journey to the sun

Sauna Domes, 2013, acrylic and oil on wood

Elizabeth Huey: Radiant Swim

Harper's Books

Oh, yes -- give me beachfront motels, turquoise pools, cabanas and coconuts, 
flaming heat. Take me there. Now. 

Or, take me to Harper's Books in East Hampton where the blazing white sun bears 
down on a group of masterful swimscapes by Elizabeth Huey. Being immersed in 
these paintings is like vacationing in a Sam Fuller movie where dreamy panoramas 
of poolside leisure and boozy, bikini-clad evenings are scorched by light day and night, 
as if the sun were afflicted by lens flare. 

The paintings -- a blistering mix of flatness and depth -- are electrifying. 

Observation Pool, 2013, acrylic and oil on wood

Jess Frost, curator of the exhibit, selected works that move through narrative and composition with breakneck speed -- nearly flying off the canvas at every turn -- yet they manage to linger, like memory. 

Huey's imagery is nostalgic but fugitive, or illusory, with passages that function like flashbacks from a dream or a long ago family vacation. Tinged with fleeting, alluring dramas, they captivate the eye. My own memory of soaking in the steaming salt baths outside Las Vegas on a chilly February morning -- the mountains silhouetted against a crisp blue sky -- comes alive here.

 

Sunblind Splash, 2013, acrylic and oil on canvas

A hot sky absolutely fries the canvas over Sunblind Splash, a painterly aggregate of scumbling, scraping, brushwork and, well...splashes. There's so much activity in paintings such as this one that you end up reading them like a book, scanning the surface for tension and psychology, spatial disparity and subversions in tone, perspective, distance. An amalgam of cutaways, jump cuts, perspectival structures and glorious leaps of faith, Huey's sumptuous brush and knife work combines with aspects of collage to startling affect. 

In many of these works, the pool functions like a proscenium stage with small dramas played in it, around it, and in spite of it. Huey understands theatricality, and she lays down her scenes with powerful vistas in two and three-point perspective. The pools, which lay foreground or midground, variously stand or recede, bouncing in between front and back, and they usually possess a sense of perspective that grounds the entire composition. Like a generous lead act, they function as gemstones, inviting the peripheral action to take center stage in spite of, or perhaps because of, their glint.

 

Violet Moonrise, 2013, acrylic and oil on wood

Huey's cavorting tourists are slathers of thick brush work defined by deep fleshy strokes, as if the artist is channelling the late great Richard Diebenkorn. Gorgeous. 

In Violet Moonrise (above) the open umbrella tipped at mid-ground doubles as a slice of that ubiquitous and mouthwatering Florida orange and all the while, a purple sky hangs in the distance. It's exhilarating. 

Private Pool Party, 2013, oil on linen

Huey lives in Brooklyn, where painting has recently been reinvented. She studied psychology at George Washington University, and by all accounts has maintained an lifelong interest in the science of the mind. 

In Private Pool Party, plinths and partial walls rise from the poolside like ancient portals held inside a dark vessel. The road sign that hovers above looks like a full moon in the pitch dark sky yet the leisure set lingers on, bathed in hot white light. It's an otherworldly place where night and day coexist, linked as if poised between culture and psyche.

Radiant Swim, 2013, Acrylic and oil on panel

Huey is also an avid collector of vintage photos and a crack photographer in her own right, and she derives subject matter from a pastiche of found and created photographs. The exhibition namesake above, Radiant Swim is a concise work with sharply defined compositional elements that skewer the picture place. The reiteration of those hulking golden arches, an aspect of the retro-architecture that inhabits much of the artist's visual field, anchors the image field with the sort of grand gesture that only a seasoned painter can pull off. 

Moonlight Soak, 2013, acrylic and oil on canvas

At day's end, the faceless sunbathers, palm trees and shiny pools huddle together like potent signifiers from our collective memory bank, a powerful visual elixir. But it's the confidence and vision with which Huey executes her paintings that will draw you to and keep you looking at this work.  

 

Red Sky Submersion, 2013, acrylic and oil on canvas

It's always a good time to see wonderful paintings, but today is a great day to see the sunshine.

Soft Wind, 2013, acrylic and oil on wood

Elizabeth Huey: Radiant Sun is on view through February 18th. Don't miss the opening reception tomorrow, January 4, from 6-8pm at Harper's Books.

 

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.