Look, See

Untitled

Untitled, 2004, HTML, 340 x 594 pixels

Multi-Panel Painting

Left to right: George Lawson, Klava, 1986, oil on slate, installed at Elins Eagle-Smith (SF); Anne Appleby, installation, 2004, oil on panel, at Paule Anglim (SF); Byron Kim, Synecdoche, 1991-present, oil on panel, at BAMPFA (Berkeley).

The work of these three artists is currently hanging in the Bay Area: Lawson and Appleby in SF, and Kim in Berkeley and SF. Although each uses the grid as an organizing structure, each is also very different.

Lawson painted on square slate tiles with a coarse brush. Each panel is a fairly consistent single blue color, with different blues on each panel, and the paint is stiff looking, has body, and shows the pigment. Each panel is hung with L-fasteners nailed into the wall, which visibly holding each slate tile to the wall.

Appleby's paint is much more liquid, almost rubbed smooth and flat, but mixed and layered so that there is a variety of color on each square panel turning or fading out to the edges. The wood panels are hung flush to the wall, with no support visible.

Kim's panels are vertical rectanglar wood panels, with thick, finely-ground, creamy paint smeared or scraped on with some kind of knife or another applicator. The panels are hung flush to the wall similar to Appleby's.

Lawson's Klava is an object and image with a range of possible associations: sky and water; movement and weight; a real thing versus a picture of a thing; a square neutral shape between landscape and portrait; a book, a story, a map, an aerial view, a fractured view reaggregating, a narrative; a whole and its parts, a balancing act; and a moving between interior and exterior. The fact that the way that the panels are hung is exposed to the viewer adds weight, provokes the feeling or image of each painting having been handled, treated separately, perhaps makes the viewer imagine the panels slipping off the wall, lying on the floor, and the effort it takes to put them back on the wall. The rough surface of the slate is visible beneath the paint, is part of the image, and is not merely a surface onto which paint is applied to do its thing. Slate being rock, which is solidifed earth, makes one think of cave walls, painted pottery, fresco, building surfaces, walkways, cliffs and shear rock face. Each is hard and heavy, rough and old, sensitive to temperature, and long-lasting.

Appleby's painting share some of Lawson's associations, but her work more easily slip beyond the general landscape to the specifics of plant, blossom, flower. The grid is like a schematic, a large detail, an exploded diagram, accumulated select impressions at close view that spiral out to a to a general whole and back to details. Her light is outdoors, bright, ideal. Her paintings are weightless, closer to not being objects but instead pictures. There is a photographic quality to her surface and color. The panel is submerged beneath the layered paint, but the viewer sees the grain of the bare wooden edges and the spilling over of gesso from the front, reminding the viewer of the tension between illusion and material. In Appleby's work the wooden panel is an object, raw wood turned into something historical and functional, a surface that is material, has had a life from standing in the woods, being cut and planed, finding its way to racks and shelves, a once-living material still porous, with a smell, a grain, with the possibility of change.

Kim's Synecdoche is a project to describe something very specific: the color of each panel is an attempt to match the skin color of someone who sat for him. Each 8 x 10 panel, in size, shape, and color, is obviously a portrait. Numbering around 300, the painting is a record of social interaction, of a network of people, of an understanding or partnership and consent. Together the paintings, in order alphabetically by first name, are a chart, a record, a graphical plotting of individuals, their colors, their names, a demographic tool to describe a particular milieu. Each panel is a face in a crowd, part of an audience, part of a group of witnesses to the viewer. Synecdoche is a reification of de Kooning's comment that, "flesh was the reason oil paint was invented" (a quote that keeps coming back to me; I recently used it in a much different way in an essay on Lawson's San Cai paintings). Kim's wooden panels are carriers of paint, convenient and durable, each one of many of the same, a multiple, not quite unique, not quite the same.

The grid has been a well-used device. Abstract painting has a now somewhat long history. The use of the grid in abstract painting is still full of possibility for a variety of purposes. The different approaches described here, the diferrent meanings undertaken by each artist, and those meanings and others perceived and experienced by the viewer, are significant, meaningful, and fruitful. These differences are sometimes quite obvious, are other times quite nuanced, but they are important because they are part of the subject and meaning, and inherent in the conveyance of subject and meaning, in abstract painting specifically, as discussed here, and, typically, in painting in general. Observing the range of choices and the the artist's decisions and how they are implemented are key to the meaning of painting.

Untitled

Untitled, 2004, HTML, 340 x 594 pixels

Untitled

Untitled, 2004, HTML, 340 x 594 pixels

Untitled

Untitled, 2004, HTML, 340 x 594 pixels

Ramones Reunion

OK, no mystery what this little series is about. I like the Ramones. I still have the original first three (or four?) LPs.

Johnny Ramone dies and it suddenly occurs to me that three quarters of the Ramones are dead before they qualify for AARP membership. It's one thing to be a classic Rock 'n Roll burnout like DeeDee, but it's quite another to die from disease, as Joey and Johnny did. Maybe Tommy was right to bail so early on.

It occurred to me that, as it was revealed in the recent film The End of the Century (which I have not seen, have read plenty about, and do want to see) that Joey and Johnny did not get along at all, what would happen if they reconciled and reunited in the afterlife?

First thing, of course, is that they'd need a new drummer. And since all their drummers are alive they'd have auditions, and what would be better than a drummer named Angel (Ahn' hel) Ramone?

So that's it. An excuse to do a series of drawings. Square like a record album cover, lots of black and white, blue and pink, like from the first four or five record covers. Also, pure teehee factor: the eight images form a shape with a hole in the middle, kind of like... a record. Get it? Badaboom! I didn't plan that. I didn't know how many of these I was going to do when I started.

Now, go do something important and play Beat on the Brat and Rockaway Beach real loud.

20040925 SF Galleries

Some gallery shots taken yesterday...

George Lawson at Elins Eagles-Smith Gallery; I posted earlier the essay I wrote for the show:

Anne Appleby at Paule Anglim (review):

Rick Arnitz at Stephen Wirtz (review):

Unusual: pictures of SF gallery openings at Artnet.

8. Encore

8. Encore

7. Reunion in the Afterlife

7. Reunion in the Afterlife

CD & Book images

These pictures show the CD and limited edition books I just produced for exhibit and sale at the 14th International Symposion for Concrete Art in Gmunden, Austria; thanks to Siegfriend Holzbauer, who is showing them. The CD includes nearly every HTML drawing I've done for my weblog since 2002. They are organized in series chronologically and alphabetically, with about twenty selected series highlighted. The CD includes a number of texts: an introduction by Siegfriend, essays by George Lawson and Jim Harris, excerpts from Tom Moody's weblog, and my statement. The first ten produced are in a slim jewelcase, and five more are in a paper sleeve I designed, printed, cut, and folded; additional copies will be issued in the paper sleeve.

I produced a small folded book in an edition of 10 (plus 5 artist's proofs) using the drawings from the "mouthsounds 1-30" that are laid out to be printed on both sides of an 8 1/2 x 11" piece of paper; making only three cuts allows the sections to folded up into an accordion-like book that is about 2 3/4 x 2 1/8", which is contained in a small hand-made vellum envelope. Each of the the jewelcase-version CDs includes one of the editioned books, and the first five in the paper sleeve contains an AP. That's fifteen total; I'll make more copies of the CD, but I don't think they'll include this book. I may change my mind, and if I do these additional books won't be signed or numbered.

I also produced for the occasion an edition of ten small books using the ten drawings from Dasarâjadharma: Ten Principles of Good Governance. These were printed four to an 11 x 8 1/2 page, then cut into four pages, and handsewn into books with a vellum cover that slips into a hand-made vellum envelope.

6. "Onetwothreefour..."

6. "Onetwothreefour..."

5. First Rehearsal: Johnny, Joey, DeeDee, & (newest drummer) Angel

5. First Rehearsal: Johnny, Joey, DeeDee, & (newest drummer) Angel (Ahn' hell)

4. Where's Tommy? Drummer Auditions!

4. Where's Tommy? Drummer Auditions!

3. Joey and Johnny Reconcile

3. Joey and Johnny Reconcile, 2004, HTML, 320 x 320 pixels

2. DeeDee Greets Johnny

2. DeeDee Greets Johnny, 2004, HTML, 320 x 320 pixels

1. Johnny Arrives in Heaven

1. Johnny Arrives in Heaven, 2004, HTML, 320 x 320 pixels

Untitled (Blue & Green) 1-18