SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 www.galleryandstudiomagazine.com VOL. 14 NO. 1 New York GALLERYSTUDIO SENATEDELLA! The New York Art World’s Controversial Gadfly, Robert Cenedella, Skewers the U.S. Senate
plus: LOOKING FOR AMERICA, another excerpt from Ed McCormack’s memoir in progress HOODLUM HEART pg. 14 Norman Perlmutter “ORDINARY THINGS” “File Box,” Acrylic on Canvas, 24"x30" “File Box,” October 25 – November 8, 2011 Tues - Sun 2-7pm Artist’s Receptions: Thurs., Oct. 27 & Fri., Nov 4, 6-8pm 2/20 Gallery 220 West 16th Street, New York, NY 10011 212-807-8348 — www.220gallery.net TINA ROHRER Awash in Blue and Green Geometric acrylic paintings presenting color interactions and impresssions of movement “Accent Aqua II,” Acrylic, 18"x18" “Accent Aqua II,” Dates: October 4-October 29, 2011 Reception: Saturday, October 8, 4-6 PM :HVWWK6W1<& 7XHV6DWDPSP ZZZQRKRJDOOHU\FRP
GALLERYSTUDIO SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011
GS Highlights
On the Cover: Cenedella Takes On The Teabaggers –– pg. 9
PLUS: Eloping to the tune of a Simon & Garfunkel song ... Living a La Boheme fantasy like incestuous siblings in a blue Sharyn Finnegan, pg. 8 collar family attic ... Starry-eyed on the brink of nuclear apocalypse ... the HOODLUM HEART saga continues –– pg.14 Joan Marie Kelly, pg. 20
Catherine de Saugy, pg. 21
Marcia Clark, Malka Inbal, pg. 7 Tina Rohrer, pg. 4 pg. 5
Subscribe to GALLERYSTUDIO GALLERYSTUDIO An International Art Journal $25 Subscription $20 for additional Gift Subscription $47 International $5 Back Issues PUBLISHED BY Mail check or Money Order to: ©EYE LEVEL, LTD. 2011 GALLERYSTUDIO ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 217 East 85th St., PMB 228, New York, NY 10028 Phone: 212-861-6814 217 East 85th Street, PMB 228, New York, NY 10028 (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 CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Maureen Flynn City www.galleryandstudiomagazine.com State/Zip 2 GALLERYSTUDIO SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 Many Paths Converge in New Century Group Show
ike phrases such as “uncontrollable within an atmospheric existential void. painted in a style influenced by realistic Lurges” or “unsolicited advice,” Carol Pepper-Cooper evokes her own comic strip art, within a lively context “Undeniable Tendencies” is an rarefied dream realm in paintings of combining elements of Pop and admittedly novel concept for an crowds of small figures gathering as geometric abstraction. The versatile exhibition; yet it applies quite literally if for some spiritual act of witness in painter Ismena Halkiewicz, however, to some of the trends spotted in the landscapes that range from the hellishly employs diverse figurative strategies intriguing group exhibition of that name. fiery to the sumptuously heavenly, as ranging from fractured cubist planes seen in one work where mountainous containing eyes and other facial features, Prominent among them is a species candles burn amid more dispersed to a brilliantly hued and radically of organic abstraction exemplified by conflagrations that appear dangerously distorted New Image manner, to the Mira Satryan,” whose punningly titled close to consuming the shadowy gracefully stylized female nude floating painting “The Bright Site of the Moon” pilgrims, and another in which figures amid amber waves in her painting is notable for its muscularly configured clad in brilliant blue convene gaily amid “Honey.” forms and a palette combining cosmic giant flowers and marmalade hills. Then blue and visceral red hues. Another there is the painterly wizard known Wojtek Pakowski attacks the figure gifted abstract painter, Basha simply as Wioska, who weaves lyrical with the entire arsenal of abstract Maryanska, appears even more directly spells in a palette of pale yet luminous expressionism –– its slashing strokes, beholden to nature in “Toward Light,” hues, summoning softly diffused figures drips, and violent gestural thrusts where she accomplishes the seeming to emerge from pastel mists amid –– to activate the human figure with a alchemical feat of evoking the most picturesque ruins and fanciful landscapes passionate energy, as seen in “Spotlight,” ethereal of subjects in the material enlivened by delicate flora, fauna and where a lithe yet voluptuous nude diva, substance of pigment, with shimmering phantom faces hovering in midair. perhaps a pole-dancer in a Times Square showers of luminous golden yellow bar, occupies center stage in hazy red strokes streaming down like heavenly Assemblage would also appear to be light, and “Adam and Eve,” in which the beams. thriving, judging from Steven Rodrig’s sexual tension between the two figures is wonderfully zany neo-dada sculptures made palpable in pigment. More geometric styles of abstraction, intricately constructed from computer albeit subtly modulated with scumbled innards with titles such as “Data Roach By contrast, the symbolic figures surfaces and layered palimpsests and Motel,” “Attempt to Transfer Data painted by Kathryn Hart are, pentimento, also made a strong showing into the Organic World V-9,” and so paradoxically, physical and spectral at in the work of two other painters: While on –– all of which appear to be about the same time, given the artist’s use of serving as a striking formal armature the frustrations of conducting a sane thick impasto to evoke featureless beings for these compositions, Jan Niksinski’s human life within an increasingly virtual that emerge from painterly swirls and rectangular shapes simultaneously allude reality. One was also quite transported by spatters, taking on an almost haunting to windows and architectural structures, Helen Zajkowski’s “American Dream” presence akin to the emaciated sculptures while paying homage to artistic installation, a model home with a facade of Giacometti. Quite an opposite effect predecessors with titles such as “My covered entirely by lotto tickets and a is created in the unusual medium of home with the cross of Tapies/recycling cut-a-way back revealing rooms filled wire mesh by Bonnie Shanas, who 2009,” and “Naturelle abstraction or talk with gilded grownup and baby shoes, its achieves a remarkably detailed semblance with Mark Rothko.” Witold Adamczyk, message as poignantly redolent of broken of classical anatomy in a seemingly on the other hand, employs a varied dreams as what Ernest Hemingway unyielding industrial material, imbuing vocabulary of geometrically derived came up with when a drinking buddy her single or entwined nude figures forms in shaped canvases and modular challenged him to write a novel in six with a sensual grace that harks back formats in which recurring motifs and words: “For sale: baby shoes, never to sculptural fragments salvaged from slightly shifting color values create used.” antiquity. chromatic frisson within emblematic compositions. That more traditional three- Then there is the photographic artist dimensional art forms also continue Susan Hammond, who evokes an idyllic Quite an opposite aesthetic made an to gain aesthetic traction was made menage a trois in almost cinematic terms, appearance in the work of artists who strikingly clear by the prolific sculptor in a sequence of images in which a young specialize in fantasy and fabulation, as David Green, whose works in stone, woman watches from a rock as a couple seen in “Call a Lady,” Karin Zukowski’s wood, and bronze range from swims in a lake below, before joining wildly imaginative oil of a one-armed gracefully swirling organic abstract them, the three comely nude swimmers woman holding an egg with a human forms to a severely simplified female merging harmoniously in a romantic face aloft as an anthropomorphic bird figure, all sharing an exquisite formal water ballet amid the sparkling ripples. perches on her helmut-shaped coiffure, reductiveness. as well as in her more down-to-earth yet Undeniable tendencies indeed! ironically titled mother and child diptych Although no one needs to tell us at “Bourgeois Emancipation.” Elizabeth this late date that figurative art remains –– Maurice Taplinger Castonguay evoked a neo-surreal an undeniable tendency, it’s heartening private realm as mysterious as that of anyway to see how many artists in this Odd Nerdrum, in her darkly nocturnal show have headed Pound’s exhortation paintings of realistically rendered to “make it new.” Marian Solisz, for Undeniable Tendencies, New Century human figures set nakedly adrift in the example, presents erotically suggestive Artists Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, company of exotic birds or butterflies close-ups of female anatomy, pristinely August 29 - September17, 2011.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 GALLERYSTUDIO 3 A Classical Concern: The Abiding Art of Tina Rohrer
o keep the faith of geometric painting Rohrer creates a subtly, Tin the postmodern era requires shimmering optical frisson. considerable conviction, not to mention And in the six modular courage. But it is doubtful that, in the units that make up the privacy of her studio, basking in the warm composition called “Awash chromatic glow that radiates from her in Blue and Green,” where vibrant acrylic paintings, Tina Rohrer ever pure white squares mingle thinks of it that way. Surely she must be (like windows on the wall too engrossed in the primacy of pure form ) in not quite random and color as visual conduits to the sublime patterns among others in to even consider the imperatives of an art the blue, green, aqua range, market desperately dependent on novelty yet optically scintillating and what the Australian art critic and TV chromatic epiphanies commentator Robert Hughes once called reward the attentive viewer. “the shock of the new.” (Never mind that Nothing could be novelty has a notoriously short shelf life more “fraught with and we are by now so benumbed as to be imminent peril,” as W.C. virtually unshockable.) Fields used to put it, for Tina Rohrer’s allegiances have never a colorist of Rohrer’s been to the passing trends of disposable seductiveness, than to culture anyway. She defers only to such risk a monochromatic distinguished predecessors as Seurat and composition. So naturally Albers, the former for opening her eyes she takes up the challenge to the optical qualities of color, the latter in works such as “Black because his use of the simple square to and White Configuration,” explore his color theories in a manner an especially small yet unhampered by the distraction of other significant acrylic painting theories suggested the geometrical in which she not only presentation that has become a hallmark of dispenses with her most her own paintings. crowd pleasing asset but Her formalist approach seems to have set blithely violates the sanctity in soon after she graduated from Harvard of the two-dimensional University and has sustained her through picture plane, the “opacity” a long career in which she has seemingly of which, according to not taken the stylistic detours that many Rosalind Krauss, is the other artists do. Rather, she has more less “bedrock” upon which stayed a steady course of stringent formal modernism rests “and exploration from the start, deepening while must be retained as a “Black & White and Red All Over II” simplifying her manner of pared down fundamental concept.” a thin strip of brilliant red at the bottom color construction with a doggedness that “Oh, yeah? Why?” Rohrer appears to of the top panel, on the side of the middle can only be compared to Agnes Martin’s ask in this modest little work, in which one, and on the top of the bottom one. contrastingly monochromatic fidelity to the she introduces an illusion of deep space Together, the three thin red stripes grid. with two brick-shaped forms arranged in converge to form a “phantom” panel on What unites the work of these two vanishing perspective, one even casting a the white wall, only three fourths complete distinctly different yet somehow kindred “shadow,” albeit filled not with darkness yet with a presence fully as palpable as women artists is an abiding concern with but more of the small gray squares that that of the other three. Could any avowed a classical aesthetic. Indeed, had Rohrer’s make up both bricks. formalist make a more magically allusive present work been available to him in the For an artist so steeped in the traditions statement, even while adhering to the 1970s when he evolved his thesis regarding of modernism to create such a work, even classical modernist doctrine of the artwork “the hyper-realism of simulation in an age on a diminutive scale, constitutes more as literal object? where reality has been co-opted by mass than a playful excursion, an aesthetic Here again, Tina Rohrer demonstrates media,” the esteemed postmodern theorist “tchotchke,” so to speak. It indicates a the exquisite refinement, as well as an Jean Baudrillard might have included Tina willingness to think “outside the box” ability to surprise us within the strict formal Rohrer, along with Albers, Agnes Martin, (if the reader will pardon the irresistible perimeters she sets for herself, that makes and Ad Rheinhardt, in the excellent aptness of the cliché) that suggests we are her work a constant source of pleasure for company of Piet Mondrian, as exemplary of in the presence of a creative sensibility viewers seeking a more subtle and thought those rare artists who “achieve originality unwilling to dismiss any possibility out provoking aesthetic experience than is through repetition.” of hand. At the same time, in another commonly available in the often sideshow- For in the native color relationships monochromatic work titled “Black and like environs of postmodern painting. of paintings by Rohrer such as “Blue White and Red All Over,” Rohrer returns –– Ed McCormack Construction,” wherein the skillfully to the picture plane in a “staggered” calculated proximity of small, intricately triptych of three same-size canvases, varied squares of blue, green, and arranged vertically on the wall, consisting Tina Rohrer, Noho Gallery, aquamarine, arranged within two vertically primarily of characteristically intricate 530 West 25th Street, stacked large rectangles and set afloat patterns of black, white, and gray squares. October 4 - 29, 2011. emblematically against a lush blue field, The pièce de resistance here, however, is 4 GALLERYSTUDIO SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 Marcia Clark: Making a Melting World Immutable
“Edge of the Icefiord Ilulissat, 2009” lthough they are, admittedly, very the naturalist John Muir and many others he used that word for partially erased Adifferent types of artists, I always tend today, traveling to the ends of the earth, fragments of handwriting as the title of a to think of Marcia Clark in the same breath and I bear witness as an artist.” memoir. as Rockwell Kent, whose Arctic memoir, And it truly is as an artist that Clark For Clark, too, endeavors to include “N by E,” purchased secondhand at an bears witness in vistas that combine factual what she refers to as “the element of time” antiques sale upstate the month we lost our documentation with emotional immediacy in this and other constructs of observation son Holden to AIDS, provided intermittent and aesthetic appeal . Especially striking and memory in which maps or fragments of distraction, if not escape, from my raw in “Edge of the Icefiord, Ilulissat, 2009” them figure prominently. grief. For something about the unforgiving is what can only be called the “natural Such layered allusions also enliven “Old vastness of the Arctic, at least as I imagine cubism” that she finds and highlights in Harbor Intersection, Reykjavik,” comprised it, has always given me cold comfort: a the shifting planes and luminous reflections of five drawn, painted, and collaged images sense of the ineffable forces of nature and on the craggy surface of the ice, as well arranged in a cruciform format. fate that rule our destinies and mock our as the gestural animation, redolent of The sensation of vertiginousness that puny human sentiments. abstract expressionism, that her vigorous enlivens some of Clark’s compositions This profound pitilessness is what strikes brushstrokes impart to the surrounding emanates, here, not from the ever shifting one most powerfully about the massive, watery flow. lay of the “land,” so to speak, but from a implacable edifice of ice dominating Marcia Altogether peculiar to Clark’s Arctic cinematic sense of being visually wheeled, Clark’s “Edge of Icefiord, Ilulissat, 2009,” landscapes, however, is a sense of as in a fast vehicle, around the picturesque a panoramic oil on twelve frosted Mylar vertiginousness that can only occur in harbor, catching topsy turvy glimpses of the panels affixed to a six by twenty-two foot a place where, because the ice is always gateway to the ice-world. folding screen. A synthesis of observation melting, the very horizon line is up for By contrast, in the oil on aluminum, and memory, Clark’s magnificent grabs, creating the feeling that one could “Harbor Ilulissat, #2,” the clustered composition confronts the uninitiated slide right off its slippery slopes of ice and dwellings, smokestacks, and muddy hills with a crystalline mountain range of ice of the hamlet are as forbidding as it is beautiful. But with blocked in on the the extra-human empathy of the artist/ picture plane as solidly naturalist Clark is drawn to the vulnerability as the elements in a of the hugely looming polar ice monsters Cezanne. Yet hints that she paints, saying, “Icebergs can appear of “process,” such permanent as mountains, yet one turns for as traces of pencil- a moment and forms may shift, collapse, or line peeking like vanish. There would be a poignancy even if pentimento through Arctic melt were just a cyclic occurrence.” the pigment in But apparently it is not. Like Rockwell places and the artist’s Kent, Clark has written eloquently about characteristically her travels in arctic areas of Alaska, Canada, vivacious brushwork Greenland, and Svalbard. And she reports imbues even this that on an earlier visit to Ilulissat, in relatively serene Northwest Greenland, a local museum composition with director assured her that a warming trend its own sense of had been common knowledge for almost a “Harbor Ilulissat #2, 2011” immediacy. decade. Bravura brushwork “In Greenland (2007),” Clark wrote, hardened snow as if off the curve of the also enlivens “Ilulissat Icefiord, 2008,” a “I watched vistas of Arctic atmosphere, globe itself. Thus it seems especially apt that vibrantly glowing oil of the majestic ice and huge chunks of ice carried by the in another painting on frosted Mylar, “City Continued on page 22 current, with a new, poignant awareness Center Intersection, Reykjavik,” a map of movement and change. I can’t help but detail is at the center of the composition be aware that I’m observing a threatened and map fragments of Iceland are mounted Marcia Clark, Blue Mountain Gallery, landscape. Trying to understand my place in behind the painting, creating a “palimpsest” 530 West 25th Street, this changing panorama, I find myself like in the sense that Gore Vidal meant when October 4 - 29, 2011
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 GALLERYSTUDIO 5 Pat Fairhead: A Painter Who Goes with the Flow espite the watercolor as a finicky luminous washes of color, employing the Daccomplishments medium most suitable very element that she is depicting as the of its great modern for traditional realism in vehicle for her pigments, she achieves a exponents such as John her dynamic semiabstract stunning synthesis of medium and subject Marin and Charles compositions on large matter, the translucence of the aquarelle Burchfield, watercolor has sheets of paper (some reflecting that of the water itself, even yet to be acknowledged as measuring more than fifty as she invents abstract equivalents for the major medium that it inches), with bold forms the forces of nature, rather than slavishly can be when employed for and colors that command imitating them. finished works on a grand the wall as powerfully The spirit of surf splashing off rugged scale, rather than merely as any work in oils on rocks clustered on coastal shorelines for sketches and studies. canvas. cloaked in fog comes alive in her One artist in point is As a child, Fairhead compositions through a sense of its vital, the Canadian painter Pat fell in love with the surging energy, rather than through any Fairhead, who was born untamed wilderness of her attempt at the picturesque depiction of in England, a country new country, adopting specific scenes. with a history of great its national pastimes of Indeed, Fairhead works within an watercolorists (as well as “Water #8” hiking, camping, and abstract framework of bold, roughly accomplished amateurs canoeing. She remains rectangular color areas, usually saturated such as Prince Charles), before her to this day a dedicated outdoorswoman, with a single green-blue aqueous hue, nationality was changed in childhood when taking inspiration from an active its luminous, shimmering surface further her mother remarried to a Canadian man. participation in nature, while sketching enlivened by subtle tonal variations Indeed, along with being included in over the scenic wonders of the wilderness to be suggesting the play of sunlight and shadow 200 corporate, national, and provincial developed as large scale watercolors in her Continued on page 22 collections in Canada and the United studio. States, one of her watercolors is in the Although she also works in oils, acrylics, Pat Fairhead, Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Royal Collection of Prints & Drawings, in and printmaking, the medium is especially Street, October 7 - 28, 2011. Reception: Windsor Castle, England. well suited to her latest series, “Water.” Thursday, October 13, 6 - 8 pm Fairhead defies the stereotype of Saturating the surface of the paper with Water, Water Everywhere in West Side Photo Show lthough we are impressed to learn how imbued with the romantic quality that on an oddly anthropomorphic presence Amuch water makes up our bodies and invariably distinguishes Ruskin’s work. when placed in a rowboat on a river in covers the surface of the earth, we still tend One of the show’s more dramatic Monticello, New York. Seen from different to take this ubiquitous element of nature contributions was a luminous vision of the angles sans the gawking, interactive crowds for granted. Thus a photo exhibition called Luray Caverns, in Virginia, composed with it attracts in an urban setting, the oversize “Aqua” could have seemed little more than multiple layers of clear film, vellum, and confection becomes the solitary protagonist a novel notion, until one actually saw how frosted glass, presented in a lightbox by of a mysterious ongoing narrative. many intriguing images the theme inspired Jonathan Morrison. By contrast, in “Small A sense of stillness, expectancy, and in its participants. Waterfall,” Morrison demonstrated equal melancholy haunts the black and white Dr. Barry Pinchefsky took a wide-angle skill in capturing one of nature’s more marine photography Carolyn Reus, whose approach to the subject with aqueous modest phenomena thriving within the “River Boat” evokes the opposite of Mark images ranging from a mother and child circumscribed wilderness of Central Park. Twain’s colorful tales of gamblers and fancy romping in a pool on Long Island to a In a new series of exquisite silver gelatin ladies on the paddle-wheeled “floating great heron in flight over the Amazon prints frequent exhibitor Jean Prytyskacz palaces” of the Mississippi: a small craft River, in Brazil. Dr. Pinchefsky’s purist paid particular attention to subtle textural dwarfed by the expansive body of water it approach to black and white photography qualities, as seen in “Muddy Waters,” as traverses and the towering bridges above. A recalls the plainspoken poetry of William well as in another picture of park benches single silhouetted bird, however, appears as Carlos Williams. near a pond and a lawn covered by a dense self-possessed as a Buddha as it perches on Dan Gelb, on the other hand, offered an carpet of fallen leaves. With this emphasis a river railing. intimate view of watery places in his digital on tactile qualities, Prytyskacz adds a Then there is Daniel Jumpertz, whose C-prints of reeds, puddles, and lily pads new wrinkle to her already impressive digital print, “The Things You See When observed up close. Gelb’s pictures revealed photographic oeuvre. Your Toddler Wakes Up at 5 am” is a an appreciation for the small things in Upside-down boats on tall dry grass shimmering, crystalline vision of a tall nature akin to that of the ancient Chinese project a poignant mood in “Lake Gleneida tree reflected in a private pool at dawn ink painters. NY,” a silver gelatin archival print by Deena that justifies its awestruck title. And In a rare departure from the hand- Weintraub, making water all the more Jumpertz again evokes magic in “Clouds colored photographs for which he is best conspicuous by its absence, as in a drought. Condensing,” another visionary view of a known, David Ruskin showed untinted By contrast, the entire land appears awash in city skyline bejeweled by beads of water on silver gelatin prints of subjects such as Weintraub’s dramatic “City Island,” where a windowpane. ––Maureen Flynn the Tulleries Gardens in Paris, its trees dark rocks and what appear to be remnants and statues mirrored in rain puddles, and of a broken pier jut from the rippling tide. WSAC, “Aqua,” recently seen at Broadway the weekend crowds around Bethesda The ubiquitous giant cupcake that Mall Community Center, Broadway and Fountain, in Central Park. Yet even these serves as the piece de resistance in so many 96th Street (center island). relatively straightforward images were of Jack Cesareo’s recent pictures takes
6 GALLERYSTUDIO SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 The Emotive Body in the Photography of Malka Inbal n an essay entitled “Representation the terrain of the human –– and specifically mediated by the products of a singularly Iand Presence,” the art historian Sally female –– body. refined aesthetic sensibility intent on O’Reilly states, “Over the course of the Inbal has also said that light is “the lead unflinching self-examination. 20th century, profound developments in actor” in her work, and indeed it assumes For what is being explored here is a art’s relationship with the human form a starring role in her latest compositions, communion between the body and the soul have overturned centuries of convention, illuminating them with unearthly auras. At to which the artist appears to allude when radically repositioning the body of the the same time, however, there is also an she says, “In this series I chose to investigate subject, the artist and the viewer. The main undeniable sensuality to Inbal’s imagery, the issue of femininity, a fascinating subject thrust of this development has been from wherein feminine anatomy is reflected as in and of itself, and even more so now passivity to active agency, so that the body if in a funhouse mirror (once again, that when I am in my 50s. At this age, the great is no longer a static optical phenomenon, looking glass, originally referenced by the fear of loss of femininity has faded away, but the embodiment of dynamic human artist herself, recurs as the apt metaphor replaced by inner calm. I choose to enjoy relations and even a medium of change and which springs most immediately to mind), the infinite process of learning and different influence within the artwork itself.” creating a kind of perceptual striptease developments in my life.” At the present postmodern moment by revealing the dark areola of a milky Indeed, one is reminded of Ralph Waldo in art history, it happens that Emerson’s famous definition of this new attitude toward bodily poetry as “emotion recollected representation converges in tranquility.” For at the half- auspiciously with the growing century mark, Inbal appears recognition of photography as to have achieved an enviable a major art form on a par with perspective on past experience painting or sculpture. No longer that enables her to introduce a must the photographer track fresh sense of objectivity into daily life like a hunter and lay her work, even while dealing patiently in wait for that “perfect with the supremely subjective moment,” that visual epiphany subject of the body as a conduit worthy of recording. More and for individual consciousness. more of our best photographers As Sally O’Reilly suggested create their own reality in the in the essay excerpted at the studio in a manner that takes beginning of this review, more their medium far beyond its enlightened attitudes toward original documentary function morality, gender, and sexuality, into new areas of autonomous as well as the forthright aesthetic discovery. presentation of nudity in Asked to name a currently performance art and other areas active artist who best exemplifies of aesthetic endeavor, have the merger of these two revitalized representation of the significant contemporary human body, making it once tendencies, this critic would again one of art’s vital frontiers. choose none other than the Malka Inbal’s experience of innovative Israeli photographer bodies has been more extreme Malka Inbal. At first glance, the “From White to Gray 2” and perhaps more emotionally skillfully distorted human forms indelible than that of many in Inbal’s new pictures could recall the white breast or the suggestion of a pubic others, judging from a quote included by paintings of the renowned British artist thicket in a torso that appears to meld with this writer in a review of one of her earlier Francis Bacon. But this initial impression another figure as though in erotic embrace exhibitions, which bears repeating here: dissipates with prolonged perusal of her so intense as to melt two bodies into one. “I joined the army at the end of the 1973 work. For while Bacon’s figures provoke One quickly realizes, however, that this war, when the corpses were brought from the squeamish sense of grotesque lumps of mating is strictly symbolic, signifying a the battles to be buried. One of the female protoplasmic matter, trapped in mortality spiritual nurturing of the self rather than a soldiers’ duties was to go with the soldiers’ like meat on a butcher’s block, Inbal’s sexual union with another. families and place bouquets of flowers on are possessed of a dancer’s grace that Yet by virtue of their fluidity, the the graves ... So much sadness and tragedy suggests transcendence, as they twist and apparent anatomical anomalies that result ... so far from glory ...” turn as sinuously as wisps of smoke on the from the abstraction of figurative forms Surely undergoing such a morbid shimmering surfaces of her large black and in Inbal’s compositions never descend to experience in one’s youth must intensify white prints, whose absence of color yet the level of grotesquery; for set against the emotions one feels toward the body, rich variety of subtle gray tones enhances the silvery swirls that the artist reportedly both as a vehicle of pleasure and pain, their overall effect of ethereality. creates with a mysterious and unique of joy and mortal destiny. Such intense “In most of my series I dealt with the technique involving carefully arranged feelings and the hard-won wisdom they human soul,” Inbal has stated. “Through and folded fabrics exquisitely lit, every must bring are everywhere evident in the my many observations, I’ve staged my element appears constantly in a state photography of Malka Inbal. works as a type of mirror into human of flux, of metamorphosis. Indeed that –– Byron Coleman nature, in accordance with my feelings and nothing in her compositions remains stable interpretations.” In this series in particular, imbues her pictures with a seemingly Malka Inbal, Noho Gallery, the mirror is turned toward the existential limitless allusiveness. As in life itself, one’s 530 West 25th Street, condition of the inner self, as reflected in consciousness is constantly being buffeted September 6 - 30, 2011. the abstract play of light and shadow on between the sacred and the profane, as SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 GALLERYSTUDIO 7 Sharyn Finnegan’s Self-Portraits Project an Unflinching Beauty have always thought that the 1970s they are also representative of the angst Iwould have been a much more exciting and exaltation of an entire generation. time to be a woman than to be a man. “Woman, 35,” for example, based on the To put it in the most simplistic terms, it figure of Eve in Jan van Eyck’s “Ghent seemed as if every thinking woman was Altarpiece,” is a picture of empowerment a revolutionary and every man –– even writ large. The artist confronts the viewer in many men who declared themselves full frontal nudity. Her long hair streaming revolutionaries –– were behaving like, to her shoulders, she holds up a fine- well, Republicans, in regard to jealously pointed sable brush in the same position protecting those privileges they had long that van Eyck’s Eve holds a small citrus fruit considered to be their birthright. known as an “Adam’s apple,” which he Sharyn Finnegan’s graphite drawing substituted for the traditional apple. “Anger 74” seems iconic in this regard. Art historians consider Van Eyck’s The viewer is greeted by a close-up of an painting an important departure from the almost stereotypically pretty young woman idealization of the medieval tradition in in her early twenties. But even with her favor of more naturalistic depiction of the fair hair in girlish braids, her aspect is less human body. Likewise, while Finnegan like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm than still cut a comely figure in her mid thirties, Cochise. The haughty angle at which her her flesh firm, her features fine, her gaze head is thrown back, the sharp slant of her frank and intelligent, her depiction of her high cheekbones, the slight narrowing of “Evolution” curvaceous body departs somewhat from her feline eyes, the set expression of her the canvas, one imagines clenched fists), the anorexic ideal of her time. down-turned lips –– all indicate that this is wearing a blue denim work shirt over a “I hated my thighs before I painted that someone not to be fucked with, if one will turtleneck, with blank sheets of drawing picture,” she says. “But when I finished I pardon the expression. paper taped to the green wall behind thought, ‘Hey, my legs look pretty good –– In “Scream 75,” an oil from the her back. Here, one thinks of the Primal they’re strong!’ It was better than years following year, judging from her furrowed Therapy popularized by John and Yoko, Continued on page 22 brow, the repressed pain beneath the rather than the stark terror of Edvard anger appears to burst forth from the Munch’s famous painting. Sharyn Finnegan, Blue Mountain Gallery, gaping mouth of the young artist, as she For while the self-portraits in Finnegan’s 530 West 25th Street, September 6 - stands in her studio with her arms at her new solo show, ranging from her 20s October 1, 2011 sides (although her hands vanish below to her 60s, are deeply, bravely personal, Janese Hexon: “The Human Clay,” Cast in Bronze ne of the major vices to which many some amputees are said to Baskin’s naked Job-like Ofigurative sculptors all too often feel in a “phantom limb.” patriarchs. succumb is a tendency to generalize. Indeed, a receptive viewer In yet another The very nature of materials such as who has suffered personal another bronze called stone or bronze, with their potential for loss may even experience “Fractured,” a naturalistic monumentality, encourages them to blur this piece on a visceral level, female head and torso the features of their figures into those of with a pang of physical merges totemically with Everyman –– or Everywoman, as the case empathy that bypasses three vertically stacked may be –– making them symbols rather mere intellectual reasoning abstract forms to evoke an than people; vessels of angst, vehicles for a or aesthetic delectation to unsettling emotional state mawkish sentimentality. strike a deeper emotional in stark visual terms. And Happily, this is a tendency that the chord. in “Untitled,” a pale blue Pennsylvania-based artist Janese Hexon In another bronze visage with serenely shut avoids assiduously, achieving a more that the artist calls “La eyes is cradled protectively genuine monumentality by virtue of Introspection ll,” a haggard within huge, dark, graceful her ability to couple the delineation female figure with a lined arms that flare out in a of individual character with a grasp of face appears more naked flowingly harmonious significant form that appears to come as than nude, her body more synthesis of the figurative naturally to her as the human empathy that narrow than slender, with “La Introspection ll” and the abstract, suggesting makes her figures so affecting. the worn, poignantly nothing short of the night “I want my work to reflect the lived-in quality of a cast-off garment. In a sky’s embrace of the lunar orb. communion that we all experience with our global culture so inundated with images In an introductory essay for his book exchange of feelings and emotions,” states of youthful, cosmeticized, eroticisized, “The New Humanism,” Barry Schwartz, a Hexon, the earthy appeal of whose pieces, seemingly immortal femininity, when every critic, author and project organizer for the even cast in bronze, invariably evoke W.H. Hollywood starlet is a nymphet and there Archives of American Art, extolled artists Auden’s phrase “the human clay.” would seem to be no place in the popular who provide a humanistic alternative to the Witness, for one, the work she calls iconography for women of a certain age, it Continued on page 22 “Holding Grief,” in which a female figure is almost shockingly novel to encounter the modeled in a rugged, tactile manner appears female soul embodied so blatantly in the Janese Hexon, Pleiades Gallery, to clutch absence to her bosom, lending aging, vulnerable flesh. Here, Hexon fills an 530 West 25th Street, the invisible object of her grief a presence important gap for future archeologists by September 6 - October 1, 2011 as palpable, if not physical, as the ache that providing a distaff counterpart of Leonard 8 GALLERYSTUDIO SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 SENATEDELLA! While I read My Tea-Tags, Robert Cenedella, the New York Art World’s Resident Gadfly in the Ointment Deflates the Tea Baggers and the U.S. Senate with the Same Skewer ven though a certain political party has criminal –– things I Elately given tea a bad name, I still prefer did in my reckless, it to coffee because since I switched I can feckless youth. I get more caffeine into my system without mean, the entire the inevitable nausea that drinking one cup project amounts of black coffee after another all day long to an enormous will produce. Tea goes down easier and act of self-scandal I like the idea that I don’t automatically fraught with all think of it as “American industrial fuel,” as manner of possible I do coffee. And I also get valuable advice danger and possible from tea-tags, those little labels on tea bags, repercussions, so much as some people get their fortunes I couldn’t help told by tea leaves –– at least from the brand wondering if this that my wife and I drink. cautionary tea-tag It’s called Salada and not only is it was trying to pull cheaper than any of the other brands on me back from some sale in our local Gristedes on the Upper abysmal brink into East Side but it has a certain nostalgia value which I was about because it was one of the most popular to plunge. brands on the Lower East Side when I was But of course rant about my beverage of choice. a kid in the l950s. I seem to remember that the sense of danger is the very thing that But this may be for the best, considering the slogan back then was “It’s Salada Tea,” excites me about this wildly indiscreet the saying on another tea-bag that turned (the way you’d say “a lotta tea” in our magnum opus I am writing (my old up in my cup the other day (the trick is neighborhood dialect) and the only thing friend Fran Lebowitz didn’t call me “The never to choose one but let them choose as good was the slogan of the other popular Existential Ed” for nothing). So I couldn’t you if you want the magic to work) that brand “Swee-Touch Nee” which, dirty- really heed this tea-tag warning in the way said, “When your work speaks for itself, minded kid that I was, always sounded to that I could at least try to be mindful of don’t interrupt.” me like an allusion to how sweet it could be the earlier one that said “Poise –– the art That’s always good advice for someone to touch a girl’s knee (something I didn’t of raising an eyebrow instead of the roof,” as garrulous as me (“Ed, you can talk get to do as much as I would have liked to and may have kept me from blowing up someone into something and out of it in back then). at someone who on that same day sorely the same breadth,” a musician friend who Anyway, even more than its nostalgia tested my inability to suffer fools. Just as knew me too well once said). And it also value, the cheap price of this brand another tea-tag that said, “Exercising thrift applies especially well to Cenedella’s work, appealed to me, since I drink so much tea keeps you fiscally fit” may have reminded which always speaks eloquently for itself every day in order to get myself wired to me to reconsider an extravagant venture and hardly needs a great deal of explication the point where my teeth are grinding as I was thinking of undertaking; or the way or bloviating from me. Indeed, his though I were writing on amphetamines, yet another that said, “A poet can survive paintings offer a refreshing respite from the which I once did routinely but had to anything but a misprint” seemed to rub self-conscious obscurity of so many other give up, along with drinking, in order to it in when, although I had checked the painters by clearly addressing issues of the continue living. For all I know Salada may proofs myself, the word “except” instead day in a manner akin to that which made be cheap because it’s rotten tea, which I of “excerpt” appeared on the cover of the it prudent for his one-time teacher George probably wouldn’t notice and wouldn’t issue of this magazine in which the first Grosz to leave Germany after the Nazis make much difference anyway, since I drink installment of my memoir ran... came into power. tea the way I drank alcohol, for the effect Anyway, further proof that these tea- After Grosz came to New York and rather than the taste, and was never adverse tags, which guide me much in the same started teaching at the Art Students to the worst brands of beer, bourbon, or way fortune cookies guide the destinies of League, his work lost much of his satirical vodka either as long as they did the job. credulous types who patronize inauthentic bite. That can happen when you’re not Another reason I buy this brand, Chinese restaurants with names like Lo Fan on your native turf anymore and don’t though, is because the pithy little sayings Palace, can be uncanny occurred this very really know the players very well and are and musings and messages that the Salada morning when I first started writing what faced with the reality of having to eke out company puts on its tea tags can often was to be a piece about Robert Cenedella’s a living as an exile in a strange land. But seem uncannily personal, as though they painting of the U.S. Senate, when my tea- Grosz was a great teacher and late in his are actually trying to tell me something. tag said, “Oxymoron: Senate Ethics.” teaching career, which spanned the years The other morning, for example, as I Thus rather than starting right into from 1933 to 1959, he had a great student began work on my memoir in progress, describing this eye-boggling Boschian named Robert Cenedella who became his “Hoodlum Heart: Confessions of a vision of one of our more august and class monitor and picked up the cudgel and Test Dummy for the Crash and Burn dubious governing bodies, recently literally continues to bludgeon the worst among his Generation,” the tag on my first cup of the unveiled by the artist himself amid the kind fellow countrymen –– and women (let’s day warned “Never write about a wrong.” of PT Barnum-by-way of Andy Warhol Continued on page 22 To someone else that might seem just hoopla that invariably attends Cenedella’s a bad pun on the locution “righting a forays into the public arena, to hordes of wrong.” But it struck a particular nerve hooting cheering citizens crowding the Robert Cenedella, Studio 57 Fine Arts, for me because a lot of my book is about street-level window of Studio 57 Fine Arts, 211 West 57th Street all the wrong –– and sometimes even I was diverted into the preceding personal
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 GALLERYSTUDIO 9 Nicole Alger: A Painter for the True New Age “ ew Age” is a term with a broad work is steeped in the aesthetic traditions A female Napplication, often encompassing a of Western figure painting, as seen in two nude in the lotus variety of multicultural disciplines that offer youthful female portrait heads, respectively position also alternatives to the spiritual barrenness of titled “My Siddhartha” and “Prayer II.” appears in an modern life. Normally, when the term is The former focuses on the compelling oil on canvas by applied to art, however, we picture images countenance of an exotic beauty with clear Alger entitled of unicorns, wizards, earth goddesses, almond eyes, the red dot Hindus called a “Aspiration,” here fantastic landscapes in imaginary fairy tale “bindi” in the center of her forehead, and amid a panoramic realms, and other lighthearted, often banal areas of luminous blue light emanating vista of majestic subjects related to popular notions of a from the thick, dark mane that surrounds mountains and “Red Sun” generalized gift shop “spirituality.” her face like a halo. In the latter, another rivers awash Wisely, Nicole Alger, a New York young woman’s soft features and serenely in glowing pastel hues. By contrast, in painter trained in classical realist painting shut eyes appear enveloped in radiant auras “Presiding,” all of the majesty is embodied techniques in Florence, Italy, does not which are enhanced by the gold leaf that in the figure itself. Although the nude apply this term to her own art. However, Alger occasionally integrates holistically model, posed grandly against an expanse her paintings elevate the concept of what with oil pigments, rather than applying of brilliant blue, resembles a blonde New Age art can be by virtue of her serious only to backgrounds and other discrete Nordic goddess, the glowing whiteness of immersion in the chakra system, a term areas of the composition, as is traditional in her torso, accented by her contrastingly originating in ancient Hindu texts, derived Christian icons. suntanned face and limbs, suggests the from the Sanskrit word for “wheel.” The More in the spirit of the Pre- tantric mingling of mystical and sensual term is employed in traditional Indian Raphaelites and the Symbolists, Alger’s elements in the Hindu and Buddhist belief medicine, which holds that “consciousness paintings project a sense of beauty and systems. is pure energy and our thoughts directly transcendence, as seen in both “Red Sun” Nicole Alger is clearly a visionary painter impact our bodies,” as Alger puts it in and “Spectrum,” where the nude female whose work recontextualizes and invites her artist statement. The system divides form takes on new meaning as spiritual us to examine anew ancient wisdom and the body into seven energetic wheels or emissary rather than merely erotic entity. intriguing notions heretofore woefully chakras, each represented by a color. In “Red Sun,” a woman appears airborne unexplored in contemporary art. Thus the light and color in Alger’s against a swirling blue field enlivened by –– Peter Wylie vibrant oils on canvas derives from a scarlet solar burst. In “Spectrum,” a the symbolic language of the Chakra meditating figure levitates within a circle Nicole Alger, Agora Gallery, 530 West system rather than from outer sources, of light, the emblematic composition 25th Street, October 7 - 28, 2011. as in Impressionism and other schools of combining elements of Western realism and Reception: Thursday, October 13, 6-8pm. Western painting. Yet at the same time her the Eastern mandala. A Photographic Exploration of Urban Diversity ital contrasts enlivened the West striking a seductive pose decorating the also gives us splendid images of proud VSide Arts Coalition’s recent photo entire side of an open-topped sightseeing young majorettes smiling and strutting in exhibition “Uptown, Downtown,” in the bus with tourists on its deck gawking the African American Day Parade, as well art gallery of an historic public library elsewhere. as a serene picture of venerable brownstone in Harlem. Jonathan Morrison showed Random still life setups glimpsed amid stoops piled with snow on 119th Street. atmospheric urban scenes, shot from urban complexity capture the attention The incongruous contrasts of busyness high above, of streets, avenues, traffic of Daniel Jumpertz, whose sharp eye for and leisure that can occur both uptown islands and bare winter trees glistening ironic found poetry comes across in his and down come to the forefront in Carolyn with snow, as well as a panoramic print digital print of a children’s ride with a Reus’s picture of fenced off ice skaters of a couple walking with their pram and handwritten sign saying, “Duck Not in gliding along as hectic pedestrians rush leashed dog in “Pier 1, Riverside Park” Service.” But Jumpertz also shows a more by or disembark from a yellow cab. Reus under a magnificent sky. His use of Archival lyrical side in his vibrantly colorful print also showed an intriguing picture of a pigment ink on Valley Litho Gloss paper of florist’s display presenting a pocket of covered walkway between two downtown imbued his prints with a luminous quality urban Impressionism in the bustling city. buildings, suggesting the antique science that enhanced their subject matter. There is invariably a strong formal fictional style of the old Buck Rogers comic In his vibrant digital prints, Cal Eagle, component in the digital prints of Jennifer strip or the fad called “steampunk,” with its caught young people romping in sunlight Holst, here represented by a print in which focus on 19th century futurism of authors at Coney Island, their mood and fashions the gridded pastel windows of a modern such as Jules Verne. conveying a lively hip hop mood. One was building suggest one of Mondrian’s Janice Wood Wetzel employed digital especially struck by Eagle’s portrait of a stringently geometric compositions. Another technology like freehand drawing to comely young mother poised like a classical picture by Holst, “Highline Park #1,” convert photographic imagery into colorful statue on the stairs above the crowds focuses just as engagingly on the patterns of linear patterns and riff jazzily on neon swarming around Astroland. windows on a more severe stone edifice. signs, restaurant facades and moving traffic Jean Prytyskacz’s exquisite small black Khuumba Ama captures the changing set against a dark background in her print and white silver gelatin prints suggested face of a neighborhood in black and Continued on page 22 the superimposition of disparate images white in her companionable picture of a and reality endemic to city life: an elevated middle aged Black woman and a young WSAC “Uptown,Downtown,” train passing above a huge Green Project Caucasion woman sharing a bench and recently seen at Countee Cullen Library mural; an Amazonian image of a model laughing together in Jackie Robinson Park, Art Gallery, 104 West 136th Street. who resembles a latter-day Brigitte Bardot pointedly titled “New Harlem.” Yet Ama
10 GALLERYSTUDIO SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 Celebrating a Happy Marriage of Art and Craft ranscending boundaries between fine “Necktie ‘Mirror’” collage, in which the Tand applied art, a recent group show viewer saw him or herself reflected in the by members of the Artist-Craftsmen of tie’s sterling silver surface; as well as the New York featured many examples of how Neo-Dada mixed media configurations of utilitarian and purely aesthetic objects Evelyn Letfuss, particularly “ ‘Taxi!,’ she can interact and often overlap. Although whinnied, flicking her tail,’ ” combining an the prizes awarded in categories such as actual woman’s high-heeled pump, a horse Collage, Fiber Art, Jewelry, Mixed Media, tail, and a horse shoe with nails sticking Photography, and Sculpture, were all well out of it, creating an intriguingly fetishistic deserved, casual viewers enjoyed the luxury effect. of wandering through the exhibition and Francine Medoff apparently takes picking their own personal favorites. inspiration from folk art dolls and possibly Among ours were Shula Mustacchi’s the 3-D tableaux of Red Grooms in her intricate, ornate, and opulent collages, colorful and lively freestanding sculptures particularly “Joseph and Six Birds,” and such as “Kleizmer Band #1,” with its “Paper Quilt with Persian Miniature five musicians in brightly patterned garb #11”; and prizewinner Dongjune Lee’s playing the frenetic folk music sometimes works with religious iconography in the called “Jewish jazz.” unique medium of fiber/dye on fabric Equally playful in another way is the and Plexiglas; Babette Meltzer’s tactile jewelry of Alice Sprintzen, which like mixed media wall relief “Soft Spots,” Alexander Calder’s famous “Circus” and Lila Turjanski-Villard’s mixed media transcends craft and rises to the level of table sculptures in paper, with their fine art by virtue of Sprintzen’s ability to graceful elongated figures harking back to adorn the wearers’ body with masklike Giacometti; and Ruth F. Levine’s fanciful faces and simplified figures possessed of monoprint “Butterfly Dreams” and winning simplicity and grace, as seen in her watercolor collage “Opening Act,” with “Wrench Man Pin,” in which miniature its linear chorus line in a winningly direct tools and a golden cog morph into an style. Inca Sun God. Pearl Brody’s jewelry in Sally Shore showed a group of eye- precious metals, pearls, and gemstones is dazzling geometric “Twill Drawings” possessed of classic elegance. By contrast, possessed of a striking formal and coloristic Karen Strauss employs novel materials and
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power, created with fiber, ribbon, and techniques such as wire and silkscreen and twill weave. Prizewinner Dorothy Hall was image transfer to create colorful jewelry represented by a group of collages jam- with a playful, youthful quality. And Laura packed with intriguing antique magazine Godler combines the simplified shapes of and newspaper imagery, as well as a 3-D butterflies and birds fashioned in polymer For health care information assemblage called “Music Box” as poetic clay and framed in sterling silver to create as a vintage Joseph Cornell. We were also poetically evocative wearable art, such as, please contact New York Artists Equity captivated by Lauren Singer’s witty and “I Remember Spring.” Association, Inc. (NYAEA) at 212-941-0130. funky found object assemblages, such as Continued on page 19 Write for information to “Blowin’ in the Wind,” with its references NYAEA, PO Box 1258, New York, NY 10276 to the famous song by Bob Dylan song Artist-Craftsmen of New York, or email: [email protected] or (whose brooding face appears in a crude Recently seen at line drawing set against wire mesh, as in New Century Artists Gallery, [email protected] a junkyard icon); Gloria Prival’s Neo-Pop 530 West 25th Street. SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 GALLERYSTUDIO 11 A Salon Show That Does Justice to the Name n order to be worthy of the name, and abstract works in this category was French abstract expressionist Georges Isalon exhibitions should be richly Jesse Robinson Jr.’s acrylic on canvas Mathieu. And speaking of abstraction, a varied affairs encompassing a wide range “Monk at the Minton,” in which the brave undertaking in the postmodern era, of styles, and a recent one by the West great jazz musician’s distinctive mode of it too acquitted itself handsomely, starting Side Arts Coalition, called appropriately dress and posture at the piano, as well with Jutta Filipelli’s “Abstract Red,” enough, “Salon Show 2011,” fit the bill as his architectonic style of harmonic which was just that: a blazing but almost perfectly. Each genre, from landscape to improvisation, is masterfully evoked in contradictorily diffused composition figurative to abstract and everything in brilliant areas of hard-edged color in a nearly entirely in that color, subtly set off between was well represented. tour de force of a composition combining by the merest touches of blue and other In both painting and photography, the best qualities of distinguished complementary hues that made one look one of the most fertile areas was predecessors such as Jacob Lawrence at red anew for both its optical heat and landscape, which included works ranging and Stuart Davies. Carole Barlowe also subtle visceral identification. from realistic to various degrees of abstracts from the figure with economy Robin Goodstein also displayed the abstraction. Linda Lessner’s oil “Cape and grace in her diptych in acrylic and panache of a consummate colorist in Code Shoreline” was among the more collage on canvas “Doorway Tenant,” “Purple Salad,” an oil on canvas in which literal interpretations, with its crystalline wherein two versions of the same maplike patches of pigment akin to evocation of sand and surf beneath a mysterious lurking personage, altered those of Clyfford Still –– albeit in candy luminous and cottony clouds that rhymed slightly by collage elements, are conjured yellows, reds, greens, and caramel ocher visually with the foamy white curl of in a combination of line and spare color –– fairly danced across that luscious the rolling waves. Marguerite Borchardt areas, set against a pure white ground. purple ground. Marivi Peralta projects combined similar elements in her own Another standout was Nate Ladson’s her own exuberant gestural sensibility unique manner in her oil “Pine by oil print on canvas “Guys on the Block,” with sinuous brushstrokes like scarlet the Shore,” where the tree of the title a photorealist triple portrait in grisaille smoke, interspersed with swirls of white, perches on a rocky mound, dramatically of three elderly African-American men, enlivening a luminous yellow field in windblown above a still body of clear blue one in a wheelchair with a leg missing, her acrylic and oil pastel “Spring Spirit.” water. lounging against a brick wall and watching Conversely, in the unusual medium of David Ruskin, our leading the world go by, their strong character acrylic on foam, Jack Cesareo employed contemporary proponent of the hand- revealed by the artist’s skillful depiction angular strokes and thick pigment in colored photograph made an especially of the lines of their well-worn faces. The his abstract composition “Walk With atmospheric statement with “Hyde Park, gifted young draftsman William Hunt Me” to create a rugged physicality and London,” in which tall trees, misty tints made his own strong graphic statement power akin to Tachisme. In “The Great and autumn leaves scattered across the in “Caring About the Earth 2,” a large Connect,” Robert N. Scott employed grass suggest the perfect setting for a charcoal and pastel on paper of a woman watercolor with a bold expansiveness in a nineteenth century duel at dawn. By with flowing waves of hair balancing on composition built on overlapping circles contrast, in Herbert Fogelson’s painterly one palm and planting a fervent kiss on a of roughly the same size that created digital photograph “Sunset in Ulster symbolic globe on which one green land dynamic visual rhythms by virtue of the County,” where surf crashes against mass morphs into a masklike face bearing manner in which the artist overlapped dark, craggy rocks and boulders and the lines that simultaneously suggest seismic them. And working with acrylic, metallic blue of the water is brilliantly intense, cracks and streaming tears. paint, and pumice stone on Plexiglass, the very forces of nature seem to reflect Another of our most astute Jonathan Morrison achieved subtle sense the political turmoil of a troubled land. contemporary symbolists, Margo Mead, of amorphous forms floating in space in a Thus George Jellinek’s lyrical oil on addressed similar concerns from a more color field composition called “Breath (n) linen, “Water Lilies at Monet’s Garden,” celebratory perspective in a work in Create (v) Love (n).” presents an auspiciously serene contrast watercolor, ink, and oil crayon on rice Nancy Johnson, opts for an allusive with its lyrical treatment of another watery paper, depicting graceful cosmic dancers approach to abstract composition in subject. cavorting amid a fiery yellow orb and “Blue Abstract Square,” where the title Then there is Marsha Peruo, whose two an ethereal earthly sphere that floats like apparently alludes to the symmetrical small works in watercolor and ink from a soap bubble upon a sumptuous blue shape of the canvas, rather than the her “Land and Sky” series reduce an entire expanse. More down to earth but no less forms within it, which are flowing and terrain to an intriguing semiabstract visual compelling is a close-up double portrait organically suggestive, owing to the shorthand, as succinct as musical notation, by Larry Frank of a middle-aged man who artist’s skill in blending softly diffused in which comicstrip clouds outlined in confronts the viewer with a thoughtful secondary hues. black hover over geometrically codified expression, the painter’s vigorous bravura Elizabeth K. Hill demonstrates that land masses enlivened by delicate washes brushwork in oil on canvas and mastery of humor can be a serious business in fine of aquarelle. And for sheer charm it would close color harmonies in the fleshy pinks art with her witty acrylic on canvas “No be hard to top Marie Robison’s oil pastel and yellow range imbuing the image with Sand” in which a conglomeration of “The Old City,” in which a man and a the sense of an intense human presence. colorful mops and brooms sprouting up child stroll down a cobblestone alley while In his own manner, the innovative out of a large sweeping compound a woman gazes out the window of an photographer Archie Hamilton also Continued on page 22 adjoining house in a quaint little hamlet evoked a presence, albeit a more spectral that time seems to have forgotten, evoked one, in his black and white silver gelatin with faux-naif sophistication reminiscent print, “Flashhlight Face,” apparently of early Chagall. created by photographing a light-beam WSAC, Salon Show 2011, recently seen Figurative art also made an impressive swiftly tracing a visage in darkness, but at Broadway Mall Community Center, showing, and interestingly enough one also suggesting scrawled graffiti or the Broadway and 96th Street (center island). of the most simultaneously realistic linear gestural explosions of the showy
12 GALLERYSTUDIO SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 Felicities of Form and Touch in the Paintings of Cecilia Fernandez Q ecause she began as a sculptor, the and pull.” Indeed other kinships with the the painting with such BChilean painter Cecilia Fernandez Q practice of the New York School (and of striking élan. came first to form. Color followed in due the Englishman, Bacon, as well for that Drawing and painting time: subtle and refined combinations of matter) are also evident in the style of this are combined with a complementary secondary and earthy hues Chilean artist. Perhaps most prominent winning insouciance that define, without being subordinated among them is her use of drips and rivulets reminiscent of Larry to exquisitely drawn human and animal of diluted oil pigment as formal and Rivers in another oil “Woman I” figures informed by an underlying sense expressive elements, as well as spontaneous and charcoal on canvas of abstraction. Because drawing, the bare markers of painterly “process,” as seen by Fernandez Q called “The Beginning.” bones of all visual expression, is central to in “Study 1.” Here, too, the title seems Here we encounter a slender young woman her work, the essential armature on which significant, in that there is really nothing with wispy bangs seated barefoot with her structural aesthetic rests, a firm charcoal tentative or study-like, nothing sketchy crossed legs on the floor, her arms hugging line remains a visible element in her oils on about this superbly resolved and finished the knee on which she rests her chin. canvas. work. What the term seems to refer to in Her eyes wander away from the viewer, Fernandez Q’s compositions featuring this context is the sense of immediacy and as though dreamily gazing at something dog subjects are especially engaging, but discovery experienced by the artist in the outside the right edge of the canvas; yet not in the manner that one is used to; for act of creation. the picture engages one fully, due to the they contain not a hint of canine cuteness. Another distinctive feature of Fernandez artist’s engagement with subtly tactile Quite, the opposite, they seem more Q’s aesthetic is her use of the intriguingly qualities of mark-making and “touch.” akin to certain works by Francis Bacon off-center, asymmetrical composition, It is precisely her ability, exemplified or Marshal Arisman for their starkness. as seen in “Dog 1,” where the severely here, to make the subject at once palpable There is no sign, however, of fangs, of feral cropped, curled sleeping canine figure and elusive, with the edges of forms beastliness in these pictures. hovers pregnantly at the upper right alternating tantalizingly between blurred In “Dog 1” and “Study 1,” for example, corner of the composition. Its form is at suggestiveness and sharp linear delineation, the animal is seen sleeping, curled into itself once weighty and weightless. Seemingly that makes Celia Fernandez Q such a in that almost fetal manner of its species, aloft, like a balloon, its grayish brown complex and consistently fascinating harmless and unguarded. The position is hue hovers against an area of pale pink, painter. –– Maureen Flynn poignant but it is hardly the point of these positioned above a broad block of baby pictures, wherein the tension emanates blue, enlivened by variegated lines Cecilia Fernandez Q, Agora Gallery, from Fernandez Q’s taut handling of and drips, that anchors the bottom of 530 West 25th Street, September 13 - the spatial relationships to which the the composition. It is characteristic of October 4, 2011. Reception: Thursday, great Abstract Expressionist teacher/ Fernandez Q’s painterly panache and September 15, 6 - 8 pm. guru Hans Hofmann referred as “push subtlety as a colorist that she carries off G&S Classifieds opportunities NEW WORK/NEW SPACE A huge gala to launch the season in our beautiful new space: WEST SIDE ARTS COALITION (WSAC) established 1979, welcomes new members from all work by First Street Gallery artists September 6 -October 1. DANA SAULNIER, NIGHT TIDES: WATER, geographic areas. There are approximately 14 exhibits per year for Fine Arts, Photography, and Craft Arts. FLESH, AND SKY October 4-29. First Street Gallery, 526 West 26th Street firststreetgallery@ Music, Poetry, Theater and Dance programs available. Contact info: Tel. 212-316-6024, earthlink.net www.firststreetgallery.net email- [email protected] or website- www.wsacny.org. Or send SASE to the West Side Arts Coalition, PO Box 527, Cathedral Station, New York, NY 10025. Visit our ground floor gallery at 96th Street & Broadway (on the center island) New York City. Open: Wed. 6-8pm, Sat. & Sun., 12-6pm. STROLL THROUGH HISTORY WITH CUSTOM PICTURE FRAMING for artists and galleries. Museum quality, selected frames & THE CONEY ISLAND HISTORY PROJECT mats. Float & dry mounting, canvas stretching. Jadite Galleries, 662 10th Ave. (betw. 46/47 Sts.) WALKING TOUR! Hours: 12 - 6 pm, Free delivery in Manhattan. 212-977-6190 [email protected] Fall Series - Sept 18 thru Oct 30. Visit the Tours page at ConeyIslandHistory.org MONTSERRAT CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY is reviewing artist portofolios for its new events@coneyisland Chelsea Gallery. National and International artists are invited to submit. Sase, slides, photos and brief artist bio. Send to: Montserrat Contemporary Art Gallery, 547 West 27 Street, NYC 10001
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SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 GALLERYSTUDIO 13 LOOKING FOR AMERICA an excerpt from HOODLUM HEART: Confessions of a Test-Dummy for the Crash and Burn Generation a memoir by Ed McCormack While I sincerely believed that I would have been willing to die for love, I was hardly prepared to be tarred and feathered for it. I might shriek like a girl as the hot sticky goo was applied and appear ridiculously unattractive to my love –– like a big molting ostrich! –– were she to see me immediately afterward. Yet in his own genial way, Jeannie’s uncle Walter had made such a fate seem like a distinct possibility, should I stick around and push my luck much further in Fauquier Country in the Virginia horse country. And the following morning, after her grandmother shot me a withering look and muttered something under her breath that sounded like “cur,” I wondered if I was as good as tarred and feathered already. So it was with a confusing mixture of sorrow for my intended’s tears and fear for my own sorry ass that I allowed myself to be driven to the Trailways depot that morning and boarded the bus back to New York without a fight.
* * * As my Uncle Charlie proved after his marriage ended and he drank himself into an early grave, people on my mother’s side of the family could literally die of a Side a couple of years earlier. than opposing early marriage on practical broken heart, even if the official cause on Such maudlin occasions were a specialty grounds as most sensible people would, the death certificate was cirrhosis of the of my mother and her siblings. Although supported me lavishly in my romantic liver. But Charlie was still with us that they were all grown and out on their anguish. In fact, the more they drank the night, after I got back from Virginia, when own by the time my grandfather became more serious Charlie and his older brother my relatives took me out to drown my a widower, after he followed his wife to Georgie began to sound about renting sorrows at a bar called Jack’s Dog House, the grave they would sometimes reduce a car, driving down to Virginia, and in New Dorp, the blue collar beachfront themselves to tears over beers around our transporting a minor they had yet to meet community on Staten Island to which my kitchen table, singing a sentimental old and had only seen in an ad for American parents had moved from the Lower East song that went, “Daddy, dear old Daddy, Airlines that I had proudly showed off way up above she could see/ to them, across state lines. Neither of You were more than a dad/ You my uncles had been around on the day were the best pal I had/ Daddy, I brought Jeannie home to meet my you were a mother to me.” parents and my younger sister Maureen, Now, to paraphrase a more who were already crazy about her (even recent song, it was my party and my habitually silent and noncommital I could cry if I wanted to. But father had to allow as to how she was having always been embarrassed “exceptionally pretty, Eddie, a very sweet by my family's mawkish kid” –– albeit in a somewhat incredulous displays, I refused to give them manner, indicating that he couldn’t that satisfaction, even as my imagine what she saw in me). But in the uncle Georgie kept feeding coins romantic spirit of our crazy clan, both into the jukebox at Jack’s to play of my uncles were ready to incriminate a selection with the hatefully themselves on behalf of a foolhardy haunting refrain “Love letters adventure. straight from the heart/ keep us “I’m not bullshitting you, Chumley,” so near though apart/ I’m not Charlie, who invariably addressed me by alone in the night/ When I can my embarrassing family nickname, kept have all the love you write...” insisting, as his older brother, Georgie, Yet, convinced as I sometimes nodded in agreement, “All she has to do was that there must have been is tell us where to come and pick her up a mix-up at the hospital, I now and we’ll drive down and bring her right felt grateful for having been back here.” born into a family that, rather Fortunately my uncles’ reckless scheme 14 GALLERYSTUDIO SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 a cold winter morning when I’m sitting here fortifying myself with a Rheingold or two for that goddamn trip on that godforsaken ferry to Pier 57, I look at his nibs over there, snoozing by the stove, and wish to Christ I could change places with that lazy mutt.” No one, however, was more distraught about being banished to Darkest Nowheresville than yours truly. Unable to afford a place of my own on a copy boy’s salary, all I could do was stay with friends in Manhattan whenever possible; get wired on espresso and sit up all night at Cafe Figaro; or on those too frequent occasions when I had no other choice, go back to Staten Island and let my mother fill me in on the most recent developments in the family soap opera. Her youngest sister Irene, the latest to make the move, was already complaining that her Italian truck driver husband Frank (who used to put on the gloves with me when I was about ten, staying with them while my mother was in the hospital, and on the pretext of boxing lessons, resentfully knock me around their never had to be put into action. Jeannie Delores had started the tribal migration livingroom) was too much in his element called me a few days later with the from the Lower East Side soon after their on “this island of goombahs.” exhilarating news that, after her mother youngest son, Jimmy Boy, had settled Frank, whose nickname for some reason had returned to Richmond, secure that a dispute with an older bully on Henry was “Buff” (and to whom my father her impulsive plan to marry “that strange Street with a hammer and they decided unfailingly referred as “Buffalino,” in boy” had been thwarted, her grandmother that the old neighborhood was changing honor of his Italian origins), had always had a change of heart and decided not to too fast to remain a place where children been a good amateur balladeer in the stand in her way. One could only surmise might be respectably raised. Tony Bennett mode, performing mostly that upon further reflection a woman Almost from the day they moved, my at weddings and other family functions born in 1900 had decided it would be the mother never stopped telling my sister when we all still lived on the Lower East lesser of two evils to let the foolish child Maureen and me how much Jimmy, his Side. Now he sang on weekends at one of marry the Yankee cur who had seduced big brother George, Jr., and their elder the Island’s many Mafia-owned nightclubs her than to condemn the girl to the scarlet sister Jane were enjoying suburban life. and had turned into a real prima donna, woman’s half-life of shame and social Although my sister and Jane were around according to my mother. ostracism. the same age, Jimmy Boy and Georgie Every Saturday night, as he got ready In any case, we arranged to meet in Boy were both several years younger than to go to the gig, he treated Irene and Washington D.C. and ran into each me. I had already decided where I was the kids like gofers and valets, throwing others’ arms that gloriously sunny day. meant to be and balked at the idea of tantrums worthy of Maria Callas if they “Wow, this thing is heavy,” I said, being uprooted from a place so convenient didn’t have his shoes shined or weren’t picking up her suitcase. “What have you to my beloved Village and transplanted prompt enough in fetching his tux and got in here anyway?” to what I considered the most remote, toupee. Once, when his spaghetti wasn’t “Oh, just my undershirts and things,” backward, and bigoted of the white flight sufficiently al dente, he tossed it up in the said my bride-to-be, and I knew right boroughs. But as soon as the upstairs air and it stuck to the kitchen ceiling, the then our life together was going to be apartment in the two-family rental house red strands dangling down like those long interesting. where my uncle and aunt lived on the ruddy hairs between a buffalo’s legs. We boarded a bus back to New York ground floor became available, we were Always the biggest news, though, in a scene I would later remember fondly already on our way to that blue collar were the latest exploits of my other whenever I heard Simon & Garfunkel’s backwater. aunt Emmy’s criminal offspring Richie song “America,” about two equally As usual my father, who came to hate and Dennis, both of whom splendidly clueless kids setting out on a Greyhound the ninety-minute commute to work demonstrated that while you could take in search of that same mythic land. Only, by bus, ferry, and subway even more a boy out of the Lower East Side, you Jeannie and I traveled no further than than he had hated the Lower East Side, couldn’t always take the Lower East New Dorp Beach, Staten Island, a place to had no say in the matter. All he could Side out of the boy. Either they had which I felt I had been shanghaied by my do after the move had become a fait pistol whipped and robbed the kindly parents against my wishes and where I had accompli was point disgustedly to our neighborhood pharmacist who filled their sworn I would never willingly settle. new typical suburban family dog, Duffy, mother’s prescriptions on credit; or one * * * and complain to his downstairs neighbor, of them had shot an arrow into someone’s My Uncle Georgie and my Aunt “I swear to Jesus, George, sometimes of ass with a powerful cross-bow of the type
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 GALLERYSTUDIO 15 normally used for deer hunting over a On the assumption that Jeannie’s family attic, where we ended up living drug deal gone wrong; or any number parents, being of slightly more recent more like incestuous siblings than proper of other violent incidents and armed vintage, might not exactly share her spouses for the next couple of years. God robberies for which they were constantly grandmother’s old-fashioned notions only knows what grunts, moans, shrieks in and out of jail or prison. regarding the stigma of premarital sex and of delight, mad giggles and things going Only Emmy’s oldest son Eddie seemed attempt to thwart us, our plan was to hide bump bump bump in the night disturbed to have made a success of himself, until out in the family attic until we were safely my mother’s eternal cooking and cleaning, the Staten Island Advance reported that married. To throw them off our trail, we my father’s perennial television watching, his used car lot was the front for a stolen instructed my mother to tell anyone who my sister’s teenage reveries in her room, car ring. My mother laughed when I contacted her from Virginia that we had as we romped energetically in the playpen remarked that it was heartening to hear eloped to South Carolina. of polymorphous perversity, testing all the someone in the family was involved with So fortunately, she was prepared when possibilities of our healthy young bodies in slightly more organized crime. Yet her Claude Eaton, a handsome and charming every innocent, inventive way. sympathy for the two younger thugs, descendant of Mayflower passengers After awhile we began to test my big babies who got too homesick to run with a drinking problem, showed up mother’s patience as well, by behaving very far even when every cop on the unexpectedly at her door one afternoon as irresponsibly as Paul and Elisabeth, island was out gunning for them, seemed while my father was at work, my sister was the rambunctious adolescent brother inexhaustible. at school, and, fortunately, Jeannie and and sister who inhabit a realm of private “Richie is on the run again and he I were across the river attending to our games and fantasies in Jean Cocteau’s stopped by my stand the other day,” she blood test and marriage license. novel “Les Enfants Terribles (The Holy would tell me, referring to the salted Jeannie’s father had a yellow cab that Terrors).” Mama had always been my pretzel concession in the Pathmark store he had taken all the way from Manhattan chief enabler. (Back when I was a teenage in New Dorp Plaza where she had taken a (presumably via the vehicle deck of the poet as lawless, if arguably not as gifted, as part-time job. “Every time him or Dennis ferry, since the Varrazano Narrows Bridge Rimbaud, hadn’t she diverted investigators is in trouble again I try to talk sense into had not yet been completed) idling from the public library who showed up them before they get themselves killed outside the house with the meter running to inquire about all the unreturned books trying to escape. And of course they yes and a bottle of Jack Daniels under his checked out on her son’s card to that me to death: ‘I know aunt Mabel, you’re arm. When my mother told him our same convenient state of South Carolina?) right, I gotta stop livin’ like this.’ Then cover story, he shrugged amiably as if to Now we had rewarded her for helping us they go back and do the same thing again. say,“Well, that’s that,” requested a couple avoid annulment by turning her attic into But they’re not really bad kids. How else of glasses, and insisted that she join him a bohemian garrot where we hid from the could they turn out, all through their in “a toast to our children’s happiness.” adult concerns of the workaday world, as childhood having to watch that dumb When Jeannie and I got back from the in an ivory tower. Polack father of theirs beat the hell out of city that evening, my mother, who always Under my influence, Jeannie had their mother?” had a weakness for handsome alcoholic resumed the artistic interests that had Perhaps because she wished to keep men anyway (or why would she have been discouraged as unsuitable for faith in her own son’s virtue despite all married my father, the tippling heartthrob a proper Southern belle during her evidence to the contrary, my mother of the company health club, and why adolescence. She painted and wrote seemed to agree with Father Flanagan, would she be such an avid viewer of Dean poetry. She even started styling my hair. the founder of Boys Town, that “There’s Martin’s TV show?) was as flushed and Able now to pursue self-expression no such thing as a bad boy.” So she’d giddy as a schoolgirl. For the afternoon, with a vengeance, she began to think of invariably slip her fugitive nephews a little she told us, had ended with Claude modeling as frivolous, or at very least something from the unofficial “bonuses” chasing her around the dining room table, “superficial” –– one of our favorite words she regularly awarded herself out of the until she managed to convince him that when we were feeling especially deep pretzel stand till. (What her cheap bum her husband was due home from work –– and let her agency contacts lapse. I of a boss didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him, at any minute and he reluctantly took his had mixed feelings about her modeling right?) leave. anyway. While it made me proud to see But even Mama was appalled by a Not until years later would we learn her picture in a magazine, I was still holiday card Dennis once sent her from that my future father-in-law had used insecure enough to fear she might get Rahway Prison. Put out by the Aryan the occasion as an excuse to go on a swept away by a world of glamour in Brotherhood, it had a picture on the front monumental binge, not returning to which I had no place. And I was insanely of three hooded Klansmen burning a cross Virginia for several days. jealous the one or two times she posed on a lawn, and when you opened it, it With my uncle Charlie as best man and with a male model, despite her assurances said, “Wishing You a White Christmas.” my mother, my father, and my sister as our that the superficial vanity of the guys in * * * witnesses and only guests (we were in a that business made them anything but For a long time, for reasons I seem to hurry, it was a weekday and all the other attractive. have made clear here, it had behooved relatives were at work), the ceremony In any case, I was pleased that now me to keep a safe distance from family took place at an Episcopal church called she modeled exclusively for me –– at my life on Staten Island. But now, with a Saint Simon’s, which had a more liberal request, almost always nude. Don’t believe fiancé in tow and no immediate prospects attitude toward quickie weddings than anyone who tries to tell you that aesthetics for supporting her (obviously, it would our local Catholic parish. It was followed and salaciousness don’t mix; that a male have been awkward to show up for work by an intimate, impromptu reception at artist leaves his libido outside the studio at the Hearst Corporation as though Chinatown Chinese Restaurant in the door when he works from the nude female nothing had happened), the prodigal son nearby Hylan Boulevard shopping center. model. What would be the point in that? conveniently returned to the fold. Our honeymoon was spent in my Being a vigorous young man, I can’t
16 GALLERYSTUDIO SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 remember ever not being in a state of We didn’t learn until years later Jeannie’s first Christmas on Staten tumescence with my beautiful bride, ever that they had originally belonged to Island, when my child-bride was the eager helpmate, standing, sitting, or an older artist named Jay Milder, for crestfallen to learn that we Yankees lying naked before me. Painting her that whom my sister occasionally baby-sat, bought trees in a shopping mall rather way was invariably foreplay to the foreplay. and who I would eventually befriend in than chopping them down in the woods, If anything, the sense of being in the the downtown art scene long after the it was Charlie who stalked onto a presence of something as eternal as a albums had gone the careless way of neighbor’s lawn like a serial killer with an classical statue made it all the more erotic, most of our material possessions. He and ax and abducted a plump young pine, later as I alluded in some lines I scribbled in my his wife Sheila had lived for awhile in a explaining to his irate older sister, “I just poetry journal after one session: “Look/ storefront on Cedar Grove Avenue, the hadda do it Mae, we don’t want the poor on the avenue/ the same come-/ liness same street as our seedy neighborhood kid to be homesick, right?” we see/ in Antiquity/ only with arms!” bar, and he had set up a studio in the Now he immediately offered Jeannie Objectively, those youthful nudes may cavernous shell of Seaside Hospital, an and me the Castro convertible sofa in his have been among my most derivative abadoned infirmary on New Dorp Beach. apartment in Elmhurst, Queens, where he paintings. I seem to recall that in more They were known as “the beatniks down drove a delivery truck for a furniture chain than one, the warm flesh tones I stroked by the beach” and, being outsiders, were called Koos and sought sexual solace after into Jeannie’s naturally elongated torso apparently considered fair game by the work with rummy barmaids old enough owed something to Modigliani. Yet there local burglars, as we too would probably to be his mother. But I realized from my was nothing objective about them for me. have been were we not so securely divorced uncle’s forlorn expression, as he And they would be among the works I sequestered in a reputable workingclass carried the bedding into his living room, grieved for most viscerally, some years in home. that to stay with him too long would be to the future, after a vindictive madwoman Hardly being stupid, however, it rub his nose in our wedded bliss –– not to who lent me a studio took it upon herself was inevitable that my mother would mention inhibit our conjugal gymnastics. to dispose of almost all my paintings as a eventually weary of supporting our La So I called my mother first thing in the calculated act of revenge. Boheme routine, as we squandered the morning and sweet-talked us back into the But long before we could even imagine money she gave us to travel across the attic. anything bad ever happening to us, we bay and job-hunt on idle hours in Village Although I had long practice at were simply blissful in our attic. We spent cafes. It was as though we had each found winning my mother’s sympathy, no our evenings painting, writing, regaling in the other our missing twin and were so matter how angry I managed to make each other with poetry (our own, as well incestuously contented together as to be her with me, it was her daughter-in-law as everything from Donald Allen’s The without further aspiration. who placated her in a more practical and New American Poetry to the Rubaiyat of After months of this, my mother, lasting way by taking steps to remedy our Omar Khayyam), and listening to Ornette who had initially been charmed by her unemployment situation. First Jeannie Coleman’s LP “Free Jazz,” which had a new daughter-in-law’s “you-all’s” and got hired as a receptionist on Wall painting by Jackson Pollock on its cover other cute Southern belle mannerisms, Street, always easy for a young woman that made it all the more appealingly avant attributing to her none of the faults she as decorative as she. Then she contacted garde to us. I had acquired it dirt-cheap, saw in my sister, of whom she could be the Hearsts, probably playing upon the along with a stack of other hip modern unfairly critical, realized we were two of a guilt they must have felt for not having jazz albums, as “swag” (a longshoreman’s kind. Calling us “thick as thieves, partners chaperoned her more successfully, to term for items like the “Grace Line” in crime,” she finally blew up and ordered secure me a new newspaper position. This towels and other stolen goods I grew up us out of her attic, leaving me no choice one was with the Brooklyn Section of with and took for granted) from a local but to call upon the limitless good nature the New York Journal-American, in the thief named Billy Whitman, who hung of my favorite uncle, former bed-mate, same building on South Street where I out at Jack’s Dog House. childhood buddy, and best man, Charlie. had fraudulently filled out the application
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 GALLERYSTUDIO 17 that got me my first job with the Hearst lead to a reporter’s position. And since share with her over the course of a long Corporation. it appeared that I would have to make a life together, next we headed west to the That John Newton, the ornery editor living at something in the square world Cedar Tavern, on University Place, one- of the Brooklyn Section –– who, because anyway, a future journalism didn’t sound time haunt of my Abstract Expressionist of Bill Hearst’s personal intervention, too bad. (Kerouac’s good buddy Lucien heros. There were only a couple of other may have assumed I was a rich kid with Carr was an editor for the United Press, customers in the Cedar that afternoon and a dillitantish whim to try newspapering, after all, and it didn’t stop him from we took a table in the front, right across and have resented being stuck with me making the Beat scene). from the bar. I was telling her a story I –– had the same name as a notorious But a future in anything suddenly had read about how that prodigious drunk 18th century slave ship captain seemed seemed like a moot point, once the Cuban Jackson Pollock was always getting 86’d entirely appropriate. When he got after Missile Crisis got under way in October from this place for brawling with fellow me about not keeping up the shelves of 1962, not long after I was hired at artists, but would come back and smear of back issues in the office, a duty in the Journal-American. Since imminent his face against the plate glass window like which I was admittedly remiss from the doom has a wonderful way of enhancing an imploring gargoyle, until they let him start, I felt more like a miscreant cabin romance, if nuclear annihilation was a back in, when I noticed a middle-aged boy under the lash than the copy boy I distinct possibility Jeannie and I chose to man with a shock of salt and pepper hair was supposed to be. However, since the treat it as a certainty. shooting straight up from his head like original Newton eventually underwent a Without telling my mother we were porcupine quills staring over at us from a religious conversion and ended up writing skipping work or even bothering to call corner seat at the bar. When I stared back the repentant Christian hymn “Amazing in to our respective jobs, we decided to at him, he flashed a crooked, kindly grin, Grace,” something I could never have wander around the city doing whatever we and called over, “Hey, I’d like to buy you imagined his namesake doing, it would wished until the missiles rained down and two lovebirds a drink.” probably be more accurate to compare we moved on to spend eternity together. Since it was the Cedar and his dialogue the editor to Captain Bligh, as played Everywhere we went, people were had that slightly dated Bogart style some by Charles Laughton in “Mutiny on the crowding anxiously around newsstands of those old New York School artists Bounty.” to gawk at headlines, listening to staticky affected, I took him for a painter –– A hulking, white-haired, red-faced old news reports on transistor radios, and perhaps a lesser known peer of Pollock man, whose pronounced limp suggested staring at television screens set up in store and de Kooning, waxing sentimental on a a peg-leg and added to the seafaring windows at ominous black and white bender. Then he came over to the table, impression, Newton had worked for the images of the Soviet ships that JFK had stuck out his hand and introduced himself, Journal-American in one capacity or ordered to turn back steaming toward and suddenly I was star-struck. another for over five decades, according Cuba, bearing more nuclear warheads. I had been a fan of William Steig’s to Stan Fischler, a reporter for the Reasoning that the Chinese, having cartoons ever since I first encountered his Brooklyn Section who tried to give me survived so many centuries of drastic work as a young kid in the back issues of practical advice about how to humor history, were unlikely to be as hysterical The New Yorker on the end-tables in my and get around him. Although Newton as everybody else in the city –– or if mother’s doctor’s waiting room. Since would sometimes be a little mellower in they were, the language barrier would my mother suffered from a chronic heart the afternoons, following a liquid lunch muffle the anxiety level, at least for us condition and her checkups often led to at Mutchie’s Bar, the old newspapermen’s –– I suggested that we go hang out lengthy hospitalizations, visits uptown to hangout down the block, his habitual in Chinatown, a much smaller, more Dr. Basile’s office were invariably anxious crankiness may have been exacerbated by insular neighborhood in the early sixties occasions for me. Thus the magazine’s a raging case of hemorrhoids that made it than it is today. And I seemed to have many gag cartoons provided welcome necessary for him to cushion his desk chair calculated correctly, judging from the distraction from worrying over the with a rubber donut almost as big as an relative calm, as we sat in a seafood bar outcome while she was in being examined. inner tube. on Mott Street called The Lime House, What attracted me to Steig’s cartoons But as the former Brooklyn Section where I introduced my recent bride to in particular was that, along with those copy boy who had been mercifully the exquisite sensual pleasure of washing of Syd Hoff, a lesser cartoonist who also transferred to another section of the paper down raw clams with cold beer, which favored prole subjects, in contrast to the to make room for me put it over beers at she rarely drank, her father’s alcoholism sophisticated nightclub denizens and Mutchie’s, “That old bastard just likes to having had the exact opposite effect on Park Avenue swells of Peter Arno, Rea bust balls, period.” her as my father’s had on me. (Being Irvin, Whitney Darrow, Jr. and others, Since there was only one other reporter the more thoughtful youngster, she saw Steig’s streetsmart urchins, stoop-sitters, besides Fischler, a veteran newshound the shame, secrecy, and stigma attached lamppost-leaners, and tenement dwellers named Al Sekine, on staff, I occasionally to overindulgence by polite Southern who dined in their undershirts had a rude got to try my hand at a short filler item. society, while I saw working people who Lower East Side vigor with which I could Inexplicable as it seems now, I was were gloomy all week whooping it up more readily identify. especially proud of the headline I came on Saturday night, and couldn’t wait to And in that circuitously associative way up with for one that I rewrote from a get drunk myself.) But Jeannie gamely that memory often works, meeting him press release about an old whaling kettle agreed to drink with me that day and was now as the world prepared to end made in Mystic Seaport, Connecticut, that was delightfully tipsy by the time we were me flash back to my mother’s account being used to collect charitable donations: working on our second dozen clams and of how she first met Dr. Basile, a suave “Whale of a Kettle Kicks Off Salvation second pitcher of beer. little Frenchman who thought nothing of Army’s Local Fund Drive.” Since I also wanted to give her a taste, patting his female patients on the backside The Hearsts had hinted to Jeannie that however abbreviated, of some of the in an affectionate way, and with whom the job, if I stuck with it this time, could other earthly pleasures I had hoped to I had always suspected she was at least a
18 GALLERYSTUDIO SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 little bit in love. black ribbon down onto the cute little to deal with stubborn elderly people. So, If the good doctor, who was several years potbelly beneath his starchy white coat, he I’m going to try anyway, okay?” older than my mother, were still alive and resembled Mr. Peanut. She never told me exactly what she practicing today, I have no doubt he’d be “He’s such a shrimp, I could eat said to the old tyrant. But she must have up to his stethoscope in sexual harassment spaghetti off his head,” she’d say, perhaps worked some powerful Southern belle suits. But as far as Mama was concerned, to ridicule the very idea that anything mojo on him, because she came back Dr. Basile could do no wrong, ever since could ever go on between them. But she talking about what a sweet, gallant old the day she grabbed his sleeve while he was was clearly crazy about him and I got the gentleman he was. passing through a ward in Saint Clare's feeling that he had a special place in his “He even sent someone out to get us Hospital in midtown Manhattan shortly heart for her as well. coffee and took out his wallet to show me after her first heart attack. After one of her attacks he even made some pictures of himself as a young man,” Having been informed by the attending a house call, traveling downtown to a she told me. “And after I told him how physician that her childhood bout with neighborhood whose squalor obviously handsome he looked in them, he agreed to rheumatic fever had developed into a offended his French bourgeois sensibility, give you one more chance, as long as you life-threatening condition and micro valve and doing so during a dock strike, when show at nine sharp tomorrow morning and surgery was her only hope, she clung to his he had no chance of being paid. My father don’t ever disappear like that again.” white coat, begging for a second opinion. was in his usual chair at the kitchen table If I was not as ecstatic as I should have Attempting as gently as possible to and my uncle Georgie was standing at been about still being alive to return to disengage himself from her grasp, he the stove, frying porkchops. It was not Newton’s slave galley, at least it was a pleaded that he was a gynecologist and quite noon, but they had already gone consolation to realize, once again, that not qualified to diagnose heart ailments. through a couple of sixpacks. As Dr. Basile I had married a most formidable young But she tearfully implored him to look at leaned over the sofa with his stethoscope, woman. her chart, and realizing that he would not listening to my mother’s heart in the * * * be allowed to finish making his rounds livingroom, which was continuous with unless he did so, he sighed and took the the kitchen of our railroad flat, Georgie ARTIST-CRAFTSMEN OF NEW YORK clipboard from the foot of her hospital bed. kept interrupting him, pulling the meat Continued from page 11 He studied the chart for awhile, raising his out of the pot with a fork, waving it “Maximalism” is the only word that eyebrows significantly several times, shaking around like a flag, saying, “Are you sure suffices to describe the mixed media/ his head, and making little “tsk tsk” sounds you don’t want one of these chops, doc?” Polymer clay wall reliefs of Joan Israel that, along with his accent, my mother At one point, just as he glanced up, whose “My Own Zoo” evokes an entire relished imitating the many times over the annoyed, to insist once again that he did bestiary of fanciful creatures and critters years that I heard her repeat the story to not, my uncle dropped the meat on the anyone who would listen. floor, picked it up, and put it right back surrounded by all manner of colorful Then, leaning close and putting his into the pan. and ornate rain forest flora. Like those of stethoscope to the chest of the wanly Dr. Basile leaned closer and whispered Romare Bearden and Matisse’s “Jazz,” the pretty young woman languishing in the to my mother, “You will never recover, collages of Elizabeth BouRaad are bold beds while surreptitiously slipping his card dear, if you don’t get away from this explorations of cut colored shapes that into her hand, Dr. Basile whispered in my madhouse!” create figurative compositions, of which mother’s ear, “Listen carefully, dear. You It was just the sort of absurd human one of the most striking is “La Bamba,” must never repeat to anyone what I am situation that William Steig savored in depicting a jaunty figure in tiger-patterned about to say, because if they knew I told his drawings. Perhaps he saw Jeannie and shorts. Then there is Judy Pestronk, who you this, they could take away my license me in cartoon terms as well, when he first moves easily between sculptural jewelry and to practice medicine. Do you understand spied us through the mirror behind the jeweled sculpture, as seen by comparing her this, dear? Very well, now pay attention: bar at the Cedar, all scribbled together at wearable piece in sterling silver, “Face Pin,” You must not sign for this surgery. It is our table like the couple in his wonderful with her freestanding figure “Peacock,” very risky and you are in no condition drawing “Newlyweds.” in vermeil with colorful gems for eyes and to survive it. Maybe when it has been Past the initial introductions I don’t decorating its tail. perfected this will change, but definitely even recall what we talked about –– Photography made a strong showing not now. So after you are released from certainly nothing so depressing as the in the late William Englander’s haunting the hospital, I want you to come to my day’s news! All I remember is that the images of children in Paris, one of a shy little office and I will try to take care of you as kindly cartoonist was memorably gracious girl half hidden behind a hall door while a best I can in the meantime.” to two scared kids he saw clinging to each bigger boy grins mischievously through an From that moment on, he was her other for dear life and decided to favor adjoining glass panel. Also outstanding in Maurice Chevalier of the bedside manner, with a Doomsday drink. this category were Robin Herstand’s large treating her for many years for a fraction * * * color print of a solitary figure strolling on of what he charged his more affluent When the Soviet ships turned back, a nocturnal beach enveloped in moody uptown patients, and affording me the the missiles were withdrawn from Cuba, indigo auras, evocatively titled, “Dreaming opportunity to devour those first precious and the world didn’t end on schedule, of a Steinway... and Jazz Piano Blues #1.” issues of The New Yorker piled up in his I told Jeannie that her plan to show up We were also impressed by Trudy Jeremias’ waiting room. personally at the Brooklyn Section and try exquisite close-up of beads of water on With more gratitude and affection than to convince John Newton to give me one a delicate tree-limb, “After the Storm,” malice, my father always referred to Dr. more chance would be a waste of time. and Lauren Golden’s unearthly landscape Basile as “that little frog.” And my mother But my wife was adamant: “If there’s “Illumination,” both of which were liked to joke that, with his eyeglasses one thing I learned from growing up with awarded Honorable Mentions. dangling like a monocle from a long my grandmother,” she insisted, “it’s how –– Maurice Taplinger
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 GALLERYSTUDIO 19 ART ONLINE Joan Marie Kelly: A Painter Among Sex Workers or centuries artists have been painting the Lily Under the Couch,” in which the In contrast Fbrothel and harem scenes, almost semi-nude body of another sex worker, to the always from the romantically skewed this one as zaftig as a female sumo meticulous perspective of what art historians refer to wrestler, is just as dramatically illuminated classical as the Male Gaze. Some examples that from a source outside the picture space realism of come most immediately to mind are the –– conceivably a gigantic flat TV screen of her larger many paintings and drawings of brothels the sort one might expect to find in an up studio in nineteenth century Paris by Toulouse- to date art Asian fleshpot –– as she leans paintings, Lautrec and Jules Pascin, in which back on a sofa draped with a satiny blue the on-site prostitutes and Madames are depicted cloth, apparently studying a text-message studies are lolling about in plush Victorian parlors; on her cell phone. (“This is Zen, a Chinese vigorously teasing or even bullying customers –– as sex worker from Singapore,” Kelly tells us immediate in Edgar Degas’ monotype, “The Client,” in her informative exhibition notes. “The impressions where a sassy nude tart takes charge of a hand phone was a part of her business. of particular timid little Milquetoast of a bourgeois in She sang Hokkien songs and answered the sitters, as a derby and dark suit, boldly yanking him phone postponing all engagements until well as into the boudoir by his cane-arm while the painting was finished.”) crowd scenes three of her fellow working ladies look on That even the poorest prostitutes in of workers “Eco Cyber Feminist” much amused; or, in their idle moments Singapore sport trendy “skinny jeans” and seeking engaging in indolent erotic play with each employ state of the art technology in plying nocturnal distraction or pleasure in their off other in a manner especially compelling their trade are among many revelations hours amid the brightly lighted stores, stalls, to the perversely voyeuristic aspects of the to be gleaned from Kelly’s pictures, of and bordellos, executed in bravura strokes Male Gaze. which one of the most poignant is “Night of bright pigment. Ingres, of course, gave us the ultimate Negotiations.” This large canvas in a vertical Kelly won the confidence of the local classical courtesan in his “Odalisque,” a term format apparently depicts the delicate people by spending every Friday night which has come into common usage for an commercial courtship between an attractive painting in Geylang, one of the red artistic convention later adopted by Matisse young couple, which here apparently involves light districts of Singapore and inviting and others, of painting voluptuous female a literal dance before a mirror around a comments from bystanders. nudes, often in settings of hokey Orientalia, dimly-lit room where two wine glasses can be “Because the people of Geylang suggesting harems or exotic bordellos. seen on a nearby table, he touching her upper thought I ‘should’ want to paint ‘beautiful It would appear, however, that the thigh, she messaging his bare chest with one women,’” she says, “they brought the sex ultimate contemporary odalisque has been hand and with the other gently restraining workers in the area to pose for me.’” painted by a woman artist named Joan one of his hands from venturing beyond her She developed a rapport with the Marie Kelly, as part of a series called “Zones upper thigh, which it already clutches –– at women, who took this friendly red-haired of Contact,” centering on sex workers least until the exact terms of engagement foreigner into their confidence and shared and their clients in red light districts in have been agreed upon. the intimate details of their lives with her. Singapore and Calcutta. Indeed, the nude In another life they might have married. She reciprocated by giving them drawing in Kelly’s large oil on canvas, “Eco-Cyber But she is by economic necessity a sex pads and encouraging them to sketch Feminist” is every bit as voluptuous as the worker, possibly still kicking back her entire their memories of home and even to languorously reclining figure in Ingres’ first year’s wages to the brothel owners “collaborate” on some of her more casually painting. But rather than lying supine on to pay her passage to Singapore. And he executed paintings of them by signing their a divan, she sits upright on a sofa with is most probably an itinerant immigrant names or adding background details, as earphones on, a cell phone in one hand, laborer from Bangladesh who can barely seen in “Thai Woman with Lipstick” and and an open laptop on the low coffee table afford to buy her favors for an hour or the group portrait “Thai Women Getting before her, off of which spills a veritable two, much less support a wife, on his paltry Ready,” where the more raw colors, looser serpent's nest of wires and cables. Being a wages from the factory or construction site. paint handling and the Buddhas, sampans, proactive rather than a passive odalisque, Thus the sadly romantic stalemate in which and other exotica sketched in by the sex electronic gadgetry helps her maintain the artist freezes them for all time. workers creates a painterly effect curiously “zones of contact” with her clients. Such imaginative speculation, which akin to some of Matisse’s odalisques. With this canvas, powerfully painted in the narrative allusiveness of these paintings Even more germane, however, given the an accomplished realist style, the light of encourages anyway in the viewer, is based in hard economic facts of the sex workers’ the laptop screen illuminating the serenely part on Kelly’s web site, which offers a wealth existence, is that Joan Marie Kelly paid smiling face and formidable hourglass of information about the conditions under her models a fair trade posing wage figure of the enterprising sex worker in a which sex workers and their clients in India –– something quite unheard of, from what manner that harks back to the candlelit and Singapore are forced to live. For the one gathers, in that part of the world. scenes of Georges de la Tour, Kelly updates artist truly “got down with the people,” so to Yet those of us who have been afforded and revitalizes a venerable theme for the speak, by establishing herself as a benign, not enduring glimpses of a fascinating closed ages. But even while extolling her for to mention novel, presence in the bustling world by this immensely gifted painter replacing lasciviousness and exoticism with nighttime streets of Little India, painting are by far the biggest beneficiaries of that the superior wit and empathy of the Female portraits of all comers –– or at least anyone deeply human transaction. Gaze, one should make clear that Kelly is, who wished to sit –– at her portable easel. –– Ed McCormack above all else, one hell of a painter. Several of these plein air portraits were Indeed, among contemporary realists also featured in Kelly’s recent exhibition Joan Marie Kelly, recently seen at only Alfred Leslie approaches her mastery at Blue Mountain Gallery in Chelsea, and Blue Mountain Gallery 530 West 25th St. of chiaroscuro, which is also evident in some can be seen, along with photos of the Her work can be viewed on her website: another large oil on canvas called “Throw artist at work on the streets, on the website. www.joanmarikelly.net 20 GALLERYSTUDIO SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 ART ONLINE Luminous Transcendence in the Art of Saugy n first encountering the innovative the symmetrical formats the artist favors in novelty, since Saugy’s works on paper Opaintings employing mixed techniques other works in the series as well). Indeed, are entirely consistent with those on on Plexiglas of the Swiss-French artist for all its visual attributes of purity and Plexiglas and impressive in their own right, Catherine de Saugy, who prefers to be balance achieved with a pristine and refined particularly the composition called “Don known simply as Saugy, their intriguing technique characterized by subtle shadings Quixote,” with its complex overlappings of combination of fluid organic shapes afloat and tonal felicities calculated to please even rectangular and circular forms engaging in a amid more rectangular forms suggesting an aesthete whose primary concern is with geometric dance through which more fluid portals, evoked memories of Aldous formal relationships, “L’envol” transcends forms and sinuous linear configurations Huxley’s “Doors of Perception,” its its purely aesthetic virtues –– as well as the thread like strains of an elusive melody. She drama of otherworldly incongruities perceived correctly, however, that she could that are normally classified as imbue the particular forms in her visual “surreal” –– to achieve a sense of vocabulary with further depth and mystery what Huxley, viewing a van Gogh in the newer medium, the unique qualities under the influence of mescaline, of which become immediately apparent in a referred to as “ a sacramental vision work called “Winter 1.” of reality, where everything shone For here is all the beauty and mystery with an Inner Light and was infinite of the season encompassed, as in a snow in its significance.” globe, in a sublime minimalist composition Here, as in all of Saugy’s works comprised of a single white-on-white on Plexiglas, which she substituted orb contained within the rectangle of for canvas in 2005, twelve years the Plexiglas panel. Its perfect symmetry into her artistic career, the sense plays off against the subtly irregular of ethereality is enhanced by the configurations of white strokes within translucence of the material itself, its circumference, which could almost which is auspiciously suited to her appear akin to those in Robert Ryman’s exquisitely delicate delineation of white-on-white works, except that in her forms, as seen in another work Saugy’s painting, rather than merely on a Plexiglas panel entitled “Le exploiting the materiality of pigment, they Bouquet de Dulcinee,” where the are insulated beneath the surface of the L’envol romantic notion of presenting of transparent support rather than upon the title lifted from a line in the great British bouquet to one’s sweetheart, inherent in surface of a canvas and thereby transcend visionary William Blake’s poem “The the title, is somewhat ironically dampened the palpable to suggest more complexly Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” by an image that, while essentially abstract, variegated qualities and contrasts between Huxley’s book was inspired by an nonetheless suggests the melancholy the matte whiteness of powdery virgin experimental mescaline trip undertaken lyricism of scattered windblown petals of snow, the sheen of slippery ice, and even over the course of a single afternoon an autumnal burnished orange hue in flight the cirrocumulus clouds that our warm, as part of a much broader program of past the unforgiving geometry of a stony vital human breath issues out into the frigid consciousness expansion. And although gray facade. Huxley eventually decided that psychoactive Interpreted in such a manner, this (later to be referred to as “psychedelic”) composition has the poignant beauty drugs were merely “toxic shortcuts” to a of an Edith Piaf song. Yet one must be “self-transcendence” which could be more cautioned about reading too-specific lastingly achieved through meditation, meanings into any work by an artist as autohypnosis, and The Alexander innovated, adventurous and multilayered Technique, and other more holistic as Saugy, and in whose richly varied oeuvre methods, the experience yielded “purely such symbols invariably take on a broader, aesthetic” benefits that led to insights more metaphysical, abstract suggestiveness suggesting that, along with Vermeer, –– here possibly having more to do more Chinese painting, and other examples cited with the transience of time itself, rather in the text, the author might have had a than with the dissolution of a romantic keen appreciation for the metaphysical liaison. After all, of her initial decision to Intuition aspects of Saugy’s art. For her works create move beyond the canvas to Plexiglas, Saugy a visual language for how the mind expands herself, a musician trained at the Geneva winter air. and experiences a timeless dimension Conservatoire de Musique before turning Indeed, it is Saugy’s ability to juggle wherein the physical world disperses and to painting, has stated, “I had a desire to so many diverse allusions within a single becomes pure energy. experiment with painting by introducing composition and make them speak to One especially apt example can be seen in another dimension to it; to expand ‘finite us on several levels simultaneously that “L’envol,” in which sinuous graceful shapes time,’ to drive emotion to express itself by makes her works on Plexiglas infinitely float like wisps of smoke or translucent rose- using materials that are supposedly cold compelling, amounting to a veritable colored clouds over superimposed window- and techniques that appear to be complex visual manifestation of the ever shifting like rectangles. As in ancient Chinese scroll and inaccessible; to mingle inner vision and kaleidoscope of memory fragments and painting, these ethereal elements seem like outer vision, both of which are captured by sense perceptions about which Huxley envoys from infinity, an effect enhanced by our eye, over and beyond logic, analysis and wrote so eloquently. ––Peter Wiley the perfectly square shape of the Plexiglas observation.” panel which, like that of a circle, signifies Obviously, the decision was not www.catherine-de-saugy.com a limitless eternal expanse (as do, in fact, determined by considerations of mere SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 GALLERYSTUDIO 21 SHARYN FINNEGAN “between the measure of a place and the icon pose and...God help us all! Continued from page 8 immediacy of the painted view.” Nor could But by now (since they’re multiples, you of therapy!” inveterate creatures of concrete like myself, see, not unique works like Cenedella’s ) my Even more relevant from an artistic who have never experienced anything more umpteenth tea-tag of the day is again reminding standpoint, however, is that in this exacting, Arctic than the record snowfalls that blanketed me not to interrupt that which speaks exquisitely painted large canvas, with its rich New York City this past January, have wished eloquently for itself. gravy-brown background and warm flesh tones for a more appropriate work to preserve our So I rest my case, fellow Americans, and refer brought alive by beautifully limned shadows great adventure than “Riverside Drive, Winter you to the full color reproduction on our front and highlights, Finnegan goes toe-to-toe with 2011.” cover. the late Flemish master without coming away For no less than her series of muscular oil –– Ed McCormack the least bit bruised. sketches of icebergs in Greenland on aluminum, Equally powerful in its own way is the earlier this large oil on collaged Mylar of snowed-in WSAC “UPTOWN DOWNTOWN” diptych “Split Self, N.M., ’76,” in which the cars lining the slippery slope alongside the park Continued from page 10 artist straddles two canvases, clothed in one, and bare trees clawing a frigid white sky evokes “129th Street.” And she also showed a more nude in the other, with hands on hips and the terrible beauty of winter as only Marcia traditional gift for incisive portraiture in her legs parted in a bodacious pose reminiscent of Clark can. picture of a street vendor in African garb Wonder Woman. Ostensibly, this large work –– Ed McCormack standing in front of mural of great African- harks back to a time when Finnegan traveled American leaders and the greeting “Welcome to between studios in two different places, but the PAT FAIRHEAD Heavenly Harlem.” psychological implications of the title suggest Continued from page 6 Jack Cesareo is perhaps best described the self-questioning endemic to a tumultuous upon and within a body of water. Her broad as a photographic conceptualist, since all period in “herstory,” as they used to say. areas of boldly blocked-in color are often of his pictures center around a giant pink- In Finnegan’s case, the personal narrative separated by narrower bands of a contrasting frosted cupcake that he apparently moves also includes her triumph over a serious illness, hue indicating a horizon line between watery to different parts of the city, documenting celebrated in the small oil “Haircut, ‘85,” in depths and endless sky, in compositions as peoples’ reactions. In ”Columbus circle”, which her locks are not as long and lustrous but stringently formal in their own way as the Color bemused pedestrians rally around the imposing have at least grown back. Then there is “Death Field paintings of Mark Rothko. confection, creating a festive mood. On “142nd in the Family, ‘05” another small but powerful In Fairhead’s case, however, the serene Street and 5th Avenue,” however, workers facial self portrait painted just a few days after stillness of the overall format is sensationally busily shoveling snow appear oblivious to the her mother’s death on an old masonite panel, disrupted by vigorous bursts of splashy “action incongruous cupcake. the distressed condition of which matches the painting” which, unlike the calligraphic lines of It’s all about contrasts. artist’s grief- drained expression. Mark Tobey or the drips and spatters of Jackson ––Mark Spencer Perhaps the most affecting painting of all is Pollock, are all the more powerful for springing “Woman 60, ‘07,” another large oil in which from a natural source rather than from a formal WSAC SALON SHOW Sharyn Finnegan pays tribute to that Alice imperative. Continued from page 12 Neel’s famous nude self portrait at age eighty, Indeed, like the British master of marine drum with the phrase of the title printed four years before her death. For by painting scenes J.M.W. Turner, who once had himself on it appears at first glance to be a floral herself in the same state and approximately lashed to the mast of a schooner in order to still life. The same genre is also delightfully the same position, Sharyn Finnegan (whose experience the full force of his subject, one gets revamped by Meg Boe Birns in her style is closer to the unflinching realism of the feeling that Pat Fairhead literally paints from deliciously tactile painting of a painting Lucien Freud than to Neel’s personal take within the center of the storm. “French Flowers,” with textures like cake on expressionism) flies bravely in the face of –– Maurice Taplinger frosting and a label on its painted “frame” fashion, imparting a similarly liberating nobility SENATEDELLA! that says, “Les Fleurs Francais.” Richard –– and, yes, beauty, to the aging female body. Continued from page 9 Carlson also puts a new spin on floral still –– Ed McCormack not be politically incorrect and leave out life in his mixed media work “Light,” in the Republican pinup girls like Michel Bachmann, geometric compartments that distinguish JANESE HEXON Sarah Palin and Ann Coulter) –– as only a his more abstract compositions function Continued from page 8 native son can. effectively as containers for more traditional increasing “technocratization” of society –– and And now we have the U.S. Senate with all imagery. art –– by infusing their work with “poetic or the usual suspects on both sides of the aisle Two final artists, Deborah Yaffe and lyrical qualities derived from an inherent respect in that veritable rogue’s gallery cavorting like Amy Rosenfeld, give new meaning to the for the human being.” characters in an Ensor carnival or a three ring term “mixed media,” each through her Whether it is the totem of fused faces in her circus staged in a gaudy shopping mall where inventive use of materials: Yaffe’s textile “Distant Memories,” or the poignant parody of Newt Gingrich rides astride the GOP elephant assemblage, “Growing Flower,”suspended defensive hauteur in the single figure “Alpha- and the present pope and the ghost of Osama from a crossbar like a Chinese scroll, makes Omega,” those qualities are everywhere evident Bin Laden recite from their respective holy fanciful reference to natural evolution with in the sculpture of Janese Hexon. And given her books side by side as our beleaguered President printed floral patterns that expand as they passionate, almost self-effacing, commitment balances on a tightrope up near banners in the ascend. Rosenfeld’s “Assorted Collage” to an eternal subject, it seems a safe bet that peanut gallery that say “Defeat Health Care,” makes innovative use of aluminum soda can Hexon’s work will outlast the trends with which and “Help Save Capitalism,” and “Tea Party, snap-tops and plastic packaging materials, she now seems so much at odds, and endure. The Party of God,” and “Corporations Are transforming this banal and familiar –– Peter Wylie People” (the latter recalling the billionaire dwarf everyday industrial detritus in a manner Mayor of New York’s astounding statement that makes us discover its hidden beauty. MARCIA CLARK that “K-Mart is a good corporate citizen”), Indeed, like all of their peers in this Continued from page 5 while down below the president’s erstwhile lively salon exhibition, splendidly curated edifice painted over a map of the region opponent is flashing his little pit bull fangs and by participating artist Margo Mead, they transfer-printed onto the canvas, creating a probably still going on patronizingly about “Joe both demonstrate the transformative magic metaphysical synthesis that splendidly realizes the Plumber,” while his dim bimbo of a former of art. Clark’s stated aim of creating a tension running mate strikes a prayerful Christian Right –Byron Coleman 22 GALLERYSTUDIO SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Fall: Rising Above 9/11 Art Club, Inc. A fine arts exhibit September 10 - October 2, 2011 Reception: Sunday, September 11, 2011 2pm - 6pm 115th Annual Open Exhibition Douglas Cisneros offers a 9/11 blessing at the reception October 4–October 28, 2011 D. J. Barry • Nicolas Bouteneff • Carson Ferri-Grant* • Ha Lee %HQHILW5HFHSWLRQ Friday, October 14, 5:30-8 PM Artur Pashkov • Russell Swanson • Olivier Rabbath • Hani Shihada Shikoh Shiraiwa • Roy Szuper • Peter Tunney • Regina Valluzzi National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South, NYC *curator Benefits the Metropolitan Museum of Art Donation: $25 Broadway Mall Community Center *DOOHU\+RXUV %URDGZD\# 6W 1<& &HQWHU,VODQG Mon., Wed., Fri. 10am-12pm, 3pm-5pm *DOOHU\+RXUV :HGSP6DW6XQSP Tues. 2pm-5pm Sat. & Sun. 1pm-6pm [email protected] 212-316-6024 www.wsacny.org Sculpture Gallery open daily 1-6 PM
ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE
*Learn how to use your body correctly. *Improve your posture. *Achieve lasting results. Open 2011 A hands-on redirecting of the mind and body that has been used A photography exhibition curated by Jonathan Morrison successfully for over a century. Learn to use your body in a more efficient way which will have far reaching benefits. It involves October 26 - November 13, 2011 changing old habits and learning new ones to last a lifetime.
Please call for a private consultation and introductory lesson. Opening reception: Saturday, October 29, 2:30 pm-5:30 pm Union Square studio, or house and office calls available. Closing reception: Sunday, November 13, 2:30 pm-5:30 pm Limited Introductory Offer: Consultation, intro lesson, plus free additional lesson. Sliding scale available. Broadway Mall Community Center %URDGZD\# 6W 1<& &HQWHU,VODQG DIANA MULLMAN, AmSAT. *DOOHU\+RXUV :HGSP6DW6XQSP 212-734-7875 [email protected] 212-316-6024 www.wsacny.org
Viridian Artists is pleased to present “MOVED” Abstractions 2011 (Moving Currents) a Group Show of Gallery Artists A fine arts exhibit celebrating the move October 5-23, 2011 Reception: Saturday, October 15 to our new location Oct. 23: Modern Music 3:30 – 4pm at 548 West 28h St, suite 632. and Free Verse Poetry 4 - 4:30pm Joseph Boss • Elizabeth K. Hill • Yukako Ishida • Nate Ladson Leanne Martinson • Emily Rich • Marie Robison The exhibition continues Jesse Robinson • Anne Rudder* • Robert Scott • Meyer Tannenbaum from September 20th *curator through October 15th, Broadway Mall Community Center with an opening reception %URDGZD\# 6W 1<& &HQWHU,VODQG *DOOHU\+RXUV :HGSP6DW6XQSP Thursday, September 22, 6-8PM. [email protected] 212-316-6024 www.wsacny.org
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 GALLERYSTUDIO 23 Nature is Transformed in the Paintings of L. Byrne
ontrary to the belief of strict formalists who would prefer to Csee it as a function of dispassionate aesthetic gamesmanship, abstract painting had its origins in mystery. For it was born when European modernist masters such as Kandinsky, and Malevich, influenced by Theosophy and other esoteric belief systems prevalent at the turn of the century, sought to probe beyond the world of outer appearances and evolve a visual language for the unseen. It remains true today that the most authentic way to approach the abstract is not through imitation of these early artistic pioneers but through the ineffable mysteries of life, one of the most deeply affecting of which is personal tragedy. Such was the case for the painter L. Byrne, who was moved a decade ago by a profound family trauma to abandon her early figurative style for an abstract mode of expression more suited to exploring new emotions. Born to Irish immigrant parents “Flower Power II” she has always felt ties to the heritage of that country where beauty and tragedy are inexorably bound. And raised amid the grandeur of the Canadian wilderness, she was inspired by nature’s ability to renew itself. She wished not merely to capture the lay of the land, but to apprehend, in the immortal words of Dylan Thomas, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” Thus in paintings such as her “Iris” and “Fuschia l” it is not so much the forms of the individual flowers that we see but an effusion of gestural strokes of luscious red, pink, scarlet and ochre pigment suggesting their earthy essences. Byrne’s large oils on canvas are invariably filled with light, color, and a sense of wonder. While her bold brushstrokes and the expansive scale of her paintings can prompt comparisons to abstract expressionism, they have also been called “abstract impressionist,” a term that may be even more apt, considering their coloristic radiance. The canvas she calls “Field of Grass,” for example, features a Gallery lyrical explosion of verdant vertical strokes set against an expanse of luminous sky. The composition is exquisitely simple, but Framing Studio with these two elements alone, Byrne arguably provides a more accurate, not to mention more lyrical, vision of grass and sky on Workshop a warm summer day than most more literal depictions of such a subject could provide. For one feels the heat and can almost smell the chlorophyll-filled freshness of the turf with the immediacy of an indelible childhood memory. Indeed, such reveries play an essential role in Byrne’s work. “The memories of my youth were populated by the nature and wilderness surroundings of Canada,” she recalls. “Long canoe trips and lingering campfires decorated by the Northern Lights are still vividly etched in my creative spirit. The environment and the outdoors have influenced the colors selected for my paintings along with the rugged texture found in most of them.” The spacious majesty and ruggedness of the landscape is everywhere evident, in “Oceanscape,” with its sense of a vast horizon and the Northern Lights suggested abstractly in the patchy strokes of brilliant color enlivening the expanse of blue above; in the pile-up of thick earth colors contrasted with visceral reds and purples in “Mud Slide”; and in “Flower Power ll,” with its vibrantly rioting floral forms in thickly encrusted primary hues. In these, among other sumptuous oils on canvas, L. Byrne probes deep below the lay of the land to the very wellsprings of Subscribe to nature. –– Wilson Wong GALLERY&STUDIO L. Byrne, Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, October 7 - 28, See page 2 2011. Reception: Thursday, October 13, 6 - 8 pm. 24 GALLERYSTUDIO SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 MALKA INBAL
FROM WHITE TO GRAY
September 6 - 30, 2011
Reception: Thursday, September 8, 6 - 8 pm
:WK6W1<& 7XHV6DWDPSP ZZZQRKRJDOOHU\FRP “From White to Gray 1” UNDENIABLE TENDENCIES &217(0325$5<,17(51$7,21$/$576+2: NEW CENTURY ARTISTS, INC :WK6W 1HZ $XJ WK WKURXJK 6HSWWK RECEPTION 6HSWHPEHUWK SP SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 GALLERYSTUDIO INNER IDEA ARTISTS: Beauty Follows Truth October 4 - 22, 2011 Tuesday - Saturday 12-6 p.m. Reception: Thursday, October 6, 2011 6-8 p.m. Fred Bender Mary Cooper Karen Frances Linda Frederick Donna Graham Mary Jane Rivers Anna Rogers Margo Spellman Cheryl Telford Lana Thomas David Zehring Peggy Zehring D. Zehring Graham Thomas Telford Rivers Cooper Rogers Spellman Bender Frances Frederick P. Zehring CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY 547 WEST 27TH STREET NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10001 PH. 212.268.0088 FAX 212.274.1717 WWW.MONTSERRATGALLERY.COM