Archives for November 2009

In her 30s, having destroyed all student work, Fay Jones started painting tiny, folkloric scenes on her kitchen table. She used tempera for a while, tried oil paints and didn’t like them.
In a 2005 interview, she explained her preferences for acrylics and watercolor.

What other people like about oil I don’t. It dries slowly. Others like the brush against the canvas. I hated to wait for the paint to dry. My paintings were mud. There’s no romance to acrylics, but they’re fast and worked for me right away. Oils have a life of their own. With acrylics, you have to mix them to get good colors. For me, watercolors are a sensuous experience. They are as close as I come to romance in the process.

By the late 1970s, she began painting larger than her hand’s span but continued to work on paper. She made the leap to life-size figures after she realized she’d figured out everything she needed to know to work small.

I wanted to go beyond what I knew. I don’t plan my work in advance. I figure it out as I go. The formal qualities that make the painting click I find as I’m working. When a painting is larger than I am, I have to keep moving. Everything changes. The eye stays in motion, and I feel freer.
My paintings are weightless. When they’re weightless, they’re mine. I could roll 10 years worth of painting in a tube and carry it.

[Read more…] about Fay Jones and the School of Float

From Mike Leavitt’s Art Army.

James Abbot McNeil Whistler, Arrangement in Black and Gray, No. 1, 1871 (Image via)

Last year at Howard House, from my review:

Ken Kelly has worked his way out of a decade-long slump to bounce back at the top of his game. For years his paintings labored under the effort of their making. By the time they were done, they had gone dry.
His new work is monochrome oil and enamel on a grid. Make that a subverted grid. Kelly offers Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie married to African mud cloth and lace dollies. It shouldn’t work but it does. As form snaps into place, you can almost hear the click.
These paintings are both maps and places. In their densities there is also air. Their patterns allude to landscapes, and shapes are suggestions hovering on the edge of fact. Kelly is once again the painter he promised to be, capable of merging force with grace.

Plot from the 2008 exhibit:

Second verse is not same as the first. The paintings in the current exhibit look like but aren’t stretched letters. He moved on from Mondrian to offer constructivist typography  in a fun-house mirror.

Go-Go

Kelly does not tape off. He pencils his shapes freehand onto canvas, which gives them, when seen in person, a tender intimacy that pushes against the loudmouth elan of their abstracted graphics.

Black and Tan

Through Nov. 28.Saturday, 1 p.m., Kelly talks about his work at the gallery.

In 2006, when Robyn O’Neil was at the Frye, I wrote:

Houston’s Robyn O’Neil
draws dense, dainty tableaus that make light work of heavy symbolism.
Her heart’s in the radical scale shifts and hallucinated oddities of
art history: Hieronymous Bosch without his silky spatial connectives, or Pieter Brueghel
without his interest in community. Her humans are loners and her
animals lost causes. Even when she crowds her space, nobody’s home.

O’Neil, The Passing

Jennifer Zwick managed to convey the same thing at the same time, wordlessly.

Zwick, Robyn O’Neil, Wall Text, 2006

Zwick, Robyn O’Neil, Oh, How the Heartless Haunt Us All, 2006

From Steve Bloom’s Nairobi Merchants via This Isn’t Happiness.

Why Eirik Johnson? There’s nothing wrong with Johnson’s work, but why him for a solo exhibit at the Henry Gallery? The Henry heaps few such honors on Northwest heads, which makes him an unlikely candidate. He’s a photojournalist with a solid idea. For years he has traveled through what’s left of the logging towns along the Coast, documenting life in the shadow of a once-flourishing industry.

I’d seen his work at G. Gibson Gallery and thought, nice enough, but it doesn’t inhabit its own experience. What Jasper Johns said about sculpture – Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. – also applies to photographs. There’s something loose and unresolved about Johnson’s imagery. His are impressions too faint to score on their own. Had the Henry wanted to explore the myth of the West rattling around in the wrecked present day, it would have been far better off with Glenn Rudolph. Each of Rudolph’s images is a world.

The exhibit turned out to be better than I imagined. Turns out, loose and unresolved can be virtues in the right context, like mist on a moor.

Chief Henry curator Elizabeth Brown gave Johnson the chance to rise to the occasion of his formidable backstory. In smaller galleries leading to his are 19th and early 20th century logging photos by Darius Kinsey and Carleton Watkins. They capture the grotesque sublime of a booming industry chomping its way through forests as if other old growths would rise magically in their wake to be logged in turn.

Magic is gone by the time Johnson shows up. He documents the makeshift instead of the magnificent.

He’s one of those artists whose work resonates in its own company. He offers not soloists but a chorus.

Johnson images via G. Gibson Gallery and Rena Bransten Gallery.

I was sold on this show until stopped by Morris Graves, whose Abandoned Homestead hangs in an adjancent gallery.

Graves, U.S. (1910 – 2001) 1934 – 1937, Oil on canvas 37 3/8 x 43 9/16 inches. Morris Graves Foundation — Robert and Desireé Yarber

It knocked Johnson clear out of my mind, and I’d just seen him. Through Jan. 31.

Neither here nor there but somewhere in between, standing on a ledge, looking over a curb or hanging in the air like a parade float:

Tim Hawkinson – Bloat is beautiful.

Jeanne Silverthorne – Staring at her future, which is behind her.

Christopher Rauschenberg – Feet in muddy water, head in a cloud. (detail)

Juan Munoz -The isolation of the outsider.

Claudia Fitch – Fear of heights, stuck in a high place.

Bought many postcards from museum shops lately? I thought not. There was a time that travel required them, as keepsakes and to let folks at home know you’re not only in Houston but at the Menil, not just in Chicago but enthralling yourself with Seurat.

Given the recession, there’s also less reason to buy nonessentials on a whim, which pretty much deals a death blow to the rest of the stock. Exit cash cow, enter space waster.

The problem used to be acute at the Henry Art Gallery, where two different vendors brought in to run the gift shop went belly up. Last year, the Henry stopped pretending it had a gift shop. There were books on a small cart near the admissions desk, and that was it. The room behind the cart was dark.

It’s dark no longer. Painter Matthew Offenbacher proposed turning it into an artist project space, and the Henry said yes.

Offenbacher:

The Henry museum shop has been in deep hibernation since last year, an inaccessible space of institutional dreaming, a snoring lacuna in the museum’s lobby–but not for much longer. Beginning the last week in August this project will turn up the temperature, transforming the shop into a hot house, a catalyst, an incubator for Northwest artists. Exhibitions will fall like dominoes: a cascading cavalcade of adventurous, collaborative, celebratory artistic energy. How do artists work together? What can an art exhibition do? What is an audience? Who are you? What can we learn from each other? I hope you’ll join us.

It didn’t open in August, although the original date is still on the Henry’s Web site. It opened in October and was worth the wait. Offenbacher assembles artist teams by picking their names out of his hat. First up are Joseph Park and Jennifer Zwick with a sad-sack video installation.

Gift shop shelves are empty, which adds to the dishevelment. All the action’s in a corner in the dark, where the artists’ images are projected onto their cut-outs on a makeshift stage. They spin on a pair of Lazy Susans, kick box, dance and stand with silver tinsel at their feet and sing.

Friviloity is hard to pull off in an art context, leading so easily into self-indulgence, but Park and Zwick are adorable.

Next, Claire Cowie, Sol Hashemi and Jason Hirata open Nov. 14 with their version of a Northwest Coast Indian potlatch, The Gift Exchange.

Charlie Roberts, The Cave (Via Jennifer Zwick)