Painting Archives | Art Dallas Contemporary Art Fair

June 19, 2020 In Art By Hannah Smith for Art Dallas

Nathan Walsh, Clark Gallery

“Perhaps the first thing to say about Nathan Walsh’s astonishing photorealist cityscapes is that, for all the seeming influence of photography in their making, it is, paradoxically, their distance from that medium which makes them into interesting paintings. Walking the streets, making complex perspectival drawings that subtly adjust space to make a good picture, a knowledge of art history, Bonnington in particular – Walsh uses all these means to arrive at something much richer and more thoughtful.” – Nicolas Usherwood 2007 Galleries Magazine

Walsh deals exclusively with the urban landscape and aims to present a painted world, which in some ways resembles the world we live in. He is fascinated by the city, its visual complexity and constant state of flux. The act of painting is an attempt for Walsh to fix this information and give vision to our experience of living within it.

His work aims to create credible and convincing space whilst making reference to our world displaying its own distinct logic. This space is created through drawing, which Walsh sees as fundamental in establishing a world the viewer can engage with. Drawing allows him to make human pictorial decisions instead of relying on the mechanical eye of a camera or software package. The process is open ended and changes from one painting to the next. While Walsh employs a variety of perspectival strategies, the methods are not fixed or rigid in their application. Working with a box of pencils and an eraser, Walsh will start by establishing a horizon line on which he will place vanishing points to construct simple linear shapes, which become subdivided into more complex arrangements.

By using simple mathematical ratios, Walsh can begin to describe concrete form within his picture plane. Over a period of time, he will draw and redraw buildings, manipulating their height, width or nature in relation to other pictorial elements. By introducing spatial recession to these elements, Walsh aims to present a world the viewer can enter into and move around.

Some of his more recent works deal with layers of information, whether this be the description of reflective surfaces or the combination of inside and outside spaces. This, he believes offers great potential for re-presenting reality, sandwiching what is in front of and behind the viewer together, allowing for further pictorial invention and new realities.

Duplicating the flatness of a photograph or a series of stitched together photographs is of no interest to Walsh. A camera lens will have a fixed local length and a software package will obey a set of algorithms. The reproduction in paint of these mechanical processes negates the human experience of responding to the world.

http://www.clarkgallery.com/exhibitions

April 10, 2020 In Art By Hannah Smith for Art Dallas

Artist Jamie Adams, Zolla / Lieberman Gallery

“My work functions as a kind of personal memoir, drawing from memory, desire, and dreaming. It’s my response to life, to bear witness, while operating somewhere between private confession and public entertainment. I borrow images from my own personal stash—images of family and friends, cinematic/TV culture from the 1950s and 60s, or other paintings, photos, vintage books. For the last decade in particular the work has mixed aspects of painting with cinema—its personae, projective nature or use of montage, etc… as a way to suggest some kind of complication or disturbance.”

Jamie often gives himself projects. He works similar to how a director works by hiring actors, a crew, etc. His most recent work, Niagara Series, draws from an array of sources including American Luminist and The Technicolor films of the 1950s. He draws aspects of his favorite films from that period into his work, such as Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, Hathaway’s Niagara, and Leone’s Once Upon A Time in the West. From a contemporary perspective Technicolor’s overly saturated color in those films seems to embody the anxieties of postwar trauma, and societies striving for conformity, prosperity, peace. In Hathaway’s film Niagara, he essentially takes the ‘Honeymoon Capital of the World’ and turns it into a crime scene. Niagara Falls, recognized as one of the grand, natural wonders on the American landscape, and elevated to iconic status through a multitude of luminous American paintings by Church, Bierstadt, Inness, and others, is transformed into what Adams believes to be the ‘monster’ in the film—the American equivalent to Japan’s Godzilla– a more sublime sense of catastrophe or dread…much more palatable for an American audience.

The earlier jeannie series (2005-2012), was a group of black and white paintings based on a black and white film– Jean-Luc Godard’s French new wave films, Breathless, released around 1960. “I was initially drawn to Jean Seberg’s character in the film, and the wonderful ambient light in her bedroom apartment where monochromatic folds of flesh, and bed sheets and cotton clothing merged into one continuous surface. Jeannie kept changing though. For a while she was everything to me—the reason to make the next painting. It’s because she seemed an empty vessel that I thought I could fill with my own ideas, memories, wishes. And she could play any role–the surrogate, model-mother, furtive lover, ephebic male, the muse, youth…the artist. At the time I wanted to belong to this filmic space; to settle down, set up shop and make something. Initially the painting’s black and white surfaces were suggestive of early film technologies or a painting’s under layer of grisaille. The painted figures, with their curvaceous volumes, additionally began to take on the appearance of Neo-Classical sculpture, semblances of marble statuary.”

Jamie creates paintings based on what he wants to see. For him, it is always a negotiation between idea, the visual experience, and manipulating paint matter. While many of his paintings begin in an organized fashion, they usually slip into chaos. Some characters that begin as one gender sometimes end up burlesquing another; others added are eliminated; scenes come and go. Characters are made to ‘fit’ into the painting. “I construct them in relation to the frame and other elements within it, and as a story reveals itself. And certain aspects of the body may become accentuated in order to highlight particular qualities: a torque of the hip, iridescence of flesh, a hand gesture, attenuation of the sternal notch or canopy of the chin, etc…I suppose this is my theatrical experiences coming into play….How the painting at a certain point needs to assert itself, make its own demands, project to its own audience. One move affects the need for another and then another and so on.”

https://www.zollaliebermangallery.com/

February 18, 2020 In Art By Hannah Smith for Art Dallas

Artist Mary Abbott, McCormick Gallery

Mary Abbott always felt she was born to lead an artful life. Born in New York City in 1921, she was the great, great, great granddaughter of John Adams, the second president of the United States. Her family was not in politics, but rather her mother, Elizabeth Grinnell, was a poet and Hearst columnist, who clearly supported her artistic daughter’s ambitions.

Abbott was interested in art from and early age and studied with painters such as George Grosz at the Art Students League and Eugene Weiss from the Corcoran Museum School. In 1941, Abbott, who was a stunning woman, came out as a debutante at the Colony Club and became the belle of Manhattan. As a working model she appeared on the covers of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, among others. She married and continued painting and studying throughout the War years.

In 1946, separated from her husband, Abbott set up a studio on Tenth Street in Manhattan. After meeting Willem de Kooning, whose studio was nearby, she became romantically involved with de Kooning and remained close with him until his death. At that time, she also enrolled in an experimental New York school and worked with founding artists Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, William Baziotes and David Hare. Through these associations Abbott moved into the heart of the New York avant-garde, becoming a member of the Artist’s Club, where she was one of only a few female members along with Perle Fine and Elaine de Kooning. Also in the early 1950’s, Abbott began to exhibit extensively with shows at celebrity galleries, including the Stable Gallery, Kootz, Tibor de Nagy, Tanager, and in three of the famous Stable Gallery Annuals.

Abbott and her second husband spent winters in Haiti and the U.S. Virgin Islands where the tropical environment influenced her many beautiful and inventive abstractions. Abbott was always serious about her painting career and declared her life’s work was “using the medium, paint, color and line [to define] the poetry of living space.” In 2016, Abbott was included in the game-changing exhibition, “Women of Abstract Expressionism” organized by the Denver Art Museum.

With her death at the age of 98 in August of 2019, she was one of the last survivors of the original AbEx generation. She left behind a legacy of bright, color infused work full of her characteristic sweeping and energetic brushwork. Today Mary Abbott’s work is represented by McCormick Gallery in Chicago.

https://www.thomasmccormick.com/artists/mary_abbott

Muriel Guepin Gallery - Isabelle-Menin_Rome-ou-la-tentation

February 17, 2020 In Art By Hannah Smith for Art Dallas

Artist Isabelle Menin, Muriel Guepin Gallery NYC

Belgian photographer Isabelle Menin creates portraits of flowers that are not only gorgeous in form and color, but also uniquely expressive. Fresh blossoms and withering blooms melt into each other in dreamy washes of color and hazy drips and swirls. Hues and flowers are reflected in pools of water, as forms disintegrate and reappear in trickles and indistinct glimmers of light. The resulting images are breathtaking interplays of light and shadow, form and reflections, and breathtaking colors and textures.

Looking at Menin’s vibrant and organic work, it isn’t surprising to learn that she has a background in painting. After exploring working with paint while developing a career as a graphic designer for over a decade, the artist turned to digital photography. Taking pictures, scanning pieces of nature, she constantly plays with textures and colors, transforming them, mixing them, in order to give shape to a fictional nature, dense and flamboyant at the same time. With rich colors, bold textures, and a stunning abstract quality, her creations look more like masterful illustrations and paintings than conventional photographs.

The complex outcome of every artwork is due to the digital manipulation that Menin loves using to transform and blend her images in order to create her beautifully moody works. As she explains: “Going digital allowed me to push back my limits, to find a much wider sphere of activity where things tied up fluidly and were reversible. I create a space that unfolds through the depth I get by accumulating layers, by light, by transparency and opacity; I put elements together that create a kind of fake landscape, I photograph and then manipulate them in order to twist them and show the sometimes hidden sides.”

Menin calls her work “inland photographs and disordered landscapes” in reference to the strange complexity of nature, which reminds her of human complexity. She says, “The uncontrolled forces, the shapes’ complexity, the inter-weavings and the synergy of the elements, they all look to me like a mirror of human spirit. We are not straight lines, we are like nature, a very large network of interferences that work together to produce something which sometimes looks accomplished and then gets destroyed in a perpetual coming and going between order and disorder.”

In the past five years, Isabelle Menin has had numerous exhibitions in Europe and internationally, both at art fairs and museums. Isabelle Menin lives and works in Brussels, Belgium, and is represented by the Muriel Guépin Gallery.

http://www.murielguepingallery.com/artists/isabelle-menin

February 14, 2020 In Art By Hannah Smith for Art Dallas

Artist Daniel Sprick, MM Fine Art

Colorado artist, Daniel Sprick’s subjects range from extraordinarily realistic portraits to hauntingly contemplative still lifes. His paintings, while reminiscent of the Dutch and Flemish tradition, are wholly contemporary, subtly blurring the line between realism and abstraction. His paintings feature a range of subjects, from still lifes of flowers and unlikely assortments of objects to interiors and urban and pastoral scenes. A diverse range of men, women, and youth populate his portraits and figurative works; taken together, they reflect a rich and encompassing view of humanity. The meticulous representation of everyday objects and stirring interpretation of the human form provide viewers a new way to look at the world.

As Timothy J. Standring, exhibition curator and Gates Foundation Curator at the Denver Art Museum explains Sprick’s work: “Upon first glance, viewers might think Daniel’s works are photographs because of their stunningly realistic elements. However, the longer we look at one of his paintings, the more we become aware that they are anything but a part of our world. We encounter Sprick’s paintings not so much as statements, but more as experiences, whereby we engage deeply with his creativity.”

Born in 1953 in Little Rock, Arkansas, Sprick currently lives and works in Denver, CO. Sprick and his work have been the subject of museum shows, including the Museum of Outdoor Art in Englewood, Colorado; the Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga, Tennessee; the Evansville Museum of Art and Science, Indiana; and the Denver Art Museum. Sprick’s work is represented in numerous public collections, among them the Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock; the Denver Art Museum; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. An articulate spokesman about the nature of art and his own work, Sprick is the subject of a recently released PBS documentary.

Daniel Sprick is represented by MM Fine Art in Southampton, New York.

http://www.mmfineart.com/sprick-daniel.html

February 13, 2020 In Art By Hannah Smith for Art Dallas

Artist Gene Davis, Vallarino Fine Art

Gene Davis was born in Washington, D.C. in 1920 and spent nearly all his life there. While he is most famous as an American abstract painter, painting lively compositions of thin, vibrantly colored vertical stripes, before he began to paint in 1949, he worked as a sportswriter, covering the Washington Redskins and other local teams. Working as a journalist in the late 1940s, he covered the Roosevelt and Truman presidential administrations, and was often President Truman’s partner for poker games.

Davis considered his nonacademic background a blessing that freed him from the limitations of a traditional art school orientation. His early paintings and drawings—though they show the influence of such artists as the Swiss painter Paul Klee and the American abstractionist Arshile Gorky—display a distinct improvisational quality. His preference for spontaneity and fascinated by color relationships, Davis delighted in alternating thin bright vertical stripes to create syncopated patterns reminiscent of jazz and bebop. Despite their calculated appearance, Davis’s stripe works were not based on conscious use of theories or formulas. Davis often compared himself to a jazz musician who plays by ear, describing his approach to painting as “playing by eye.”

In the 1960s, art critics identified Davis as a leader of the Washington Color School, a loosely connected group of Washington, D.C. painters who created abstract compositions in acrylic colors on unprimed canvas. Their work exemplified what the critic Barbara Rose defined as the “primacy of color” in abstract painting. And while he took up abstract painting in the 1940s as a hobby, and was featured in a few local shows, he was never successful enough to devote his full time to art until, after 35 years in journalism, he finally turned to it 1968.

“The idea of my ever making a livelihood out of painting was the farthest thing from my mind,” he said in a 1981 interview. But he hit on something—a parade of brightly-colored, edge-to-edge stripes—that not only made his name and changed his career, it put him at the forefront at the only major art movement to emanate from the nation’s capital, the Washington Color School.

In contrast, Davis experimented with complex schemes that lend themselves to sustained periods of viewing. Davis suggested that “instead of simply glancing at the work, select a specific color and take the time to see how it operates across the painting.” In discussing his stripe work, Davis spoke not simply about the importance of color, but about “color interval:” the rhythmic, almost musical, effects caused by the irregular appearance of colors or shades within a composition. Davis is known primarily for the stripe works that span twenty-seven years, but he was a versatile artist who worked in a variety of formats and media.

In keeping with his unorthodox attitudes, Davis’s works do not follow in an orderly sequence. Davis described his method as “a tendency to raid my past without guilt, going back and picking up on some idea that I flirted with briefly, say fifteen or twenty years ago. I will then take this idea and explore it more in depth, almost as if no time had elapsed between the present and the time of its original conception.” As a result, similar works may be separated by years or even decades. Davis’s works, which resonate with his romantic, free-wheeling approach to art-making, reveal a seriousness balanced by whimsy and an unpredictability that is always a source of joy.

In 1972 Davis created Franklin’s Footpath, which was at the time the world’s largest artwork, by painting colorful stripes on the street in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the world’s largest painting, Niagara (43,680 square feet), in a parking lot in Lewiston, NY. His “micro-paintings”, at the other extreme, were as small as 3/8 of an inch square.

A lifelong Washington, D.C. resident, Davis died in his hometown on April 6, 1985, and his work is included among the collections of important institutions, such as the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and The Phillips Collection and Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. Today, his work is represented by Vallarino Fine Art in New York City.

http://www.vallarinofineart.com/modern#/gene-davis

February 12, 2020 In Art By Hannah Smith for Art Dallas

Artist Anthony White, Greg Kucera Gallery

Anthony White is an artist and curator in Seattle, Washington, where he is currently represented by Greg Kucera Gallery. He is a recent alumnus of Cornish College of the Arts, the first in his family to complete four years of professional training. White’s work consists of intricate portraits, still lifes, and objects meticulously spun from common PLA plastic. His work disrupts hierarchies of status and wealth by placing trivial souvenirs and low-brow accoutrements in luxurious environments.

White has recently received the 2019 Special Recognition Award from the Seattle Art Museum’s Betty Bowen Award committee, and was the 2018 recipient of the second place AXA XL Catlin Art Prize juried by prominent international museum curators, at the New York Academy of Art, in New York. He was the COSA 2019 Award recipient, and recently presented a Solo Presentation booth at EXPO Chicago 2019. White completed his Spring ‘19 PLOP residency in London, UK, where he returned for a solo exhibition, “Black Friday” at Public Gallery in December 2019. All of which are in conjunction with a museum curatorial project that will launch in June of 2020. During the 2019 Seattle Art Fair, the Frye Art Museum acquired work by Anthony White, as did the Crocker Art Museum at EXPO Chicago 2019 to add to their permanent collections.

Anthony White was born in 1994 in Santa Maria, a small town outside of Santa Barbara, California. He attended middle and high school, in Prescott Valley, AZ. Both places played different roles in his subcultural exposure and identity development. However, in Arizona, the young White found an undertone of disapproval towards anything that wasn’t right-wing and stereotypically normal. Prevailing societal roles and the predictable confines of gender and sexual identity politics fought against his confidence in presenting his true identity and expressing his genuine interests.

His working-middle class parents, Tyra, (an elementary school teacher) and Gilbert, (a lowrider car mechanic) were supportive and encouraged his farfetched and wild dreams—-even gifting him a tattoo machine on his 15th birthday. His younger brother and sister, have been supportive as well. White grew up around his grandmother, who was a craft artist building benches and chairs with a vast collection of low-craft accoutrements, which he believes was the initial influence toward his interest in pursuing an education at Cornish College of the Arts. He is the first in his family to complete four years of school and professional training.

Things To Teach Yourself by Anthony White

His intricate collage-like ‘paintings’ are created from threads of colored PLA plastic–often found in throwaway consumer goods and luxury products alike–which are heated, melted and used to fill in his erratic still life compositions. Each creation is crammed with references to pop culture and the hallmarks of everyday life, no matter the socioeconomic class. Household items are scattered around Versace and Balenciaga pieces. Diamonds and bundles of cash sit alongside power tools and hot sauce. What underpins his work, though, is the use of cultural symbols that are somehow recognizable to us all.

In a recent Creative Review interview, he explained, “The work is both very time and labour intensive. I often forget the exact hours I spend on each piece after they exceed 100, but I enjoy the process, and I do think it is important to slow down, and really highlight and explain each part within each work through the time I spend on it. Each piece has a basic contour drawing done first, for technical reasons, but a lot of the line direction and color and figurative elements are intuitive–they have to be.”

See his most recent works at Art Dallas 2020 in the Greg Kucera Gallery Booth, April 16-19, 2020, at Dallas Market Hall in the Dallas Market Center.

https://gregkucera.com/white-anthony.htm