Ancient Thoughts

"If the man's mind is uninformed and his imagination dormant and his heart narrow, how can he breathe grandeur, vitality and feeling into his works." Aristotle

The Crayon, Vol.7, No. 6(Jun., 1860), pp. 153-165
http://www.jstor.org/pss/25528067

GELBES MEER
Watercolor. Circa 1913.
Signed in pencil lower right Nolde. On thin Japan. The colors fresh and vibrant.
Provenance: Georg Kurlbaum (until 1929); since then Private collection Berlin, later USA
Size: 228 x 330 mm

Emil Nolde Quote

"The artist need not know very much; best of all let him work instinctively and paint as naturally as he breathes or walks"

Emil Nolde

Mallarme thoughts on Manet

Manet, when he casts away the cares of art and chats with a friend. . . in his studio, expresses himself with brilliancy. It is then that he says what the he means by painting . . . how he paints as he does. Each time he begins a picture, says he, he plunges head long into it, and feels like a man who knows that his surest plan to swim safely is dangerous as it may seem, to throw himself into the water. . . no one should paint a landscape and a figure by the same process, with the same knowledge, or in the same fashion; now what is more, even two landscapes or two figures. Each work should be a new creation of the mind.

Mallarme states about Manet thoughts.

Steve Charles--Upstair Rooms at Marleborough Gallery

I found this review on artreview.com posted by Dan Adams.
I think he saw a current James Kalm video, which is a very good video to see.
Charles scuptures are wonderful, lots of color!

When did art become a group effort?
Posted by dan adams on 30 October 2009 at 2:00am
View My Blog

I Just viewed a video of artist Steven Charles in his studio in New York and HORRAY!! A YOUNG artist speaking out about NOT wanting to use assistants, techno-crap and the like. He wants to paint, to create by himself, and if he fails, SO WHAT, it's his hand that's creating, not 10 assistants (sorry Damien Hurst) carrying out the master's orders. Last night I watched "Art in the 21Century" on KPBS. JEEZ, You had to have a program to figure out who was the artist from all the assistants, hanger-ons and maybe a personel Guru or two. If I had thought that's what being an artist was, I NEVER would have picked up a brush and started to paint...

Thanks Dan.

Urs Fischer - The New Museum

Urs Fischer’s Grandmother makes Genius Cakes
“People seem to fear art. Art has always been a word for this thing that cannot be rationalized when you see or hear something that you struggle to explain. But that’s its strength, of course; that’s what the word art is for. For example, I’m reading about Caspar David Friedrich. In the essays, there are many ideas and interpretations about Friedrich’s intentions, trying to personify him, and his ideas and politics. This might all be true to some degree and have actually factored into his decisions, but even he doesn’t know why it’s good. You see, there are so many people trying to explain how a certain piece is interesting, and it’s so limiting––it’s crazy. An artwork is shrunk down to two or three sentences. It’s like you were to say: “This is my grandfather, and he likes leather shoes,” or: “This is my grandmother, she makes really genius cakes.” I think art is like people: you cannot reduce them to a couple of sentences. It is much more complex, much richer.”

-Urs Fischer, in an interview with Massimiliano Gioni, the curator of Fischer’s current exhibition at The New Museum.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 10:46 am and is filed under Art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Urs Fischer’s Grandmother makes Genius Cakes”
naomi says:
Saturday, October 31, 2009 at 10:22 am
Brilliant; so true! It’s important to go make the work, think about it later. All the thinking will be subjective anyway.

Update from James Kalm

YouTube: Jerry Saltz Seeing Out Louder, David Hockney New Paintings. Very Current! New book by Jerry, and Hockney's new paintings.

Raoul De Keyser

Enjoying a long-standing reputation as being a ‘painter’s painter,’ De Keyser has been a leading influence on the next generation of painters, including Luc Tuymans, Rebecca Morris, and Tomma Abts. Modest in size, De Keyser’s spare works have a special intimacy that derives from the physical characteristics of the medium itself, as well as the tension created between plane and depth, figure and ground. As noted by Hamza Walker of The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, where De Keyser had his United States museum debut in 2000:
De Keyser’s pictorial logic is one in which conclusions regarding composition, color or manner of brush handling are confidently proposed but never asserted to a degree suggesting the evolutionary terminus of an art form . . . Although De Keyser has managed to merge various contradictory elements - figuration and abstraction, gesture and geometry, the garish and the restrained - his work in no way exhibits tendencies of a postmodern eclecticism that would reduce the history of painting to a mere collection of styles. If anything, De Keyser’s work, in modest proportions, has the spirit
of painting when abstraction was celebrated for opening new possibilities within the realm of pictorial expression.

2009 Chelsea Opener

Check out on YouTube "2009 Chelsea Opener", presented to us by James Kalm.
Thank you James!

View some of Raoul DeKeyser works.

Erik Parker

Another New York artist that likes pink.
Check out on YouTube: Erik Parker Crisis Creation at Paul Kasmin

Peter Doig

New paintings
at Gavin Brown Enterprise / Jan. 2009

It seems to me that Doig likes pink. Avery used pink,too. Interesting.
Using the color pink is not easy. Check it out on you tube. "Peter Doig new paintings at Gavin Brown Enterprise".

Milton Avery Quote

Nature is my springboard. From her I get my initial impetus. I have tried to relate the visible drama of mountains, trees, and bleached fields with the fantasy of wind blowing and changing colors and forms.

Lee Krasner Quotes

+ I think, if one is a painter, all you experience does come out when you’re painting.

+ I like a canvas to breathe and be alive. Be alive is the point. And, as the limitations are something called pigment and canvas, let's see if I can do it.

+ I like to surprise myself. I have to be interested in what I’m doing. Surprise, for me, is as important as it is to anyone that views it once it becomes a painting.

Giorgio De Chirico: Mystery and Creation

" To become truly immortal a work of art must escape all human limits: Logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the regions of childhood vision and dreams. " Giorgio De Chirico
Source Goldwater, R & Treves, M. 1976 Artists on Art, From the 14th to the 20th Century. John Murray

November 22, 2003-March 14, 2004
The Art of David Ireland: The Way Things Are
Great Hall
Presented by the Art Department

David Ireland virtual feature

Exhibition sponsors


David Ireland, Angel-Go-Round, 1996, installation view from exhibition at Oakland Museum of California, 2003-04. Fiberglass and cast concrete figures, motor, and nyon belting. 22 x 25 feet diameter. Courtesy of the artist; Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco; Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, California; and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photograph by: M. Lee Fatherree.
"You can’t make art by making art" has been a guiding principle in the work of David Ireland, one of California's most important and critically acclaimed artists working in the challenging arena of conceptual and installation art. "Ideally my work has a visual presence that makes it seem like part of a usual, everyday situation," he says. "I like the feeling that nothing's been designed, that you can't tell where the art stops and starts."

The Oakland Museum of California exhibition surveys three decades of the work of this key figure in the conceptual art movement. The Art of David Ireland: The Way Things Are, the first in-depth assessment of Ireland's art and its ongoing significance, is on view to March 14, 2004.

The exhibition features approximately 80 works created between 1972 and 2002, including four large-scale installations, 30 sculptures and 47 two-dimensional pieces. Included is a wide range of work demonstrating Ireland's adventuresome sense of creativity, from drawings made of cement and dirt to a motorized sculpture and a wooden chair 18 feet high. Ireland has been directly involved in the exhibition's installation, "activating the space" and creating relationships among his works of the past 30 years.

David Ireland virtual feature


The exhibition also includes a video program featuring Ireland and his home—a San Francisco Victorian described by one writer as an "environmental-sculpture-in-progress"—and a reading room for visitors to learn more about the artist.

Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown said of Ireland's work, "David Ireland is one of this country's most influential conceptual artists, an artist of the enigmatic commonplace whose provocative, idiosyncratic art is like a Zen Koan. He makes us see that art is all around us and we need only to stop and look.''


David Ireland, Big Reading Chair, 2003; Drywall and paint; Courtesy of the artist; Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco; Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, California; and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; photo by: M. Lee Fatherree.

Good Hope, 1991 Copper, wire, broom, concrete, and wood stool; Collection of University of California, Berkeley Art Museum; purchase made possible by a bequest from Therese Bonney, Class of 1916; photo by: Benjamin Blackwell.
Over the past 30 years, David Ireland has produced a remarkable series of architectural transformations, installations, objects and drawings that consistently challenge viewers' everyday distinctions between art and non-art. A self-described "post-discipline" artist guided by Zen thought and postmodern aesthetics, Ireland moves fluidly from making small drawings to creating sculptures as large as houses. The exhibition features early two-dimensional works from the 1970s, made of dirt, talcum and cement, that have been rarely seen since they were created but are important in foreshadowing Ireland's later work. More recent two- and three-dimensional pieces reflect his wide-ranging interests, from exploration of the phenomenon of chance to his interest in process and history.

One of the artworks for which Ireland is perhaps best known is his home in San Francisco. In 1975, he purchased a run-down Victorian at 500 Capp Street and spent the next three years working on it. While he did not initially intend to create a work of art, he gradually began to perceive his actions in cleaning and restoring the house as an artistic performance, equating his moves with those of any painter or sculptor. He approached his tasks — stripping wallpaper, polishing floors, sanding trim and repairing the sidewalk — with a deliberate respect and finesse that for him fixed his actions firmly in the realm of art. When he repaired the sidewalk in front of his home, Ireland videotaped it as though it were an artistic performance. The house is filled with sculptures made out of "non-art" materials, including old brooms, bent wire, cement and wet paper.

Ireland was born in Bellingham, Washington, in 1930. He received his bachelor's degree in industrial design and printmaking from Oakland's California College of Arts and Crafts in 1953. He returned to school in the early 1970s, studying plastics technology and printmaking at Laney College and receiving a master of fine arts degree in printmaking in 1974 from the San Francisco Art Institute. His studio is currently located in Oakland.

He did not fully commit himself to art until he was in his early 40s, after traveling extensively around the world and working as an architectural draftsman, carpenter, designer, businessman and African safari guide. The exhibition looks at how these early life experiences have been influential, resulting, for example, in the reference to elephants in his works, the claiming of architecture as art, and the open-ended sense of exploration that is the foundation for his work.


Other Id, 1992 Branded alder wood, glass, metal, paint & pillow; Collection of Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, Stanford
University, Stanford, California; Modern and Contemporary Art Fund,1998.109.a-d; photo by: M. Lee Fatherree.
David Ireland's work has been presented in more than 40 solo exhibitions, at venues including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; The Museum of Modern Art and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. He has created major art projects and private commissions in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and other cities. His work is included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Oakland Museum of California, and the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, among others.

Curator of The Art of David Ireland: The Way Things Are is Karen Tsujimoto, senior curator of art at the Oakland Museum of California. Ms. Tsujimoto has more than 25 years experience in the organization of exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, and in 1985 organized David Ireland: A Decade Documented, 1975-1985 for the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum.

The exhibition is accompanied by a 248-page catalog published by The University of California Press. The catalog contains 140 color and black-and-white illustrations along with essays on the development and significance of Ireland's work by the exhibition curator and Jennifer R. Gross, Seymour H. Knox, Jr. Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Yale University Art Gallery.The catalogue is available in OMCA's online store.

The exhibition, catalog and all public programs are made possible with generous support from the Oakland Museum Women's Board; National Endowment for the Arts; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York; Ann Hatch and Paul Discoe; Paule Anglim; Agnes Bourne and Dr. James Luebbers; Nancy and Steven Oliver; and Friends of David Ireland.

Following its premiere in Oakland, the exhibition will travel to the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts (April 17 - July 18, 2004); Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden, University of Nebraska, Lincoln (August 21 - November 14, 2004); and Santa Barbara Museum of Art (December 11, 2004 - March 15, 2005).

For press information see www.museumca.org/press/

© 2003 Oakland Museum of California | Credits |Phone: 510-238-2200

Sea Dream-by Cicely Fox Smith

Why did I dream last night, I wonder, about the ship Ledore
I made a passage in from China — was it 'eighty-three or four —
And left in the East India Basin, and after saw no more?

I thought we were off the Pescadores, waiting a breeze from the land;
There were some fishing junks becalmed there, and nets spread out on the sand;
The sun had left the sky one glory, the sea was flat as your hand.

It was just like looking at a picture, I saw it all so clear;
Little things I'd long since forgotten about her rig and her gear,
And shipmates' faces I hadn't thought of for many and many a year.

I could see them all as plain as daylight — and then some fellow spoke,
"Here comes the wind," he said, "by thunder!" — the sea all round us broke
Into a hundred thousand wrinkles, and on the word I woke.

There was nothing out of the way about her so far as I recall;
She wasn't out of common handsome or fast or smart or tall;
There was no one in the crowd to remember — they were chaps like most, that's all.

We'd nothing much in the way of weather out of the usual kind;
The times we had they were like most times, goods uns and bad combined,
And nothing ever happened on board her to make her stick in your mind.

Just the same old round of sailorizing that us old shellbacks know,
The old hauling of sheets and braces in the Doldrums to and fro,
The old jobs aloft in the Tropics when the good trade-winds blow.

Reefing and furling, wheel and lookout, shifting and bending sail,
Tallying on to the topsail halyards, snugging down in a gale,
And an old song in the dog-watches and an old seaman's tale.

I went with never a look behind me, and glad to leave her too,
When we made her fast in the dock basin and the mate said, "That'll do!"
And it's rum I should have dreamed about her, of all the ships I knew!
Notes
From SAILOR'S DELIGHT, edited by Cicely Fox Smith, published by Methuen & Co., London, UK, © 1931, pp. 70-73.

Here we have the old sailor musing over why he dreamed so vividly about a particular ship and crew he sailed on when there was nothing remarkable about her, his crewmates, or the voyage.

Odilon Redon - Quote

"I have often, as an exercise and as a sustenance, painted before an object down to the smallest accidents of its visual appearance; but the day left me sad and with an unsatiated thirst. The next day I let the other source run, that of imagination, through the recollection of the forms and I was then reassured and appeased."

Cy Twombly

Cy Twombly quote: My line is childlike but not childish. It is very difficult to fake.. to get that quality you need to project yourself into the child's line. It has to be felt.

Hans Hoffman -- Exploring with color.

"The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color." Hans Hoffman

Pieces

This is one of my current paintings. Size is 24 X 30.

The energy of Elizabeth Murray

In a 1991 interview Murray, stated, "When you walk out of the studio, and you walk down the street that's where you find art. Or you find it at home, right in front of you. I paint about things that surround me-things that I pick up and handle everyday. That's what art is. Art is an epiphany in a coffee cup. "
http://islandlass.wordpress.com/2008/08/01/elizabeth-murray/
Elizabeth Murray, A Pioneering Painter.

ArtPrize bringing art to the people.

Artist's reception

Join us!
We are welcoming 51 artists from around the world entered in ARTPRIZE, the world’s largest art prize.

Important Dates
September 23
Opening Day of ArtPrize

September 24
Artists’ reception at Riverview Center!
5:00—8:00 pm
678 Front Ave NW, Grand Rapids
Located on the Southwest Corner of the historic Sixth Street Bridge

Meet the artists, see the artwork, VOTE and make your voice heard.

October 1
Top Ten Artists Announced

October 8
Winner of ArtPrize Announced

October 10
Closing Day of ArtPrize

What is ArtPrize?
ArtPrize is a radically open competition from September 23 - October 10, 2009. Open to any artist in the world who can find space. Open to anybody in Grand Rapids, Michigan who wants to create a venue. Open to a vote from anyone over 16 who attends.

My ArtPrize painting-- 2,3,4 - Riverview Center 678 Front Ave NW, Grand Rapids- vote34771

Part of my still life arrived today.

A piece of my still life arrived today, so quietly it was placed.

Catch the energy

Joan Mitchell's energy is contagious.

Artprize

Check out Artprize.com

Update on next painting

I am working on a new painting, this painting has the American flag in the still life. While I am painting the still life it has been growing. Once the painting is completed, then I will fully understand why I painted this. The over all feel of the painting and understanding is arriving in pieces.

Perspective Equation

This is my latest painting titled Perspective Equation. This painting is oil on canvas,
size 24 x 30.
As you can see I am continuing with having an element of the flag in this painting, along with linear elements that are crossing and dividing the canvas into compartments. There is a still life behind the flag, which is hidden from view. So this painting has one still life you can see and another in which you can not see.

Amedeo Modigliani

Manet

From the MOMA

James Ensor
June 28, 2009–September 21, 2009
The Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Exhibition Gallery, sixth floor
Purchase the exhibition catalogue
James Ensor (1860–1949) was a major figure in the Belgian avant-garde of the late nineteenth century and an important precursor to the development of Expressionism in the early twentieth. In both respects he has influenced generations of later artists. This exhibition presents approximately 120 works, examining Ensor's contribution to modernity, his innovative and allegorical use of light, his prominent use of satire, his deep interest in carnival and performance, and his own self-fashioning and use of masking, travesty, and role-playing. Examples of Ensor's paintings, prints, and drawings are installed in an overlapping network of themes and images to produce a complete picture of this daring, experiential body of work. Ultimately, this exhibition presents James Ensor as a socially engaged and self-critical artist involved with the issues of his times and with contemporary debates on the very nature of modernism. The exhibition, which is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, will travel to the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, October 2009–February 2010.
Organized by Anna Swinbourne, Assistant Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture.

Two of James Ensor Paintings

A painting of James Ensor, by James Ensor

California Dreamin, 36x48, oil on canvas, 2009

Artist statement for current series of paintings.

RaNae Couture
Artist Statement

The work in this series is about creating a conversation of contrast between forms within a theatrical space. The meaning of contrast is similar to a poem or story that is broken up into two points so that one complements, is the opposite, or is opposed to the other. It is like two different points of view or maybe even a paradox. There is a linear flow of line that often dances among the color and this enables the objects to have a voice and relate to each other. The objects are simple such as rocks, glass, string, fabrics, pieces of nature and food. Through intense observation and manipulation of line and color, I create a space with a vision that includes stillness as well as movement, calmness as well as restlessness, line contained or not contained and color that is crisp and clear or vague and transparent.
Also, I search for the poetic presence of the objects. I have looked hard at the objects and searched for the essence of its surface. The Italian still life painter Giorgio Morandi once stated, “One can travel the world and see nothing. To achieve understanding it is necessary not to see many things, but to look hard at what you do see.” Searching for the poetic presence begins during the set-up process of the still life. Arbitrarily moving the items around and balancing an item ever so gently that a breeze could collapse the structure, helps me to understand the still life. Also, unexpected change in the still life will happen, such as tiny pieces of nature falls and lands on the fabric or light fluffy seeds begin to float out of a milkweed or the fruit begins to decay. Allowing unexpected change to happen contrasts the fact that I am painting a still life.
Poetry and literature have inspired me during this creative process. I have been influenced by late nineteenth century art and literature of France and Belgium. Studying James Ensor’s free expression with color, Edouard Manet’s intellectual structuring and Amedeo Mondiglioni’s child like line, have been inspirational.

Nostalgia

2,3,4

Flag With Meat Loaf