Dirk De Bruycker

Dirk De Bruycker is a Belgian-born artist who currently divides his time between Santa Fe, NM and Granada, Nicaragua.

'I think some of the intensity and sensuality of Latin America has crept into my work. There is a feeling of unease here below the surface that is palpable and yet it is so beautiful here. The force of life here is so strong; it permeates everything… you can literally hear things grow. I think it is some of that intensity of life, which is very different from my cooler northern European sensibilities, that I have allowed to surface in the paintings.'

I wanted to speak a bit about a favorite painter I admire. Dirk De Bruycker. I remember the first time I saw his work. It was 1999 at Jan Maiden Fine Art in Columbus Ohio.

I first stopped by on the Saturday before the night with the artist, as she always held the artist talk on a Sunday. Which in my opinion was so perfect. As Sunday always kinda has a laziness to it. A willingness to hang around and talk about painting.

I remember it like it was yesterday. Walking into a gallery filled with such deep orange and red colors. It was an uneasiness I had not felt in quite some time. The specter of the new...paintings I didn't know could have existed 5 minutes before, were now staring me in the face.

The paintings on the right side of the gallery were the ones which touched me immediately, and still are kind of my favorites of the work he has accomplished. Maybe because it is the first works I saw of his. Maybe because aside from a few more paintings, it is the only work I have had the pleasure of witnessing in person.

I walked into the back of the gallery to give my usual hello to Jan, as I came around I witnessed something I have never before seen in a gallery or in any other artists studio. A painting lying on the floor...getting ready to be hung. Man I wish now that I had the camera I have now, as it was an amazing site. A brilliantly burn umber orange with streaks of asphaltum in a grid so black into the canvas, and it appeared to be not even quite 100% dry yet. Later Dirk told me that these paintings have a tendency to have a sheen with the asphalt when it is first applied, over time it turns into a deep matte color. I will never forget this painting, as I hope to one day have it in my collection...Jan if you are reading this, you know which one it was...I WANT THAT ONE!!!!

The next day I came in for the artist talk, came across Jan and Ben Maiden. And proceeded to ask who the artist was. I came upon a gentleman, slim build, who to me...looked kinda like David Bowie...to me. He, like so many other artists whom I admire, spoke with a great tone to their voice and spoke as though he had so many many other times. Amongst all the other painters that must have been visiting that day. I still think I had the most impact on him. I even made sure to wait around afterwards to get his autograph in the book they were giving away at the show.

BIG GIGANTIC THANKS going out to Jan and Ben Maiden...for if they hadn't been in Columbus and had a gallery, I wouldn't know about half of the artists I know of today.

"A migrating monarch's wings beat a blue black that rapidly expands the eye. The moth is the palimpsest of the soul in flight to the next world and back. Night blooms in the ultraviolet center of a poppy. The fundamental exploration of the mystery is all De Bruycker is after. His only dogma: intense sustained wonder. The point of art is to bring spirit to matter. Dirk De Bruycker does this exceedingly well." - Jon Carver

http://www.lanouefineart.com/artists.php?artist=23&section=X

CJ Collins

Now a lot of you might think that CJ is a relative of mine. But I doubt it very little, as I've always been of the thought that our family name makes us in some way related to each other. Perhaps one day I'll know for sure.

CJ is a wonderful person I met online a couple years ago, was stunned by her work, the line the formless forms she was working on at the time, which she has grown that painting into an even more abstract style of painting, restricting her use of color to black on white or black on this deep orange as you see above. Or to the paintings on kraft paper that is used for grocery bags at the supermarket. Her work is not used in supermarkets, just to clarify that.

I had the pleasure of having a sit down with her in 2004 when I first visited NYC, which I really need to get back there. She's got an amazing space to paint, huge walls, huge ceiling that really lends itself to making quite large paintings. We spoke about the state of the painting crisis that is still going on today, all because people seem to be more into purchasing work that is representative instead of putting their faith into a painting that will allow the collector to grow with it over time. Painting in it's abstract form doesn't let you in immediately...it's like a relationship...it takes time to grow.

CJ just let me know of a new show of hers that just had the opening, said it went very well. I wish I could have been there for her to show support and to see how these wonderful paintings look inside a gallery as opposed to the studio of the artist. Paintings seem so much more personal while in the studio of the artist than they do in the gallery.

Look and enjoy.
Jeffrey

http://www.cjcollins.com/

Michael Lukacsko AKA Neterhet

"August, 2007"
28" x 28" Giclee canvas print stretched onto heavy duty stretcher bars

Mike, is part fine artist, part graphic artist, part seeker. Mike works mostly on his spiritual mandalas which he creates mostly 12 for each year. One for each month. These artworks are created digitally, then converted onto canvas which make for an extremely smooth surface.

Mike also creates many paintings using acrylic on canvas, which focus on growing aspects of imagery he has created within his mandalas.

A very spiritual person. Lukacsko brings his spiritual life into his artwork.



"April 2007"
28" x 28" Giclee canvas print stretched onto heavy duty stretcher bars

Joseph Marioni: The Painter

Those of you who know me, know that my favorite living artist is Joseph Marioni. I find his paintings to be the most compelling and downright gorgeous paintings being made today...well...except mine of course, but I'm kind of biased on that one.

I wanted to take some time to write a bit about Joe and himself that many people don't get to know. The guy who stares down a camera like he wants to break the lens with the power of his stare, but with the heart of an incredible generous and loving person, and downright one of the smartest people I have had the privilege to know.

I have many stories about Joe and the ways he is. But frankly I don't want to spoil them by telling everyone who reads this about them. He is always telling me about his new shows and the wonderful new paintings he is creating. I always want to be able to travel with him to these shows and hear him speak about painting and his art. But alas I'm not wealthy enough to be able to do that. So I have to rely on his letting me know how things went

I wanted to let all my friends know about this great man, so I have decided to share his work with you here. There is included a really great review by his good friend and great writer Michael Fried, which was written about his 2006 show at Peter Blum Gallery in Chelsea NYC.

Enjoy. Perhaps soon I'll be able to personally see more of his work, which I will be sure to share with everyone here.

Thanks for reading. Jeffrey



Joseph Marioni
PETER BLUM CHELSEA

By Michael Fried

At Peter Blum's new gallery in Chelsea, Joseph Marioni recently showed six paintings made earlier this year in his newly renovated studio, a former meeting hall in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania. This studio has, for the first time, given Marioni the space to take his art up to what may well prove to be its maximum size —and the results are dramatic. The artist paints on stretched canvases hanging on a wall, using a long-handled roller. There is a limit to his (two-handed) reach with such an implement, and in several of the paintings on view here, that limit seems to have been attained.

What is immediately striking, at first almost jolting, about the new work is that with two exceptions —a smaller, exquisite white painting on the street wall and a gorgeous "black" picture, lush as a poppy, in the back room — it departs from the delicately layered and amazing sensuous coloristic and factorial register of his most characteristic pictures of the previous ten or more years. Not that multiple layers of transparent and translucent acrylic are not everywhere in evidence; but the overall effect of the layering, at the new scale, is less overtly sensuous than it is revealing of the internal structure, or rather the constructedness, of the individual paintings. So, for example, in a magnificent large dark canvas (gray-blue over orange over white over ocher) just slightly more vertical than square, jagged, flame like internal figuration unexpectedly recalls the forms in certain of Morris Louis's dark veils, though with an altogether more material resonance. (Even more veil-like in its figuration and proportions is an incandescent green canvas that strikes a coloristic note unlike anything in Marioni's work to date.) Moreover, the picture's sheer size (eleven by ten feet), in combination with the perceptual difficulty posed by its extreme darkness, has the effect of calling into question the apparent shamelessness one associated with Marioni's previous work, only to arrive at a different sort of pictorial integration that stands at the very limit of viable relations of internal scale.

In two other paintings , both horizontal rectangles, the image-gestalt changes, with the layers of paint (after the first violet one, itself modified by a final all-embracing layer of transparent green) dramatically drawing in from the sides of the canvas to force the issue of a Newman-like confrontation with the viewer. In these paintings also, the central downward-flowing "sheets" of paint —milky green in one, milky blue in the other —reveal just a hint of upper-right to lower-left bias that I see as expressing the artist's right-handedness, more broadly his embodiedness, as he wielded his long-handled roller, to transport waves of liquid pigment to the canvas and to influence the pigments in subtle ways so as to produce the final results. All the canvases are unframed, as their heroic physicality requires them to be.

These are by no means comfortable paintings, but they express in every square inch of their redoubtable surfaces a pictorial; conviction that has all but vanished from the contemporary scene. Put differently, they are truly challenging works, and the challenge they extend is not just to their viewers but also to their creator: to withstand their impact, to learn to move freely around them, to explore their implications for his paintings to come.

"07-24-2007 (New Floors)"

"07-24-2007 (New Floors)" A/WF/C 25.13" X 24" W

This is my first painting completed in 2007. It has a beautiful chocolate looking overlay of color, making the painting almost look like you wanna eat the thing. As I was working on the steps to create this painting, I stumbled upon a new writing from myself.

“Subconscious Painting”

Jeffrey Collins

A look at my newest painting that I am involved with.

I watch the wood putty as it dashes and glides about the canvas,

In my ever chaotic ways of addition and subtraction of the surface.

The putty herein lies my subconscious mind…

The subconscious self that slightly manifests itself on the surface

Of the newly primed canvas.

I have been told on so many hundred occasions,

That there IS imagery within

My ever so abstract paintings.

Even though I am in a constant struggle

To make a painting with no representational imagery.

Through the wood putty and my improvisations,

I subconsciously allow my innermost

Cravings and tenderous thoughts.

With this painting that was begun on Monday May 28th 2007

I begin again,

Only to consistently find even more about myself…

My thoughts…my art.

Here are a few of the detailed images of the painting. You can see the amounts of detail within the painting are too much for a single photo to say.






Enjoy. Jeffrey

Jose Maria Casas...

I wanted to speak for a moment about a friend who lives in the southern hemisphere in the beautiful country of Argentina. Jose Maria Casas. A wonderful painter who loves his color. I met him about a year ago online, and we have been in touch ever since. Had many conversations about Art, Painting, Music and life. This gentleman is doing wonderful things for other artists in and around his hometown of Mar del Plata. He has begun his own art fairs and gallery. Fully interactive with his art and his handling of other artists.

Please be sure to check out his work and his gallery.

"Belfunk" - Oil on Canvas - 50x60 - Aug. 17, 2004 - Selected on the Forma Summer 2005 Salon (title for abover painting)

http://www.josemariacasas.com.ar/

http://abstractpainter.blogspot.com/

http://moderna08.blogspot.com/2007/08/moderna08-call-for-international.html

http://galatlanticosur.blogspot.com/

"09-02-2007"

My first addition is my newest painting, the title is also the date it was finished. It had been sitting on my painting wall for a couple weeks waiting to be finished. I guess I had a bit of a fear of finishing it. I was working with a color I barely even touch. Even though I love the color Orange, I've had quite a bit of trouble working with it in a painting in the past. I guess it being a finished painting just shows how much I believe I have grown as a painter in the last 9 years that I have been seriously painting.

This painting is 24" wide X 25.13" tall, and like all others is Acrylic and Wood Filler on Canvas.



Here, you can view the detailed images of my newest painting. They show the definition that creates the texture across the body of the canvas. Only standing right in front of this painting will you have a better viewing of this painting.



The thing I love about this detail pic is the amounts of detail that are within it. You can really see what the wood filler does to the canvas and the residual covering of the canvas, not just the big gestures, but also the little ones too.



Here you get a raking photo of the canvas and a little bit more of a chance to see the painting from it's side and to see just how much the wood filler is put upon the facade of the painting.



Enjoy....until next time.
Jeffrey

I've only just begun....

Welcome. I have decided to unleash this material out into the world of the piranhas of artistic culture. I needed a space to go and be able to constantly update with new paintings and the odd video of the painting itself...which I use to help the viewers see more of what the painting would look like in person.

My paintings are filled with so much detail that the basic digital photograph does not entirely do the painting justice. Now truly the best way to view paintings is in person. But while I am in Ohio, I have to use any and all means necessary to give the viewer and collector every possible venue to see and experience what the painting would look like in that beautiful white cube called a gallery.

We begin our ride with a pic of my newest painting, which was just finished Friday night...you get to view it here in it's birthing state while the paint was still wet. Man I love pics like this.























Cheers! Jeffrey