IF

If technology were culture this would be a Renaissance !!!

Born An Artist

Outside The Kafka Museum

Location: Franz Kafka Museum, Prague, Czech Republic
Sculpture by David Černý, bronze, 2004(?)

Quoted from an article by Jeffrey Fleishman of LA Times:
Cerny’s …project is a sculpture of two bronze naked men. They have swivel hips and, facing each other, they urinate into a pool shaped like the Czech map, writing famous Czech sayings in the water. One is by Kafka: ‘Prague is beautiful but it has claws.’
“There’s a Czech idiom about ‘peeing over somebody,’ which I guess translated into English would be to ‘get one over on somebody.’ That’s what the peeing men mean. It’s the way our country behaves,” he said.
Cerny sat near the sculpture the other day. “Oh, it still works,” he said. “You know there’s a computer underneath and you can send phone text messages and the men will pee them…
…Yeah, I’m a prankster,” he said. “It would be nice at the moment when I’m dying if I could say to myself, ‘You know, someone enjoyed something I did.’ Why not?

Why Not?

The Prophet Of Today's Modernist Predicament

Ahhh The 80"s... These Works Are Much More Impressive In Real Life

Sorry About The Ad That Comes With This Video

Is This An Art Show Or Macy's?

Deborah Zlotsky

Deborah Zlotsky "Waiting Room" 2011

Deborah Zolatsky "Catch-22" 2011

Deborah Zlotsky "All That Follows" 2011

Deborah Zlotsky "Atavistic" 2011

I love the precise color harmonies of this work. They glow like a well done fresco. I would call the forms natural geometry; they are so evocative of material and something non-material which is becoming the heart of my own study. See more of her work at Deborah Zlotsky's website.

Bacon's Dog?

This painting is entitled "Touc, Seated on a Table" by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. I read a wise comment that wondered if Francis Bacon had not seen this painting? Also at the Hammer Museum in LA is this wondeful Cezanne painting I had never seen before.

Paul Cezanne "Boy Resting" c. 1887

Contemporary Curators Are Like Capitalism'; They Can Consume Anything

This is a piece of a review by Peter Schjeldahl in the November 21st New Yorker.  It seems pointless to complain because it just raises these sophomoric, tiresome shanagins to some level of the scandalous, which they are not, but they do take up valuable resources. Are curators held accountable to anyone other then fellow artworld nitwits??

Another Stunning Day In Artland!!

Andreas Gursky's Rhine II photograph sells for $4.3m

 

Sum paid for sludgy image of desolate, featureless landscape sets new world record for a photograph

 

More here from the Guardian. Thanks to my friend Matthew Beall for reporting this crime to me!

 

Tea Time With Karel Appel-Love The Music

Milton Resnick The Elephant in the Room at CHEIM & READ

AAHHHHHHHHHHHH

After 5 days the electricity is back on! It went off just as I was about to animate my monster. Luckily I was able to procure some ice and he is still as fresh as a daisy. Tonight I will bring him to LIFE! I hope I don't regret it.....

Milton Resnick: there's a measure called recognition.

The God of Small Things - Lucian Freud Captured on Film

Check out the Master's thoughts about what is and isn't Art. Warning to clever folks! Video found here.

Conservation of the Archimedes Palimpsest from Walters Museum on Vimeo.

Walters researchers decode the secrets of the Archimedes Palimpsest

"Twelve years ago, Walters Art Museum curator Will Noel opened a parcel and discovered what he calls "Archimedes' brain in a box." Thus began a search for buried treasure — in this case, the lost writings of Archimedes of Syracuse, a famed Greek mathematician and inventor who lived in the third century B.C. Noel and his boss, museum director Gary Vikan, found a 174-page book made of cured goatskin that was ugly beyond belief. The sheaves were singed around the edges, the text and pages were defaced by water stains, and mold had eaten away entire sections. Noel began to gently riffle through the pages but stopped when they fell apart in his hands. "It looked as though it had been in a fire, or something had chewed it up," Vikan says. "It made me think of shredded wheat." Even worse, the manuscript had been washed and scraped away by a medieval monk and written over with prayers (making it a "palimpsest," a document in which the original text has been imperfectly erased and written over.) Only ghostly traces of the original remained.Twelve years ago, Walters Art Museum curator Will Noel opened a parcel and discovered what he calls "Archimedes' brain in a box." Thus began a search for buried treasure — in this case, the lost writings of Archimedes of Syracuse, a famed Greek mathematician and inventor who lived in the third century B.C. Noel and his boss, museum director Gary Vikan, found a 174-page book made of cured goatskin that was ugly beyond belief. The sheaves were singed around the edges, the text and pages were defaced by water stains, and mold had eaten away entire sections. Noel began to gently riffle through the pages but stopped when they fell apart in his hands. "It looked as though it had been in a fire, or something had chewed it up," Vikan says. "It made me think of shredded wheat." Even worse, the manuscript had been washed and scraped away by a medieval monk and written over with prayers (making it a "palimpsest," a document in which the original text has been imperfectly erased and written over.) Only ghostly traces of the original remained." More here.

A Furrytale

The Mill & The Cross | trailer SUNDANCE 2011 Rutger Hauer Michael York C...

Wow The Mindlessness Is Numbing! Jerry Saltz Proves Again He Is A Dick!

Contemporary Artists I Can Tolerate #3

Adrian Ghenie: Haunch of Venison London from Haunch of Venison on Vimeo.

Just Makes Me Sad....

John O'Donnell, Oct 2011 from Gorky's Granddaughter on Vimeo.

Very Interesting

Lisa Sanditz, Oct 2011 from Gorky's Granddaughter on Vimeo.

Is Painting Again Dead?

I recently posted how I was rejected by the New American Painting Competition. The curator of the "contest" was a curator from the deCordova Museum by the name of  Dina Deitsch. Now I have noticed that Ms. Deitsch was co-curator of the 2012 DeCordova Biennial opening in January of next year. Looking over the list of 23 chosen artists I have found only 3 painters. Was she really the best choice to pick painters for a painting periodical? Was her heart truly in it? I look forward to seeing her 40 painters when the New American Painting Northeast edition comes out in February.

Gerhard Richter Up Close

I found this absolutely fascinating video about Gerhard Richter over at Matthew Beall's Blog. Check it out; it will give you a whole new appreciation of Richter and get a look at his incredible studio along with the installation of his big show at the Tate.

This Is Just Too Much Fun ! You Couldn't Write This Stuff ! I Am Afraid These Protesters May Just Represent The 97 % !

I Am Getting Cranky!

Fresh New Rejection From The Folks @ New American Painting.
I keep telling myself I am not going to enter sweepstakes anymore. On the other hand my 50 dollar entry fee does entitle me to a five dollar discount on the magazine I am not in. We ( I ) have to get smarter about all this.  I am thinking of starting a "Competition"-let's call it The Artmark Gallery Invitational- with an entry fee of only 35 dollars. I know a good space I can rent to put the show up for a month. Any takers. Sorry I'm just bitch'in. I can't really speak to the validity of The New American Painting magazine (though they did take in $60,000 in artist fees alone) but every Tom,Dick and Harry is running an entry fee scam. I saw a listing the other day for a gallery in some university student union charging an entry fee! And of course there is a commercial gallery in CA that is charging just to look at your work (or rather charging to reject your work). It takes 30 seconds to look over the slides or dvd and  send out a rejection postcard. It would take a flunky a half hour a day to make us think someone is looking. I best stop ranting now. Luckily very few people read this blog. I also have an idea for a Gallery Show scratch ticket


October 2011
Dear Northeast Artist,
We apologize for the delay. I regret to inform you that our juror did not select the work you submitted for this year’sNortheast issue. Over the years our competitions have become increasingly competitive. Only 40 artists could beselected from the nearly 1,200 who applied. We hope that you will compete again next year. Many artists submitmore than once before being selected for publication.Thank you for competing. The deadline for next year’s Northeast entries will be August 31, 2012.
Sincerely,
Steven Zevitas
Publisher


If you would like a copy of the New American Paintings (#98) in which this competition’s winners will appear, you can
order one directly from us at the discounted price of $15 (regularly $20). Please fill out the form below and return it
to us. We will ship you the book when it comes off the press in February

I guess the poor photography doesn't help.

It's Amazing What People Think They Have A Right To Do

If Street art(vandalism) wasn't illegal it would be completely pointless. Now it has risen to a tweener fad and soon it will be an MFA degree program. Boston University bad-ass twinky student "Skeczh"(real name probably Claire) sez, "...that the prospect of getting arrested does not intimidate her.
“The sheer fact that street art is illegal is stupid. It’s another form of expression,” Skeczh said.
One of her friends, COM sophomore Michaela Smith, said she sees Skeczh as “fearless.”
“There’s a righteousness behind it for her. She feels completely justified in doing it,” Smith said.
“You shouldn’t have to be a famous artist for people to see your art,” Skeczh said." More Here.
Just another idiot in art school running up huge tuition loans that they think they shouldn't have to pay back. If you want to be a "Street Artist"...Don't Go To College! Posers

More Awesome Coverage of the Occupancy

If These People Represent 99% of the US Population and I'm not Rich then Who am I?

A Grass Roots Movement ? Same Old Same Old

Some Notes on My Methods

I am finding myself doing more and more of my painting away from the studio. I do more thinking (is thinking the word?) then actually painting each piece. I lay in bed, sometimes for hours, going over the current painting in my "mind's eye". Now this would sound like it would make my work very well plotted but it has had the opposite effect and I am becoming looser and more abstract. I know that the work can only really happen in front of the canvas but somehow my "twilight painting" opens me up with a notion that finds itself in a less conscious part of my brain. When I approach the easel I do and don't know what will happen and I can paint a lot in a few hours and then I must stop.


I am also spending a lot of time dreaming; more then I ever have. I really pay attention not because I think they are prophetic but because they cause certain creative impulses in me. There are recurring themes -like I can never make a phone call; I keep looking for a phone and if I find one I over and over mess up the number I am trying to call. I have many other dreams of things I can not complete or communicate. I have lately had dreams that I know are dreams but I decide not to wake up and realizing I am dreaming gives me more power in the dream. I have also had dreams where I am dreaming within the dream; I wake up and realize I am still dreaming. I dream in color because I have seen several plane crashes and house fires. But my most important dream is when I see a painting and I try to get as close as possible and try to remember it for when I am awake. I have included fragments that I have retained in some of my work. My dream life has become very valuable to me for reasons I don't completely understand.

Clyfford Still: A Life in Paintings

When TV Talk Shows Were Great #1

Great Van Gogh Drawing

This Van Gogh drawing of Joseph Roulin will be going on view in a little over a month in NYC. Here is a NYT article about the impending show "The Ronald S. Lauder Collection: Selections From the Third Century B.C. to the 20th Century/Germany at the Neue Galerie in NYC.

Contemporary Artists I can Tolerate #2

Two Faced

But only one brain and one stomach. More here.

Try This

After listening to the following two versions of Wm Blake's Tyger try playing them at the same time. Maybe it's just me.....?

Is This Really A Poem For Children?

Another Version

Contemporary Artists I Can Tolerate #1

Sometimes The Standards Seem Really Low But I Don't Know How To Have Fun!!

Fascinating Mid-Nineteenth Century Painter

Thomas Chambers (1808-1869) was a rather naive English born American  painter who seems to have painted many marine scenes and eastcoast landscapes. I love the color and the primitive realism. Below is a picture of the Connecticut river valley very near where I live. The foreground bush like shape has me perplexed. In the background you can see the Oxbow feature of the river right near Mt Tom. See more of his work at the 19th-Century American Women blog.

Thomas Chambers . Connecticut Valley. National Gallery of Art

Thomas Chambers View of Nahant (Sunset), Boston, circa 1843

Thomas Chambers View of West Point

Harold Bloom-Guilty of Having Strong Beliefs in a Post-Modern World

I love Harold Bloom! It's like being a hidden Fascist or Marxist in a world that only accepts context and relativism. Check out this article in The National Review.
Here are a few of the criticisms leveled at Bloom, ideas that I cherish about the man (who is unafraid of any post-modern claptrap!):

"BE THAT AS IT MAY, Bloom’s ideas, as he elaborated them across a half-dozen more books, came to center on notions derived from gnosticism, the ancient body of mystical beliefs. Gnosticism held that the world of matter, created by inferior gods, represents a fall from a condition of divine unity or fullness. Each of us contains a fragment of that godly fire, a spark trapped within our material selves—which means not only our bodies, but our minds or psyches as well, our intellectual and moral beings. Our true soul is hidden to us, occulted: salvation consists of achieving gnosis, experiential knowledge of that daemon. (This is very far from “self-knowledge” as we ordinarily understand it.) All this matters because Bloom finds gnostic ideas, which persisted well beyond the ancient world, to be widespread in modern spiritual thought, not only at the heart of the Romantic tradition, but also in what he calls the American religion, which he sees as having emerged in the nineteenth century in such sects as Mormonism, Southern Baptism, Christian Science, and others—and which, he says, has little to do with Christianity"

And here is the angst that I fully understand:

Romanticism sought to overcome the world of death, in the wake of the loss of religious explanations and comforts, by creating what Stevens called “supreme fictions”: new systems of symbolic meaning to redeem the cold universe of matter. Bloom sees gnostic ideas—Emerson’s Over-soul, Whitman’s “real Me”—at the center of those attempts; but more to the point, gnosticism serves as a supreme fiction for him. Beneath the jargon and the self-inflation, there is in Bloom an undersong of yearning, of spiritual hunger, a lonely person’s need for solace and belief. What eloquence his writing has—its subsidence, sometimes, into calm simplicity—what claims his work to be the thing to which he says all criticism should aspire, wisdom literature, originates in this urge. (“The ultimate use of Shakespeare is to let him teach you to think too well, to whatever truth you can sustain without perishing.”) The pathos of his thought, as he wrestles the poetic angels for their blessing, lies just in the fact that he both believes and disbelieves his fables of redemption. The ecstatic certainties of Blake or Whitman—imagination’s infinitude, the soul’s immortality—are not for such as him. He is condemned, instead, to Stevens’s melancholy skepticism. Supreme fictions, but only fictions—held together, for the space of the verse, by poetic lines of force."

I Love Helen Mirren-Kandinsky Not So Much

Artist I Just Discovered

Sidney Nolan

Sidney Nolan The Chase 1946

Sidney Nolan The Slip

Sidney Nolan Death of Sergeant Kennedy at Stringybark Creek 1946

Elizabeth Langslow poses with some of her grandfather Sidney Nolan"s  Ned Kelly and Kelly Gang paintings  at the NGV.

In the following video is a beautiful multi-panel painting of "The Riverbend; look closely for any of Nolan's trademark figures. Read about Mr. Nolan here.

Sidney Nolan - "Riverbend"

What does it feel like to fly over planet Earth?

de Kooning: The Great Woman Paintings

Must See Show-Perhaps The Best Paint Handler Ever!

Top Twenty

Albert Pinkham Ryder by Marsden Hartley

I had thought about putting together what I consider the top ten greatest artist of all time. But then I couldn't decide what "great" really meant. It is not merely most important, meaning most influential, but also having a timeless quality. An example would be my friend Andy Warhol. I must grudgingly admit he is the most important, influential artist of the second half of the twentieth century extending into the present. But I feel that influence has been so damaging to the humanist tradition of painting that I can not consider him great. All I could come up with was three and one of those was a tie. They are (in order) Michelangelo, van Gogh/ Gauguin and Picasso with perhaps (don't know) maybe Giotto or Courbet or Manet? And I guess maybe the whole ancient Greek sculpture/ architecture team. So I put together a list of my top ten favorite artists:


1. Michelangelo

2. van Gogh

3. Gauguin

4. Picasso

5. Beckmann

6. Guston

7. Hartley

8. Bacon

9. Titian

10. Cornell

And now for the next ten:

11. Ryder

12. William Blake

13. Kitaj

14. Manet

15. de Kooning

16. Winslow Homer

17. The Mystical Beuys

18. Matisse

19. Gorky

20. Morris Graves

Of course this list can and will change without notice on the wings of whimsey. Notice that I am mostly attracted to dead artists. What can I say? Next I will try to put together a list of living artist I can tolerate. Pardon me for being a misanthrope!

Failure Will Set You Free If You Let It

BEING AN ARTIST MEANS you never have to say, “I failed.” Think of the advantage that gives artists over the rest of the plodding classes. Artists never have to admit the lack of wit, talent, or stamina needed to conceive of work, realize it and see it through. All they have to do is rummage through their junk pile and declare everything in it “unrealized.”

More at Studio Matteras

Total Studio Envy...Though He's Been Painting Exactly The Same For 30 Yrs.

L'Hippocampe (The Sea Horse)

Pure Life-of what we are made

Rainer Fetting im Atelier

SAUL LEITER

Saul Leiter Harlem 1960

Saul Leiter Taxi 1957

Saul Leiter Haircut 1956

More Saul Leiter photographs here.

One Dot

I wish to be neither here nor there,
nor anywhere in between,
but rather to say,
I prefer not.

I long to be before here and there,
in the bosom of the one dot,
but explode we must,
as stars we are made.

Does anyone know??

I remember reading a great quote by Sean Scully about the preponderance of art trying to use the social sciences. He declared that most of this work was neither science nor art. Does anyone know the source of this insight?

Goodbye Mr. Freud

Leigh Bowery by Lucien Freud

I did not realize until today that Lucien Freud died this past July. There is no other artist alive who can replace him. No joke! When you would have thought there was nothing left to say about realist painting along came Lucien.  He manages to make you not only see but feel the human figure. Most figurative art is a simulation but with Freud the flesh is real like a communion wafer.

In Freud's Studio

Who Were the Savages?

Mark Warren "Savage (The Death of King Philip) 2011 40" X 48" oil on linen

This is a slightly older piece from the beginning of 2011. It is the last work I will be able to post until I can borrow another camera.

Poem

3:45 AM


How could you know anything
 if everything you knew
was known?

To know everything
would be to know nothing.
Where is life?

To know love and death
and everything between
would be no knowledge at all. 

A Diseased Mind

Mark Warren "The Poet" 2011 18" X 24" oil on linen

                                        

"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" by Wallace Stevens (poetry rea...

Damn Ugly

                           Mark Warren "Peace & Abundance" 2011 48" X 58" oil on linen

Inspired By Melville

 

Mark Warren "At Sea" 48" X 58" oil on linen

Someone Borrowed A Camera

 

Mark Warren "Billy Budd" 2011 40" X 48" oil on linen

Mark Warren "An Idealist" 40" X 48" oil on linen

More New Work

                             Mark Warren "Plagues and Resurrections" 48" X 58" oil on linen

                                           Mark Warren "The Day I Died" 48" X 58" oil on linen

New Work

 Mark Warren "All Too Human" 48" X 58" oil on linen

 I had a major computer crash where all my data was lost and windows 7 disappeared! But I am back...if anyone is still out there? This is a painting from the last month and you can see my work is getting more abstract though I will never lose contact with the human body. One thing I will say is those little amoeba like things are an artistic rendering of smallpox.

Completion?

As the first idea hits the canvas there is such promise. Somewhere along the way it reaches it's zenith with a vast multitude of possibilities and begins its slow descent as more and more decisions are made, filling in more and more blank space until it crashes in defeat with all hope extinguished. It is the specific that kills the transcendental. Does anyone else still believe in the sublime? Then begin again, fooling yourself that this time it will be different. This is my way of saying I will be posting new work soon.

Ab-Ex Dogs

Jackson Pollock with Gyp and Ahab

A Rationalization?

"He who thinks for himself can never remain of the same mind" -Melville on Milton

Found In Old Notebook

I Wanna Cry!!

Grey Villet, Tiny squirrel monkey strapped into capsule for space travel, 1958

Soulless

"So Saltz’s comments correlate with a whole slew of observances I have about the practice of art in 2011. So much art now is “ready-made for critics who also love parsing out the isms of their elders.” I keep looking for art that passes the Roberta Smith litmus test who, like me, is looking for this: “art that seems made by one person out of intense personal necessity, often by hand.”
Saltz addresses the problem of an all too recognizable “generic ­institutional style”, one that rehashes the same issues over and over again:
It’s work stuck in a cul-de-sac of aesthetic regress, where everyone is deconstructing the same elements.


More here on the Slow Muse blog.

Hope

Only when there is no hope will hope arrive. Or not.

When Sadness Was An Art

A Madonna

Catherine Opie "Self-portrait Nursing" 2004

First 11 Verses Psalms 103

 ¹ Hear my prayer, O LORD,
         And let my cry come to You.
 ² Do not hide Your face from me in the day of my trouble;
         Incline Your ear to me;
         In the day that I call, answer me speedily.
        
 ³ For my days are consumed like smoke,
         And my bones are burned like a hearth.
 ⁴ My heart is stricken and withered like grass,
         So that I forget to eat my bread.
 ⁵ Because of the sound of my groaning
         My bones cling to my skin.
 ⁶ I am like a pelican of the wilderness;
         I am like an owl of the desert.
 ⁷ I lie awake,
         And am like a sparrow alone on the housetop.
        
 ⁸ My enemies reproach me all day long;
         Those who deride me swear an oath against me.
 ⁹ For I have eaten ashes like bread,
         And mingled my drink with weeping,
 ¹⁰ Because of Your indignation and Your wrath;
         For You have lifted me up and cast me away.
 ¹¹ My days are like a shadow that lengthens,
         And I wither away like grass.

RePaint When in Doubt

Mark Warren "Ice Horses" 40" X 48" oil on linen

old version

Born In Violence

Mark Warren "Turner's Falls"  24" X 32" oil on linen