finished

figure study no. twelve   ballpoint on paper   19" x 24" 

life of pi

2012 directed by Ang Lee

based on the 2001 novel by Yann Martel

afternoon at the morgan library

Leonardo da Vinci, Head of a Young Woman (Study for the Angel in the ‘Virgin of the Rocks’), 1480s, metalpoint heightened with white on buff prepared paper.

Leonardo da Vinci, Head of a Young Woman (Study for the Angel in the ‘Virgin of the Rocks’), 1480s, metalpoint heightened with white on buff prepared paper.

Exhibitions included drawings by Leonardo da Vinci from the Biblioteca Reale in Turin, letters from J. D. Salinger, and a collection of material pertaining to the life of Edgar Allen Poe.

framed

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This piece from the Verso series has finally made it home

antigua

Please click through the image to see a gallery from our short but gorgeous trip.  The images of snorkeling with sting rays are only in our memories, however.

salinger

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2013 Directed by Shane Salerno

“Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.” 

― J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye

storm king - mountainville, ny

Mark di Suvero  Pyramidian; Mon Pere, Mon Pere; and Mother Peace

Mark di Suvero  Pyramidian; Mon Pere, Mon Pere; and Mother Peace

More than 120 monumental 20th-century sculptures are sited on the Storm King Art Center’s 500 acres. Scattered throughout a landscape of rolling hills, lawns, fields, and woodlands, the works are placed to highlight the relationship between art and nature. The collection includes examples by many of the world’s most influential postwar sculptors including Alexander Calder, Isamu Noguchi, Richard Serra, Mark di Suvero, and Barbara Hepworth.

collected writings of robert motherwell

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"Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator." -RM

From On the Humanism of Abstraction 

As the dictionary says, the purpose of abstraction in any field —art, science, mathematics—is, out of incredible richness and complexity and detail of reality, “to separate,” “to select from” the complexity of reality that which you want to emphasize, or to deal with. . . it is not feasible to re-create the Battle of Gettysburg; yet the ultimate aspiration of that naturalistic notion of what a work of art is remains of reproduction of reality itself; hence the popularity of the cinema in the 20th century, as of the novel in the 19th.

. . . All our forms of communication are abstractions from the whole context of reality.  I have often quoted Alfred North Whitehead in what I think is one of the crucial statements on abstraction, that “the higher the degree of abstraction, the lower the degree of complexity.”  In that sense, mathematical formulae are (ironically) by nature of a lower degree of complexity than a painted surface with three lines, even it it’s an Einsteinian equation. Once one understands that every expression is a form of abstraction, then choices are made in relation to emphasis, i.e., to significance. . .

Once one can get over one’s inherited primitive feeling that what a picture is, is a picture of something in nature, and think instead that a picture is a deliberate choice of a certain degree of abstraction (which in the case of Andrew Wyeth or Norman Rockwell, for example, is a very low degree of abstraction and a relatively high degree of abstraction, or moving from them to, say, Mondrian, a high degree of abstraction and a low degree of complexity), then one begins to view painting in an entirely different way. . .

A difficulty for an artist speaking to you (in comparison with a composer or a mime) is that they can give you a performance, and the painter cannot. . . Painting is also a language that is universal by nature, but one highly-sophisticated and elite, in terms of the general run of people. If one is a very skillful abstract painter, it’s difficult for many people to be aware of it. . .

Most people have a prejudice against abstraction in anything. . . And I must say that when I look at an advanced mathematical equation, it’s meaningless to me. I can’t read it, any more than I can read Chinese. But I don’t have a resistance to it for its being abstract, because I regard abstraction as a most powerful weapon. It is also true that abstraction can become so removed from one’s experience—one’s sensed experience—that it become remote from its origins. Most people’s resistance toward abstraction is just that it is remote. . .

. . . You see, art is a triangle. Let’s say, in the case of painting—most people think that the triangle is composed of yourself and the canvas and “nature,” and that I, as a painter, look at nature and then stick over there on the canvas what I’m looking at. Actually, the triangle is composed of oneself, the medium and human culture, not brute nature alone, which is but an aspect of culture; the sum total of one’s human experience in relation to one’s culture in painting. So in many ways, rather than looking at a tree, one is playing a game with other painters. . .

. . . In painting or music or poetry, one is concerned with how a specific medium functions, and paradoxically, in how it is functioning, the whole human soul is revealed, more than if one tried to paint a “picture” of the soul. It’s one’s soul that’s being communicated, how one feels about the character of reality. . . In the end, more hits your heart and your gut than can a photograph of a massacre or a photograph of two lovers embracing and so on, because abstract art. . . can convey feeling in its “essence” (in the Platonic sense) in a way that “naturalism” cannot: it has far too many extraneous details, and loses its emphasis, its focus. . .

. . .In this sense, abstract art is active and decisive, not passive and undifferentiated, and only becomes remote, by definition, when it becomes too distant from its original discriminations among the complexities of concrete reality.

(The previous was excerpted from the full essay posted by Liz Hager on Venetian Red) 

begone dull care

Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart  Begone Dull Care  1949

Insomnia in a small town hotel led me to the Classic Arts Showcase on public access, which then brought me to this wonderful animation set to the Oscar Peterson Trio. 

james turrell @ the guggenheim

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Aten Reign installation view at the Guggenheim

 

The last time I saw so many blissed out New Yorkers lying on the floor was during an exhibition by one of my favorites, Olafur Elisson in 2008.

Dig it here.