James Nares, Untitled, 2014, ink on paper, 60 x 95 inches

As in his “Brushstroke” paintings and “Road Paint” series, James Nares has fashioned his own tools to create a new action series: “Speed Drawings”. This body of work on paper is created with ink and brushes and may be described as paintings but Nares views them as drawings as they are about line. They are also about speed - in the process of their making and in the result. Not unlike the Damien Hirst “Spin” paintings, Nares has incorporated a motorized mechanism to create the thrust necessary to make this work. Large scale paper is affixed to a steel drum powered by a motor making it spin at high speed. Then he delivers a steady flow of medium with brushes he’s fashioned with an ink reservoir delivering a steady flow of medium like a fountain pen would, allowing for a continuous delivery of ink without the interruption of refilling his brush.

The  method of art making on a speeding drum has allowed Nares to create a still work that captures speed. Similar to a photograph documenting speed with a blurred image, these “drawings” comprised of many lines alluding to the blur of movement from a distance but at close inspection show the detail in the process. The saturation of color in each line delivers a crisp punctuation and the shifting of color from heavier to lighter creates an effect similar to light falling on rippled yardage of silk.

The magnitude of this extraordinary new body of work cannot be understood from images on-line. This is a “must-see” exhibition at Paul Kasmin Gallery, 293 10^th Avenue, NY. The opening is tonight 6-8pm. The fall season for Chelsea is off to the races with Speed Drawings by James Nares!

COMPREHENSIVE MONOGRAPH

WHATS NEW IN NEW MEDIA.....Monumental works that fit in a pocket.....
 “It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.” Thoreau

Life and work have obstructed my blogging for some time but Raphael Rozendaal has sounded the wake up call. Last fall fine art collector, Benjamin Palmer purchased a work of art (a URL) at Phillips de Pury auction. That's correct, he walked out of the auction house with nothing tangible - just a web address on his smart phone and an paperwork documenting the rights and the sale.  Palmer doesn't need to invite his friends in for a viewing and he and his artwork are literally "joined at the hip"! He has nothing to hang up with exception of an iPad with internet an connection. This defines virtuality and reality converging in art and commerce. Rozendaal has made 85 works and nearly a third have sold. Raphael envisions his art and accessibility to it as a huge shift in making art available everyone and not only the elite. Collectors are contractually obligated to keep the URL live on the world wide web for everyone's access. They are custodians for the work with an invoice and certificate to prove ownership but the material remains accessible to the mainstream. It sounds like fodder for a Jim Kempner "Madness of Art" episode. 

Rozendaal has been brutally criticized in on-line commentary by those claiming this is not art or about as much about art as excrement which is testament to the ignorance of art in today's society. Wake up and smell the 21st century people...this is art whether you respond personally to the aesthetic or not and it has an auction record to prove it. All we seem to need these days to validate art (good or bad as it may be) is validation from the right people acknowledging it as art and the best way to achieve this is with the collector glitterati and auction records being made. So bravo Rozandaal, that's a win for you.

The Artist's writing on the creative process:

"Over the years my work became more abstract. I have no idea why. I have no idea because I have no idea what I’m doing in general. The heart wants what it wants.

An abstract work is a thing, not a picture of a thing. I like both things and pictures of things. Lately I have been making more things than pictures. But it might change in the future. Who knows?

A change of direction is a change of emphasis. There are no absolute directions. There’s always some figuration and there’s always some abstraction.

I follow my interests. I do whatever is most interesting to me at that moment. I don’t have a plan. I’m wandering. I am not in control of my interests. Just think about it… what interests you? Why are you interested in something? Why not something else? I can’t decide where my mind wanders. It would not be wandering if I decided where to go. Wandering is wonderful. You’re just moving around. Not moving to get anywhere, just moving to be in motion.

I like it when I’m somewhere and I’m not thinking too much. Just observing, not making any decisions. Kind of bored and staring at something, looking around, until something presents itself. These moments are the starting points of my work. Whether the work is abstract or figurative, they come from the same “state-of-mind”.

I’m interested in the space between Almost Nothing and Hardly Anything. Something non verbal, sub conscious, non intelligent, not-thinking-too-much. The ideas have no intention other than wanting to exist. Something that exists just because it wants to exist."

The Artist talks about his work

RELATED LINKS:
NPR interview

USA dealer: Steve Turner Contemorary
Tokyo Dealer: Takuro Someya Contemporary Art
Artist's Site: Raphael Rozendaal
Linticular works on canvas: Postmasters Art, NY
Museum installation: Kawasaki City Museum, Japan
Seoul Square (Korea) - world's largest LED screen VIEW HERE

Edith Newhall Reviews Photography Exhibition at PPAC

Edith Newhall, Art Critic fro The Philadelphia Inquirer reviews Contemporary Photography exhibition at PPAC and features AB 053 by David M. Mitchell in her review making note that his work was one of a few abstract works in the show. CLICK ON IMAGE TO READ FULL ARTICLE.

William Knight - Calligraphy in Space at The Knapp Galley

 

Thru December 30th.  This is an exceptional show!

 

A tree's shape is a visual record of its life-long dialogue--by turns intense, pleasant, balanced, deprived, sporadic and short--with the noble elements of water, sun, and earth. The exploded-tire fragments I am working with likewise acquire their design by way of many, if less noble factors: the laws of physics and chaos that apply to the blown-apart pieces; the stresses on rubber and steel; the difference of the rubbers employed throughout the tires; and the nature of the impact that caused the blow-out. Furthermore, once scattered over the road, a fragment is repeatedly exposed to weather extremes and to the forces of being run over by cars and trucks which alter its shape; and the gathering together of fragments into a mass is, in turn, subjected to the above processes. In its discovered state, we can see the rubber--like the tree-- has assumed the shape of its biography. That's where my work begins.

"The raw material of William Knight's recent work are the shreds of blown-out tires, skeins of black rubber left for loss at the sides of our nation's highways. What results after a countless iteration of fine judgments--testing thicknesses against contour against overarching gesture, spacings and conjunctions and negative space considered from all angles of view--is a pure calligraphy of spirit enacted in a real space made vibrant. The works operate in two ways: mounted off walls as seemingly impromptu, open-form reliefs, using the white backdrop as a visual foil--a kind of haiku of line, space and gesture, cursively alive and adventurous within the shallow volume of space that the piece itself defines; or, delicately suspended from ceiling height. These turn subtly with air currents, and, changing constantly as one moves 360 degrees around them, remarkably hold a tautness and tightness of expression from manifold vantage points."  James Dinerstein

Mitchell - Installation view at the RMA Institute, Bangkok thru June 12

The full portfolio of Mitchell's Abstracts - 2011 collection is at Jim Kempner Fine Art, NY

MITCHELL: Abstracts, 2011, Archival Pigment prints - 36 x 36 (44 x 44 inch paper size) - A Solo Exhibition at the RMA Institute, Bangkok, Thailand opens May 21 at 4:30 pm. Concurrently, works from this collection will be available from Lynn Dunham Fine Art in the United States.

ABOUT THE WORK: Mitchell’s Abstracts 2011 collection is comprised of 39 images which follow the rudiments of Concretism, a non-objective art form of the 1940’s that defied all the norms of the Contemporary Art of its time. The central characteristic of this art movement produced works without the influence of any external factors, such as nature, people, or things. By definition, Concrete Art does not require the artist to have a definitive concept or subject. It is about the inventive play of lines, planes, and color, forming unspecific patterns and true expression of an artist's spirit. It is this movement which gave birth to Constructivism, Suprematism and Neo-Concretism, Minimalism and Op Art, all periods in art history which are embodied in Mitchell’s work since his departure from the commercial arena. He has recently employed the process of creating assemblages which he chronicles through the lens putting a contemporary spin on the principles art movements of the past century.

Mitchell’s prominent and innate sensibility is clearly related and is presented particularly in the culmination of two years’ work with the Abstracts 2011 collection, a portion of which has been selected to be exhibited in this solo at the RMA Institute. With his fresh perspective, he employs a 21st century point of view and establishes a new personal archetype. Mitchell states, “The conventional notion that photography is about representation is/has been rejected in favor of pure abstraction. The images themselves along with the process of image making are the subject rather than the depiction of something identifiable.”

JOIN US MARCH 21ST FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY

WORKS BY MITCHELL, BACHLER AND KENNEDY

PRESENTED BY A SURFACE LIBRARY AND LYNN DUNHAM FINE ART

551 WEST 21ST STREET (#402 - 4TH FLOOR) NY, NY

MITCHELL: ABSTRACTS 2011, AB 054 36 X 36 INCHES (45 X 45 FRAMED)

ARCHIVAL PIGMENT PRINT - EDITION OF 5

SIGNED, DATED AND NUMBERED VERSO

Open Door Interiews

Laurie Frick - Extraordinary

Artist's Statement
Frick uses pattern to replicate the feel of neurons firing in the brain. The use of vaguely familiar cut-up materials are representative of everything the brain processes, the amount that is seen and the amount stored - including the periferal things to which only partial-attention was given.
"I think neuroscience will find there is a link between how the mind processes pattern, and the underlying structure of the brain. How do I connect an abstract idea of neural processing to neuroscience in everyday life, and the rationale for my explorations? I like the idea of art artist expression anticipating scientific proof.", says Frick.

Neuroscience?
Frick has straddled both the world of technology and visual art. Over the past several years, she has studied the developments in neuroscience and believes scientists will begin to unravel the mystery of how the brain uses memory to develop an instant attraction to visual objects and surroundings. She believes aesthetics, is related to brain fluency and the desire to re-experience the familiar. Mathematical proportions are relevant, the attraction to external patterns may emulate the internal neural structure in the mind. "There is a human desire to find the neural mirror to ourselves, even at the most basic level -- the firing pattern of hippocampal neurons.
I'm currently investigating the notion that there is a statistical pattern underlying all cognition. If you could capture the neural rhythm and replay it, you might actually simulate the original experience.", says Frick.

Read more about Frick - Carolinas Health Care Artist-in-Residence in residency at McColl Center in Charlotte, NC.

The Laumont staff with Mitchell's new work now available for exhibition. Stunning work!

The artist, Rist speaking about the project

The Curator, Klauss Biesenbach speaks on the project

If you are using Safari as your browser, you have trouble viewing these videos in which case click behind the scenes with Pipolotti Rist and
MOMA curator on Pipolotti Rist

MOMA'S Sex Change

The Musuem's Piplotti Rist Show Cheekily Feminizes a Bastion of Masculinity - A New York Magazine, Jan 5 issue review by Jerry Saltz whose written aesthetic so perfectly describes this installation we can all enjoy through February 2nd.

The deliciously named Swiss miss Pipilotti Rist, who for two decades has been ravishing viewers with her fiesta-colored video visions, has risen to new heights of trippy bliss. Her opulently beautiful 25-by-200-foot wraparound video at MoMA—complete with two round breast-shaped projector pods protruding from the walls and close-ups of pink tulips, a black pig, and a fleshy nude—is catnip for the eye and a hormonal rush for an institution badly in need of one. It is one of the most seductively rebellious artistic gestures since Lynda Benglis’s notorious Artforum ad in 1974, for which she posed naked wielding a dildo. Benglis’s action slapped a biased art world awake; Rist’s Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) suspends us in a primordial sea of liquids, and performs a metaphysical sex change on the Museum of Modern Art. The atrium of this bastion of masculinism becomes a womb, and the museum itself a woman. In an abstract way, Rist makes the institution ovulate.
Rist’s installation is an impregnation and an incantation. It is also an exorcism. As I’ve said in these pages before, MoMA is—even with this show and the current Marlene Dumas survey—a place where very little work by women is on view, at least in the permanent collection. Rist’s installation comments on and reacts to this misogyny. She has hung magenta-colored draperies almost to the ceiling of the atrium, making it a ballroom, a Hopper movie theater, a bordello, or a living room. Her monolithic projected images caress and dissolve the hard-edged architecture. Drowsy droning music plays; bells ting-a-ling. The atrium has been carpeted, and a large circular couch with a hole in the middle has replaced Barnett Newman’s phallic Broken Obelisk. Shoes and coats are everywhere. People lie around, lean on walls, sleep, and sprawl in groups on the floor and couch. On one of my visits, the well-known painter Gary Stephen drifted by and said, “I wish I had some ganja.” This is museum as hallucination, opium den, Lotus Land, cubbyhole, and pleasure dome. Call it Trance Central station.
The images in Rist’s sixteen-minute video loop remix the colors of Fauvism, the fragmented form of Cubism, and modernism’s juicy jarring nudes. Rist’s quasi-narrative is pleasure, politics, and biology. In an interview she talks to curator Klaus Biesenbach about “our deepest craving to be synchronized with others” and “our love for fluids and water.” To some, Rist’s MoMA installation is little more than a hippy-dippy decorative circus. That’s a mistake, ignoring how clever and subversive Rist is. One subplot of her MoMA installation is to metaphysically induce a rush of psychic estrogen in the museum. By the film’s end the atrium is awash in a tidal sea of crimson and burgundy fluid.
At various points, a pig gnaws an apple, toes squish fruit, giant strawberries drift in clear liquid, a naked girl crawls in the grass. All hips, hair, and breasts, she caresses two earthworms as if removing the sin from Eve’s apple or stroking living phalluses. She fills another person’s mouth and nostrils with flower petals, eats tulips, digs into the dirt with her fingers. She is some sort of otherworldly Earth mother performing a modern-day fertility rite. MoMA seems to swell and stir to new life. A giant eye opens, a naked woman floats upside down, a trail of blood begins running up her breasts. Finally, a colossal female in a white bathing suit rises from the water. Between her legs is a flow of blood. The whole atrium goes red. MoMA comes of age.
What Richard Serra is to hard and dry, Rist is to soft and moist. Rather than only privileging the eye, as in Courbet’s yummy yoni shot The Origin of the World, Rist’s art is a full-body experience. Like Matthew Barney, who crawls like a symbiotic organism through space, or Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely's giant reclining nude that was entered between the legs, Rist wants to turn the museum into an ecstasy machine.
In the West, however, ecstasy comes with proscriptions. Especially if it’s too female—then it’s taboo. A widely circulated rumor has it that MoMA asked Rist to edit out the red between the legs. It turns out that so-called “belly-magic” is more off-limits than mind-magic. In classical terms, the Dionysian is still more fraught than the Apollonian. Thinking about this installation without the blood is like thinking about life without blood.

The internet has become the virtual cedar tavern for "beat" enthusiasts. As an abstract expressionist with roots in process oriented painting, who believes the pop movement in art and music cut the beat artists, writers and musicians off at the knees, I am reassured everyday genuine artists still exist beneath the commercial bubble of factory manufactured art disguised as fine art.

Read Eric Ernst on East End Art Scene. This article about the current east end art scene gives emerging artists hope in a world of collectors seeking blue chip art of modern masters. He has encouraging words for the local art scene. I would expect nothing less of the decendant of Max and Jimmy Ernst.

Ernst is an artist as well a writer. He was born in Norwalk, Connecticut in 1956 into a family of some notoriety in the art world. Originally intent on avoiding any direct involvement in the arts himself, he graduated from George Washington University with a B.A. in Japanese Studies followed by an all-but-completed M.A. in the same subject from the University of Michigan (to this day he insists the actual writing of the master’s thesis should just be considered a minor formality).

In between these academic respites, he lived in Japan working as an apprentice to a Japanese woodblock artist, studied Zen meditation, and was employed as a disc jockey at a Tokyo radio station under the pseudonym of “Reckless Eric, The Mad Artist of the Airwaves”. More importantly, his studies there were to later imbue his work with varied elements of Japanese and Oriental aesthetics in terms of coloration and concepts of rhythm and asymmetry in design.

Further incorporating aspects highlighting the geometric purity of the Russian avant-garde and the later Bauhaus artists, he was also influenced by his father, Jimmy Ernst’s, approach to crisp, linear compositional structure. In addition, the works are also inspired by aspects of harmony and movement drawn from disparate musical sources such as Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Igor Stravinsky, and Frank Zappa. Structurally arranging the works to be viewed as small scale architectonic spaces, Ernst recently has begun incorporating elements of representational imagery into his constructions. These serve to create an interaction of forms, shapes, and colors that, mixed with musical and harmonic elements, conjure a more immediate narrative and strive to transcend the limits of pure geometric abstraction.

Amy Ernst

My works are an extension of my hands emerging from the subjective dreams. Trying to coax the unconscious into reality, that reality seems to always remain a mystery. Like Andre Breton, author of the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, I believe in a Future Resolution of two states on mind, one is dream, and the other one is the reality. Although these states appear to be contradictory by nature, they merge and become an absolute. Amy Ernst

Eric's sister Amy Ernst is an accomplished painter as well. In an interview with Hamptons.com she said, "My father listened to jazz or classical music while he worked, whereas, I listen to Indian or Renaissance music." It's interesting how many painters are moved by music.

I missed Amy at Truman Marquez' ConTemplate opening but saw she was there from the footage of the filmed performance. I'm working on a documentary with Marquez and will have it available soon. Amy, if you're looking, I'd love your comments on the performance!

LOCAL YIELD at

Gideon Stein Gallery

2297 Montauk Highway, Bridgehampton

631-537-1900

Paintings and Sculpture by Local Artists
Tom Connor, Lynn Dunham, Hunter Herrick, Dennis Leri and Scott Partlow.
Opening Reception
Saturday, May 24th 2008, 5-9pm
Exhibition Continues through Wednesday, June 11th

Take the pulse of the local art scene with five dynamic East End artists, plus meet the brains behind this eponymously named gallery, Gideon Stein. “The artists in this show represent some of the handpicked explosion of homegrown talent that I have selected from the area.” Says Stein, “and their produce is the freshest on the market. The East End is a true artist’s community. The bonds we feel are palpable, and the energy to co-conspire is contagious. I’m proud to exhibit such a fine assemblage of my artist colleagues”.

Tom Connor’s maritime oil portrait of an original 1903 schooner reminds us of timeless relaxation, the sea, and why we love the Hamptons. Connor lives and works in Watermill.

Lynn Dunham’s sensitive abstract panels on linen glide along our field of view; the spaces let our imagination fill in the blanks. Dunham lives and works in Southampton.

Hunter Herrick introduces us to the vision of the upcoming generation of East End artists with his precision welded steel works. Herrick lives and works in Westhampton.

Dennis Leri will be the first sculptor to install large-scale outdoor abstract metal sculptures in the gallery’s new sculpture garden in Bridgehampton. “The distinct nature of a medium dictates technique and demands exploration. The sense of immediacy and oneness of purpose with the material(s) takes me on a joyful journey of chance discoveries” says Leri. Leri lives and works in East Hampton.

Scott Partlow’s wood sculptures have begun to attract the attention of some of the most prominent art collectors in the area. His work makes us wish we had beachfront mansions to put his works in, then again, some of us do. Partlow lives and works in Bridgehampton.

A new work in the recent small works series.

12" x 24" Acrylic, Venetian Plaster, cement and gold leaf on canvas.