my two cents

Here are some picks for a few of my favorite things in 2012 -- things I saw, things I wish I saw, things I wish I had had time to write about, and other things...in and around New York and the East End. A little late, but wrapping up 2012 took longer than I expected -- a nice surprise all around. And things are heating up on the East End...looking forward to events at the new Parrish and all things 2013.
  

 most made me want to paint: 

KELTIE FERRIS, [[[O]]][[[O]]], 2010 -- her show at Mitchell-Innes Nash up thru JAN 12

MATISSE, IN SEARCH OF TRUE PAINTING, at The Met, thru March 17

Every show I see at Halsey McKay makes me want to paint -- they find the most awesome artists. Here, a few highlights from their last 2012 show, Habeas Corpus:

Lisa Sanditz, Frito Lay Study, 2012

Ted Gahl, Village, 2012

 

Jeanette Mundt, I AM WORKING: WAVING BUT DROWNING, (with DVD projection), 2012

 

most fun:

POWERPLAY at Hayground School, Bridgehampton
 

 

organized by The City Firm, 

a Chelsea based art-advisory firm, 

POWERPLAY featured the work of 

28 artists whose use of recycled 

materials, invention and a 

communal spirit made way for 

the East End's coolest 

temporary sculpture farm. 

Let's hope they do it 

again next summer.

Hayground has always been amazing -- a true laboratory. Great summer event. Bravo.

biggest surprise: 

everything Scott Bluedorn does

These are pix from a few shows at Scott's gallery

in Amagansett, Neoteric Fine Art -- cool and

young and a lot of fun. He's off to a fantastic start.

 best 2 for 2:

Two curatorial ventures on the East End by Mary Heilmann

wonderful summer show at Ille Arts in Amagansett

and...

  

Roy Fowler

InsideOutsiders, Mary Heilmann and Friends at The Fireplace Project in Springs

Rick Liss, Bus Lane, 2012

Claudia Spinelli, Untitled, 2012

best sculpture:

Bevery Pepper at Marlborough Chelsea. What an amazing woman. Breathtaking.

Beverly Pepper, Curvea in Curvea, 2012, cor-ten steel

 Biennial favorites:

Nicole Eisenman, Untitled, 201, 45 monotypes

 

Vincent Fecteau, Untitled, 2011

Wu Tsang, Green Room, mixed media

most made me wish I lived in LA: 

CHRIS BURDEN's Metropolis II at LACMA

quintessential California (and beyond): Chris Burden

click below to see it in action, courtesy New York Times:

best blockbusters:

PICASSO BLACK AND WHITE, Guggenheim thru JAN 23

 the older you get the stronger the wind gets -- and it's always in your face.

Pablo Picasso 

MICKALENE THOMAS, ORIGIN OF THE UNIVERSE, a must see...at the Brooklyn Museum thru JAN 20

WADE GUYTON OS, Whitney Museum thru JAN 13 -- THIS Sunday!

 

connect the dots:

The new Islamic wing at the Met

Everything Mark Wilson does

Sharon Horvath, White Night, 2012 at The Drawing Room

Daniel Wiener's dizzying creations

Olafur Eliasson, Your thinking bridge, one of five installations in Dnepropetrovs, Ukraine, 2012

and there's so much more...

hybrids and homilies

detail: Forest Creature #1, 2012, graphite, oil on Yupo paper, 26 x 20 in

LUCY WINTON: CREATURES

Glenn Horowitz Bookseller

It's not often that I'm taken by surprise. It's not that I can't be impressed -- lots of things impress me. But true surprise is different. Picasso's Mosqueteros at Gagosian, 2009 -- that surprised me. New Zealand's Marmite shortage -- big surprise. An art fair in Atlantic City...um, somewhere between surprise and fatigue. Not that surprise in and of itself is key to art making -- not by a long shot. But after a long time of looking and thinking about art, being truly surprised is a little like falling in love. 

Enter Lucy Winton -- surprise, surprise, surprise.

Donkey Bull #2 (Love to Edwin Landseer), 2012, charcoal, graphite, airbrush, oil on vellum, 37 x 25 in

 
Now on view at Glenn Horowitz, Lucy Winton: Creatures, a small group of paintings on paper that are seductive, sentimental, cheeky and fresh. This is the real thing -- a must see.

Forest Creature #1, 2012, graphite, oil on Yupo paper, 26 x 20 in

Lucy Winton seems to do most of her thinking at the cusp of imagination, commingling the romance of animal consciousness with her own psyche, and there she pulls out quite a plum. Diving into the rabbit hole without a hint of irony, Winton dabbles in the unheimlich (Ger., uncanny) and in social taboos, absurdism and territories unknown from the past, future and present tenses.

Her paintings are intimate and luxurious, moody and gothic, and they bring to mind the likes of Poe, Lewis Carroll and Flannery O'Connor. For the artist, whose influences run the gamut from children's literature to Edwin Landseer and Jorg Immendorf, there is a special power in the creatures, places and things that populate her world, a parallel universe of visual non sequiturs filled with rich metaphors and a sweeping and poetic mindfulness. 

After War, Snow, 2011, charcoal, graphite, oil on vellum, 25 x 37 in

In After War, Snow, the artist snuggles with doe-eyed cattle that lounge among her fleshy brushwork and velvet fields of gray. Little mountains of snow fall on this softness like errant globs from another world, laying across the composition with little regard for reality. Her paint application here is subdued, evoking the Spartan curves and naturalism of Georgia O'Keefe.
 
And then -- without warning -- Winton fiercely effects a sort of painterly dismount in which she suddenly channels the hand of Frans Hals or John Singer Sargent and their swashbuckling strokes of pigment. She swirls over broad expanses, canoodling with her brushes among fleeing rabbits and bursting star shapes, tree trunks and stairways. 

Gliding her brush across swaths of Yupo paper, Winton advances into breathtaking passages of pure paint. Her brushwork is frisky and deliciously wicked, as if there's alchemy in each stroke. If you know the feel of a paint-saturated brush, you're right there with her -- skating across the icy translucence of this waxy white geography. 

Recently, Lucy Winton and I exchanged a few thoughts on content, context and the chimerical in her paintings:
  
Are there specific references to the snow in your work?

My snow is definitely a reference to Jorg Immendorf's Cafe Deutschland, The Wizard of Oz snowfall scene, and the calming -- even opiate -- feeling I get from that. I also grew up in very snowy Minnesota.

installation view with sculpture, L, Androclea and the Lion, 2012, papier mache, balsa wood, oil, 12 x 12 in, variable

There seem to be elements of Shamanism in your work, and a sort of luxurious communion with animal spirits.

I fantasize about communing with unreachable mammals...so when I paint me sneaking up on a deer or lion, I really get pleasure. That pleasure is spiritual."

Farm Whorl, 2012, graphite, charcoal, oil on vellum

Lurking within these dramas, it also seems there are the things of social taboos, repressed memory, dreams and the uncanny, or unheimlich, experiences, whether actual or intuited.

In Freud's 1919 landmark essay, The Uncanny, he talks about the uncanny experience as:  


"...that class of the frightening which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar."
  
Winton's examination of the unheimlich is far less dark than Freud's, but the idea of a parallel universe where the unfamiliar is familiar again, is an irresistible connection.

But, I digress. Winton's images and the animal consciousness they evoke are spectacularly weird and wonderful. At the same time, they seem to come from our shared childhoods or deep inside some collective unconscious.

I lived in India for about six months a long time ago. I have definitely referenced one Brahman cow eye about 6 times -- same darn eye over and over.
 

Donkey Bull Parachutes #1, 2011, graphite, charcoal, airbrush on vellum

 

Your works seem to have a floating narrative that is familiar but fleeting. Are you inspired by specific works of literature?

Mostly I am inspired by children's book illustrations -- sometimes regardless of the narrative. One weird personality marker I have is that I am inappropriately religious, indecisively so...and from an atheist, humanist background. That can leak out in my work.

Forest Creature #3, 2012, graphite, oil on Yupo paper, 26 x 20 in

The idea that (on top of everything else) part of Lucy Winton's visual psychology is driven by wanton religiosity -- makes me like the work even more. 

"The compulsion to erode boundaries between herself and 

other creatures is one of Winton's great creative strengths."

April Gornick, BOMB, Summer, 2012

Don't miss this beautiful show, on view at Glenn Horowitz through January 1.

bird notes

8:30am 12:45pm 11/16/90, 1990, ink on paper, 22 1/2 x 22 1/4 in

Billy Sullivan: Bird Drawings

Glenn Horowitz Bookseller

Since the early 1990s, artist Billy Sullivan has been drawing the birds that frequent his East Hampton backyard. Currently on view at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, also in East Hampton, are selected drawings from over three decades of Sullivan's nuanced line, keen observation and his quick and fluent hand. 

detail: 6/22/99, 6:16am 7:09am, 1999, ink on paper, 30 x 22 in

 

I focus on the birds, their activities, movements and rhythms. Watching 

them, you can see that dominance doesn't matter.

B.S. 

Sullivan's mellifluous lines and inky swashes of brush reveal more than the empirical -- they are meditations on being and birdness, flight and stasis and persona, disposition and anima. 

His imagery moves across the page quickly, multiplying with all the briskness of flocks of birds in flight. The drawings are fleeting and minimal, and yet their conveyance of the nature of all things bird is really quite astonishing.

8/6/97 11:45am 12:25pm, 1997, ink on Arches paper, 30 x 22 in

Gallery director Jess Frost sat down with me last week to share some thoughts on the exhibit, which features works dating from 1990 to three drawings completed the weekend before the show opened. 

"The way the birds move around the page, they're almost musical," said Frost. Indeed, Sullivan's methodology requires him to apprehend the birds almost instantaneously.

You want the marks to be as fast as the birds.

B.S.

4/6/03 2:15pm 2:40pm, 2003, Ink on paper, 30 x 22 in

"Some of them are like field drawings," Frost continued, "they're all done from life. Billy sits at his dining room table in front of a picture window. All the works are titled by date and time, so you can tell that certain birds arrive seasonally."

I'm excited every spring when I hear orioles before I can see them. I love seeing hummingbirds arrive in the spring, but I miss hearing 

bobwhites -- they're just not around anymore. 

B.S.

detail: 11/4/12 8:35am-9:44am 10:58am-11:57am 12:03am-1:20pm , 2012, ink on paper, 26 x 120 in

This body of work, you might say, is in direct opposition to Sullivan's acclaimed figurative paintings, which are drawn from his own photography and photographic archives. The paintings are diaristic, crisp and sexy, transforming the humble snapshot into poetic characterizations that depict the life and times of Sullivan, his famed cadre and the people and things in his orbit.
  
In his photography, a renown body of work in its own right, Sullivan has chronicled some 45 years of art world shenanigans that he experienced firsthand, beginning with those halcyon days at Max's Kansas City beginning in the late 1960s. Lauded for the incisive photographic installation he mounted in Day for Night: The 2006 Whitney Biennial, Sullivan's body of photographic works bounce from sun drenched beach parties to matter-of-fact nudes and the clubs, cocktails and camp of the 1970s and 80s.

Like the bird drawings, the imagery contained within his portraits and still lifes reveals as much about the artist as it does his subjects.

 

The birds dictate who's in the drawing. Birds have schedules. A cardinal 

always comes at meal times.

B.S.

 

IX 2/9/93 1:55 2:08pm, 1993, Ink on paper, 10 x 14 in

Mourning doves have returned this year, they had been absent for 

a while. Now there are turkeys around and downy woodpeckers

at the feeder and also pecking on the side of my house.

B.S.

Sullivan's hand is smart and honest, without a touch of cynicism. An inventive and buoyant colorist, the bird drawings -- devoid of color -- reveal that gentle bullfighter within the artist.



 

Accompanying the exhibition a limited edition book, BIRDS, with text by author, birder and conservationist, the famed Margaret Atwood and Sullivan's drawings.

 

BIRDS is available for purchase through Glenn Horowitz Bookseller

On the evolution of both the exhibit and the book, Frost recalled her delight when the famed author agreed to include her 2010 essay on bird conservation, originally published in The Guardian, in the book. 

Billy Sullivan: Bird Drawings is on view through January 1, 2013.