An Artist on the Awkwardness that is F. Porter

Fairfield Porter, Under the Elms 1971

By this point you are probably aware that I love Porter.

However, I've never had my feelings about him so succinctly expressed as Dan O'Connor did in a recent interview on Painting Perceptions. O'Connor is a recent MFA grad of PAFA and although his work is very impressive to me in ways, I think it is what he aspires to in Porter that unites our thinking as artists.

He says; " I am continually trying to introduce new ideas or ways of seeing into the paintings. A few months ago, I read a little catalog from a Diebenkorn exhibit where he mentions learning about the importance of whimsy from the paintings of Matisse. This has proved to captivate me for a while. I’ve always thought on whimsy as a sort of heavy-handedness or awkwardness that permeates through some paintings, but have started to see it now as something that could potentially relate a real, palpable truth about vision. It seems to present itself in limitless ways; the way you hold your brush, apply paint, stand, look, question. This playful manner of observing, I think, speaks loudly about the painter and the subject, while still providing a satiated, fully resolved, believable painting. Fairfield Porter seemed to have it."

Awesomely put.

Dan O'Connor, Dear God, Thank you For Friends, 2009

Tara Geer

Tara Geer, The Frayed Sock

I really love Tara Geer's drawings.

I think maybe more than that I love her refreshing artist statement:

"I think the most important part of drawing is seeing: The more I look around me, the more the world opens up as if under a magnifying lens-- the spoon in the cereal bowl and the floating bits of cereal lose their distinction...My sketches from the world around me are love letters to looking, but wordless ones."

Read the whole thing here on her website.

And see her work in a group drawing show at the Macy Gallery @ Columbia through November 4th. And let me know how it is because I'm not going to make it to NY until the next weekend.

Intimations Show

Alex in front of Night Couch (versions of reality and my painted reality in one picture!)

I am part of a really nice show at Hopkins House Gallery of Contemporary Art. I was so flattered to be invited to this show featuring the work of Michael Bartmann, Roger Chavez, Alex Cohen, David Campbell and two other artists I wasn't familiar with Kyle Stevenson and Jeanine La Claire.

The show was curated by Bruce Garrity who did a really amazing job of putting together artists and works that seem to compliment each other and work from the same perspective but still in very personal ways. The title Intimations seems to say it; work that hints, suggests and implies. Works that come from experience and life and are retold in another reality, a painted reality.

The show is on until October 29th, so please stop through!

Beautiful Bischoff Drawing

Kimura Reflections

Tshuta Kimura, Country House in Provence, 1984

I just read an article by Arthur Danto on Kimura which is very poignant. I can't put it in his words but here's what I gathered: Kimura paints what is underneath the imagery of landscape. Its as if he paints what swells up from under namable trees, grass and flowers when that ecstatic, nostalgic fall sun hits your back. He captures visually what I experience through all my senses plus memory. Its smell, sound, sight, touch, memory all funneled through and replayed in the visual. So for me the experience of his paintings is completely overwhelming.

Re-reading that I actually don't know if that is quite what the article said but that's where it took me anyway. Probably because when I think about my own work that is also what I work to do, although I could never work from landscape. When I paint Alex and I eating breakfast its about funneling the smell of coffee, sound of the heater, sight of the morning light, touch of the spoon and memory of doing this over 600 times at Rodman street all back through the visual. What a powerful and impossible task.