Interior, Exterior, and Textural...

My newest painting... 01-15-2015 has really upped the ante about how I am not only an exterior painter, the paint no longer sits on a flat surface. The paintings now also have an interior, one with which I am striving to learn about and explore. There is not much written about interior painting at present. There are only a handful of painters I know of that deal with the interior. Granted from looking at their work, their interior is not the same as mine, there's is more a byproduct of the exterior, whereas my paintings are definitely dealing with that elusive interior space between the front of the painting and the back, which my new paintings also deal with. What becomes of the wall, and the space that became the back of the painting, never looked at by anyone who didn't have the painting in their hands. In my original Yarn Painting #1, the interior, like the rest of those painters, was hardly there. Focusing more on the surface, and exterior. I blocked out as much as I felt I could of it, and only gave a slight nod to the interior, by showing off the chassis. With the birth of the larger Yarn Paintings, the interior became inevitable and I began to realize it was something I needed to learn about.

01-15-2015

66 X 41.5 IN
167.64 X 105.41 CM
Acrylic on Acrylic Yarn on Painted Wood Chassis.

Left side interior detail.

The interior of this painting are really shown off in these pictures. You get the best sense I can give you in reproduction of how the light plays into the interior and finally onto the wall behind the painting. Click on the image to see a larger version so you can have more to enjoy.

These days I think a lot about Lucio Fontana along with Fabian Marcaccio. The two painters I feel were the first to explore the interior of painting.

Jeffrey

Brutal Whitness

Working on my second painting of 2015. I began in darkness, now I continue into almost absolute whiteness, augmented by Nickel Titanate Yellow. The texture in this particular painting is reminding me of Clyfford Still in it's jagged mannerisms. No more talking, time for the visual.

01-15-2015
66 X 41.5 IN
167.64 X 105.41 CM
Acrylic on Acrylic Yarn on Painted Wood Chassis.
 

 

Granted right now I do not have the space or wall for the nice painting on the white wall. The colors are exact, taken in daylight, no artificial bulbs to light the situation.

Please click to view the photos in the larger online format. Get in there and see it up close.

Thanks.
Jeffrey

New Landscape...New Year.

2015 has begun with some nice pleasant gifts unto me and my family. I will only be focusing now on this new painting. I wanted to get some photos done of it before I do it again on a white wall. But for now, you can really peek into what I am accomplishing in my recent paintings. Can't wait to show this off to people, I especially can't wait till this weekend when one of my paintings...10-20-2014 will be included in the new Sideshow Nation III exhibition subtitled CIRCLE THE WAGONS!!! The exhibition opens: Saturday January 10 6-9PM and runs through March 15.

01-03-2015
Acrylic on Acrylic Yarn on Wood Chassis with Aluminum Frame.
30.5" X 67" in
77.47 X 170.18 cm
Click on images for larger scale.

Thanks, see ya soon.
Jeffrey

40th Anniversary at Andre Zarre Gallery

I wanted to get some images from Andre Zarre Gallery's 40th Anniversary exhibition. Up now.

Peter Reginato: Whom you've heard many times of my appreciation for. This time his painting has a ring of commentary on what seems to be pissing a lot of people off, the whole idea of Zombie Formalism. In Peter's painting, the dots are the zombies taking over the world, or the art world. A gorgeous painting with a great commentary on contemporary art life.

Ellen Banks: This is my first painting I have seen from her. I quite like it. I can't tell if it's encaustic or just oil mediums mixed with wax, ala Brice Marden. Either way, it's what she does with the mediums that count here. Very sensual painting that makes me wonder just how powerful they could be scaled up.

Dee Shapiro: This is my first Shapiro that I have witnessed in person and I have to say i'm quite impressed. I did hear that she doesn't do many of these and I think that's a shame as they are painting that I would like to see more of. It looks like she uses an extruder in these paintings and just the thought of her using a different method of paint application gets me more into it. As you know, I have a love for irregular paint applications.

Robert Swain: Finally got to see a work in person by this color maestro. Guys like Swain have such a control over their colors that it really becomes as amazing to see the interior of their studios and all those jars of color they mix. I now wish I had seen the exhibitions at Minus Space and at Hunter College. (video courtesy of James Kalm AKA Loren Munk)

The next two paintings are by painters that really dig texture in their work. Textural painting really gets my eye going. And these two paintings by Don Hazlitt and Joy Walker both get the eye candy idea going in me.

There's not a lot I can say about these two paintings, but what I can tell you is they are works that NEED to be seen in person. No amount of camera work is going to extrapolate what one can and will see in person.

Dee Solin: You know me, you know I dig the work of Solin. I've watched her painting grow over the last three years and she continues to surprise me with her radiant paintings. My only regret is that she doesn't make 8ft paintings. Something to truly engulf the viewer, as I believe these truly would. They are micro and macrocosm's at the same time. Dee talks about her paintings like a scientist and you don't get much of that these days, people always seem to talk about work that it does this and that, which usually just sounds like artspeak and turns people off. But Dee's commentary is as lucid and together as her paintings. I just wanna take a swim in them. Over the years I've been privy to see the mastery of her brush, as she has come from a photorealist background and is so intense with structure of her paintings. I do believe she is working on a new body of paintings for a solo exhibition to come at Zarre...THE BERKELEY PAINTINGS MARCH 3 - APRIL 4, 2015

I hope that you are able to take the exhibition in for yourself. It's a very sparsely hung exhibition with lots of room between paintings. A really great group exhibition. It's on until January 24th 2015.

Disconnected: Bishop/Hantai/Marioni @ Paul Rodgers 9W NYC

After my time at Petzel. I headed over to Hauser & Wirth to witness the Thomas Houseago exhibition. Than it was onto Zwirner to see what they had, which turned out to be a Serra work on paper show. Unfortunately they were doing work downstairs and the smell from whatever chemicals they were using was ruining my enjoyment of Serra's work. I had to get out of there quick.

Right beside Zwirner is the legendary gallery building at 529 W. 20th Street. There were two exhibitions I knew I didn't want to miss in that building this time around. This is the first one.

Paul Rodgers 9W is, as you can tell, on the 9th floor, West side. It is a gallery that usually flies under the radar of most gallery hoppers. Which is unfortunate, especially when people are talking about a Simon Hantai or James Bishop show at one of the majors, or a show of Joseph Marioni and no one is mentioning the better exhibition at Rodgers' gallery. Paul is an incredible historian and very keen on making grand exhibitions that keep the notion of space to a maximum. This particular exhibition up now is titled DISCONNECTED: Bishop/Hantai/Marioni and is quite a minimal exhibition with one painting per painter. Each from a distinct period in the artists oeuvre. Especially with the painting from Bishop, who doesn't work very much in dark paintings such as the one on view.

To your left when you walk in is a wonderful mid period Hantai, if you get the chance to when you visit, ask the gentleman behind the desk to tell you a bit about Hantai, or if Paul is there, he can really tell you a lot about this genius, and I don't use that word often.

Hantai is the originator of a technique called Pliage. It's a method of folding a canvas, crumpling it up sometimes, but mostly concentrated folding, painting on what is left after all the folds have been brought together, and then releasing the fold and seeing the result. It is known as the next great technique for painting after Jackson Pollock.

The first time I saw Hantai's work was at the Wexner Center exhibition AS/Painting, curated by Philip Armstrong, Laura Lisbon, and Stephen Melville, which ran May 11-August 12, 2001. They made sure to include an early Hantai where he was beginning his development of the pliage method, up to the late paintings. So it was a major eye opener for someone like me that was just in the beginning stages of my own development with the uses of texture and color.

Any of you that know me, know of my deep appreciation for the paintings of Joseph Marioni. I was surprised to learn that after looking at the painting included in the exhibition, a gorgeous orange painting from 1977 that it was the one recently sold at auction. This just showed me how much contact he has with his collectors, they purchased the painting and immediately had it brought to Paul Rodgers' gallery for this exhibition. I was blown away by the swiftness of them getting it there. I think it was sweetest because I remember wishing I could have seen the preview, because most of these works sold at auction hardly ever go into public view, or at least not that I've seen. I felt I was given a second chance to see it, I was glad. 

The James Bishop painting was something I never thought i'd see either. Especially a dark painting of his, because there aren't many. I tell ya this one is a feast for the eyes of the painter who admires it. It's like a volcano is going off in the interior of the paint. It just sits on the wall still glowing from it's birth.

These are the best photos my iphone 4 could get. There are some really nice ones online, but I wanted to get views that only I took. Most galleries won't take photos of the side of the painting, but we painters love seeing things like that.

Until next time.