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Repository 212: Richard Kurtz | Wrestlers and Golden Books
Below is an essay I wrote after interviewing artist Richard Kurtz last month, and diving deep into insider/outsider/whatchamacallit art which I have been interested in for some time. His work will be featured at the New York Outsider Art Fair in New York this month (January 18 – 21). Please visit Booth 19 should you find yourself there. Meanwhile – let’s dissect the idea of outside art. Peace – c “Perhaps there is more sense in our nonsense and more…
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Repository 195: Great Landscape Art | The Unicorn of Contemporary Genres
Years ago while studying in Italy I had an assignment to paint a landscape over the course of a week. I dutifully packed my equipment and took a bus to some random hilly spot in Sienna. I remember sitting on the hillside, earnestly attempting an al fresco painting that lay before me. I spent hours at that spot, attempting to address and define the rows of olive trees, the variations of green and the utter beauty of it all. At…
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Repository 165: Albert York | A Painter’s Painter
A short post before exiting this fast and furious year. As I prepare to return in earnest to the studio, and not in the form of paper mache or glue gun art, I am currently doing research on Albert York, whose work I have been obsessed with for the past month or so. A post-humous show of 37 of his small paintings was just taken down in NYC’s Matthew Marks gallery. The following is from a New Yorker article from 1995….
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Repository 124: Bon Mots | Joan Mitchell | Less Think, More Feel
“As soon as you start with all the blah blah blah you ruin a painting”. – Joan Mitchell, from the film ‘Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter”. Her abstraction reigns supreme in my imagination and myth of painting. Her painting methods were used as explorations as well as a form of burying. Respecting her allergic reaction to any serious dissection of her paintings, I will make this post short to simply say how very grateful I am for Joan…
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Repository 119: Bon Mots | Lucien Freud on the Ultimate Aim of Art
“I assure you that I do not paint the world in desolate colors for my own pleasure, after all I can not change my eyes. As for my lack of convictions, I am only too full of convictions. I burn with suppressed anger and indignation, but my ideal of art demands that the artist shows none of this and that he appears in his work no more than god in nature. For the man is nothing the work is everything….
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Repository 95: Bon Mots | Artists + Writers = Love
I have just completed one of the more exciting little projects I can remember of the past several years. Collaborations with artists are never easy, and I am always contemplating their honesty, their effectiveness, and their power. It requires a dropping of ego, and faith in the process: something rare in the arts and otherwise these days. While I am not ready to share all the delicious details, I will say that I am overwhelmed with the generosity and creativity…
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Repository 61: Marlene Dumas on Alice Neel
– Image courtesy of the Tate, Alice Neel’s “The Family (John Gruen, Jane Wilson, and Julia) Most figurative painting is not about people and seldom about “characters.” Philip Guston painted cartoons. Warhol painted public images. Chuck Close uses portraiture to paint about painting; Alex Katz paints the cool; and Elizabeth Peyton paints dreams…Alice Neel painted people. – Marlene Dumas
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