Look, See

Untitled (Deerhunters)

Untitled (Deerhunters), 2005, HTML & JPEG, 400 x 500 pixels (image used without permission)

Untitled (Woman, Vampire)

Untitled (Woman, Vampire), 2005, HTML & JPEG, 532 x 652 pixels (image used without permission)

John McLaughlin

I was glad to see this review by Grace Glueck in today's NYT (that link will probably expire) of a show of John McLaughlin's paintings. He is well-known on the West Coast but still seldom seen. His work has meant a lot to me since I first saw it over twenty five years ago. As Glueck says, " McLaughlin's paintings do not really lend themselves to verbal description. See them, let your eye romp and your mind fall into them."

John McLaughlin
Ameringer Yohe Fine Art
20 West 57th Street, Manhattan
Through Oct. 1

Once much appreciated by artists, collectors and curators, but somewhat lost in the shuffle of today's art world, the self-taught painter John McLaughlin (1898-1976) lived in Southern California for his last three decades. There he made reductive paintings remarkable for their intense quietude amid the hubbub of the West Coast art scene. Born to a cultivated Boston family, McLaughlin early on developed an appreciation for Asian art, eventually zeroing in on Japan. His experiences of that country's life and culture, especially of the 16th-century Zen and literati painters, may have deepened the meditative sensibility that informs his work, but he was also beholden to the radically reductive "spiritual" Suprematism of the Russian painter Kasimir Malevich.

McLaughlin didn't begin painting full time until he was pushing 50. "My aim is to achieve the totally abstract," he said, and the works on view in this small show, dating from the 1960's and 70's and mostly in black and white, come close to that goal, if anything devised by human hand can really be considered "totally abstract." Austere, yes. Bars - vertical and horizontal - rectangles, empty spaces and fields of solid color inflected by stripes characterize this late work, which seems to point toward Minimalism but does not relate at all to its industrially derived aesthetic and prepossessing size.

A canvas like "Untitled" (c. 1965), whose cream-colored ground is divided down the middle by a vertical stripe, itself divided vertically in half, one-half black, the other dead white, plays with the eye's perception of symmetry while at the same time offering it a restful expanse of space. Other good works present the eye with teasing figure-ground relationships, like one from 1960 consisting of black horizontal bars separated by eight white ones.

But McLaughlin's paintings do not really lend themselves to verbal description. See them, let your eye romp and your mind fall into them.
GRACE GLUECK
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/23/arts/design/23gall.html?pagewanted=print

Untitled (Stingray)

Untitled (Stingray), 2005, HTML & JPEG, 420 x 660 pixels (image used without permission)

Guide Aims to Help Bloggers Beat Censors

Guide Aims to Help Bloggers Beat Censors

A Paris-based media watchdog has released a free guide with tips for bloggers and dissidents to sneak past Internet censors in countries from China to Iran.

Reporters Without Borders' "Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents" is partly financed by the French Foreign Ministry and includes technical advice on how to remain anonymous online. It was launched at the Apple Expo computer show in Paris on Thursday and can be downloaded in Chinese, Arabic, Persian, English and French...

In a bid to inspire budding Web diarists around the world, the 87-page booklet gives advice on setting up and running blogs, and on using pseudonyms and anonymous proxies, which can be used to replace easily traceable home computer addresses...

The San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation also published an online guide this year to help Web diarists keep their blogs anonymous. That includes pointers on anonymizing technologies, including the EFF's own Tor, and tips on keeping postings out of search engines. The guide, though, was mostly aimed at preventing firings rather than bypassing censorship.

RSF handbook: http://www.rsf.org

EFF guide: http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Anonymity/blog- anonymously.php

Untitled (Hands, Child, Bull)

Untitled (Hands, Child, Bull), 2005, HTML & JPEG, 431 x 650 pixels (image used without permission)

Untitled (Lapidary Saw)

Untitled (Lapidary Saw), 2005 HTML & JPEG, 400 x 600 pixels (image used without permission)

Untitled (Deer, Child, Hands)

Untitled (Deer, Child, Hands) 2005, HTML & JPEG, 360 x 440 pixels (image used with permission)

Labels

Today I shipped five framed drawings titled Qinglü to Gallery Siano in Philadelphia; I made three labels for the back of each. The top label is the usual basic info about the work, the middle label is a longish statement about this series, and the bottom shows a thumbnail of each of the five drawings in the series. Very easy to make custom labels with the free Avery software that you can download.

Untitled (Speedway Grand Prix)

Untitled (Speedway Grand Prix), 2005, HTML & JPEG, 480 x 638 pixels (image used without permission)