIO Blues for Smoke at the Whitney Museum pg. 6 , 2007 Oil and acrylic on canvas, 32 x inches. Courtesy of the artist No Room (Gold) #42 Glenn Ligon, Los Angeles. Photo by Joshua White. Los Angeles. Image courtesy of Regen Projects, and Regen Projects, ©Glenn Ligon In Real Life, All Happy Endings are Temporary, an excerpt from Ed McCormack’s HOODLUM HEART pg. 12 VIRGINIA EVANS SMIT 1%0/%-2&%0 Recent work 4%8,303+=3*6978 “F is for flowers, fish and fragments” 4LSXSKVETL])\LMFMXMSR

“Bird of Paradise” digital print 22" x 30" April 9 to April 27, 2013 Artist Reception – April 13, 2013 4-6 pm 1E]XL¯.YRIRH Hours: Tuesday – Saturday 12:00 – 6pm 3TIRMRK6IGITXMSR8LYVWHE]1E]XL¯TQ VIRIDIAN ARTISTS, INC :HVWWK6W1<& 548 W. 28th Street / 547 W. 27th St. Suite 632, 7XHV²6DW²SP New York, NY 10001 212-414-4040 www.viridianartistsinc.com ZZZQRKRJDOOHU\FRP %6'-0)7--2631)´4%68PP 4EMRXMRKWERH(VE[MRKW 1E]³ µ8LI(VIEQIVERH,IV(VIEQ¶\ 3MPSR'ERZEW %,%%6'-0)7- +EPPIV],SYVW;IHRIWHE] *VERGIWGE%VGMPIWM ,31&)6+*-2)%68 7YRHE]TQ  *VSRX7XVIIX 7YMXI ELE$ELEÁRIEVXGSQ 2SVQE,SQFIVK &VSSOP]R2I[=SVO [[[%,%*-2)%68'31 

GALLERYSTUDIO APRIL/MAY 2013

GS On the Cover: The Blues is more than a mere mood or musical genre. It is an original homegrown American art form that has gone worldwide, multimedia and interdisciplinary in “Blues for Smoke,” a major exhibition at the Whitney Museum. –Page 6 Also in this issue “In Real Life, All Happy Endings are Temporary,” by far the bluest excerpt of Ed McCormack’s Hoodlum Heart. –Page 12 A Group Show About People “Stylin’ and Profilin’ ” umming up its theme in a single color print of the smooching bridal couple, these inanimate surrogates are sometimes Sword, “People” a photographic group she looking like Billy Holiday with a silken haunted by reminders of mortality in the exhibition, curated by participating artist Jack faux-gardenia in her hair, he sporting some form of tiny plastic skeletons with whom they Cesareo for the West Side Arts Coalition, sort of haute couture futuristic suit with share shelf space. made a highly entertaining statement about matching flying saucer beret. The little boy Paul Margolis, another skillful exponent of the species overall. in the snazzy suit and tie grinning as though the black and white silver gelatin print, makes For some time now, Cesareo himself proud to now have all his teeth also cuts a a trenchant statement about “the artistic has been toting a huge fake pink-frosted snazzy figure in another color print by Gecht life” in his “Portrait Painter, Port Authority cupcake around the city and the country to called “Four and a Half.” Subway Arcade, NYC” in which, surrounded photograph the reactions of the citizenry. Jean Prytyskacz also treats people as a by framed examples of his handiwork, the In Tompkins Square Park, in New York’s colorful spectacle in her raucous color picture painter sits at his easel copying a snapshot of East Village, where they’ve seen everything, “Mermaid Parade,” in which contestants his latest portrait subject, an island of calm two local girls, dressed for some reason like decked out in blue bra-tops and fishtail in one of the most hectic sites in the entire dancehall girls in Dodge City 1880, cozy bottoms appear on the verge of falling off a hectic city. up to the confection as though they’ve been blue float that resembles a swimming pool In his five-image sequence of archival expecting it all along. In a remote corner of raft as they wave to the crowds lining the pigment prints on premier art gloss paper, Atomic City, Idaho, a lone bemused-looking sidewalk for the yearly festival in Coney “Polyptych: A Young Girl’s Progress, Central gent coming out of a Texaco station with Island. Prytyskacz also immortalizes two Park,” JD Morrison explores the filmic his hands in his pockets spies it sitting out femmes fatale posing bodaciously in period possibilities of still photography focusing in the dusty road and probably wonders if costumes (what period uncertain) and ornate from some distance above to capture the long the Martians have landed. But in Spokane, opera masks, one holding a white Pekingese journey of a small child across what amounts Washington, where a public park boasts a in a white tutu, in another bizarre print called to a relatively short space for the adults gigantic replica of a toy red wagon by the “At the Fair ll.” traversing it at the same time. By contrast, sculptor Ken Spiering, the cupcake that Air Senegal mechanics also “style and in his collage series of three color prints Cesareo has placed right next to it looks profile,” judging from a picture by Francois mounted in a single frame in a staggered proportionate –– the perfect-size after-play Ilnseher’s picture “Cap Skirring” of one such arrangement, David Reibman speeds up the treat for a five year old giant! technician standing on the wing of an aircraft action of a bicyclist’s shadowy nocturnal ride “Smile, you’re on candid camera,” Cal and leaning over to make some sort of pre- past lit-up storefronts in his piece “Night Eagle seems to be saying to the strollers takeoff adjustment while sporting a pair of Cycle.” traversing the pedestrian mall in Times shocking pink 1970s-style flared bellbottoms. The final artist, Celia Cruzado, treats us Square in his large digital prints. A Japanese Ilnseher also captures the combination of to a veritable travelogue with perceptive and tourist couple look agog, gazing up at the the everyday and the exotic that invariably iconic images of a woman in a saffron shawl kinetic billboards as though they’ve never catches the eye of a perceptive stranger selling vegetables in a marketplace in India; seen the Ginza. A gray-haired daughter touring a strange land in archival digital other women displaying their national finery in navigating her gray-haired mother through prints of faraway places that include scenes Tanzania, Africa, and San Juan, Puerto Rico; the madding crowds looks intimidated. But a in Bangalore, Natechka, and San Miguel de and men enjoying gelato in Venice, Italy. slender young fashionista sporting a sleeveless Allende. One world, one love, as they say. halter and culottes, as she strolls along The “people” in Deena Weintraub’s –– Maurice Taplinger carrying an H&M shopping bag and sipping surreal series of monochromatic silver iced coffee through a straw, looks cool. gelatin prints “The Watchers,” are actually “People” was recently seen at Broadway Mall Fashion was also in full flower at “Tanya’s dummies in store windows and their ghostly Community Center, 96th Street Wedding,” judging from Robyn Gecht’s big reflections. Like the real people they imitate, (center island). 2 GALLERYSTUDIO APRIL/MAY 2013

Robert Cenedella: A Daumier of Saloon Society

“ ’ve done roughly 50 advantage of poetic Ibar paintings,” Robert license!) When New Cenedella recently York magazine ran informed me in one of his a feature article by characteristically stream Peter Kaminsky, who of consciousness letters, neglected to mention erratically typed on one the mural, Cenedella of those now antique got his revenge contraptions called a when Philip Roth manual typewriter in the visited his studio. A wide borders around an lightbulb went on over original print, exquisitely Cenedella’s head. He linear in a manner recalling said “You’re a better both his early Art Students writer than this guy,” League teacher George and painted Roth Grosz and maybe Matisse right over Kaminsky. (if our foremost living (Message: Don’t fuck satirical painter will forgive with the leading gadfly me for comparing him of the New York art to one of those French world!) art-for-art’s sake aesthetes!) In the late 1940s entitled “Drawing from Franz Kline reportedly Life” depicting a semicircle did some bar murals of eager students with in ginmills around the their sketchpads at the Village in a pseudo ready gathered around Ashcan School style an instructor gesturing that he later considered with his pointer toward a hack work and was pedestal containing a giant eventually embarrassed can of Campbell’s Soup. by when he became “Thomas Hart Benton one of the big guns of whose work influenced Abstract Expressionism. me early on once said, ‘I’d By contrast, Cenedella’s rather show my work in Brughel-lively bar any bar than a museum scenes do not depart ... Definitely my view as from the distinctive well. Maybe I’ve taken figurative style for the concept further . . . which he is well known. I’ve often pointed out to Quite the contrary, my students or anyone they rank among else who would listen to the highlights of his me that ‘I’ve definitely Bar” collage adamantly humanistic sold more art and made social realist oeuvre. connections for sales and exhibitions in bars East 58th Street, where “Le Cirque –– The In the same recent letter, he told me that than galleries.” First Generation” a six-by-ten-foot mural, he’s presently doing a painting of a well In quoting from Cenedella’s typewritten completed over two years, may well be his known hangout called Toad Hall (“My latest communiques, one dares not attempt to masterpiece in the genre. favorite bar”). “They don’t know it yet. It’s reproduce his unique syntax, grammar, While much to the artist’s credit he often how I work. Incognito, one might punctuation, or unique approach to spelling, generally steers clear of the celebrity culture say. I’ve rarely been hired to paint a bar. But for fear of being accused of imitating that consumes the attention of most I’ve managed to sell every one (after the “Finnegan’s Wake” –– Joyce’s novel, not mortals in our media-saturated age, the fact) . . . and this includes the LeCirque. . . the Upper East Side singles bar named for it latter magnum opus contains immediately I did this painting . . . to be connected with (which boasts no Cenedellas, since it hardly recognizable portraits of 142 bold-face something that would annoy all those in the ranks in a class with most of the joints his names, ranging from Imelda Marcos to Establishment who just want “that pain in work has adorned). Sylvester Stallone, from Julia Child to Henry the ass” (your quote I believe) to go away Among them are Soho bohemian Kissinger, from Frank Zappa to Donald . . .No one ever suggested it was a good landmarks like the Broome Street Bar (which, Trump, From Nancy Reagan, to Woody painting. They just said, ‘How did he ever get with bipartisan liberalism, displays a painting Allen, from Jackie O to Joan Rivers. that commission?’ –– meaning, like the rest that he did of another dive called Watts “I sketched about fifty meals there,” he of the corrupt art world, talent doesn’t mean Happen Inn (“Now, a victim,” he notes, says, “always at the same corner table. . . The shit!” “of Soho gentrification”); P.J. Carney’s the staff would point out who was who, since I Cenedella’s quote from me –– which I most famous Irish pub in midtown (which really didn’t know.” meant affectionally, by the way (what else boasts some twenty Cenedellas, one a Daily News gossip columnist Liz Smith was should any artist with integrity be but a pain mural-scale piece); and the supremely elegant flattered to be included in the star-studded in the ass to whomever or whatever he or she and toney uptown celebrity restaurant and mural but wondered why she had to share considers the Establishment?) appeared in a bistro Le Cirque, in the Palace Hotel on a table with Richard Nixon. (Nobody can previous article that I wrote about him in this ever accuse Cenedella of failing to take 4 GALLERYSTUDIO APRIL/MAY 2013 publication a couple of years ago, headlined daytime drinkers, the Blarney Stones, most not be more different in most other regards. “The Art World’s Last Angry Man.” And such places are fast vanishing, which gives For Morley’s work, regardless of its it’s nice to see that he still hasn’t lost his “Smyth’s Bar a poetically elegiac quality ostensible subject matter, like that of many outrage, in a time when, as Michael Findlay that softens Cenedella’s satiric edge with an other painters today, is actually art about puts it insightfully in his recent book The atmosphere of Pompei-like melancholy. art: an incestuously self-referential endeavor Value of Art, the contemporary art world’s Indeed, even at their most acidic, comparable to those so-called “Language leading movement might as well be called Cenedella’s saloon studies are more tenderly Poets” who deliberately divorce words from “Commercialism.” sympathetic than his “Gallery Opening,” meaning. By contrast, Robert Cenedella Along with his large murals crammed with a large limited edition color serigraph that eschews all such aesthetic gamesmanship, multiple portraits, Cenedella has also painted occupies an honored place on one of the walls employing similarly skillful techniques to many more intimate satirical saloon scenes of Jeannie’s and my apartment, its rogue’s embrace the larger subject of modern life reminiscent of his former mentor Grosz, gallery of freeloading culture vultures ignoring in all its tawdry glory. In this regard, he is yet possessed of his own stylistic dynamics the art as they cadge free drinks serving to a kindred spirit of Daumier –– and even of and contemporary energy. In one he calls, remind us why we not only generally shun Charles Dickens –– for his celebration of the “Bar Talk” a brilliantly caricatured Richard such affairs but also the art scene politics and diverse quirks of personality, character, and Nixon leans precariously on the bar holding schmoozing that go with them. mood in the people with whom he populates forth with an overturned shot glass next to On the other hand, all one need do is his paintings and prints: Be it the solitary his elbow while a dead ringer for a graying look closely at Cenedella’s epic canvas “P.J. black workingman sitting all by his lonesome Adolph Hitler on the next stool, his gestapo Carney’s,”one of his own favorite hangouts nursing a beer next to an empty shot-glass in uniform replaced by a low-level clerk’s white when he’s uptown teaching at The Art “Harlem Bar, 1978,” opposite a cash register, shirt and cheesy-looking striped rep tie, gazes Students League, to realize that bar rooms a sign that says “No Credit” and rows of at him with bleary admiration, hanging on are the true hubs of democracy and shrines bottles with round silver pouring heads that his every word. Behind them, in an intricate of culture in our city. Notice the portrait of make them look suspiciously like an occupying composition skillfully tied together by the James Joyce, upstaging a TV screen full of army of white men in all their corporate patterns of red and white checked tablecloths brawling hockey players high on the wall, as conformity; the row of morose imbibers, and the garish light of reflected neon, a he gazes down as benignly as a patron saint at bathed like phantoms in an eerie spectrum crowded orgy of raucous barroom bullshit the flock of paying drinkers crammed into the of alternating hues of reflected neon, in ensues among patrons with faces as grotesque booths and tables, bellying up to the bar, and “Rainbow Bar”; or the rowdy mob of straw- as the masks in one of James Ensor’s Carnival swarming the floor. hat sporting yahoos awash in variegated bilious panoramas. Clearly, the Weimar Republic had Here at Carney’s, where the artist is likely green light in “St Patrick’s Day.” nothing on Manhattan in the 1980s when to run into some of his students among the Each of his people bears “the human Cenedella painted this postcard from New famous (the familiar faces of Willie Nelson, stain” –– the indelible mark of a unique Hades. Sam Waterston, and Al Sharpton emerge identity. That is what makes them more than In “New Years at Gills, West 4th Street, from the madding crowd), the infamous, and generalized “figures in a composition.” And 1976,” barflies in duncecap partyhats ogle the Great Unknowns, once again each figure what makes Robert Cenedella more than a and make baboon faces at the balloon-boobs is a meticulous cameo portrait of an actual mere satirist or protest artist and possibly one of a topless barmaid amid funhouse mirrors individual lovingly delineated by a painter of our last great humanists. and dusty, drooping holiday decorations. It who can pile minute detail upon minute –– Ed McCormack is yet another tour force of demonic revelry detail while never succumbing to fussiness to which Hieronymous Bosch himself or slowing the brisk fluidity of his brush. In Bob Cenedella, Cenedella Gallery, might have tipped his hat. By contrast, in fact, although his purely painterly prowess 13 Laight St., New York, NY. “Smyths Bar,” a panoramic composition in a is sometimes upstaged by his sensational Email: [email protected] horizontal format from the same approximate subject matter, the sheer vivacious variety of Also: Anything but the Truth: period, Cenedella captures the equally busy Cenedella’s brushwork within a single picture The Robert Cenedella Class Show but less frenetic atmosphere of a 42nd Street can suggest a seemingly impossible synthesis The Arts Students League, chain-bar at lunch hour, with some hardhats of the Turner Prize winner Malcolm Morley’s 215 West 57th Street, 2nd Floor Gallery. and disheveled office workers hugging the early photorealist oceanliner paintings and Opening reception: Thursday, April 18th, long bar while others line up at the steam later freewheeling Expressionist canvases 5:30 PM to 8:00 PM table. Along with those other staples of –– notwithstanding that the two artists could

APRIL/MAY 2013 GALLERYSTUDIO 5 Blues for Smoke: The Whitney Museum’s Rendition of Birth of the Blues

Stan Douglas, Hors-champs, 1992. Two-channel video installation with stereo sound, 13:20 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwimer Gallery, New York. Image courtsey of the artist and David Zwimmer Gallery, New York ©Stan Douglas

ike me, my neighbor on the Upper East Jeannie, and I took in David Hammons’s red –– giving new meaning to the term LSide Julio Perez came up on the Lower sprawling installation “Chasing the Blue “colored people.” East Side back in the bad old diddibopping Train,” the first work of over ninety in various “La Vida,” another large oil by the days of the 1950s. But it wasn’t “me and mediums that you encounter on entering Chinese-American painter Martin Wong, Julio down by the schoolyard.” I don’t know the group survey “Blues for Smoke,” at The who died of AIDs in 1999, evokes the what it was like out in Queens, where Paul Whitney Museum. Hammons’s piece features bustling life in and outside a row of three Simon went to high school; but our hood an electric train, painted blue, traveling on connected Lower East Side tenement was so inbred and provincial that if you went a maze of tracks around six baby grand buildings in meticulous detail and with a few blocks this way or that and you were on piano lids standing on end like curvaceous raucous Brughel-like vivacity. Cameo foreign turf. mountains and through a tunnel under a portraits of individual Hispanic and black While I lived below Delancey Street, big pile of coal in tune to a cacophony of tenants and a few occupying NYPD officers Julio was above it, in the area the slick real overlapping solos by Trane and Monk issuing appear in all the many windows, as others spill estate sharks would later rename “The East from separate boom boxes. out onto the fire escapes or mingle on the Village.” In its own way, it’s as iconic an expression sidewalk below, where kids ride skateboards “On the real Lower East Side, we thought of the African-American journey as Jacob or cool off in the spray from a hydrant, as of the alphabet avenues as Uptown,” I Lawrence’s famous “Migration” series, sadly street musicians play guitars, bongos and kidded him the last time we ran into each missing from this 150 artist survey, which conga drums. As it’s title affirms “La Vida” other at Starbucks. the Whitney bills as “an interdisciplinary is a painting that celebrates the life that But Julio one-upped me right back, saying, exhibition that explores a wide range of transpires with enhanced vibrancy on the very “Did I ever tell you about the time I played contemporary art through the lens of the verge of the blues. stickball with John Coltrane?” blues and the blues aesthetic.” Roy DeCarava knew that emotional It was a bitching hot summer evening Included, however, are a group of classic juncture well and chronicles it here in a before sundown and “Trane,” who was living collages of Harlem streets and rural South picture from “Sweet Flypaper of Life,” a on one of the side streets around Tompkins scenes by Romare Bearden. There’s also a book with a text by Langston Hughes, of Square Park at the time stopped and watched Van Gogh-like portrait of Charlie Parker, couples dancing in a tenement kitchen in the game for a few seconds, then asked the resplendent in the robes of an African king, Harlem in the early ‘50s, as well as in a fresh kids if he could join in. He may have been on by Bauford Delaney. Along with a desultory and pretty portrait of a smiling young Billy his way to a gig, judging from the sharp way mixed media painting by Jean-Michel Holiday before heroin addiction took its toll. he was dressed. But he took off his suit coat, Basquiat called “Undiscovered Genius of the DeCarava has a worthy heir in the rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt and, Mississippi Delta,”there’s an Edenic mural- contemporary photographer Carrie Mae acting like he had all the time in the world, scale oil on canvas by Bob Thompson, an Weems, whose autobiographical pictures, for played stickball with Julio and his friends. artist possessed of just as much raw genius which she writes her own texts, have a similar The closest I ever got to that great sax and promise who fatally OD’d almost as snapshot immediacy. One shows her perched genius was shortly after I dropped out of young in 1966. Titled “Garden of Music” playfully like a gladly grinning little girl on Seward Park High to hang out in the Village and merging Poussin-influenced classical her elderly father’s knee, and is captioned: and be a beatnik. Me and my 14-year old composition with a species of neat-edged “Daddy and I have a special thing going, and modern dancer girlfriend Helen Aronson Expressionism of his own invention, to this day I use his lap as my private domain. would sit in “the peanut gallery” off to the Thompson’s painting depicts naked jazz He says, ‘See Carrie Mae, what I like about side of the bandstand at The Jazz Gallery on musicians surrounded, in a fanciful pastoral you is that you can talk that talk to them Saint Marks Place, digging back-to-back sets setting of polka dot fields and lollypop trees, white folks, and you’s smart too, just like by him and Thelonious Monk. by naked women of all hues, from earthy your daddy.’” I was reminded of all this as my wife, brown and shocking pink to bright cadmium

6 GALLERYSTUDIO APRIL/MAY 2013 Among the multimedia installations one of the most intense is Stan Douglas’s “Hors-champs,” a filmed jam between three horn players and a bassist riffing on a composition by “free jazz” artist Albert Ayler. Then there’s a room featuring simultaneous sound videos of diverse musicians, ranging from elderly bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins to the &/$66,& Bad Brains, Cecil Taylor and Jaki Byard, the avant garde musician and composer who coined the phrase used for the exhibition’s title. But :22'672&. the showstopper here is a sensational old black and white docudrama :678',2 from way back about Duke Ellington, featuring His Elegance at the piano with full orchestra amid a fantasia of Art Deco nightclubs and Cotton Club style showgirls in elaborate production numbers. The exhibition as a whole explores a great American art form and 6XSHUEO\ SULYDWH RQ  %HDUVYLOOH DFUHV cultural idiom’s worldwide journey from its origins in New Orleans ERUGHULQJ :RRGVWRFN /DQG &RQVHUYDQF\ WKLV and the Mississippi Delta, through gospel, R&B, modern jazz, soul music, do-wop, hip-hop, and the commercial appropriations of black XQLTXH KLGHDZD\ IHDWXUHV YDXOWHG EHDPHG musical styles by white recording stars like Elvis Presley and the Rolling FHLOLQJV VWRQH ILUHSODFHV LQ ERWK ¶ *UHDW 5RRP Stones. The dissemination of blues-influenced culture worldwide IDPLO\ URRP FRXQWU\ NLWFKHQ ZFXVWRP EDUQ is conveyed conceptually in Renée Green’s installation of relevant VLGLQJ FDELQHWV  %5V  EDWKV H[SDQVLYH GHFN reading materials on aluminum modular shelves with audio and video augmentation “Import/Export Funk Office.” ZSHDFHIXO YLHZV RI 0WV *XDUGLDQ 2YHUORRN But Kara Walker reminds us that the appropriation of black peoples’ 3/86 VSDFLRXV 678',2JXHVW VSDFH ZVOHHS ORIW bodies began long before the commercial rip-off of their music, IXOO EDWK DERYH LPPDFXODWH FDU JDUDJH with “Fall From Grace: Miss Pipi’s Blue Tale,” a harrowing video  installation bringing her well known silhouetted figures to eerily 5HGXFHG WR  animated shadow-show life to depict the rape of a slave woman by her white “master” in the Antebellum South. -R\FH *UHHQEHUJ “Blues for Smoke” gave us a hell of lot more to think about, as /LF 5( 6DOHVSHUVRQ we took a break in one of the pews of installation artist Rodney   [ McMillian’s full-scale walk-in reconstruction of a “down home” MR\FH#ZHVWZRRGUHDOW\FRP country church completely covered in garish red vinyl, than the deal that legend has it that one of the most revered bluesman, Robert Johnson, made with the Devil one midnight at The Crossroads to gain the immortality he so rightly deserves. –– Ed McCormack

“Blues For Smoke,” Whitney Museum, 945 Madison Ave., through April 28, 2013.

FOR EXHIBITION AND GALLERY ADS contact Jeannie McCormack, publisher, (212) 861-6814 at [email protected] FOR DISPLAY ADS contact Betty Cheung Advertising & Marketing Manager at [email protected]

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 RESERVED 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

APRIL/MAY 2013 GALLERYSTUDIO 7 Nobuko Tanabe’s Seamless Contemporary Synthesis of Eastern and Western Aesthetics hat juncture once famously tradition add additional Tdenied by Mark Twain, weight and depth to her where East and West meet, has aesthetic enterprise. become a popular crossroad in Although much Asian art recent years, traveled frequently is monochromatic, Tanabe in both directions by many of herself is a consummate our most urbane artists. Few, colorist. Her colors glow however, make that journey with subtle tonal variations as naturally or successfully as that become especially the Japanese painter Nobuko noticeable when she Tanabe, first reviewed in these employs a single color, as pages in 2002 and then again in a totally red painting in 2008. in her new series where Over the years Tanabe has the underlying striations refined her style from an early created with crumbled Minimalism encompassing paper swirl like waves elements of Color Field of molten lava. Indeed, painting and Abstract confronted with Tanabe’s Expressionism to the highly red painting –– such an personal manner of tachiste animated opposite of Mark abstraction that distinguishes Rothko’s melancholic, her work today. All quietly smoldering throughout, she has employed monochromatic canvases a technique of gluing gossamer –– one is put in mind of the Japanese papers to her canvases, frequent volcano eruptions which she wrinkles in various of Sakurajima Volcano in ways to create rippled textures Japan, which reportedly that lend her work an unusual spew huge crimson plumes tactile appeal. thousands of feet in the air. This works splendidly with For while Tanabe’s work Tanabe’s use of color, which is is not only related to that invariably vibrant, as seen in the of Rothko and other more series she calls “Wave,” perhaps gestural New York School in homage to the great ukiyo-e painters like Pollock and master Katsushika Hokusai, de Kooning, as well as but which also suggest other, the Color Field paintings more Western influences. “Blue Wave” of Jules Olitski, her form In “Wave Blue,” a work ambitious mainstream contemporary art. of abstraction is invariably in acrylic, gesso, Japanese paper, and glue She also asserts a connection to her allusive. Studying some of her “Wave” on canvas, for example, the brilliant hues of cultural heritage in yet another abstract work paintings –– particularly one in which the bright blue and yellow and the rhythmically comprised of a large circle centered on the tactile blue tides appear activated, as well as swirling lines immediately call to mind the canvas. Here, the reference would appear to illuminated with fiery orange reflections, meteoric energy of the thickly painted cosmic be to the ”Enso” (or circle) so ubiquitous by a small lunar-looking orb slightly left of forms in Vincent Van Gogh’s “The Starry in Zen Buddhist painting and calligraphy, an center in the composition –– one also thinks Night.” all encompassing character which stands for of the eccentric American painter Albert While so-called “appropriation” has long enlightenment, as well as strength, elegance, Pinkham Ryder’s mysterious nocturnal been an accepted practice in contemporary the universe, and perhaps any number of marinescapes. One arrives at this association art, Tanabe brings a much more personal other things. In traditional representations, not only from having recently viewed a slide element into play in this painting by virtue of the enso is drawn with ink in one swift show of Ryder’s paintings accompanied by her crumpled paper technique, with which stroke. In Tanabe’s painting, however, it is a recording of the Japanese pianist Yoko she reciprocates in her own more calculatedly constructed in relief in her usual glued paper Kanno’s composition, “The Cloudy Road,” conceptual manner the love that Van Gogh fortified with gesso and stained with fiery red and having been reminded once again of how felt for the art of her country. After his first and orange hues with bits of green woven seamlessly the Western and Eastern aesthetic encounters with Japanese art at the Japanese through. The texture and the luminous hues sensibilities can be made to merge in art. But Pavilion at the 1867 World Exposition in also make this particular circle resemble one also because the mixture is especially potent Paris, as well as in a gallery next door to the of Van Gogh’s thickly painted suns, with the in the paintings of Nobuko Tanabe, who one owned by his brother Theo, he started equally bright background suggesting the assimilates the best of each tradition to create collecting postcard reproductions of ukiyo-e residual halo of its rays. Yet when one looks her own singular synthesis. prints, which he pinned to the walls of his closely, it is possible to perceive the dark trace –– Maurice Taplinger studio for inspiration. Even while employing of a black outline, particularly at the bottom Japanese paper in the manner that she does, of the circle, as if the artist began by drawing Nabuko Tanabe, Montserrat Contemporary to create an effect resembling the oil impasto the traditional Zen circle in ink before Art Gallery, 547 West 27th Street, once peculiar to Western painting alone, building up its textures with layers of paper April 16 - May 4, 2013 Tanabe preserves a symbolic sense of her own to nearly sculptural thickness. Such traces of 212-268-0026 Wed. - Sat. 12 - 6pm national identity in the process of creating 8 GALLERYSTUDIO APRIL/MAY 2013 The CLWAC’s Annual Offers Many Pleasures ne always looks forward to the Priscilla Heep-Coll (also represented Oannual members’ exhibitions of the in the show with a spare sketch of Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club for a nude in oil pastel marked by a several reasons. Perhaps most important sculptor’s flair for economy of form ) is that, flying in the face of the “art star” of an odd-looking bird distinguished mentality that dominates so much of the by her characteristic use of intriguing art scene today, their group shows are negative spaces within her gracefully invariably mounted salon-style. With works flowing semiabstract forms. Grace in all media hanging all over the walls, each of a more human kind also animates attracting the eye on its own merits, they Shirley Dani’s sprightly realist are huge democratic affairs. sculpture of a slender young female This has long been a hallmark of the lute player, “Chantilly Serenade.” club established in 1896 with a sizable Janet Cook A skill that never fails to astound fund left by Catharine Lorillard Wolfe less ambidextrous pedestrians was (1828 – 1887) to promote women artists. managed just as handily in aesthetic A prominent New York Philanthropist and S T Faith terms in Sylvia G. Jacobson’s multi- art collector, Wolfe was the only woman canine and one human figure bronze piece among the 106 founding members of “Dog Walker.” The lone figure in “The The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Winds of Wall Street,” S.T. Faith’s paper also gave the museum its first endowment, sculpture (newspaper mache, apparently) is when she bequeathed to it her collection, animated in another manner, by gusts that thus starting the Met’s European painting make his overcoat billow like pages of The collection. (It’s a fascinating story, actually, Wall Street Journal blowing along over his and is told in the recently published book feet as he plods along preoccupied by drops “A Chronicle – The Catharine Lorillard in the market. By contrast, the countenance Wolfe Club,” available through the club’s Bonnie Rapaport Susan Samet of the African-American diva with her head website: www.clwac.org/). lip and the strong black outline the artist crowned by a mass of curls that Lee Hutt Moving on to The 2013 Annual drew around his face in an otherwise realist summons up in her resin and steel piece titled Members’ Exhibition, we visited the portrait. Just the opposite quality came across “All That Jazz” exudes queenly serenity. elegant Salmagundi Art Club Gallery on in another pastel by Daggi Wallace called Certainly she appears more content than the lower Fifth Avenue a day or so before the “A Glimpse of Transparency,” zeroing in on nun in Jean T. Kroeber’s walnut sculpture judging took place because although we’re one blue eye and swirling shadows of her “Silence,” who looks stately and slender in sure all the winners were well chosen, we blond hair on the fair cheek of a young girl her shawled robe but whose gloomy facial enjoy making our own choices. Among the with the other side of her face in shadow, her expression hints that she carries her piousness still life paintings we especially liked Karen full, moist lips expectantly moist, as though heavily. Kaapcke’s oil “Chicken,” because although waiting to be kissed. Landscape painting also distinguishes itself the pale, denuded fowl was uncooked, Then there were also two beautiful oils by in ”Maine, August,” by Janet Lippmann not the most appetizing state for a chicken Lucille Berrill Paulsen of young fresh faces, both who combines quintessentially contemporary to be seen in, Kaapcke made it appealing executed in the exacting manner of medieval sense of underlying abstraction akin to nonetheless by virtue of her succulent paint icons with ornate gold frames and halos: “St. Fairfield Porter and Jane Freilicher with a handling. We were also taken with Elizabeth Karin” within twinkling stars in hers; the one sense of color-as-light and air inherited from B. Derderian’s acrylic painting, “Homage to encircling the head of “St. Christopher” was the Impressionists, as seen in her breezy oil My Father: An Upholsterer’s Arrangement,” a baseball mysterious adorned with numbers “Maine, August.” By contrast Cary Thorpe with its unfolding ruler, box of tacks, and that one can only assume had some special Brown conjures up a sense of the Southern other tools of the trade neatly lined up on significance for the artist. Gothic school sensibility exemplified a work table like wooden soldiers; Bonnie There were also a number of fine paintings by writers like Carson McCullers in her Rapaport’s classic example of the genre in oil, of nearly full-length figures: JoAnn Bishop’s swampy and dark yet fiery little mixed media “Antique Vase with Ivy,” distinguished by “Night Swim,” a small acrylic of a stout compositions such as “Tangled Past.” By its sublime handling of light and shadow on man in a swimming pool, his kicking feet, virtue of a brilliant but mellowly matte yellow diverse surfaces of the china vase, the silver multiplied and distorted under the water sky, a nondescript stretch of country highway pitcher, and the orange skins; and Jeanette so that they appeared to become fins in lined with squat buildings and receding Helene Koumjian’s “Pick of the Crop II,” a an illusionistic metamorphosis reminiscent telephone poles, takes on a sense of hopeful monochromatic work in graphite delineating of Francis Bacon. Chong-Sun Oh’s magic in Dora Atwater Millikin’s oil “New delicate floral fragments on sixteen squares of accomplished realist oil portrait “Man in Day.” Holly Meeker Rom captures a pastoral paper arranged in a grid format. the Leather Jacket,”suggesting a moody patch in the midst of the Metropolis in her Several excellent closeup views of figures rebel with his uncombed black hair slightly fresh yet detailed watercolor of a Central Park also stood out. Sadly In Memorial among hanging over one eye, his stance reminiscent scene, “Bethesda Fountain.” And Dorothy them was “Soda Pop,” a watercolor of a of Brando in “The Wild One.” Janet Cook’s Mason exploits the peculiar combination of father and son sharing the same ice cream “King Henry’s Wives” a succulent large oil transparency and painterly substance in the soda through two straws, by Susan Samet, in which the bloodthirsty monarch’s latest ancient wax-based medium of encaustic to a gifted member of the club who recently future victim, a comely ivory-complected its utmost in her panoramic composition passed away. Aubrey O’Meara’s pastel brunette proudly displaying her charms in “Baltimore Harbor.” –– J. Sanders Eaton “Kristopher” was especially strong for its a Madonna-like bustier, while haughtily “in your face” treatment of a young man’s ignoring her ghostly predecessors, hovering expression, the confrontational feeling of the in the background shadows. closeup enhanced by the shadowy stubble Seen recently at The Salmagundi Art Club, Sculpture also made a strong showing i n 47 Fifth Ave. between his flared nostrils and defiant upper “The Inspector” a stoneware clay piece by APRIL/MAY 2013 GALLERYSTUDIO 9 Discovering the African Portraits of Gaby Hahn aby Hahn, an artist originally from modern city dwellers, causing one to consider posed GGermany, spends part of each year in that there may be benefits to the severe yet –– if that Africa, painting the people of Northern simple living conditions of tribal people. word can Kenya and Southern Ethiopia. Coming to One sees this apparent ease of being in applied to a painting late in life, she paints in a studio Hahn’s figure groups as well, In “Three creature of that sometimes serves as a school for African Turkana Women,” the subjects standing in such size, children that she established as part of her life a field display the brilliant colors and ornate captured in mission. patterns of their long, graceful garments, the motion, its Her oils capture the sense of easy intimacy elegance of which would not look at all out large lethal- that she has maintained with the people in this of place on a high fashion runway in Paris or looking continent, especially her face-to-face portraits New York. However, the two women Hahn tusk aimed such as “Turkana Woman Carrying Sacks depicts at work, stooping in a field like Millet’s straight of Flour,” in which the young woman, her famous “Gleaners,” in another painting called ahead! neck lengthened by an ornate yellow tribal “Two Turkana Women Cutting Lucerne” Here, “Three Turkana Women” necklace that appears to add at least a foot to wear garments that are simpler, if no less the animal’s her height balances two heavy bags of grain, brightly pleasing to the eye. Here, too, the thick gray hide is depicted in loving detail on atop the other, on her head. Still, she gazes artist gives us a glimpse of the country’s by the artist, all of its wrinkles, tones, and out placidly at the viewer, as though totally expansive beauty, with the high grasses of the textures delineated with accuracy, along unburdened, at home with herself and her lot foreground where the women toil giving way with the texture of the tall grass beneath its in the only life she knows. to a yellow field and verdant green mountains. huge feet. Here, too, the hide’s beautifully The load is lighter for “Turkana Girl With Along with other paintings of native people modulated grays, in concert with the small Fish,” in which the subject is seen in profile going about their day-to-day business, Gaby areas of deep nocturnal blue which remain with a single fish atop her head. She too has an Hahn gives us pictures of animal subjects, visible beyond the animal’s great hulking bulk, elongated neck lengthened by an ornate red as seen in “Elephant II,” in which a large demonstrate Gaby Hahn’s ability to capture and yellow tribal device and the angle from pachyderm and its small offspring are viewed and hold one’s attention with a less brilliant which the artist paints her enables the viewer from behind, strolling along together in the palette of hues than those which enliven her to contemplate her interesting hairstyle, with wild in as orderly a manner as in a circus perceptive human portraits. much of her head shaved, but for a kind of parade. But here in their natural environment –– Byron Coleman pony tail in the back and bangs in the front. they project a calmer dignity and kinship than Like the previous model, she has a serene such creatures ever do in captivity. The same Gaby Hahn, Agora Gallery, expression on her face that contrasts sharply can be said of “Elephant III,” in which one 530 West 25th St., Through April 16, 2013. with the anxiety one sees in the faces of so many large animal fills the entire canvas, frontally Reception: Thursday, April 4, 6 -8 pm. Photo Show Focuses on Human and Other Animals he relationship between people and The sense of menace that one gets from Having gone from near extinction to an Tother species animated the group photo coming face to face with potentially deadly alternative to beef hamburger meat in the exhibition “Living Beings” –– either by virtue species came across in Cornelius Mead’s past few years, could the hulking creature of actual interactions between us and them –– wildlife print “Pair of Lionesses.” By contrast, seen standing alone in a grassy field under or by our own species’ odd habit of viewing Mead’s “Mating Oystercatchers” might tall trees in Jack Cesareo’s picture “Bison/ and recording everything else from our own produce an embarrassing sense of voyeurism Yellow Stone” be pondering the point perspective. in the viewer if the foreplay of these gawky of it all? And would the poor beast be at Perhaps the most notable degree of waterbirds were not so comical to behold. all consoled to know that at least it is not interaction could be seen in Paul Margolis’ Lucinda Prince, on the other hand, Cesareo’s usual subject, a giant cupcake? black and white print “Cow on the Banks captured avian subjects, such as “January In “Black and White (Tanzania, Africa),” of the Ganges River,” in which not only Blue Jays” and “Winter Robin,” as well as Celia Cruzado gave us a close-up view of the large black bovine, but a stray mutt and other small creatures, like “Black Squirrel,” a zebra herd that made their overlapping good number of people, including fakirs all but camouflaged by their natural stripes reminiscent of one of the optical artist and beggars of all descriptions, sprawled and environment of crisscrossing twigs and tree Bridget Riley’s eye-boggling monochrome strolled along the wide stone steps leading limbs. paintings. In Cruzado’s wittily titled “Above down to the bank of the river in marvelously By contrast, Jean Prytyskacz’s pictures all things,” however, a lone giraffe took on messy profusion. of a pet cat called “Miss” are intimate and a surreal quality as it towered over an entire Speaking of crowds, Amy Rosenfeld whimsical. In “Miss with her Flowers,” the landscape. showed pictures of one of the true crowd feline sniffs the bright leaves and delicate JD Morrison gave us two of the show’s pleasers at the Central Park Zoo: the feeding buds with the civilized air of a bourgeois most unusual images in “Mantis,” in which of the sea lions. By comparison the five housewife in Impressionist painting. But in the much magnified close-up of the insect dogs leashed to a low tree-rail in another “Miss Looking at a Pigeon,” however, her took on the delicate grace of a petite ballet of Rosenfeld’s photos appeared starved for primitive instincts seem aroused as she stares dancer in a green leotard. In another picture attention. longingly at a luscious-looking pigeon on the by Morrison of three birds flying in an almost Less domestic species and their human other side of the window gates and glass. perfectly symmetrical formation, the avians keepers were featured in the images of Arturo Carolyn Reus also introduces a humorous appeared at once weightless and as though Cajigas. In pictures of a flute tootling snake note with “Motor Cat,” her image of a little carved in stone. charmer rousing a serpent from a basket with girl delighted by the sight of a cat wearing Continued on page 27 motorcycles in the background and massive helmet perched on a Suzuki motorcycle. By pachyderms and their turbaned drivers at a contrast, Reus’ picture of a peacock perched “Living Beings,” curated by Carolyn Reus, taxi stand, presumably in India, Cajigas put on a rail on the bucolic grounds of St. John’s recently seen at Broadway Mall Community an exotic spin on business as usual. the Divine is a model of captive beauty. Center 96th Street (center island). 10 GALLERYSTUDIO APRIL/MAY 2013 At Salmagundi: Watercolor in All Its Fluid Beauty f one were to chose two single works just as readily in “Silver, Crystal and Magnolia watercolorist, Barbara Nessim, pale profile Ifrom the many on view in the American on Linen,” meticulously detailed still life by morphing quite bizarrely into a white yacht. Watercolor Society’s 146th the Annual Laurin McCracken and “Bixby Bridge, Big Like several other works in this show, “Girls International Exhibition that demonstrate Sur,” a freely flowing pastoral landscape by Just Wanna Have Fun,” Susan Young’s bold the versatility of the medium, Sue Allen’s Patricia A. Allen. And that no other medium composition named for a song by Cyndi ”Palimpsest” and Jason Rowles’s “Welcome surpasses watercolor for creating atmospheric Lauper and featuring a big yellow dog playing to St. Louis” would do as well as any number effects was evident in Michael Kotarba’s with balls that resemble planets on a rug with of others. The former is a freely configured “Moon Light,” a beautifully evoked patterns suggesting a cosmos where dog abstraction with shattered planes influenced nocturnal vision of a graciously appointed biscuits float like satellites, also gives the lie to by Cubism white house behind a white picket fence with the old-fashioned notion that watercolor is a arranged on its porch light glowing warmly in concert medium more suitable to scenic transcription the two- with the full lunar orb above, the artist’s than surreal flights of fancy. dimensional skill with chiaroscuro put to good use in the On the other hand, no other medium does picture plane. surrounding foliage. such justice to landscape, as seen in Jessica L. The latter A far more desolate impression is conveyed Bryant’s “Little Death Creek,” with tall dry is a detailed in Gregory S. Bruno’s “After the Storm,” in grasses in the foreground, each pale yellow realist which the skeletal wreckage of what was once blade sharply delineated by a “drybrush” composition a house, its shattered boards and window technique in which aquarelle can be as precise Jeffrey A. Jakub depicting frames, with now calm blue sky shining as egg tempera (as Andrew Wyeth sometimes the graffiti- through, form an ironically serene geometric proved), giving way to dark green pines in the scrawled abstraction. By contrast, Dean Mitchell’s middle distance. More fluidly brushed in a interior of an “Urban Mansions” is a deadpan but detailed “wet-into-wet” manner, yet detailed in its own abandoned view of a row of brown brick dwellings, way, the two small figures huddled in close building, winter trees, and telephone poles set against a conversation add a hint of narrative drama to with rotten large expanse of uninflected sky. Brienne Brown’s landscape with architectural two by fours, Like American regional artists such as elements, “Discussing Grandpa’s House.” broken Thomas Hart Benton and Charles Burchfield Indeed, implied narratives are plentiful bricks and (the latter made watercolor his main medium in this exhibition. Consider: The three other debris and expanded its expressive perimeters in elderly men lolling in the sun on a bench in littering much the same way he enlarged his paintings Carl Phillips’s “Ready, Willing and Able.” the door, by pasting additional pieces of paper to his The longhaired, white-bearded rock critic illumination compositions as they developed), Wilmer in rakishly tilted cap and black leather entering Anderson and Edwin C. Shuttleworth both jacket meditating at his laptop in a cafe in by way of perfect a subjectively stylized species of realism. “Contemplating the Works of Dylan” by the missing Anderson combines observation and fantasy in Jeffrey A. Jakub. Henry Casselli’s “Bird’s windows an enchanting synthesis in “Wisconsin Hot Air Nest Revisited # 1,” in which a little sad- Michael Kotarba and door, Balloon Festival,” in which farm folk and their looking black girl stares straight out at the through children gather among meadows and hills to viewer as she stands in almost total darkness which the watch the big colorful balloons float among with her back to a white wooden structure viewer can baroque layers and strata of cumuli above eerily suggesting a slightly askew Klu Klux glimpse fairytale meadows and valleys. Shuttleworth Klan cross. Cathy Hegman’s mysterious foliage gives his own unique treatment to “Mill “Weight of Balance: Limited Freedom,” and other Town Strike,” in which rickety little houses depicting a strange figure wearing a tall blue evidence of capped with snow and leaning this way and cone-shaped hat that could just as easily the outside that take on anthropomorphic animation, be a dunce cap as a wizard’s crown, as he world. Then their windows resembling eyes agog with balances on a circular something-or-other again, equally amazement at the human hubbub of the while holding two airborne birds behind dramatic humans rallying and brawling outside, as the him on thread-thin leashes. And Peter contrasts dirty brick structures and chimneys of the Carey’s image of a homeless man, his cart between shutdown mill loom overhead. filled with miscellaneous detritus, who has subject and More formal in approach is June Pierpont paused on the sunny sidewalk to skim a technique Webster’s “Rainy Day Rhythms,” where discarded newspaper near the entrance of an Karen Brussat Buttler come across pedestrians passing rows of parked cars in establishment called The Ritz Carlton Club. what appears to be a strip mall are dissected Among other urban vignettes that by neocubistic patterns and reflections. The caught one’s eye were: “Night Lights of influence of Expressionism comes into play, the Big Apple,” by David Stickel, in which combined with that of Art Nouveau in Karen the transparent glass facade of the big Brussat Butler’s phantasmagoric “Tattoo Apple Computer store on 5th Avenue is Ball,” where distorted figures adorned with transformed into a magical crystal palace intricate body decorations shimmy and shake by virtue of the surrounding lights of large amid bright swirls of color. In “Soliloquy” hotels and office buildings; “New York City by Miles Batt, Sr., an angular bare-breasted Continued on page 26 mermaid, depicted in a manner akin to the great New Yorker cartoonist Saul Steinberg, American Watercolor Society 146th Annual floats on her back on a translucent rainbow- International Exhibition, Salmagundi Club, striped sea reminiscent of yet another terrific Jason Rowles 47 Fifth Ave., April 2 - 21, 2013 APRIL/MAY 2013 GALLERYSTUDIO 11 In Real Life, All Happy Endings Are Temporary an excerpt from HOODLUM HEART: Confessions of a Test-Dummy for the Crash and Burn Generation a memoir by Ed McCormack

When our son Holden was a very little only on rare occasions and at my urging did authoritative male figure to look up to than boy he went through a phase in which he she indulge in the herbal sacrament of our the one I presented with my beads, bracelets, wanted to become a policeman. Every day, generation, generally preferring meditation and Indian caftans. On the other hand, it everywhere we went, he insisted on wearing to marijuana. could just as easily have been a normal little a Halloween costume cop-cap, a tin badge, So when my younger sister Maureen boy thing, like my own childhood desire a cap-gun in a holster-set with a pair of showed us a snapshot she had taken in my to be a cowboy; or else an extraordinarily toy handcuffs dangling from the belt, and parents’ living room on Staten Island, of clever child’s way of rebelling against the carrying a little plastic nightstick. Holden in his policeman’s getup down at the annoying permissiveness of his adamantly When we got on the subway, rather than opposite end of the sofa glancing askance in antiauthoritarian parents. sitting with us, he stood by the pole in the our direction, Jeannie was at least half joking Of course, I rationalized conveniently that middle of the car staring sternly over at when she commented, “He looks like he all rebellion was healthy, be it mine against Jeannie in her tie-dyed top and miniskirt and wants to bust us!” the paternal forces of society or my son’s me with my long hair and bellbottom jeans On the other hand, it wasn’t hard to against me. And when Jeannie suggested like a vigilant transit patrolman keeping his imagine that our little boy often fantasized that instead of spending so many weekends eye on a couple of suspicious hippies. about busting me for all the joints I was and summer vacations with my parents on Some of our fellow passengers would be always smoking in his presence. How else Staten Island, perhaps Holden should spend all smiles. They probably saw us as some cute was a solid little citizen who was actually more time in the city with us, doing “normal Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post put off by the lack of academic discipline in family things, like going to the Central Park cover for a new era. But I knew my son was a private school, founded on the theories Zoo, the Museum of Natural History, or serious; he was always an unusually serious concerning “mind, soul, and spirit” of the the Hayden Planetarium,” I quickly pointed child, perhaps, I have sometimes thought, Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, in out that there was an even bigger zoo on to make up for his father’s frivolity. I speak which we enrolled him for awhile, supposed Staten Island, as well as a nice beach just a only for myself: although my wife looked to feel about a delinquent father who couple of blocks from my parents’ house. I like the quintessential beautiful hippie chick flaunted the law so blatantly as to make a also reminded her that the last time we took (Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and The mockery of all adult authority, including his Holden to the Museum of Modern Art, he Papas was the comparison people usually own? Although I considered such Freudian was bored almost to tears and complained, made) and her esoteric interests made it formulations trite and oversimplified, “I hate all these ugly monkey paintings!” possible for her to converse concerning some might have seen his policeman Never mind that dinosaurs or the planets matters “cosmic” with the farthest out freaks, preoccupation as a longing for a more might have interested a kid his age more 12 GALLERYSTUDIO APRIL/MAY 2013 than de Kooning’s slashing strokes or high school and they invited us and Jeannie’s Pollock’s drips and splashes; conveniently, grandmother, Kathleen Sanders, to dinner at although I knew better and my wife knew one of their favorite restaurants. I knew better, I’d stoop to a philistine’s “TRADER VIC’S: Where those merry argument: a museum was a museum, right? souls who make drinking a pleasure; who Besides, Holden liked being doted over and achieve contentedness long before capacity; spoiled rotten by his grandparents –– what and who, whenever they drink, prove able kid didn’t? –– and he enjoyed being driven to carry it, enjoy it, and remain gentlemen,” around the Island and taken for pizza by read the slogan on the matchbook I picked Maureen and her boyfriend Richie, both up on the way in. of whom behaved like giddy suburban Obviously our host had already achieved teenagers. And Wasn’t our little boy wide- “contentedness” by the time the maitre’d eyed with delight when my father –– now led us over to his table. Ensconced in this sober, homebound, and a more willing kitschy tropical colonialist-themed restaurant participant in his grandson’s games than he in the basement of the Plaza Hotel, which had ever been in my sister’s or mine –– told was also said to be one of his buddy Dick him that The Staten Island Advance reported Nixon’s favorite New York watering holes, a corpse, most likely whacked by the Mafia, surrounded by carved wooden masks, Tiki had been discovered in the basement of torches, and the 40-foot outrigger canoe Paul’s Sweet Shoppe, where Maureen and that Marlon Brando used in “Mutiny on Holden, Handsome James (the donkey), Richie regularly took him for candy and the Bounty,” William Randolph Hearst, Jr. Jeannie and me at Hilldale, in Virginia in comic books? How could hanging out with looked as contented as the proverbial fly on the early ’70's his boring bohemian parents provide thrills a turd. pilot, the actor Treat Williams, was doing as to compare? But as we got closer and he noticed my he and the other whacked-out male thespian I’m sure I believed it at the time, adept shoulder-length hair, my former boss’s playing his copilot studied some kind of as I was at rationalizing my selfish behavior genially inebriated expression clouded foldable road map of the heavens they had to myself. What it probably came down to, over noticeably. Once hugs and kisses were spread out on the control panel. though, was that I was afraid our night- exchanged all around and everyone was When we spoke in his office in midtown crawling at Max’s Kansas City, Nobody’s, seated, however, Bill Hearst regained his Sidney Lumet, the director of a gritty New St. Adrian’s, The Mercer Arts Center, and composure. Gripping my forearm with his York cop-drama called “Prince of the City” our other regular downtown hangouts big soft paw, and –– addressing me by the had predicted that the soon-to-be-released might be seriously curtailed by taking on old sobriquet my wife had shortened to film would almost certainly make Williams more parental responsibility, especially “Ed” soon after we met because she thought “the first non-Italian in a long time to on weekends. Jeannie and I had married it sounded “like the kind of guys in Virginia achieve stardom on a level with Al Pacino very young and had a right to some fun, I who were always tinkering with their cars” and Robert DeNiro.” reasoned, imagining we still had all the time –– he said, “Listen, Eddie, you don’t have to As it turned out, Williams was to have a in the world to spend with our son. Nor order one of those mai tais or whatever the merely middling career in film and television, did it ever occur to me that my generation’s hell they call them. Leave that to the ladies a fact he would blame years later on his reckless hedonism could lead to anything less and order yourself a bourbon or a good glass fondness for cocaine. But at that time, on the than a newly enlightened attitude that would of Scotch.” strength of his scenary-chewing histrionics usher in a renaissance of freedom and beauty Hearing this, my wife and son both shot in “Prince,” he had every reason to anticipate for generations to come. me uneasy looks. For years my drinking had stardom. To keep busy while waiting for it Certainly I never thought to wonder what been a given; it only became an affliction to arrive, he was flying himself and two of price our children might someday pay for after I started sporadically attending his fellow cast members out to the theater the liberties we were taking. Nor did it ever meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. Now if at Kenyon College for a summer stock occur to me to make amends to Holden for I took a drink I was having a relapse –– or a production of the Carlo Goldoni farce “A my early absence and inattention until he was “slip,” as they call it in Twelve-Step groups Servant of Two Masters,” and I was along to already an adult and no longer in need of my like A.A. profile him for Rolling Stone. guidance. In fact my most recentl fall from grace Meanwhile, I had to piss. Rather than * * * had occurred just a few mornings earlier, ask if there was some kind of portable A few years out of college, Holden took a when I found myself flying through the urinal I could use in my seat and, under job as a copywriter for Avon Books, owned clouds in a four-seat twin-engine Piper Cub such cramped conditions, risk watering the by the Hearst Corporation, and worked for aircraft with a half finished fifth of Jack actress, I’d been holding it in for hours. So awhile in the very building on 57th Street Daniels nestled snugly between my thighs, as soon as we touched down on the runway, and 8th Avenue where his mother and I from which I would take a healthy swig at I bolted out of the aircraft, bottle of hootch first met when I was the personal copy boy/ every sign of turbulence. in hand, unzipped, and relieved myself right office boy of William Randolph Hearst Jr., Folded into the seat next to mine was there on the tarmac. and she came to New York to model and a leggy young actress to whom I had just The performance got me a nice rowdy study acting over summer vacation from her been introduced before we boarded back in round of applause from the three theater Virginia boarding school in the care of his New York. Although she politely declined folk still in the plane. But it was hardly an wife Austine “Bootsie” Hearst. the ten-milligram valium I offered and the auspicious debut to make in the pleasant Holden didn’t get the job through good Kentucky sour mash whiskey to wash little hamlet of Norman Rockwell Americana any connections of ours; it was purely it down with –– “Thanks, but I’m afraid it’s called Gambier, Ohio, and it was all downhill serendipitous and earned through his own a little early in the day for me!” –– she too from there. ability. In fact, we had not seen the Hearsts seemed somewhat unnerved by the coke- It rained for hours the day after we arrived since several years earlier when he was still in fueled lost-in-space Star Trek schtick that our and Treat and I were cooped up together in APRIL/MAY 2013 GALLERYSTUDIO 13 his rented house on campus, where he had (about whose tar and feathering Jeannie’s a greasy urban smudge on the pastoral assigned me one of the upstairs bedrooms. uncle Walter Mellon had so relished telling picturebook landscape of Hilldale, never Staring longingly through the screen door at me as a cautionary tale on my very first visit had to inspect my teeth to find my pedigree the drenched Harley-Davidson motorcycle to Virginia) before divorcing him to marry wanting, was staring coldly in my direction, propped up on its kickstand out in the front Bill Hearst. Still elegant in the manner of a as though waiting for me to confirm what yard, he said, “This would be a good time mummified Egyptian empress in one of the she had known all along. for us to do the interview. Do you have any regal-looking designer turbans she favored, Phrasing my imagined reply somewhat questions for me?” she fawned over Kathleen, one of whose more obliquely, I said, “I personally never “I don’t really do formal interviews,” I infrequent visits to New York before leaving had to distort, fabricate or furnish anything told him, relaxing in an armchair, sipping on a trip to Ireland was the occasion for all to get a good story.” a can of Budweiser. “Mainly, I wait around of us getting together for the first time in the The word I emphasized was a not-so- with my eyes and ears open for something to years since Jeannie and I had eloped. veiled reference to his father’s famous reply happen.” Probably still feeling guilty for being to Frederick Remington, after Hearst senior “That’s great!” he said, frowning. “Not too much the busy society lady to properly sent him to sketch the war in Spain and the much happening today, except a rehearsal a chaperone my future bride that summer we artist wired back that there didn’t appear to little later in the afternoon. That should be met, Bootsie now tried to establish some be a war there: “You furnish the pictures, I’ll nice and boring.” common ground between her husband furnish the war.” “You never know,” I said. and his former office boy by mentioning Who could guess what Bill Hearst thought Although I would finally manage to meet that I wrote for Rolling Stone, published about having to swallow such impertinence my deadline, producing a lengthy feature by Jann Wenner, who also owned Outside, from a former serf? Making a kind of article ironically titled “Treat Williams’ First the backpacking magazine of which their “harumph” sound, he attacked his rare steak and Last In-Depth Interview” on automatic eldest son, William Randolph Hearst III, had as though it were the Red Menace itself. pilot, the following day was not much better. recently been appointed managing editor. My old boss and I hardly had two more Later I would have only dim memories of “ As I always tell Willy, I don’t see how words to say to each other for the rest of bouncing like a wildly whooping rag doll you can have an outdoor magazine without the evening. But Holden, who had recently on the back of the actor’s Harley and him guns!” Bill Hearst snorted, an editorial watched Citizen Kane on TV, could not yelling over his shoulder for me to hang on, opinion it was easy to imagine being help beaming mischievously every time we as we roared through dark night woods to repeated pugnaciously over many family caught each others’ eye. Because I had not a big bright blur of a house party where I dinners since his son first went to work for really earned it, having been regrettably busy must have behaved badly, judging from his Wenner’s pansy peacenik publication. Then, going through a second adolescence of my pained expression when he returned from turning back to me, he said, “Tell me, Eddie, own during the most crucial years of his an early jog around the Kenyon campus exactly what do you write for Rolling Stone? childhood, my grown son’s approval always the next morning to find me sitting on the They kind of specialize in a lot of that so- made me glow with gratitude. porch steps, chugging a breakfast beer and called New Journalism, don’t they? Don’t * * * toking on a joint to take the edge off a fierce you guys just distort the facts?” For three weeks several years later in the hangover... Perhaps noticing how I was gripping my spring of 1993, Jeannie and I literally lived As soon as I got back to the city I headed glass of Perrier in one fist and my fork in the in the visitor’s lounge of the Intensive Care straight to an A.A. meeting, banishing myself other, Bootsie tried to defuse the situation Unit of Lenox Hill Hospital, sleeping on once again from that fraternity of “merry by saying,“But, lovey, isn’t what the New the sofa, stopping at home only briefly every souls who make drinking a pleasure” that Journalists do more like a sketch than a news morning to shower, change clothes, and the slogan on the Trader Vic’s matchbook- story anyway? What about Tom Wolfe’s feed our pet birds, before heading straight cover so invitingly extolled. article about Leonard Bernstein and his back to continue our vigil at our son’s Jeannie and Holden, who had never wife throwing that ridiculous party in their bedside. enjoyed my drinking as much as I had, apartment for the Black Panthers? That was It was there in the visitor’s lounge of the looked relieved, but Bill Hearst glared at delightful, didn’t you think? I thought that I.C.U one Sunday, while the doctors were me scornfully when I ordered a Perrier was mahhhvelous!” conferring in Holden’s room and Jeannie water with a twist of lime instead of one Ignoring his wife’s cajoling, Bill Hearst was down at the cafeteria getting us takeout of the more tempting mood tonics he had turned back to me and said, “Let me ask containers of tea, that I picked up an Arts & suggested. you this, Eddie: Do you think it’s all right to Leisure section of The New York Times that Bootsie Hearst had grown up in the same distort facts for the sake of coming up with a another visitor had left behind. It was dated county in the Virginia horse country as colorful story?” May 5, 1993, three days after our son’s Jeannie, and had known her since she was It struck me as more than a little thirtieth birthday, ten days before he was to born. As a teenager, my wife had spent a presumptuous for the Frank Sinatra Jr. of die. couple of her summer vacations with them yellow journalism to be lecturing anyone To distract myself from the all-pervasive and their two sons, William III and Austin, about reportorial ethics. I wanted to say, “To terror I had been living with since Holden at San Simeon, the castle in California that my knowledge, no so-called New Journalist had been admitted to the hospital with a William Randolph Hearst senior had built for has so far started a war to sell newspapers.” diagnosis of full-blown AIDS, I skimmed a his actress mistress Marion Davies. And when But being cold sober, I was painfully rave review by Frank Rich of a play that had they were in Virginia, the Hearsts often rode aware that my wife and son, their cutlery just opened on Broadway called “Angels in at Hilldale, the sprawling horse farm owned suspended in midair above their plates, their America.” From what my muddled, sleep- by my wife’s grandmother Kathleen Sanders. identical eyebrows raised in tense anticipation deprived mind could gather, it sounded like In her youth, Bootsy had been a beauty. of what I might say, were both regarding a much graver, nonmusical “Hair” for the She was a model, had been signed to a me imploringly. I also noticed that my wife’s AIDS generation. I put the paper down, film contract by Howard Hughes, and was grandmother, the canny old horsewoman not wishing, for once, to feel so uncannily in married to the society columnist Igor Cassini who, from the moment I appeared like tune with the zeitgeist of the time in which I

14 GALLERYSTUDIO APRIL/MAY 2013 was living. dawned on me that being During the many uncharacteristically ornery hours that we sat at about this one last thing our son’s bedside, I may have been our son’s compulsively covered only remaining chance to entire pages in my exercise personal power or pocket notebook control over anything at all. with minuscule He refused to make marks. Although they it official –– ostensibly resembled abstract because he objected on forms in a Pollock-like principle to the stigma overall composition, on attached to testing positive, closer inspection they but really, it would later were actually tiny t’s seem to me, because simple through which I hoped, stubbornness was his by some supernatural last defense against utter act of will, to transmit helplessness. some of my own t-cells Jeannie and I felt helpless to my dying son. too, in face of the fact that I know now that I was Holden’s graduation from The Anglo-American School in 1980 in 1993, a diagnoses of caught up in the kind of “magical thinking” to himself. Even when he could no longer full-blown AIDs was almost always a death Joan Didion would describe several years speak because of the tubes crammed down sentence. Our only defense against it was later, following the death of her husband, the his throat and was forced to communicate denial and more magical thinking: When our novelist John Gregory Dunne, in her grief by scribbling notes on a legal pad, he was son was released from the hospital, we would memoir with that phrase in its title. To quote gracious and self-effacing almost to a fault. whisper to each other like plotting prisoners Didion directly, I too was “thinking as small When one of the nurses, a pretty young in our makeshift bed in the visitors lounge children think, as if my thoughts or wishes Filipino, said, “Your father tells me you’re of the I.C.U, the three of us would travel to had the power to reverse the narrative, a writer,” reaching for his pen and pad, he China, where the traditional herbal doctors change the outcome.” replied “Not of novels or anything like that. would surely have some magical cure that Naturally, Jeannie and I were ecstatic Just the copy inside the book jackets.” modern Western medical science, so cowed when Holden’s t-cell count suddenly shot Through the worst of his ordeal he by the testing regulations of its authoritarian up to a degree that his doctors found remained the most polite and cooperative medical associations and compromised inexplicable, making us think my magic of patients. Except in one regard: While he by the profit motives of its mercenary might be working; either that or the submitted without complaint to having his pharmaceutical companies, didn’t even want megavitamins Jeannie insisted be added veins jabbed painfully several times a day by to know about. If that failed, we would do to his drug regimen. (In deference to a interns who drew blood with varying degrees our own research and find a way to heal desperate mother’s wishes, the skeptical of incompetence, he had zero tolerance Holden ourselves –– perhaps with some but kindly doctor instructed the nurses to when they showed up with a clipboard combination of “art therapy” and prayer. pulverize the pills and dissolve them in our rather than a needle, asking him to sign a (Did we think we could envelope him in son’s intravenous drips.) But the false hopes permission form for HIV testing. luminous healing auras? Or exorcise a vicious that sprang up briefly with each small sign of Apparently he had never been tested, viral infection by simple virtue of wishful improvement vanished when Holden’s t-cell having taken ill suddenly with what Jeannie thinking? Given our muddled state of mind count dropped back down just as suddenly as and I thought must be a bad cold or a at that time, I have no idea...) it had risen. case of bronchitis (although he must have Although neither of us had any faith in During those weeks at Lenox Hill, it was suspected otherwise, since the doctors formal religion, we were so convinced –– or beyond me to comprehend how a young claimed his symptoms were as severe as at least we wanted to convince ourselves –– man who’d been raised as a somewhat those with which patients presented years that our love for our son would somehow sheltered only child and had never before earlier in the epidemic, before anyone knew give us the power to accomplish a miracle. been tested by serious illness could face the what it was or how to treat it.) Of course, the So adamant were we too, in our refusal to direst possible prognosis without a hint of doctors had pretty much arrived at their own accept a terminal verdict that we wouldn’t self-pity, accepting a collapsed lung among conclusions. And of course Holden knew hear of it when the hospital social worker other bodily catastrophes and increasingly that, since they had already diagnosed him suggested that we should consider having more drastic and painful medical procedures with full-blown AIDS, his HIV status was a Holden transferred to the facility’s “excellent with a stoic courage he certainly had never moot point anyway. new AIDs wing.” Especially after we learned from me. (I could only conclude At first, my own rebellious nature quelled humored the woman by agreeing to let her that he inherited it from his mother, always by abject terror, I tried to convince him give us a tour of its wards. the braver one since we were young and she that it might be helpful to his treatment “It happens we came at the perfect time,” left everything she knew behind to share my if he signed, even though it seemed to she said. “This is when the ice cream cart precarious lot in the rotton-tooth tenements please him to send those interns –– most comes around.” of New York City.) of whom looked roughly his own age and It was one of the saddest sights either of us While he could hardly have been called could probably look forward to long lives had ever seen: all of those skeletal men, most conservative, my son’s grown-up demeanor filled with professional prestige and material of them obviously older than our son (or was was invariably low-key, gentlemanly. Unlike ease, while he was staring into the face of that just an illusion of their more advanced me, he never boasted, postured, or tried in what we all most fear –– away clutching wasting?) being methodically fattened by any other cheap way to call undue attention their clipboards in frustration. Then it big bowls of ice cream every afternoon in

APRIL/MAY 2013 GALLERYSTUDIO 15 the hope of forestalling their inevitable fate. around the bed to grant Jeannie and me To even admit to ourselves that Holden some privacy, all I could do as I imagined belonged among them would be to accept my son’s spirit rising out of him to transcend that his condition was indeed terminal... me, was sob over his body, “I’m sorry! I’m During those weeks we came to relish sorry! I’m sorry!” small pleasures and momentary respites from Later that day we wheeled a creaky cart the grimness of our vigil, such as visiting along a trance-shiny hospital corridor. In it the little room where the vending machines were some large plastic shopping bags filled were late at night, after Holden had fallen with the clothes in which our son had been off to sleep, when we felt free to leave his wheeled into the Emergency Room on a bedside. I don’t remember what they called gurney three weeks earlier; a cassette player it; probably the commissary or snack bar and some audio tapes and books that we or something like that. It was always empty brought to the hospital to help him pass the at that time of the night, affording us the time in the I.C.U; as well the many pages of luxury of privacy and a welcome break from legal pad notes that he scribbled to Jeannie being figures of public pity. It had blindingly What, some might ask, prompts this and me and to answer questions from his bright fluorescent lights and their low electric soliloquy of nostalgia for what had to be the nurses and doctors when he could no longer crackle, in concert with the hum of the worst three weeks of our lives? The answer is talk. candy, coffee, and soda machines, emitted simple: our son was still alive then. Numbly, we wheeled these orphaned a communal buzzing sound that seemed to * * * belongings down what felt on that last day enhance the silence like white noise. Holden was a Taurus, the most stubborn, like an endless maze of brightly gleaming It felt so very peaceful there. We would they tell me, of all astrological signs, and his corridors. Then we took the shopping bags savor that peace and take empty nourishment HIV status remained officially unconfirmed out of the cart and walked them out of the from sugar before going back and escaping on May 14, 1993, twelve days after his 30th hospital. into our own fitful sleep on the sofa in the birthday (which he had told us in one of his At home I put the clothes, the tapes, and waiting room of the ICU. legal pad notes that he wanted to wait until the books in a wood trunk near the desk ... Only to be wakened shortly after dawn by after he was released from the hospital to in my work room and the many pages of a slapping and sloshing and bumping sound celebrate), when he died of complications Holden’s handwritten notes in a metal filing coming closer and closer. from AIDS. cabinet nearby. I told myself that one day I One of us would wake first and say to the We had just returned to the hospital would open it and look at them again. That other, “We have to get up –– here comes from one of our brief visits home to shower, was twenty-one years ago and still I have not The Mop!” change and feed our birds when a female been able to face them –– not even to refresh To be able to say it that way, with the intern met us at the entrance to the I.C.U my memory while writing these words. capital letters clearly audible, provided us and hurried us up the hall to our son’s room, * * * with another minor pleasure: To make our saying, “Come quick, he’s dying.” Someone told Jeannie about a support rueful little joke about the hospital janitor’s I still can’t fathom how Jeannie found group for bereaved parents. We all sat in mop, as it worked its way like some familiar the selfless strength in those last moments a circle in a church basement, boxes of and benign monster, toward our makeshift of Holden’s life, when all she wanted was Kleenex placed within arm’s reach here and bed at the beginning of each day; to repeat beg him not to die, to lean down over his there on the floor. With their little white those same words like some ironic morning hospital bed, tenderly stroking his face and tissue triangles sticking up, they reminded mantra, provided us with a small sense of whispering as softly, as soothingly, as she me of toy sailboats afloat in a sea of sorrows. certainty, of continuity, of the ordinary in had when he was a little boy and she would One woman, fiercely thin with brilliant the midst of an extraordinary misery, an lull him to sleep with fanciful improvised black eyes, told through clenched teeth unrelenting psychological agony. bedtime stories of an imaginary realm she about having had to hold her paralyzed Later, I would feel oddly nostalgic for called “The Land of Somewhere Else.” Now teenage son’s penis while he peed. Sure, it those terrible days and nights at Lenox Hill. in words, as in the luminous semi-abstract made her squeamish to touch her boy so I would remember how the nurses that I canvases and watercolors she had painted intimately, she admitted, answering almost needed to think of as angelic moved through over the years, she evoked fields of brilliant resentfully the question none of us was the halls of the ICU in the nocturnal hours flowers, verdant green hills, sunshine and insensitive or just plain stupid enough to ask, as silently and gracefully as fish in a dimly lit waterfalls and rainbows, while urging our yet that she knew we were all thinking. But aquarium. I would remember the soft spring son not to struggle, not to be afraid, he was she’d do it again “in a heartbeat,” she added, breeze wafting in through the open window, going to “a peaceful, beautiful place...” if only she had the chance. Toward the end, and seeing some of the windows still aglow Only after the young female intern who knowing he’d never experience it, her boy in the apartment buildings across 77th had been studying the monitor above our asked her what sex felt like. Mercifully, she Street, where normal life was continuing as son’s bed saw the line go flat and said, “He’s spared us having to hear what she told him. we sat like shadows in the dark at Holden’s gone,” did Jeannie let the tears flow freely Next to speak was a newly bereaved bedside. down her face. And when one of the nurses father who remembered how, during his Sometime after midnight a thuggish closed our son’s eyes, I wondered if they did daughter’s final days in the hospice, when looking-man would come around to empty that to satisfy the cliché notion of death as she was suffering so terribly, he begged God the trash pails. He was an albino, wore white “eternal rest,” preferring to imagine instead to lesson her burden a little by letting each rubber gloves, had multiple tattoos sleeving that what I had seen in my son’s wide- member of the family shoulder some of her his musclebound arms. Being shadows, we open eyes in the instant that he died was pain. Perhaps, he finally mused, his prayer never spoke to him, nor he to us. But there the astonishment of true awakening in the had been answered, since now they had would come a time when I even missed that heavenly landscape his mother had described. inherited it all. spooky phantom of those long haunted But after all the interns, doctors, and With clearly heroic effort, a terribly timid nights of our vigil in the dark. nurses withdrew, drawing the white curtain young Hispanic woman, barely more than a

16 GALLERYSTUDIO APRIL/MAY 2013 child herself, gathered courage to speak. In a arsonist’s oil can, intent on setting the place Like his mother, too, Holden was not benumbed monotone, she told us her baby on fire, Keith prowled and howled through given to emotional displays and now had died because her boyfriend “shook him a version of “Gimme Shelter” far more seemed embarrassed by my sudden mawkish too hard playing a rough game.” gritty and hoarsely harrowing than Mick’s mea culpa. He brushed it off brusquely, Because we were constantly reminded recorded version. saying,“Don’t be ridiculous, you were fine. that we are not there to judge each other, Marveling at how cadaverous he looked Anyway, I could never imagine having a kid or to tell anyone else how they should feel, with his kohl-blackened eye-sockets and his at the age you did. I don’t think I’d have grieve, or attempt to go on living, no one leopard-spotted buccaneer blouse hanging felt ready to be a good uncle at nineteen or commented when she mentioned that she off his old bones, Holden said, “He and his twenty –– much less a father!” still lived with this same boyfriend. whole band look like a crew of pirates; the I now believe that even one not previously Ever since the meeting began, a man in a only thing missing are the eye-patches and given to esoteric imaginings can become horn-rimmed glasses and a tweed jacket had peg-legs!” a mystic simply by being mystified by been listening silently from a place slightly Like me, Keith was pushing fifty as ‘92 unexpected experiences –– particularly outside the circle. His smirk would have segued into ‘93, and watching him in the the death of a loved one. (Didn’t I later seemed an obscenity if not for something presence of my son, I felt foolishly proud willingly accompany my wife to seminars in Job-like in his eyes, greatly magnified by that both this rock and roll legend and I had midtown hotel ballrooms where slick TV thick lenses. refused to age gracefully. Ours, after all, was “psychics” played upon the gullibility of “My son was a schizophrenic and a drug the Peter Pan generation, the generation those desperate to contact someone on the addict besides,” he finally said. “He was that said, Don’t trust anyone over thirty; that Other Side? Didn’t I even journey with her such a nasty, violent son of a bitch that half was never supposed to grow up, much less out to a bungalow in darkest New Jersey the time my poor wife and I had to live in grow old. We were a generation hung up on to a visit a more grass roots “seer” whose fear of him. He was devious and just plain juvenilia, clinging even in middle-age to our scrawny lank-haired husband pocketed our mean. He went out of his way to make life anarchic music, our myths of romantic self- cash like a hillbilly hippie drug dealer in miserable for anyone who had anything destruction. Certainly I still did that night, as their kitchen for the privilege of trying out to do with him. So I have to admit, it was I went on ad absurdom about what a miracle the “Psychomanteum,” a black-curtained almost a relief when he finally did himself it was that Keith was still alive –– and, by “apparition booth” in their bedroom, in. Yet, every once in awhile, I have one of implication, that I still was as well, given all supposedly dating back to the spirit diviners those days when I find that I just can’t stop the indignities to which we had subjected of ancient Greece?) thinking about him ... And that’s when I our mortal flesh. Yet I’m sure my remorseful outburst had come here...” But bragging about those memories of probably been brought on by the bourbon His sudden speech had cast a pall over wanton indulgence to the son in whose life I and the sentiment of the occasion, rather the circle that widened into a silence which should have been more present –– especially than by a presentiment of what was to come. engulfed us all, setting each of us as adrift during those years when he needed me most In truth I felt, if not vindicated, at least within ourselves as those Kleenex sailboats –– suddenly evoked feelings of shame and forgiven by my son, and my mood picked up littering the floor. remorse. Hearing myself reminisce made me when Keith rocked into his signature tune, Then, finally breaking the silence with a aware for the first time that mine was merely “Happy,” on which he takes the lead vocal at phlegmy coal-chute clearing of the throat, the arrogance and self-deluded egotism of Stones concerts: “Never want to be like papa seeming almost embarrassed for making us the first generation to come of age with / Working for a boss ev’ry night and day / I consider such complexities of grief, love, and a so-called “youth culture” that glorified need love to keep me happy.” hate, the newcomer offered the coldest kind hedonism: Yeah, man, sex, drugs, and rock Having not even the smallest hint that of comfort there could be: “I think it was the ‘n’ roll –– why the fuck not? Certainly I the year we had just entered would be my Irish writer Beckett, if I’m not mistaken, who never thought to wonder what price our son’s last, I was smugly happy, too. Happy once said, ‘Life is not serious –– just tragic.’” children might pay some day for our reckless to have escaped my own old man’s dreary * * * self-indulgence. But now, as my grown son lot as a dockworker, remembering him long These days, I sometimes flash back to and I sat together drinking (I had finally in the past, on New Year’s Eves all through my last good time with my son: New Year’s “graduated” from A.A. and learned to drink my childhood, slumped in his sagging Eve, 1992. Jeannie, our mutually beloved sanely –– or so I still believed at that time), I armchair with a beer, blearily watching Guy teetotaler and party pooper, had stayed up heard myself suddenly blurt out, “I know I Lombardo’s Royal Canadian Orchestra just long enough to see the old year out and was so fucking negligent, that I wasn’t always welcome in another thankless year with their the new one in. Then Holden, who had his there for you when you were growing up. dirge-like theme song “Auld Lang Syne.” own apartment but was staying over in his Let’s face it, I was a terrible father and I’m I was happy to be alive and reunited with old room for this holiday, sat up with me really sorry about that.” Jeannie after a two-year long lost weekend awhile longer. Holden had apparently inherited some of endless drink and drugs, when I woke up We drank Jim Beam and, on what may of his mother’s Southern reserve, along in the morning among strangers, feeling that have been not only the last black and white with her Southern gothic interest in the I had lost everything that really mattered TV set in the Western Hemisphere (so rarely supernatural. How often had they both fallen to me. With my wife sleeping serenely in did Jeannie and I care to turn it on), but silent and grinned like conspirators when I the next room and my son at my side, I was also the last one with a twisted wire hanger walked into a room where they had been happy to be home again and have love all for an aerial, we watched a live broadcast having one of their speculative conversations around me. from a flea-bitten downtown theater about life after death or some other subject * * * called The Academy, of Keith Richards that struck me as irrational and morbid. moonlighting from the Rolling Stones to While they both clammed up and broke play a journeyman’s New Year gig for the out in mischievous grins, how often had I Previous excerpts from sheer hell of it with his funky pickup band chided, “We’ll have plenty of time for all that HOODLUM HEART can be read The X-Pensive Winos. mystical shit after we die, won’t we? In the on galleryandstudio.com Wielding his guitar like a Prohibition meantime, life is for living, isn’t it?”

APRIL/MAY 2013 GALLERYSTUDIO 17 Josyane Martinez Practices Her Own Form of Imaginative Aesthetic Alchemy he centerpiece of the years old I insisted that my grandfather TFrench painter Josyane accompany me to his abandoned house. I Martinez’s remarkable oil found the atmosphere strange and disturbing, on canvas, “Hommage a memory that has stayed with me to this day à Dali,” is the surrealist . . .” master’s wife and favorite In her painting, the white bearded model Gala. Dali both apothecary and reputed seer prophet idolized Gala and idealized sits enthroned like a king or a pope as a her. Here, while her face mysteriously smoke-filled beam of light is mature, her compact, streams in through an open window, unblemished nude body illuminating the globe on a revolving stand is that of an adolescent and the open book on the desk before him. It Venus. She stands like a is an image to which a lesser artist might have living monument with a added all manner of other anecdotal images painter’s palette levitating and surreal props; yet Martinez exercises an over a pool of water admirable restraint, creating a composition serving as her pedestal, as that preserves the mystery of the man whose much smaller spectators predictions have since been confirmed, at below gawk up in wonder least to the satisfaction of his advocates, by from what appears to be many worldwide events. a surreal public square. “My work is influenced by my knowledge Meanwhile, a partial image of the East and of Ancient Egypt,” Martinez of Dali himself appears in says, and another oil on canvas, “Masque the upper left corner of de Toutankhamon,” bears this out. A gold the composition. In reality, bust of “King Tut,” (as we in the West Gala was not only a sex have nicknamed him) stands next to a symbol to her husband rolled papyrus scroll in the foreground. In but also a manager and a the background, across a narrow Nile out somewhat domineering of which three upright stone sarcophagus mother figure. But here figures arise like the structure at Stonehenge, she appears to be more stand the Pyramids. like a daughter and he the Josyane Martinez brings such visionary proud father (perhaps a personal imagery alive and makes it Homage à Dali version of Lolita’s doting responses as well. thoroughly believable by virtue of a flawless stepfather Humbert Humbert!) drying her As a 12 year old prodigy she prompted a realist technique, accomplished with both back –– albeit in a metaphysical, fragmented teacher to weep and apologize to the class for brush and palette knife. In the true spirit of manner –– with one of those silky, sweat- accusing her of using “transfer paper” when Surrealism, she endows improbable dreams drenched scarves that Elvis used to toss to his she proved that she had made a masterly with palpable form. –– Maurice Taplinger female admirers from the stage. drawing freehand. Don’t blame me: such flights of farfetched, Of another major oil on canvas “Les Josyane Martinez, Agora Gallery, unabashed fancy are what the paintings of Visions de Nostradamus” Martinez says, “As 530 West 25th St., April 19 - May 9, 2013. Josyane Martinez’s paintings can provoke in a child I lived in Salon de Provence, where Reception: Thursday, April 25, 6 -8 pm. the receptive viewer, along with other strange the famous prophet once lived, and at seven

Wonderful Town Dreams & Reflections Black and White photography exhibit Curators: Daniel Boyer & Silvia Boyer Curated by Jean Prytyskacz May 29 - June 16, 2013 Reception: June 1, 2:30 - 5:30 pm April 17- May 5, 2013 Artists: Opening reception: April 20, 2:30 pm- 5:30 pm Anne Rudder • Charles Coates • Lynn Lieberman Closing reception: May 5, 2:30 pm- 5:30 pm Dammika D. Ranasinghe • Daniel C. Boyer Photographers: Sílvia Soares Boyer • Arlene Finger • Livia Monaco Arthur Cajigas • Myrna Harrison-Changar • Celia Cruzado Amy Rosenfeld Robyn Gecht • Paul Margolis • J.D. Morrison • Jean Prytyskacz et al Carolyn Reus • Sondra Weiner • Deena Weintraub • Janice Wetzel %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 18 GALLERYSTUDIO APRIL/MAY 2013 Wally Gilbert Brings Aesthetic Purity to the Digital Era rom the greasy textural sensuousness and he states, “My latest work plays with the Fburnished hues of the color images of effects of monochromatic light . . . . While Norblin, an abandoned machine factory in most of these are photographic images, Warsaw Poland, with which he first captured converted to a grayscale continuum, some our attention in 2006; to the ballerinas, of the images were further modified in bullfighters, and other compelling figurative the computer to alter and to rearrange the imagery featured in his 2008 exhibition; to dark and light portions in extreme ways. the stringently geometric compositions of his This procedure produces effects akin to 2011 New York solo show; it would appear the process of solarization that was used that Wally Gilbert has been methodically with wet photography and creates novel, paring down his aesthetic toolkit in recent enhanced views of the world. The printing of years. these images directly onto aluminum metal Floor––Italy, Black and White #1 A former Harvard professor and molecular emphasizes the contrast between light and biologist who was awarded a Nobel Prize dark and brings out the force of the whites blight. Ah, but “Chimneys # 2 –– Paris” is for Chemistry in 1980, Gilbert shrugged off and the blacks.” altogether more romantically atmospheric. a question from a reporter for Chemical & Mostly of a more modest “easel” scale than With its clusters of shapely tin-capped spires Engineering News, regarding the disparity some of his previous works, the images in the rising skyward from a weathered rooftop, it is between art and science, saying, “Over the new solo show range from the totally abstract equally reminiscent for its picturesqueness, of years that I was active in science, I saw a compositions, such as “Lights Symmetric,” Maurice Utrillo’s cobbled alleyways, and for great commonality in the creative impulse and “Lights Symmetry #3” –– in which its monochromatic tonal subtlety, of the Yves –– between the artist’s impulse and the stringently geometric forms suggest Art Deco Tanguy’s surreal bone-yards. scientist’s –– that overrides this issue of who’s chevrons –– to semiabstract subjects such as Among the more numerous images in “Chimneys,” “Balconies,” Gilbert’s new exhibition are Water Towers and “Water Towers,” in – New York, Black and White,” in which which the sources of the the artist views these ubiquitous rooftop imagery remain discernible structures from a variety of perspectives but the overall thrust of the and angles, set against the facades of taller composition is nonobjective. buildings, solarizing them in some prints to One of the more create a ghostly effect, or printing them in dramatic examples is the high contrast near-silhouette in others to transition between “Facade create a dramatic counterpoint to turbulently – New York #1” and altered skies and cumulonimbi, as seen in “Facade – New York # 2.” “Water Tower – New York, Black and White, In the former, the artist #5A.” has modified the image in Although these tanks, sometimes referred the computer to rearrange to as water towers, could appear to be the light and dark portions antique remnants of another time, many are and create a stark abstract actually still in use in New York City. Indeed, composition of gray in the spring of 2013, some 300 of them will rectangles set in shallow be transformed into public art installations by Water Tower –– New York, Chimneys #2 –– Paris space diagonally against a The Water Tank Project, which has enlisted Black and White, #5A dense black ground on the two-dimensional various well known artists from around the using numbers and who isn’t.” picture-plane. In the latter, however, the globe, along with musical stars such as Jay-Z Indeed, Gilbert’s new exhibition appears to detailed image of high-rise balconies and and Thom Yorke to submit designs. further emphasize the commonality between windows and the many bricks of the facade Wally Gilbert, however, presents these the two fields by virtue of a formal austerity, emerge in natural vanishing perspective. iconic objects in their naked state in a series an almost mathematical purity, that harks back By contrast “Floor – Italy, Black and White of digital prints that makes native New to the origins of abstract photography, as it # 1,” suggests a cubistic sea with angularly Yorkers like myself, who have been only developed alongside modernist painting in rising stylized waves. Conversely, “Floor – vaguely aware of them all our lives, suddenly the early part of the 20th century. Gone now Italy, Black and white # 2,” in which Gilbert see them anew. are the painterly flourishes and the massive has reconfigured the light and dark areas of And one can’t help considering what a cool scale of the “Norblin Project,” in which some the same image to confound the viewers' tromp-l’oeil effect it would create to see one of Gilbert’s prints of 100 year-old machine perceptual distinction between background of Gilbert’s Water Tower prints reproduced parts ranged up to 4 by 8 feet and had a sheer and foreground, evokes nothing so much as on an actual water tank. Certainly in a year physical impact comparable to the big, bold a mazelike space akin to the Dutch graphic when one of our least impressive former U.S. abstract expressionist canvases of Willem master M.C. Escher’s visual puzzles, widely presidents has made big news by emerging as de Kooning or Franz Kline. Gone, too, is prized by mathematicians and scientists a surprisingly competent painter of bathtub the anecdotal drama of Gilbert’s petite little worldwide. self-portraits, a distinguished Nobel Laureate dancer in her tutu –– as timeless as a Degas Somewhat more lyrical, Gilbert’s turned innovative photo artist seems a worthy pastel, but for the telltale styrofoam cup in her “Chimneys” images suggest a visual subject of more widespread public exposure. hand, as she takes a coffee break in a modern counterpoint to the whimsical mood –– Ed McCormack day rehearsal studio –– as well as the frozen swings in e.e. cummings’ early innovative moment of life and death tension between poetry collection “Tulips and Chimneys.” man and beast in the bull ring. Silhouetted against a moody sky like thick Wally Gilbert, Color is also conspicuously absent in vertical strokes of charcoal, “Chimneys # 1 Viridian Artists, 548 West 28th Street, Gilbert’s present exhibition, of which –– Boston” calls to mind soot and industrial through April 6, 2013

APRIL/MAY 2013 GALLERYSTUDIO 19 Yasuyuki Ito Creates a World Through Inner Vision ne would never guess from his work elongated oval orbs afloat against a sky-blue itself. Othat the Japanese artist Yasuyuki Ito expanse. While most are solidly painted a Consider has had seriously deteriorating eyesight with single color, three larger ones contain stylized for proof the a loss of central vision since 2003. For his landscape images or close-ups of green leaf- quiet power mental visions remain vivid and he manages like forms. Yet another is called “Mandala.” of “Color 4,” to miraculously realize them prolifically in oils and indeed it suggests a subjective imaginative which appears on canvas distinguished by hard-edge forms re-imagining of one of those circular symbols to depict “Wing to the Future” with bold outlines and vibrant primary colors invested with spiritual meaning in both a perfectly that recall the 1960s Pop formalism of the Hinduism and Buddhism. Here, the artist symmetrical deep green plant with gracefully American artist Nicholas Krushenick. has delineated a symbolic sunwheel at the bent fronds set against one of those In today’s art world, however, it might be center of the design, with colorful large beams backgrounds comprised of clustered pebble- more accurate to align Ito with the Superflat curving like question marks around the edges like forms that Ito sometimes favors. It is a School of artists currently popular in his own of the largest of the layered circle. Perhaps deceptively simple image that grows more country, if not for the fact that he seems to they indicate eternal mysteries known only for complex and throws off more multiple have arrived at his highly personal style with followers of certain faiths or philosophies or meanings the longer one studies it. A zen no influences other than his own unique simply the puzzlement that outsiders feel in conundrum made visible with a mere few sensibility. Some of his compositions appear confronting such esoteric symbols. In either forms and a handful of colors by an artist who to allude to landscape, with repeated patterns case, meaning is secondary compared to the makes no complicated claims for his work, of severely simplified forms suggesting piled sheer visual appeal of the painting, which which speaks eloquently for itself. rocks and running water, as seen in the rewards the viewer with an almost psychedelic Perhaps the secret of Yasuyuki’s work, then, painting he calls “Color 5.” Others, however, hypnotic effect. is that it hides no secrets. Rather, it releases express direct emotions. “Happiness,” for Even more direct is Ito’s composition “ La them into plain sight like the gracefully example, evokes a veritable explosion of Rainbow,” with its swirling bands of yellow, outlined bird in “Wing to the Future”, colorful unfurling forms radiating out like red, blue and green hues set against a black soaring against intricate patterns of wavy lines sunbeams from a small central circle. Set ground –– as if to heighten the drama of a and tiny colorful jellybean circles on wings against an intricately speckled field of what natural phenomenon by transposing it from filled with blue sky and delicate white clouds. could be multicolored blue, white, and pastel- daylight to a nocturnal setting. –– Marie R. Pagano pink pebbles, these sinuous shapes wiggle and Then again, every one of Ito’s paintings is wave joyously. an act of magic, accomplished against the Yasuyuki Ito, Agora Gallery, 530 W. 25th St., Another large canvas, poetically entitled most difficult odds and demonstrating the Through April 16, 2013. “Memory Be a Balloon,” places buoyant transformative nature of the creative process Reception: Thursday, April 4, 6 -8 pm. The Vital Energy of Black Art in 2013 hile several of the preeminent Black abstract field, pays tribute to an educator, tones activating the surface in her “Winter Wartists of today and yesterday are civil rights activist and advisor to President Landscape.” featured in The Whitney’s “Blues for Franklin D. Roosevelt best known for starting Robert N. Scott, on the other hand Smoke,” the exhibition featured on the cover a school for African-American students in creates oils in which various-sized spheres of this issue of G&S, a more intimate survey Daytona Beach, Florida, that eventually inhabit dramatically lit cosmic-looking called “Black Renaissance 2013” showcases became Bethune-Cookman University. realms like floating planets, setting up some real up and comers. Nate Ladson’s “The Corner Store” is intriguing perceptual ambiguities between Among them, Sandra Brannon continues an oil reproduction in monochromatic the two dimensions of the picture plane the collage tradition of Romare Bearden grissaile of four dapperly dressed mature men and the illusion of perspective –– and, from her own unique perspective in cut paper lounging casually in front of a storefront as a consequence, between realism and compositions, such as “And Then I Rise,” has the nostalgic appeal of an old black abstraction as well. Working with crayon on featuring images of a Black woman within a and white album snapshot. Sonia Barnett’s canvas paper but departing from her more stylized tree fashioned from brightly colored vibrant acrylic on canvas, “Hard at Work,” familiar floral subjects, Dammika Ranasinghe African patterns and photographed roots. treads a fine line between abstraction and makes a bold figurative statement with a Gail Comes also makes a strong showing with representation, its spontaneous explosions monochromatic male profile inscribed in a one of her monumental heads painted in oils of red and yellow splashed onto a solid blue thick white line against a gray ground with a on a large canvas, with elegant and sinuous background simultaneously suggesting a “sophisticated primitive” force akin to the Art outlines sculpturally modeled shadows, and vibrant floral bouquet and a nonobjective Brut of Jean Dubuffet. vibrant color contrasts. “action painting” in the manner of the Then there is Ida Marx, a realist with a Daniel C. Boyer displays a linear style French artist Georges Mathieu. Silvia spacial flair for atmospheric night scenes, reminiscent of surrealistic automatic drawing Boyer, on the other hand, combines precise as well as for subtle sociological signifying, in his large semiabstract work in white ink geometric abstraction with equally precise judging from the pointed title of her oil on on a black ground, “Head of a Negress.” fragments of facial features with box-like canvas “Pawnshop and Projects,” with its Debra Holland evokes a lively multi figure forms that the title “The Mythic World of grim uptown street illuminated by lampposts, composition of exotically robed and shawled Pandora” serves to clarify. the neon signs outside rundown storefronts, African shoppers and merchants in her Also a painter of abstract compositions, and the many glowing Moloch eyes of oil, “The Market Place II.” And “Mary Dorethea T. Scott reveals a mark-making identical tall black building facades. McCloud Bethune,” Gertrude Fleming’s virtuosity ranging from the precise white –– Peter Wylie mixed media head-and-shoulders portrait of a shapes and symbols floating freely amid a dignified elderly woman with a halo of snowy welter of luminously variegated yellow and Black Renaissance 2013, Curated by Sonia white hair and a breeze-blown palm tree in orange hues in her “Forest Fire,” to the Barnett, recently seen at Broadway Mall the background, set, cameo-like against an impressionistic strokes of many colors and Community Center, 96th St. (center island) 20 GALLERYSTUDIO APRIL/MAY 2013 Virginia Evans Smit’s “Flowers, Fish and Fragments” irginia Evans Smit, an lighter ones, suggesting the VAfrican-American artist lingering phantom of a morning who can be said to have paid moon. her dues to urban life by Another aspect of Asian teaching in the New York City culture, its calligraphic tradition, public school system for thirty is highlighted by the prominent years, has always been drawn to pictographic characters layered nature. Indeed, she now spends translucently over luminous her winters in Barbados, where green red and yellow geometric she first encountered the flora and floral forms in Smit’s large and fauna that animate her digital print,“Japanese Scripts brilliant new solo exhibition, with Additions.” Then there “F is for Flowers, Fish and is another striking digital print Fragments.” entitled “Mom’s Script,” in The term “fragments” which the floral forms, awash refers to the layering by virtue in an overall haze of vibrant of a diverse combination translucent yellow that turns of printmaking and collage their pink and red petals to techniques that lends her variegated shades of orange mixed media compositions their when they bleed beyond the unique richness. geometric white forms that “Layering,” she says in only partially contain them, an artist’s statement issued are interspersed with written in connection with the new characters so expressive that exhibition, “is what printmaking they can almost be deciphered has always been about for me.” by the unschooled Western Although Smit cites the eye as “fishbone,” “human “combines” of Robert figure doing jumping-jacks,” or Rauschenberg and the “seated cat seen from behind” “Flowers” series that Jim Dine (or so the audacious eye and showed at Pace Gallery in the indiscreet imagination of at least 1980s as important influences, one Western viewer presumes!) she has evolved her own In any case, here, as in the complex process, utilizing stone previous mixed media print, lithography, intaglio, monotype, Smit mingles elements of Asian silkscreen, woodcut, and most or Western iconography in a recently digital printing. It seamless personal synthesis. began in the sixties, when she By contrast, another large started making large color “Mom’s Script” digital print, “Bird of woodcuts because she wanted to philosophical influences, rather than from Paradise,” tilts the balance more toward bring the scale of her paintings to her prints. the superficial aspects of “chinoiserie” –– an total abstraction, with feathery shapes and a “Now almost fifty years later,” she abject imitation of elaborate “orientalia,” that mysterious, vaguely bone-like shaded form notes,“large prints are the norm in the art one sees in tacky lacquered furniture, gaudy occupying a slightly off-center position in world.” satin gift shop bathrobes, and other items of the composition. Set against a fluorescently One of the most impressive large works kitsch design. fiery orange shape with a smaller hot pink in Smit’s present exhibition is “With Two In “With Two Moons,” for example, area behind it, this print mingles elements Moons,” a monotype with gold paint, which suggests the Japanese tradition of lunar of Surrealism and Pop in a compellingly which shows a remote kinship with Robert celebration in autumn, sinuous traceries of inexplicable manner that finally defies facile Kushner, one of the leading members of the ghostly white tree limbs float like wisps of analysis. Pattern and Decoration movement. Like cloud across the larger moon on the right Indeed it could suggest new, previously Kushner, Smit is not afraid of the pejorative side of the composition, linking it visually uncharted, and possibly fertile, territory for associations that those terms evoke for some to the big sensual flower floating in space this adventurous and innovative artist, whose in an art world where a cult of ugliness all too on the left. Graceful outlines of leaves and work is included in numerous corporate, often prevails and an embrace of unabashed other floral forms, revealing Smit’s exquisite private, and museum collections, to explore beauty might appear to be the last taboo. draftspersonship, are anchored to the in future exhibitions. Then again, Virginia But there the resemblance ends; because, two-dimensional picture plane by a strong Evans Smit will probably surprise us as she for all her work’s pleasing aesthetic qualities underlying abstract design, featuring a thick invariably does anyway, always making one –– which make one think of Matisse’s famous black diagonal line at the center of the eager to discover what the next stage of her statement to the effect that he wanted his composition, as definite as one of Barnett continually evolving creative journey will be. paintings to be “like an easy chair” in which Newman’s geometric “bar” paintings. –– Ed McCormack the viewer can relax and find solace from On either side, areas of dark nocturnal the day’s cares –– Smit is a deeper and more hues alternate with pinkish beige and creamy thoughtful artist than Kushner. For unlike white ones, dividing the composition into his, her inspiration comes directly from the four regularly spaced vertical rectangles, Virginia Evans Smit, Viridian Artists, great art of Japan, where she has traveled with a smaller orb positioned between the 548 West 28th St. / 547 West 27th St., widely and absorbed many cultural and crisscrossing tree limbs traversing one of the April 9-27, 2013. Reception April 13, 4-6pm APRIL/MAY 2013 GALLERYSTUDIO 21 Spotlighting Postmodern Photographic Tendencies wo exhibitions by members of The and white print by Paul Adams called “The a dragnet. In another titled “Easter” Polillo TNew York Center for Photographic Art, Clam Digger’s Wife and Her Clandestine captures a little girl holding a bucket of eggs conceived and developed by Patricia Gilman Trampoline,” in which the tiny figure of in her hand and shyly covers her face with her and Maddi Ring to “offer photographers from another spritely nude bounces high in the arm, as if wanting to hide from the camera. around the world opportunities to exhibit moody sky above a circle of driftwood poles This image which won first prize, evokes a their work in the vibrant and important New protruding from the sand of a deserted beach. universal moment of childhood. Philip Dente York scene,” which recently came to our But we are brought right back down to captured a path through a thicket of branches attention warrant more than a few words here. earth by “Flesh Trade,” a color picture by and foliage to a secluded summer hideaway in Several prize winners in the organization’s Stafford Smith of a seated man holding a can “The Pond.” large group show “People,” juried by Thomas of beer in one hand. His head is bald but for In his diptych “Kiss of Spring,” Derek Werner, showed approaches to portraiture a black fringe around the ears; he wears black- Johnson superimposed two colorful butterflies that broke new ground in escaping the rimmed glasses and his hairy chest is partially over dual black and white images of a pretty cosmeticized images of beauty one encounters covered by a yellow polkadot woman’s halter, woman’s face, while in “Leaves” Suzanne in the mass media and concentrating below which his big bare belly balloons over Engelberg encapsulated the same season with instead on what Jack Kerouac once called a pair of pale green baloney-skin tights. His a simple vision of an overhanging sapling- “unspeakable visions of the individual.” mouth is agape, as though protesting to the limb sprouting delicate bits of green. Kat Especially brave in this regard is Constance photographer as a woman, visible only from DeStefano transformed a stone footbridge Thalken’s “Self-Portrait # 1,” revealing the the breasts down and holding a drink comes familiar to most New Yorkers into a snow photographer, her white hair cropped close through the door of what appears to be a hotel scene reminiscent of the Japanese Ukiyo-E to her scalp, her intelligent eyes dramatically room, her own stomach bare above a silky master Hokusai in her black and white print blackened by mascara, as she gazes out frankly gold bikini bottom. “Winter Wonderland – Central Park. Another and unsmiling, as though defying the viewer Also among the prize winners were “Band interpretation of the season, albeit in the more not to find at least some semblance in its own on the Run,” by Sandra Chen Weinstein, in spare, calligraphic manner of the Chinese Zen peculiar beauty in her pale, no longer young, which three grim faced, mustached members Buddhist literati masters, was seen in David naked (as opposed to nude) body. of an Arabic musical contingent called “Shiv Morris Cunningham’s image titled “Winter Bruce Kravetz also makes a strong statement Band,” sporting colorful Sgt. Pepper uniforms, Haiku # 1” of a single snow-bent twig in a with “Homeless # 1,” a color print of a wiry strike formal poses in a rubbled lot beside their field of white. In another poetic approach to bearded middle-aged man with a feathery Rod humble but gaudily decorated bandwagon; winter Carolyn Hampton posed an adolescent Stewart hair-style, his shirtless chest covered Roberto Huner’s for “Waiting For/West girl as a Snow Queen in a white cape- with tattoos, the almost expected numeral 13 Africa,” a stark portrait of two black workers shouldered gown in a surreal snowy setting decorating one of the surprisingly developed regarding the photographer suspiciously, to create her black and white print, “Snow Popeye forearms crossed over his abdomen. as they take a break amid rusty oil cans and Dream.” Then there is Hatim Kaghat’s “Rituals of other debris in a prison-like workplace; and In the early days of art photography, even a Dragqueen,” a black and white close-up, “Freedom,” a contrastingly joyous image of after color film became available, many photo appropriating the deliberately washed out black and white little girls dancing together by artists chose to continue working in black and look of certain slick fashion and glamour Phillip Dente. white, dismissing color prints as “commercial,” pictures. It shows a man with a bald head But the Grand Prize among these other suitable mainly for ads and editorial illustrations and sharply pencilled-on eyebrows, one of his prize winners went to Kate Pollard’s “Sold,” in magazine. While such a prejudicial backlash lowered lids sporting long spider-leg lashes, in which a not unattractive but somewhat could not prevail in our more pluralistic reminiscent of Malcolm McDowell’s make- haggard blond woman wearing a faded red postmodern era, there are indications, in this up in “A Clockwork Orange.” By contrast hoodie frowns through the front window exhibition at least, that some photographers Jillian Van Volkenburgh’s “Composition 130: into the interior of what one can only surmise are resisting the widespread domination of Sheer,” a waist-down black and white image is a used car on an outdoor lot. Implying digital technology. This “purist” approach, is of a youthful female body in motion with an unseen narrative, Pollard’s picture has exemplified in some of the black and white glimpses of undergarments showing through a the immediacy of a still from a realistic prizewinners here: “Black Bird Fly,” Elena semitransparent gown has the haunting quality independent film. Indeed, only a still could Kyakir’s atmospheric image of feathery beings of a fragment from antiquity. freeze the spooky subliminal image of another flurrying around a fall tree; and “Untitled from Double and group portraits also make a face, gray as a stone memorial statue or a the Shadowlight Series,” a tonally rich image strong showing, ranging from “October 12, ghost, confronting the woman’s reflected by Isobel Foley of many fallen apples scattered 2012, Starkville, Ms” by Thomas Sabbatini, profile in the rear view mirror in the manner of around the thick trunk of a tree; and a fantastic in which two young black men pose proudly this eerie photographic tour de force. vision by Carolyn Hampton of a ravenhaired against a densely wooded background on Although a few images of people also goddess in an elaborate opera mask sprouting a the trunk of a maroon and beige convertible appeared in another exhibition by the New crown-like configuration of stylized limbs and parked in a suburban driveway with one door York Center for Photographic Art, its theme leaves, intriguingly titled “The Trees Whispher open, as if in invitation to a ride; to Joan was “Seasons.” Among the prize winners, My Name.” Lobis Brown’s “In the Face of Affliction #1,” Ryan Helfant personified summer in particular Not to mention Grand Prize winner in which a woman in African clothing poses with a color print of a woman in a bathing “Snowy Egret,” by Dianne Yudelson, yet holding a baby with an older child nuzzled suit standing in the foreground, her bare another photographic composition with a against her, confronting the viewer with her back looking vulnerable, the fancy braid in decidedly Asian quality –– here suggesting steady gaze; to “The Movement of the Lake,” her blond hair hopeful, as she faces a blurred a classic ink painting on silk, with its a nocturnal landscape as atmospherically group of other bathers in the distance that she juxtaposition of a large white waterbird and a mysterious as a Symbolist oil, in which two obviously hopes to befriend in a color print fat full moon. –– Byron Coleman slender nude girls float on their backs on the titled “The Longing of an Outsider.” surface of the lake like water nymphs. In a lyrical sepia-toned print “Siening,” Two photo exhibitions recently presented Equally poetic for its fanciful title as well Jennifer Polillo captured a group of children by New York Center for Photographic Art, as its transcendent imagery is another black fishing along the shoreline of a beach with www.nyc4pa.com

22 GALLERYSTUDIO APRIL/MAY 2013 Five Artistic Musketeers “On Cloud Nine” “ an you believe that we will be having our of sheet music floating around it like wisps By contrast, Cninth exhibit together?” Linda Dujack of cloud. The latter monoprint/collage is Barbara Cuthel’s the curator of “Expressions 2013: On Cloud comprised of larger fragments of sheet music, three compositions Nine” and eight previous exhibitions in a rhythmic black form resembling a shadowy in soft pastels which she participated with Barbara Cuthel, mountain, and five black vertical strokes that and one work in Linda Ganus, Fritz Erismann, and Mark could suggest either bars of music or the embroidery with Lerer, recently remarked. bars of a jail in which some errant lover is silk thread on a And indeed it is unusual for artists with confined. For as with many of Linda Dujack’s material she calls such diverse styles to join forces for going on works, the sly wit of the title deepens the “eco felt,” are all a decade. But while the Expressions group poetry of the image. about moments of could hardly be called a movement, as the Linda Ganus Albulescu on the other hand pure epiphany and banner they exhibit under implies they share works large in a series of four oils on canvas enrapturement. Mark Lerer an ethos of individual expression that unites “Flood,” created in response to Hurricane Throwing down his brushes, a painter whose them in sentiment, if not in sensibility. Sandy, the storm that caused so much name escapes memory once said, “You can’t Thus for all their stylistic differences, their devastation here on the East Coast this fall. paint a sunset!” But Cuthel gives the lie to exhibitions have a “one for all, all for one” They hang in a friezelike horizontal grouping that statement of frustration by conjuring up esprit de corps that lends them a certain on the gallery wall, the four canvases forming in luminous blue, gold, and yellow hues a unique cohesiveness. one large wave, white and foamy as it rolls sky she saw above Shore Road in Bay Ridge, This is as prevalent in the present show as ashore. What might otherwise seem a Brooklyn on the first day of autumn in 2012. in their previous ones, with Linda Dujack lyrical image takes on an ominous aspect, in Cuthel’s soft pastel “Sunset” proves, as John herself, a painter printmaker who thinks of view of our communal memory of Sandy’s Schueler does in his paintings inspired by the her home and workspace as a “house that devastating force. Here Ganus suggests that sky above the Sound of Sleat in the Scottish

Linda Dujack Linda Ganus Albulescu Barbara Cuthel Fritz Erismann shelters daydreams” providing the ingredient demonic energy without having to resort to Highlands, that to succeed in the capturing of intimate fantasy in her often miniature narrative drama. She captures it in the curl of such an elusive natural phenomenon one mixed media collages and prints. Here the the white edged oncoming wave as it gathers must start with a specific skyscape and turn it phrase “great things in small packages” force from the wind to flood ashore and into a blazing abstraction. applies in a way that transcends the stigma engulf everything in its wake. The few images Less elusive and more exactingly depicted of cliché. Take Dujack’s “The Monument,” of white wall between the canvases interrupt were “Ruby Kinglet,” a work in pastel a drypoint/chine collé that achieves the the movement of the wave just enough to and chalk inspired by a bird she glimpsed monumentality of its title while measuring a suggest the tense split second or two before perching on a bough bright with amid mere 5 X 7 inches over all. For while small it breaks upon the short and its true menace autumn leaves in Greenwood Cemetery, and in actual size, the abstract forms in this makes itself known. the aforementioned embroidery inspired by composition in pale blue and soft creme hues Ganus also exhibits a book of smaller the bees that swarm around the zinnias in the combined with black and white, are so bold images on a pedestal near the paintings, titled gardens around her apartment complex, each and expressively expansive as to suggest a “Flood” as well, in which more symbolic golden plant and yellow insect given almost much larger scale. In fact, it’s formal impact elements come into play. In one of these 3-D painterly depth by the thread she piles –– at least up close where Dujack actually smaller paintings the upper portion of half on as thick as oil impasto. prefers to have her worked viewed –– is of a woman’s face, from the brow to the Mark Lerer on the other hand is clearly comparable to some of the largest canvases of upper bridge of the nose, dominates the a “drawer.” rather than a painter, obviously Franz Kline or Al Held. Both “Moon Song” entire left side of the composition, awash in inspired less by the Old Masters than by the and “Kiss Me Again Between The Bars” both the aquamarine depths. Beyond it another great comic book cartoonists like Jack Kirby, of which are even smaller at less than five eye can be seen only faintly, belonging to an to whom he pays homage in his ink drawing inches square are among her most exquisite octopus, just beyond what appears through “Galactus.” But that Lerer deliberately recent works. Although there are faint traces the watery miasma to be one of the woman’s Continued on page 26 of yellow and pale blue pigment, the pièce arms. One is reminded of some lines by de résistance of the former mixed media the British poet Stevie Smith: “I was much Expressions 2013, New Century Artists composition is a central black orb suggesting further out than you thought / And not 530 West 25th St., Suite 406, a full moon in full eclipse with tiny fragments waving but drowning.’” through April 13, 2013. APRIL/MAY 2013 GALLERYSTUDIO 23 Vincent Arcilesi’s Rome Redux: Goddesses and Angels Made Flesh hile previewing his new its head craned in the same position Wexhibition “Arcilesi in Rome that Arcilesi adopted from Rivera by –– Part II,” in his studio in downtown way of Veronese. Manhattan, it occurred to me The largest painting in the show that the central drama of Vincent at 54 by 78 inches, as well as its Arcilesi’s artistic mission is the heroic centerpiece, is “The Dreamer and Her reconfiguration of a unified world Dream.” In a composition bathed vision first fragmented by the guerilla in golden fresco-like hues that make bomb of Cubism. daylight appear fully as haunting as Toward this end, Arcilesi mingles night, the dreamer of the title wears a modern life with myth, transforming sheer, clinging white nightgown with beautiful young women of our own folds as articulated as the drapery in a century (often models at the Fashion stone statue, her breeze-blown auburn Institute of Technology, where he is tresses flowing behind her, as she flees a Professor of Fine Arts) into angels somnambulantly along a red dirt road and goddesses strolling nude or nearly with one hand raised to her forehead so among the clothed tourists in in a dramatic gesture of distress. public plazas or pastoral landscapes Further back on the road, a young in a manner that calls to mind my man and a young woman, both nude, wife Jeannie McCormack’s one word strike classical poses under a row of concrete poem “Returnity.” So rarely Roman pines, their trunks as straight do Arcilesi’s comely figures appear as slender columns, with four of the fully clothed that when they do one stray cats that wander freely around is reminded of some now lost lines by Rome lolling at various intervals Richard Brautigan to the effect that underfoot. watching a woman get dressed can be In the distance, nestled amid the the tantalizing opposite of a striptease, greenery of Palatine Hill, the grand as parts of her disappear under the shell of the Circus Maximus, once the garments she puts on. “A Gathering of the Gods at Poussin’s Tomb” site of gladiatorial contests and chariot In “Circo Massimo,” for one wouldn’t meet in a Catholic Church,” races, can be seen, with the tiny figures splendid example, the artist’s pretty gallerist Arcilesi commented with an ironic little of tourists dotting its green lawn and colorful daughter, Francesca Arcilesi, is seen in a chuckle, “I took the liberty of moving his automobiles streaming like toys along the vibrant blue sleeveless shift sitting barefoot gravesite out of doors, to one of the wooded narrow adjoining road. astride a white horse with the famous Roman glens in the countryside that he loved to Whether the two idealized nudes represent ruin in the background. Characteristically, paint.” figures of torment or desire for the dreamer, as we studied this easel-scale oil on canvas Poussin’s actual tomb is adorned with this painting, which the artist described together, her father pointed out that his a sculpted stone bas relief based on his during our studio visit as “a pure fantasy,” is positioning of the horse’s head, curving painting “ Et in Arcadia Ego,” which roughly one of his most haunting to date. inward toward the rider, was influenced by translates from the Latin as “Even in Arcadia, Included in this second Roman sojourn the mount in the Mexican muralist Diego Death is present.” It depicts idealized by one of our most masterly postmodernist Rivera’s portrait of the agrarian revolutionary shepherds from classical antiquity gathered painters are other major canvases, such as Emilio Zapata, adding that Rivera was an around an austere rustic tombstone in a “Piazza del Campidoglio at Dusk,” “Bernini admirer of the Venetian master and was similarly pastoral setting to the one in which in the Roman Forum” and “The Baths of obviously influenced by the equine figure Arcilesi relocates it. Caracalla.” Particularly striking in the latter in Veronese’s “Mars and Venus United by Never one to shun poetic license, Arcilesi painting is a crouching figure holding a laurel Love.” enhances the Arcadian atmosphere by leaf, modeled after a sculpture of an angel Such references, layered down through the replacing the monochromatic stone relief on that caught the artist’s fancy in the Vatican centuries, are very much a part of Arcilesi’s the tomb with a full-color copy of Poussin’s Museum. art; for precious few contemporary artists painting almost as brightly simplified as one Juxtaposed with another graceful female are so steeped as he in the great art of the of the late African-American painter Bob figure in a formfitting red gown, the two past and comfortably intimate with the Thompson’s neoclassical takeoffs. He also women in this timeless scene simultaneously Old Masters. After visiting Arcilesi in his jazzes up the surrounding landscape with suggest priestesses engaged in a pagan ritual studio Jeannie and I reminisced about the a lush rainbow melange of cross-seasonal or modern dancers giving an impromptu cold winter night we ran into him hurrying foliage, mixing verdant summery greens with avant garde performance with the gaping, in the opposite direction, as we left the autumnal ochres, as well as a particularly cave-like portals of the ancient baths serving Metropolitan Museum close to closing time majestic species of tree that briefly blooms as a backdrop. on one of the weekend evenings when it stays with white blossoms in the spring. A group of exquisite nude studies open late. Either because the Arcadian Italian in pastel on paper are also objects of “I’m going to see Poussin!” the painter landscape that the artist has concocted is so aesthetic delectation, revealing the suburb exclaimed slightly breathlessly, as if on an otherworldly dazzling, or simply because draftsmanship that serves as the armature for urgent visit to a dear old friend. And indeed gods and goddesses cannot be seen with all of Vincent Arcilesi’s compositions. one of the larger canvases in his second Rome mortal eyes, a couple of tourists sightseeing –– Ed McCormack series is a tribute entitled “A Gathering of the in the distance appear unaware of the two Gods at Poussin’s Tomb.” lithe female nudes perched on the base of Vincent Arcilesi, AHA Arcilesi / Homberg “Poussin’s tomb is actually in the Basilica the tomb, or the barechested young Apollo Fine Art, 111 Front Street, Suite 222, di San Lorenzo, but since Roman gods nearby, astride yet another white horse with Brooklyn, May 2 - 30, 2013

24 GALLERYSTUDIO APRIL/MAY 2013 Jenyshin’s Paintings Run the Gamut of Emotions “ love to express my feelings through “In the Beginning,” as perky Icolor,” says the young Korean-born as ToTo in “The Wizard of artist Jenny Shin, who paints under the Oz,” trotting along a fanciful sobriquet of Jenyshin. And indeed her landscape; to the stylized palette is a chromatic keyboard of subtle green table-setting, huge fork, hues, making every picture a veritable piano and tiny chairs in “Family solo of her varied moods, ranging from the Dinner”; to the grotesque hopeful sweetness of “Somewhere Over the little figure in “Okay World.” Rainbow” to the majestic melancholy of With her oversize head, “Rhapsody in Blue.” blue bangs, and sunken cheeks In order to paint so candidly one must giving a skeletal aspect like risk emotional vulnerability. Or, as the artist Munch’s famous screamer, herself puts it: “I’m very honest when I paint. this figure resembles one of People who know me see it in my work. those cute little big-eyed waifs, It reflects so much of me that sometimes I once so ubiquitous in kitsch don’t always like showing it to just anyone, as decor, after a run of bad luck. it is so revealing. Most of my work has never Her long hair hanging limply been seen, even by my closest friends.” “In the Beginning” over one scrawny shoulder Thus sharing her painting in the present sticking out of a shrunken chromatic subtlety reminiscent of the French exhibition is an act of intimacy, of trust for red boatneck sweatshirt, her pale belly bare painter Odilon Redon. Quite the opposite Jennyshin, as seen in the mixed media work as it tapers into a pair of red bikini panties. of Jenyshin, however, who found her true in oils and pastel on canvas she calls “In Your The title of the painting is intriguingly métier early, Redon avoided color for the first Room,” which sounds like a slightly more ambiguous: Does “Okay World” mean that fifty years of his life, working only in charcoal guarded play on the title of the The Beach the lush green bush dotted with sunny yellow and lithography, before discovering his true Boys song “In My Room.” Depicting a flowers on the right side of the composition mediums of pastels and oils. pretty young Asian woman who resembles makes the world an okay place to be, or is the Fortunately Jenyshin gravitated a photo one has seen of the artist herself. strange little girl saying “Okay world, take me immediately to color and employs it with If not a literal self-portrait, it appears to be or leave me as I am?” Redon-like radiance in “7PM,” a floral an emotional evocation of a state of mind. Only the artist knows for sure; but one study in acrylic and crayon on canvas, the Long black hair falling like a shiny shawl to gets the impression that Jenyshin prefers surrounding space, flecked with bits of her shoulders, withdrawn into solitude, her to let her paintings speak eloquently for blue-green and violet that make it as eyes lowered, she studies an open book rather themselves. –– Peter Wylie shimmeringly vital as the pale pink and listlessly, her thoughts seemingly somewhere green petals themselves. else. Jenyshin, Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th St., Since she follows her moods rather than Here, as in other paintings by Jenyshin, her through April 16, 2013. the dictates of a “signature style,” her mixed media technique of oil and pastel or oil Reception: Thursday, April 4, 6 -8 pm. imagery ranges from the little red dog in and crayon on canvas enables her to achieve a G&S Classifieds opportunities WEST SIDE ARTS COALITION (WSAC) established 1979, welcomes new members from all CATHARINE LORILLARD WOLFE ART CLUB, INC. 117th Annual Open Juried geographic areas. There are approximately 14 exhibits per year for Fine Arts, Photography, and Craft Arts. Exhibition at the National Arts Club, NY. October 1 - 25, 2013. Open to women artists. Media: Oil, Acrylic, Music, Poetry, Theater and Dance programs available. Contact info: Tel. 212-316-6024, Watercolor, Pastel, Graphics, and Sculpture. Over $10,000 in awards. Entry Fee: $35/Members and email- [email protected] or website- www.wsacny.org. Or send SASE to the West Side Arts Coalition, Associates, $40/Non-Members. Online entry deadline is July 8, 2013. Submit your entries at www. PO Box 527, Cathedral Station, New York, NY 10025. Visit our ground floor gallery at 96th Street & onlinejuriedshows.com . For prospectus, send SASE to Okki Whang, Broadway (on the center island) New York City. Open: Wed. 6-8pm, Sat. & Sun., 12-6pm. 431 Woodbury Road, Cold Spring Harbor, NY 11724 or download prospectus at www.clwac.org . CUSTOM PICTURE FRAMING for artists and galleries. Museum quality, selected frames & mats. Float & dry mounting, canvas stretching. Jadite Galleries, 662 10th Ave. (betw. 46/47 Sts.) Hours: 12 - 6 pm, Free delivery in Manhattan. 212-977-6190 [email protected] Michael R. Horenstein NOHO GALLERY is viewing portfolios in all media for our Chelsea location. Visit Attorney & Counsellor at Law nohogallery.com for application form, or send SASE to Noho Gallery, 530 ± Arts Law, Provenance Concerns West 25th Street, NY, NY 10011. ± General Business Law ± Contract Drafting & Review MONTSERRAT CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY is reviewing artist ± Corporate Law & Company Formation portofolios for its new Chelsea Gallery. National and International artists are invited to submit. Sase, ± Commercial Litigation slides, photos and brief artist bio. Send to: Montserrat Contemporary Art Gallery, 547 West 27 Street, NYC 437 East 80th Street, No. 27, New York NY 10075 10001 Ph: (212) 517-7340 Email: [email protected]

VIRIDIAN ARTISTS 24th International Juried Competition open to all US and international artists working in 2D and 3D media will be juried by Elisabeth Sussman noted curator at the Whitney For health care information please contact Museum of American Art in NYC, winner of 2013 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence & the New York Artists Equity Association, Inc. (NYAEA) at 212-941-0130. co-curator of the 2012 Whitney Biennial. Cash prizes, Power-Point presentation, Group exhibition July 2-20, 2013. Entry deadline: April 20, 2013. $40/3 works, $5 each additional. For more information and to enter: www.viridianartists.com/submissions . Write for information to NYAEA, PO Box 1258, New York, NY 10276 Viridian Artists, Inc., 548 West 28th St., #632, NY, NY 10001 or email: [email protected] or [email protected]

APRIL/MAY 2013 GALLERYSTUDIO 25 Dick Perez is a Major League Baseball Painter s Dick Perez points out in an artist’s prime.” But always, Perez says, he relies heavily Astatement and issued for his solo on technique, design, and heightened color exhibition at Agora Gallery art inspired by to make clear that the viewer “is looking at baseball has a long and honorable history. a painting, not a photograph, or an exact Indeed, this is the go-to show if you think rendition of a photograph.” sports painting began and ends with the Perez need not worry on that score, since slick Playboy illustrator LeRoy Neiman who his oils on panel have an iconic quality that gives each picture the same gaudy neon– comes across with special clarity in “The impressionist treatment. For a long list of Intimidator,” in which we look over the serious artists: Thomas Eakins, William Merrit shoulder of a southpaw batter as the ball Chase, Robert Henri, George Bellows, Jacob hovers before him in midair in the split second “The Intimidator” Lawrence, Joan Sloan, Roy Lichtenstein, before the swing, as the pitcher lurches Elaine de Kooning, Raoul Dufy, Robert forward from the force of the throw, the steely Another is ”A Cure for What Ails You,” Rauschenberg –– and, yes, even Andy Warhol! scowl on his lean, mean face suggesting, “Go a terrific character study of an old fashioned –– have painted baseball pictures. ahead, make my day!” ball player (probably from the 1920s, judging That said, nobody has ever painted them No photograph, no matter how artful, from his floppy white cap and oddly baggy more consistently or authentically than Dick could freeze and encapsulate this moment in uniform), sitting on a wooden crate and Perez, the former official artist of both the exactly this way, making it so lifelike without looking up with a sour expression on his Philadelphia Phillies and the Baseball Hall of a single extraneous detail to distract from its rough, sunbaked features as he leans over Fame. essentially abstract appeal. Indeed, the good to re-tie the laces of one of his pointy black For Perez, who came to the U.S. from news for all you aesthetes in the box seats is cleats. Behind him on the stadium wall, are big Puerto Rico at the age of six, “Discovering the that one need not be a baseball fan to enjoy hand-lettered advertisements for headache and game, playing it in the streets and back lots this show, just a fan of good painting. neuralgia remedies that he looks over-the-hill of Harlem with my multi-ethnic teammates One standout is Perez’s wonderfully and worn out enough to need. made baseball the portal to my American leathery portrait of the late great Yankee But he’ll probably get up in a minute or experience. It was my passion as a young boy pitcher Yogi Berra, squinting thoughtfully in two and be back in position on the diamond. and became my muse in my art.” his cap and pinstripes, as he leans his crossed Because as Yogi himself used to say,“It ain’t Although not a strict “Photorealist” by self- arms on the ends of rows of upright bats as over till it’s over.” –– Byron Coleman definition the artist says, “Due to the nature of though they were boards in a back fence. The my subject matter I work from photographs. picture is pointedly titled with one of Yogi’s Dick Perez, Agora Gallery, I enjoy painting baseball’s past and many famous philosophical statements: “You Can 530 West 25th St., Through April 16, 2013. of my subjects are either dead or past their Observe By Just Watching.” Reception: Thursday, April 4, 6 -8 pm.

AWS subconscious level. Me, I look at his drawing he searches for “interactive patterns and Continued from page 11 of a gloved hand making the piece sign. Then dynamic balances.” In this exhibition he Night,” by Mark Mohr, in which the huge I notice that the glove is actually a work glove too has stripped down to the simplest kinetic billboards, bright lights, and rainy and my mind flashes back to the early 70s, means in a series of graphite drawings for reflections of one of the most frequently when the hard-hats working down on Wall an ongoing project with the working title painted thoroughfares in the world is given Street all got together on their lunch hour to “Drawing the Line Mathematical in Search new life with a luminously dappled technique beat the living shit out of the hippie college of Alternative Ideas of Order.” These reminiscent of the nineteenth century kids demonstrating for peace. And Lerer’s drawings are accomplished with his eyes American Impressionist watercolorist Maurice hand making the peace sign takes on an closed, employing as their underpining or Prendergast. –– Byron Coleman ironic new meaning, suggesting a mocking their internal logic what Erismann refers taunt rather than a symbol of unity. And it to as “a sequence of visualized numeric EXPRESSIONS 2013 suddenly seems no less threatening than his digits.” One is reminded by this series of Continued from page 23 more blatant image of a beefy male hand the French poet painter Henri Michaux’s chooses to exhibit his drawings in a fine art aiming a gun. experiments with automatic drawing, some context, rather than in the mass media, lends But what is one to make of Lerer’s more of which involved psychoactive drugs such it a conceptual dimension very relevant to his lyrically decorative drawing “The Japanese as mescaline as a spur to subconscious artistic mission. For, unlike Lichtenstein –– Bridge.” I prefer to think of it as a tribute to expression. Erismann, however, just has to but more like Philip Guston, who truly loved the great masters of the Ukiyo-E print like close his eyes and let his hand “take a little Smokey Stover and Krazy Kat, even though Hokusai. For they, after all, were the most walk with a line,” as Paul Klee once put it, to it bugged his Abstract Expressionist cronies logical ancestors of the comic strip style. create a seemingly limitless number of totally no end when he deserted High for low Then I look more closely and notice the pole linear compositions that flow as freely as the Kulcher –– Lerer reveres rather than satirizes that the man holds in the small boat passing exalted graffiti of Cy Twombley in gracefully the comics style, not only for its honest under the beautifully simplified bridge (Lerer rhythmic configurations that suggest a form expressiveness but also for its blunt beauty, having pared it down even further from the of visual music. it’s unadorned nudity. fine, supple line of Hokusai) and I have to But trying to put Fritz Erismann’s project But don’t think you can understand Mark wonder: Is he trawling the lake for a bod... into words is an even more impossible Lerer too easily, as Norman Mailer once or what? seeming challenge than painting a sunset. cautioned readers of himself, for he employs With Mark Lerer you never know. Everything gets lost in translation. This is art simple images to provoke the viewer to Fritz Erismann is an artist of a whole that must be seen in order to be experienced consider complex issues. You- look at them other species, for whom the graphic and perceived. first for what they are and then you look impulse is often a starting point, even –– Ed McCormack again to discover what they really say, as for his paintings which often begin with your mind starts to excavate meaning on a charcoal drawings on canvas in which

26 GALLERYSTUDIO APRIL/MAY 2013 Stephen Tobin’s Whitmanesque Eye hen the Newfoundlander Stephen delight, which mirrors his own in capturing WTobin, widely known as “The memorable images on the move, blowing Wandering Photographer,” decided to call them up to larger-than-life-size, and his solo exhibition “The Natural Instincts preserving them on metal for all the world to of Nature,” it is clear that he meant human savor: a curious squirrel stopping in mid- nature, as well as the less animate elements of scrurry to return the artist’s interest, staring landscape. back from the bough of a tree; a womb-like “Each of my photographs is a memory,” opening in a black cave to the dewy freshness he says, remembering how, growing up in of the green forest outside; a similarly rural Canada, his father, a teacher would take symbolic flooded tunnel with a small square him out into the wilderness, pointing out the of light glowing at its farthest end (perhaps wonders of the world. encapsulating in these two successive prints He endeavors to do the same for viewers the entrance into and the passage out of of his work, saying “I would like my art to life); and the absolute bliss of two tiny birds help people learn to stop and look around. bathing in a shallow stream. There is so much beauty and wonderment A world of wonders indeed. –– Marie R. Pagano surrounding us all whether we live in Sydney, “Italian Accordian” New York, or Timbuktu. We just have to enjoy it .... If only people could learn to hair tousled forward on his head like that Stephen Tobin, Agora Gallery, appreciate nature and their role in it, I think of a Roman senator. Both images have an 530 West 25th St., May 11 - 31, 2013. everyone would be happier.” enduring quality which makes them appear Reception: Thursday, May 16, 6 -8 pm. Tobin’s point about interrelationship carved in stone. of people and nature is well made in his This eternal feeling has as much to do with LIVING BEINGS photographs, which treat the human image, Tobin’s technical finesse and the sharp focus Continued from page 10 as seen in his picture of a frail elderly woman of his pictures (except when a more blurred Dr. Barry Pinchefsky, on the other hand, refreshing herself at a water fountain, as well effect enhances their pastoral atmosphere, as invariably views every subject from a warmly as delicate yellow flowers growing beside in “Hidden Glen,” with its breeze-blown trees humanistic angle. Here, two of his most a rugged rock formation, with similar almost appearing as though caressed by the winning pictures were “In Good Hands,” in reverence. Indeed, the title of the second supple brush of Corot) as with the particular which the hands of a young child tenderly image, “Persistent Life,” could serve to subjects that catch his perceptive eye. cradled a pet mouse, and “Making Friends,” describe both. Although he has “dabbled in sculpture and in which a butterfly alights on the hand of a Although his subject matter is almost always painting, Tobin says, “I always come back to cherubic little girl with a head full of golden intimate, Tobin prints his pictures on metal photography...” ringlets. on a large scale (often measuring at their That photography is obviously Tobin’s And in Myrna Harrison-Changar’s widest point anywhere from 48 to 60 inches) true calling is made splendidly clear in “Italian “Just Visiting,” a cat dozed in a pet store to bring attention to the small moments and Accordian,” a splendid character study of a window display of stuffed dogs sporting supposedly minor moments of our lives that street musician seated on a folding seat in canine sweaters and hoodies, obviously not he hopes to make us stop and notice the front of a wrought-iron fence. Obviously, intimidated. Another picture by Harrison- special significance of everyday events. he would appreciate alms from pedestrians Changar titled “Beach Incubator” focused Compare his remarkable color picture of passing by. Yet the serene smile dividing the on a sign sticking out of a stretch of sand a majestic eagle in flight against a backdrop man’s craggy face makes clear that his main indented with oddly shaped tracks saying of verdant foliage to “What Happened,” satisfaction comes from the sheer joy of “Do Not Disturb: Sea Turtle Nest –– the equally noble and defiant headshot of making music. Violators subject to fines and imprisonment.” a white-bearded homeless man, his sparse Stephen Tobin understands such simple Living beings indeed! –– Maureen Flynn $6,$1$576 &5$)76

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APRIL/MAY 2013 GALLERYSTUDIO DEBORAH RHODES RECENT WORKS People, Places, & Things

MAY 1ST –12TH,2013

OPENING MAY 1ST, 7–9PM Broome Street Gallery 498 Broome St, New York 10013

12 PM–6PM or by Appointment