Archives for 2009

On the West Coast, from Northern California to Seattle, a gestural
kind of painterly landscape abstraction took root in the 1950s and
1960s, sometimes but not always with figures in it.

Prime movers included David Park, Joan Brown, Elmer Bishop, Manuel Neri, Nathan Oliveira, Jay DeFeo, Richard Diebenkorn and, in Seattle, William Ivey, Boyer Gonzales, Margaret Tompkins, Robert C. Jones and Michael Dailey, who died this weekend after a brief illness.

Dailey was one of the youngest and most steadfastly abstract. Once he
found his style he didn’t change it until forced by health reasons.

(Early Morning Landscape, 1968, oil)
In the 1960s, using oil paint, he began to make colors float. His canvases are full of ripe colors only loosely contained within their frames. I’ve always had the feeling if I put a finger under one of his buoyant passages, I could flip it into the air.
That was enough for him, and he’d undoubtedly be doing it still had oil paint not become more than his balance and lungs could bear.

Dailey lived with multiple sclerosis since his 30s. While he loved the depth and illusion of oxygen he got from oil, he was ready to make the change when change was inevitable.

Acrylics took away his bounce, but what developed as a replacement has become as intriguing. Dailey painted flat smears of color that drag themselves across space and fight with their frames, which are constantly realigning their positions.

(Biscay Blue, acrylic/canvas, 2000)

Seattle art museums being what they are, none has seen fit to provide one of the Northwest’s most singular colorists a retrospective, which is why the Greg Kucera Gallery joined forces with Dailey’s gallery, Francine Seders, to provide one last January.

Dailey:

People have noted the complexity of my color and have given me credit for skill that more properly should be given to persistence and experimentation. This process of improvisation and revision has been the basis of my work since the beginning.

Born in Des Moines, Iowa, he received BA and MFA degrees from the University of Iowa. From 1963 to 1998, he taught painting and drawing in the School of Art at the University of Washington.

Besides Francine Seders, he is represented by Laura Russo Gallery in Portland, Oregon. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Smithsonian Institution, The Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland, The Seattle Art Museum, The Tacoma Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum, and the University of Washington.

Dailey is survived by his wife Linda, son John, daughter Susanne Kelly, son-in-law Jeff Kelly and granddaughters Jane and Tess. Funeral services will be private.

All I need is a room somewhere,
far away from the cold night air,
with one enormous chair

Oh wouldn’t it be loverly.

(From My Fair Lady, here.) Eliza Doolittle was not singing about a showroom sofa. She longed for the broken-in beauty of a used object, softened around its edges but still supple in its springs, exactly what Holly Ferrell paints and the reason for her success.

Farrell paints aging dainty things with good bone structures. They aren’t just tennis rackets, shoes and shelves of books, they are repositories of memory. If Bladerunner‘s Dr. Eldon Tyrell wanted the replicant Rachael to be a happy homemaker instead of siren secretary, he would have filled her head with Farell.

The child whose mother used these cookbooks ate well.

No new tennis balls in Farrell’s paintings.

What saves her work from other feel-good fantasies is the exactitude of her depiction, her spare grace. Next to hers, Thomas Kinkade‘s smeary landscapes are bloated frauds. There is also in Farell’s work an undertone of elegy. The shoes below date from the early 1950s. It’s not likely that their owner still wears them. They are what you’d find cleaning out your mother’s closet after her death. If your mother favored florals and wore high heels, these would pierce your heart.

George Carlin:

Football is a 20th-century technological struggle played on a gridiron in a stadium.

John Schuh: the gridiron opens its technological maw:

Exit, So You Think You Can Dance. I was for Brandon Bryant or (second choice) Kayla Radomski but can live with the winner, Jeanine Mason.

Enter, America’s Best Dance Crew, Season 4, tonight at 9 p.m., featuring in the top 10 9 starting lineup the Seattle dance collective and social club known as Massive Monkees.

They are percussively-gifted, hip-hop dervishes who’ve been winning top honors in global competitions for several years. Instead of a team of all-stars who come together to compete, Massive Monkees are a thriving social unit complete with DJ’s, writers, producers and a good-vibe support team.

Nearly all grew up in Seattle’s South end: Beacon Hill, Columbia City and the Rainier Valley. The majority went to Franklin High school. They developed their stick-like-glue, move-like-silk style organically over time, with members moving in and out of the spotlight.

The roots of the b-boy and b-girl dance crew movement roots are African tribal combined with Brazilian
capoeira and American gymnastics; the fancy footwork of James Brown and
later Michael Jackson; electric boogaloo poppers like Don Campbell and the footwork of Brooklyn kids in the 1970s. To
avoid summer heat trapped inside their apartments, they fooled around,
outdancing each other in the street.

West Coast crews won the first three seasons. It’s time for an East Coast victory. On the other hand, no Northwest crew has ever made it to the starting gate.

 Vvoitek Ziemilski

Annie Leibovitz, Whoopi Goldberg

Sharon Shapiro

Juniper Shuey

Steven Miller, from Decode Books’ Milky at Platform

Steven Miller, again:

A Lawrence Weiner installation at a football stadium is impressive, along with everything else opening soon at the Dallas Cowboy’s stadium, previous post here.

What is even less likely to materialize in a football stadium is art that critiques the game as effectively as Grant Barnhart‘s does.

Detail:
George Carlin on the difference between baseball and (American) football here.

Only in Texas do both reactionary politics and advanced art dominate.

Exhibit A is the Dallas Cowboys Art Program in its recently completed stadium. Instead of tapping LeRoy Neiman, somebody the state’s most famous politician is sure to have heard of, aritsts in the lineup are largely but not exclusively abstract or text based:  Franz Ackermann, Annette Lawrence, Olafur Eliasson Ricci Albenda, Mel Bochner, Daniel Buren, Teresita Fernandez, Terry Haggerty, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Jim Isermann, Dave Muller, Matthew Ritchie, Gary Simmons, Lawrence Weiner, Doug Aitken, Wayne Gonzales, and Jacqueline Humphries.

I’m dazzled. There’s a press tour Aug. 11. Press release here.

Martha Stewart is a satire waiting to get out. Not too far beneath the surface of her hints for gracious living are lunatic assumptions about the value of women’s time. Performance artists have spotted the lunacy and exploited it, including Karen Finley, who advised women to save hairs from shower drains and weave them into bath mats: waste not, want not.

Mike Simi is not about to waste his time weaving, although he too is interested in what can be salvaged from the bathroom.

Lint Roller Series: Bathroom Rug

Els Vanden Meersch as a bee, making honeycomb:

Ben Beres as a cat (SuttonBeresCuller):

Bryan Zanisnik – mom and dad as stars in the night sky, with nuclear cooling towers as background shadows and the demised World Trade Center at her feet.

Mandy Greer as a spider:

Fred Muram as a horse, after John Baldessari :

Darren Waterston as a jellyfish:

Susan Robb as an animal made of land:

Claude Zervas as many bears:

Dan Webb as a dandelion:

Gretchen Bennett as her own forest:

Last month’s edition of Flat Stanley’s Steamroller Print Initiative produced prints by Tina Randolph that will be part of Georgetown’s Art Attack on Saturday.

(Last time I checked, the link for Art Attack says July 11, but a similar event takes place Aug. 8, same place. Info on this month’s activities after the jump.)

[Read more…] about Steamrolling into art