Archives for April 2009

Bellingham’s Thomas Wood paints as if he were knitting thick threads into a coarse version of a landscape. His best work has a battered gleam, as if it had been through a lot. The awkward quality of his oils brings to mind Albert York, whom Calvin Tompkins once called the best unknown painter in America. Tompkins was referring to unknown in New York terms. Wood is largely unknown in Seattle even, though he lives a hour north of it and has shown in the city for years.

At Lisa Harris through May 2.

When you open a sentence, you instantly see the birds fly out of it.

Robert Duncan

Olivia Parker

From Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, Winter Arm, 2007, and Summer Arm, 2008.

Miner’s Camp, Jewell Ridge, VA (2006) Click to enlarge.

About this post on Gala Bent, Louis Torres quoted from and queried:

“No matter how she crowds her space, nobody’s home…. Her drawings
appear to be waiting for you to leave, in order to disappear.”

Please translate.

I responded:

There’s a mute, recessive quality to her drawings that comes close to threatening her form.

Because I realized I wasn’t connecting with him at all, I added:

I think of it as a good thing.

I was going for an improvisation rather than a review, a moment instead of a full-dress regalia.  Torres, co-editor of Aristos, disapproves. Aristos passes out awards for art writing each year.

Briefly stated, (the Aristos awards) are given for objectivity in arts
criticism, scholarship, or
commentary. Such objectivity involves the recognition (usually
implicit) that art has a particular nature, and that the art of the
present necessarily bears a fundamental similarity to the art of the
past. Often, the resulting conclusion is that a work
regarded as art by experts is not art at all. The fullest explication
of the point of view underlying the awards is found in What
Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand.

Ah, Ayn Rand. The high priestess of unregulated capitalism, the celebrant of selfishness, the enemy of community. I am delighted to disappoint you, Mr. Torres.

On vacation, Arnold Schwarzenegger ran into a bear and bought it.

The New York Times had the story first, with the SF Chronicle trailing. It’s never good to trail a national paper on your local story. Those who think getting stomped on such a trivial matter doesn’t matter haven’t worked at a newspaper. A four-footed bronze animal blocking the entrance to the governor’s office qualifies as an event. The Chronicle should have had its paws all over it.

Jon Carroll’s piece is nice, but I wish the paper had sent its art critic, Kenneth Baker. Mr. Minimalism would not have been amused. When he rouses himself to lament, it is always worth reading.

Carroll the spoilsport mentioned the real problems real bears have in California. As metaphors and representations, however, they continue to thrive.

My favorite bear opens Theodore Roethke’s Four for Sir John Davies, a passage titled The Dance:

Is that dance slowing in the mind of man

That made him think the universe could hum?

The great wheel turns its axle when it can;

I need a place to sing, and dancing-room,

And I have made a promise to my ears

I’ll sing and whistle romping with the bears.

For the are all my friends: I saw one slide

Down a steep hillside on a cake of ice, —

Or was that in a book? I think with pride:

A caged bear rarely does the same thing twice

In the same way: O watch his body sway!

This animal remembering to be gay.

I am also exceeding fond of Jeffry Mitchell‘s bears. If Roethke’s had sexual congress with Winnie the Pooh, Mitchell’s would be their issue.

If the polarities of art were considered in political terms, Obama would be classical (restrained, cerebral, detached) instead of expressionist (emotional, intuitive, physically engaged). Bush rose to neither occasion. With his irrationally sunny and
superficial certainties, he would be as out of place in the latter
tradition as the former.

(Francis Bacon, click images to enlarge.)

Nor would Bush have been at home in the Dark Ages. His privileged and tidy-minded version of the evangelical was unknown in the 14th century. Saying that century’s version of a spiritual aesthetic is notable in the age of Obama is not to link it to the stupidities of his predecessor.

Belief is hardwired into temperament and capacity, not just experience. And yet with its ruinous temperature changes, unending wars, failed economies and corruption at the core of the Roman Catholic Church, the European 14th century serves as the model of a culture so decisive it overwhelms personal inclination.

What can be said of a world in which people crawled to church on bloodied knees along streets lined with stinking corpses to pray for the courage to kill the Jews? (See, Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century.)

That mirror continues to reflect darkly. In the aesthetic realm, this species of dark sight projects an inner light. It is not today’s dominant vision. There is no dominant vision, but it’s a force growing ever more prominent. Below, a few samples, not at all definitive.

1. Philip Guston  2. Susan Rothenberg  3. Joseph Mills 4.Nigel Cook and 5, 6 and 7. Anthony Pontius at Roq La Rue through May 2.

Gala Bent draws dense, dainty tableaus that make light work of heavy symbolism. Her heart’s in hallucinated oddities with silky, spatial connectives and small, bright bursts of color. No matter how she crowds her space, nobody’s home. She’s myth-minded but modest. Her drawings appear to be waiting for you to leave, in order to disappear.

At Gallery4Culture till Friday.

Susan Skilling was raised on the lovely muck of the Northwest School’s color palette, those muted grounds seeded with light.

Hers isn’t a name that leaps to mind when talking about the region’s prominent artists.

For decades she has labored in semi-obscurity, praised when she exhibits but prone to drop out of sight for years on end before surfacing again to startle those who see her work.
It’s classically Northwest in tonality and aspiration, using dim tones to seek celestial things in gouache or opaque watercolor on paper.

Forward momentum comes from pulses of purely abstract form, small shapes aspiring to be squares but distorted by the rhythm of the piece into more fluid configurations.