August Hoviele on Rudolf De Crignis

Translated from German to English by Jeffrey Collins (ME).

When I was in 1992 for the first time the studio in Soho Rudolf De Crignis visited was a very special experience for me.

It was my third studio visit that day, the two previous artists were Americans and talking about their work as pastors of their church on the west coast. In the studio of Rudolf De Crignis silence came over me, the artist Sat silent at his desk, there was no word spoken.

Was silence, only silence, or silence and contemplation. The atmosphere gave me a very wonderful feeling. I was quiet and undisturbed look at some beautiful blue paintings.

I was no longer in new york but in Sénanque, in the chapel of the Cistercian monastery. This special feeling is I always stayed. If I were a painting by Rudolf De Crignis stand and try to penetrate into that beautiful blue plane, I feel that sensation still.

In later years, I spend many warm and intense contact was fortunate to get to know the artist. It was a very quiet but strong personality, honesty and integrity, highly critical of his own work, open to other artists.



Although his artistic path to be followed very well knew, he was anxious and uncertain about the things he was doing. Paul Cezanne was never far away.

With the death of Rudolf I lost a very close friend and adviser, but we all have lost a great artist.

Rudolf, the beautiful moments I will never forget and I will continue your work I personal effects lovingly cherish.

Goodbye

New Paintings 2010.

Just got the website updated with these photos of these paintings. As you can see here. Click 'em and you can see in amazing detail.






















"01-15-2010 (Always Up To You)"
34" X 26"





















"03-13-2010 (For D.A.C.)"
36" X 30"





















"03-20-2010"
36" X 30"

Enjoy. Be sure to check out JEFFREY COLLINS: PAINTER for full updates every month or so.

Not About Alan Ebnother

I could probably write a thousand words on how much my life has been touched by the personality and painting of Alan Ebnother...but I won't. I'll leave that for my archives.

One thing I can gladly tell you is how I got to know Alan and his painting. We met in July 2004 when I made my first trip to NYC to visit our mutual friend Joseph Marioni. I originally thought that while sitting in my crowded and smelling greyhound seat for around 11 hours, which I didn't sleep at all through it. That I would simply be meeting Joe and hanging with him through my visit. Not so. After meeting Joe in the bus terminal and making my way down the street with my arms feeling like jello, and trying to take in the situations I was in. I'm a 29 year old guy, visiting the biggest city in the world for the first time. Going to visit and hang with my favorite painter. Trying to take in all the sites at once during that first stroll down 8th Avenue.

Skipping ahead a bit. We met Alan at Joes, and proceeded to hit up the Hells Kitchen Diner for breakfast. Awesome place with great food. Heading out to Chelsea to see the galleries, and hearing Joe and Alan speak about the different spaces, I felt for the first time like a real artist, hanging out with other real painters. Trying to soak in as much as I could, and writing this. Realizing I can remember a LOT more than I give myself credit for.



Since that day, it took me awhile to get back in touch with Alan, but I knew it was something that I really wanted to do. You know how sometimes you feel compelled to wanna meet someone. You feel that maybe they have something that you are supposed to learn from that person, and you wanna find out what it is.

It wasn't till about a few years ago...I think. That I finally met Alan again online. Thank God for Myspace and it's technology which helps you to get to meet and learn about other people. This was before everyone jumped on the FB bandwagon, which I have found far more interest in.

Alan is always on FB, sharing new photos of his new paintings and him mixing his own paints. He's given me countless ideas about painting and about life.



And I just realized that i've said too much. The rest is between the two of us, and all of our friends on Facebook. HEHEHEHE.



So go add him as a friend and get to know Alan and his wonderful paintings. The rest is up to you. You'll just have to wait for the Biography to learn more.

Cheers and have a wonderful week! J

Quote for the day...4-06-09

Today's quote is brought to you through the Painter Joseph Marioni.

"I am not a post-modernist, I am a modernist, it means I practice a very disciplined art form."

You can learn more about Marioni's painting through his website, and through a few entries on this blog. Including a digitized version of one of his art catalogs.

http://www.tiac.net/~marioni/

http://www.jeffreycollins.us/Joseph_Marioni_-_Blue_Paintings.pdf

Quote for the day...3-28-09

Today's quote comes to us from Frederic Matys Thursz.

"Dust to dust, to ashes, to dirt. Paint. It is said, turns to stone. Sculpture. Then crumbles to sand. Sand painting. Painting once more."





This painting is entitled "In Praise of Hands"

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.