Annotated Image #2

Cary Markerink & Theo Baart
"Untitled"
Snelweg, Highways in The Netherlands, 1996

I like this photograph because of the saturated colors of the sky over the highway. It creates an artificial landscape that is as beautiful as rolling hills or mountains would be at sunrise or sunset. I like the trailing lines and the lights that draw your eye back. You feel a quiet rush as you look toward the horizon.

"Seven Days" Reading- Chapter 2

-p48 each student has set up camp. This is so true for me in a crit, having my own necessary means to focus. Everyone is listening and respectful to their classmates, but the room is full of activity of the individuals.
-The notion of falling apart in a crit as part of the process of learning is very true. Josh starts out not knowing exactly what he wants to say-He even starts to get tired and dejected from trying so hard to explain himself until he finally figures out what he wants to know about and gains a better grasp of what he is actually doing with his work when he can finally verbalize it.
-p54- Reminds me about our class conversation about whether work should speak for itself. Mary Kelly says "never go to a wall text...learn to read art for yourself."
-I agree that sometimes as an artist you don't know what you have done and other peoples comments help you understand your own work on a conscious level.
-p55- I think I need to learn to be put on the spot better so I don't get defensive- I want to do as Jones says " develop a thick skin and see criticism as rhetoric rather than personal attack."
-Notion of being critical of yourself not being harsh, but having a heightened awareness that allows you to not simply make everything cliche. Criticality is not a negative word.
-p 67 "have that mysterious blend of complete commitment to your decisions and total openness to reconsider everything." That should be our goal as artists.
-p72 beauty in art is sometimes found in the struggle to make it
-It is interesting that the author found the crit to be a piece of performance art in its own right

Chelsea Gallery Visits

The Andrea Rosen gallery showed Josiah McEiheny's work and I think what I liked best was the fact that his work (which was architectural) was laid out in a progression of prints, photos, and the sculpture that was very logical for viewing his work. It was like I was back in architecture school looking a a layout for a final crit. The entry room contained a few prints of sections and plans of a building as if it were the beginning stages of something to be built and then was followed by the main gallery room that contained his three dimensional works and some photos. The centerpiece was his eight foot skyscraper sculpture and then on the wall were related sculptures as if he had focused in on a detail of his main piece. The relationship of the prints, photos, and sculptures made it easy to move around the room. In a back room was another smaller show about using beautiful color to convey ugly images. For some reason a few of the pieces were hung bellow eye level and I didn't feel like there was a good reason for them to be.

At Robert Miller, Barthelemy Togou had too much going on in the one space. Though it was kind of separated into different rooms the photographs, video, watercolors, and installations was too much to take in. It was very obvious he was trying to make a political statement and too predictable that throughout all his media he was using the softness of some of his art like the drippy watercolors and installation to try to soften his hard and violent images.

Mitchell Innes & Nash showed Enoc Perez's very architectural paintings. The gallery had columns down the middle of it and instead of an obstruction I loved it. It focused me on sections of the wall. I leaned up against them and looked at each painting-I was really able to focus on the paintings as individuals and then step back and see them as a whole. The columns were like blinders if you so chose to step between them. Perez's style was loose, soft, and colorful, but it built incredibly detailed spaces. I recognized almost all the buildings. I really loved the palette too.

The Aperture Gallery was my favorite. I was surprised by the show which I figured were going to be "landscapes" as in rural country and yet they were urban and industrial-artificial landscapes. The scale of the photos was awesome to me and the way the gallery was set up with an inner and outer wall to revolve around made a clear path as to how to navigate the work. I liked that the images were grouped yet scattered. It was organized, but seemed free flowing.

The Luhring Augustine Gallery didn't interest me in terms of the work by Janine Antoni, but the space combined with the nature of the work was cool. The first room contained images, the second room had a video and sound, and the third room had images. The gallery was linked by long corridors between and without that sound in the middle gallery I don't think I would have been curious to continue.

I was glad to see so many shows having architecture- I felt like everything could help me with my paintings.

First Set of Reference Photos

Spent Sunday down in Little Italy on the last day of the San Gennaro festival and the night at my friends apartment in the Gramercy Park area. It was a total experiment with a new camera, but I really like the images. Took a bunch from the roof top of his apartment on 3rd ave and the rest are from Madison Square Park.

Annotated Image #1

Paul Jackson
"New York Nightlights"
40"x26"
Watercolor
February 2005

I love seeing watercolors that appear so controlled and detailed. I see in this the unique perspective and detail that I want to use in my paintings. The extreme overhead perspective that tips the buildings outward add to the rushing effect.

Where to Start

For the first week of painting we had to bring in our most recent paintings to talk about. Hanneline also had us outline really concrete goals for the semester. I always find it weird to talk about my own work and what I see myself doing.

In painting I mostly enjoy the formal aspects over having goals of conveying a concept. I am mostly interested in light and contrast and what layering or leaving parts of the ground exposed does to the painting. I also like the idea of intricate patterns and highly detailed subjects. I break down images into shapes or maps of color rather than seeing it as the “subject.” The subject is built by layers of color-playing with different transparencies. I like painting to be a logical step by step breakdown that is very controlled. I like exactness.

Before this painting that "subject" has usually been my horse. I can render with paint pretty much anything photorealistically so it was always just a matter of what am I that interested in or in love with that I could paint it over and over again. But after last semester I was getting really unhappy with my paintings. They were going in an abstract direction where I was focusing too much on "what am I trying to say with this." I was trying too hard to make a concept when in fact I really just like to paint what I see and like. As soon as I let go of that I felt like I realized that the concept comes out of me doing what I do best- it can't be forced.

With this painting came a lot of experimentation, but it also just came down to me approaching it the way I used to when it was Painting I and we received basic assignments on what to paint. I painted what I saw. I created the image from other images and my own photographs with the help of a friend. And then I copied it in Cezannes manner of breaking down everything into shapes of color. The picture came apart as I zoomed in and focused on small areas. Things don't get identified by what they are but by the amount of light and the shade of color on them. I literally made myself maps of one color at a time and overlayed them. Focusing on all those shapes in turn made the big picture into something more than what I started with.

New York City happened to be my choice of subject because I was painting it with a person in mind to give it to, but the subject matter works with my ideas nonetheless. NYC is fast, its complicated. The people I know and the experiences I have there make me connected to it and its energy. I like getting into the details of it and although it is populr subject matter I feel I approach it in a way all my own. It's my picture of the city and the lights. It's me in a place I never thought I'd be and finding out that it looks much different than I expected.

That has been a theme in my life in a way anyway. Thinking I know the big picture, diving head first into the details, only to find I had no idea what the picture looked like in the first place. So I'm starting with what I know and we will see where it goes.

Alex Bag Video

Humorous and crazy scenes aside, I found the video a little sad. "Alex Bag" begins her first semester totally excited-she likes being understood by others, she likes her environment, she even likes just learning about texture, light, and shading- she is ready to work hard because she feels like she found where she belongs. But her initial excitement seems to only bring her farther to fall in her disappointment. She expresses what I think drives a lot of art students- "I just want to do what I want." She did have the chance to do whatever she wanted- and she ended up becoming admitedly like everyone else...

New Museum Visit

It still never ceases to amaze me how it can take all day to do very little in the city. I spent my Saturday morning at the MOMA for painting class looking at the James Ensor exhibit that is coming down soon and the rest of the afternoon and part of the evening at the New Museum and one gallery on the lower east side. I never even got to Chelsea to look at any of the shows at those galleries on my list.

I had never been to the New Museum before. I really liked the building itself, especially the top floor with the sky room that looks over the south end of the city toward the financial district, brooklyn bridge, and what would have been the world trade center towers (I thought of that particularly, it being the day after 9/11 and all). I could have went to the museum just for the view and was disappointed I hadn't brought my camera. I've been painting the city as sort of a new subject lately, so I'll have to go back to get some reference photos. That may end up being the focus of my paintings for my thesis exhibition- I still am caught between atleast 3 ideas...

Thinking about photography and going down to the next floor with David Goldblatt's photos couldn't have been more perfect. I read about his experience in South Africa and how he was trying to deal with time and how apartheid had touched the lives of the people there. His photographs were really breathtaking-especially the landscapes. Even more amazing was his attention to detail. One photo took your eye over grass hills in the foreground meeting a line of shack houses before rushing onward to rising mountains. The shambled houses are almost blended into the landscape as if they are at the heart of South Africa's past and would live on there. Another was of two huge grassy hills connected by an arched bridge. Very small compared to the landscape was a tiny person bungee jumping off the bridge. It was totally unexpected. His photographs definitely felt timeless. I'm not sure if it was his use of strong contrast in light and shadow, or his almost aerial perspective on the landscapes, but something about them escaped time. I don't know that much about photography, but his technique seemed to pull you right into the photographs.

Emory Douglass on the next floor was completely different. His very graphic caricatures were vibrant and shocking. The very illustrative linear cartoon like drawings made the Black Panther propaganda almost seem like a kids coloring book. They were simple and easy to understand.

The last show I saw was at James Fuentes gallery which is a bunch of blocks south of the New Museum. Jessica Dickinson, who is Marc Handelman's wife, who I had for painting last semester, had her first show. Our class had seen her paintings in studio last semester so it was neat to see them finished and in New York! Her paintings are built of layers of different patterns and shapes. From a distance they just seem like nice abstract paintings, but up close you can see the intenseness that went into building it up, sanding it down and altering each layer. You can also see that she is informed from some everyday objects like windows or patterns in nature like wood grain, so it gives it somewhat of a subject, but not really. There is a lot of physicality to the paint and therefore gives it a feeling that the time it took to create each painting is somewhat tangible. She is someone who knows a lot about the process you go through to really figure out what you like doing and experimenting with in your work.