The first known abstract painting was made in 1911 by Wassily Kandinsky, and so this 100th anniversary year offers opportunities to explore a fascinating world of art from many points of view. Undoubtedly nudged by the multi-dimensional exploration of Abstract Expressionism currently on view at MoMA, numerous exhibitions continue to unfold in New York, including 70 Years of Abstract Painting—Excerpts at Jason McCoy Gallery.
The show starts off with a retina-blasting canvas from 1969 by Gene Davis (1920-1985) that capitalizes on ideas from Op Art practices of the day – filtered through an evidently fun-loving eye (below, left). At roughly 5.5 x 5.5 feet, the painting riffs on Josef Albers’ (1888-1976) Interaction of Color series, but done in a spectrum of vibrating stripes, rather than squares.
A view of Room 1, left to right, Paul Pagk, “OGLS 127” (2010), oil on linen; Cora Cohen, “Brush 8” (2009), oil on linen; Josef Albers, “Homage to the Square: Grisaille & Ground” (1961), oil on board. (all photos by the author)
Abstraction is a fickle shapeshifter. Outlines of horses and bulls in caves and geometric markings on ceramic flatware were the earliest embodiment of the craft. Since then, abstraction has travelled through an unbelievable number of incarnations. Jason McCoy Gallery recently took on the challenge of presenting a hiccup’s worth of abstraction from the 20th Century, anticlimactically titled 70 Years of Abstract Painting: Excerpts. The showing was based on the gallery’s strong holding of abstract art, looking to “initiate an unusual dialogue” between past and present.
February/March 2013 issue of print publication DestinAsian. DestinAsian is an award-winning travel magazine in the Asia-Pacific region. Article by Aaron Gulley, Photography by Jen Judge.
Notwithstanding food and architecture— and even writing— there’s an undeniable romance and import to painting, which is why I take a friend’s advice and contact Willy Bo Richardson, a rising star in contemporary art. “Come over to the studio and we can talk,” he replies when I e-mail him. Unlike New York, in Santa Fe there is a generosity of space and time.
Richardson, 38, lives in an adobe with his wife, Kim, and five-year-old-daughter, Audrey, and he paints in a bright, cramped attached garage that he’s converted to a studio. Though he’s shown in galleries from New York to London and sells paintings for more than most people spend on a car, Richardson is boyish, friendly, demure. His biography is startlingly similar to Emily henry’s: his parents moved to New Mexico in the ’60s and raised him on a commune; he moved to the East Coast to make his name (New York in this case), but returned to Santa Fe because he simply couldn’t stay away.
In 2016 the State Bar of New Mexico called me to ask if they could use my image for the cover of the State Bar Directory. Distributed to all practicing attorneys and judges in New Mexico, the Bench and Bar Directory is an resource for attorneys and their legal staffs. The folks at New Mexico Bar Bulletin chose my work for two covers in 2015.
Watercolors – the current exhibition at Phillips de Pury’s Chelsea location is a testament to the immense breadth of possibilities for this fragile, yet unforgiving medium.
Video interview transcript
Kristin Sancken: I’m a curator at Phillips de Pury, I recently put together Watercolors – a 92 piece exhibition. Right know we are looking at one of my favorite pieces by Ben Blatt. Ben’s process is interesting in that he is obsessed with composition and he’s obsessed with collage, and therefore he either takes traditional collage form or he does collaging on a computer and photoshop and where he juxtaposes several images, just layering, layering, layering images on top of each other and from that he begins to build this really complex composition and color deviations. From that he moves forward into the actual process of painting. One of the important things about his work is that it starts with a very simple idea – to get visual texture and more visual ideas, to actually look at the cellular structure of plants and bugs in these pieces which you can see in some of these forms. It is interesting because Ben is an illustrator, he is a very good renderer, he is very meticulous with the control of watercolor as a medium. From that I also wanted to show an artist who goes in sort of a different direction, utilizes watercolors’ accidental quality, which is something that I find very fascinating.
One artist that I found is Eva Lundsager, who is represented by Greenberg Van Doren. In her work she has a controlled chaos about it and she clearly utilizes just a splattering of the water and a paint and these circular, ovular objects here, but then she goes back and you can see where she had rendered control this, so its a mixture between chaotic form and this obsession with control almost, it’s like this pathological approach that she’s keeping to the page just to show this world around her.
Another thing that I found very interesting with watercolors is the importance between marrying emotion, abstraction and color and the artist who does that very well is Willy Bo Richardson. He renders life in abstraction. Every single brush stroke has a life, every single brush stroke has a rhythm, it’s not obvious but it’s there. You can tell the verticality of it allows you see the playfulness of this but also see the colors and and know that they work with each other, versus just horizontal a passage of time to it. There is a celebratory aspect to the verticality, it’s playful and it’s fun and you can really tell that he became a master at it.
Watercolors Exhibition
The “Watercolors“ show, curated by Kristin Sancken, Phillips de Pury features 92 watercolors by a diverse group of artists and includes emerging young painters like Willy Bo Richardson, Ben Blatt, Eva Lundsager and Annika Connor as well as such heavyweights of the art world as Eric Fischl. The show’s breadth is impressive as it attempts to examine the perception of watercolor as a fine art medium and the issues of value (art historical, economic and aesthetic) surrounding the medium and its relationship to oils. The exhibition is held at Phillips de Pury New York (now Phillips) Chelsea location until October 19, 2012.
Phillips de Pury & Company:Watercolors, is an exhibition featuring a diverse group of contemporary works by artists who have moved beyond using watercolor as an auxiliary mode of expression to embracing it as their primary medium. The exhibition showcases over 80 abstract and figurative works that challenge the romantic ideologies associated with historical watercolor. Continue reading “Phillips Watercolors Exhibition – Opening Reception Video”
I was the guest on A Matter of the Mind with Mark Perry, an exploration of mind, consciousness and creative intelligence. KVSF 101.5 FM The Voice of Santa Fe, Talk 1260 AM KTRC and streamed live on SantaFe.com.
