New work for painting final

My progress for for my painting final on Monday, December ninth....

Finished with this work

This work is half way done.  I'm going to enlarge the truck and mix better colors for the items inside the vehicle.

This work is finished.

This work is not done.  I still need to fix the figure left hand, paint in the ducks and fix some shadows.

Article on Isa Genzken

Found an Interesting article that was recently published in the NY Times by Randy Kennedy, profiling the artist Isa Genzken.  She is currently having her first retrospective at MOMA, which has apparently been long over due.  Reasons for the long anticipated exhibition has been cited for her bipolar disorder and even her battle with alcoholism.  With these issues under control, Genzken is happy to be in New York and showing her work at MOMA.

To read the full article click on the link below!
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/arts/design/no-it-isnt-supposed-to-be-easy.html?smid=fb-share

New Work

How should I add to these? Should anything be changed? Still struggling with adding more...

knowing when a painting is done

This semester in Painting three my teacher has tried to get us to produce work very fast.  Up until two weeks ago we were making seven paintings a week.  My method to completing these painting was producing one painting every studio session and never going back into it.  Now that our class is beginning to make work for the final critique, I'm struggling with going back into the painting that I perceive as finished.  I think the seven paintings a week was a good assignment in getting us to make a lot of work in s small window of time.  However this assignment has inhibited my ability to  know when a painting is done and how to add to paintings.  For the rest of the semester I am going to try to work on adding to my paintings and not completing them in one sitting.  

Pictures of work I have made in one sitting.  You decide if and how I should add to them.

  

New work

Just some pictures of new work I made last week...

Work that I really enjoyed from a few different Chelsea Galleries that I visited on November second.

This shopping bag with fabrics was created by Harmony Hammond.  Its is located at Alexander Gray Associates  and will be on display until December 7.  

This work is by Allison Elizabeth Taylor.  She is a Brooklyn based artist that uses a limited palette and natural wood.  This work and many others can be seen at the James Cohan Gallery until November 30th.

New work!

Just wanted to put some pictures up of some new work I made last week!

Damian Ortega

On Saturday, October 12, I visited around 12 Chelsea galleries.  One gallery that struck me in particular  was the Gladstone Gallery.  Damian Ortega is currently having a solo exhibition here.  When you first walk into the show, you see a few sculptures on a table and you also see a framed drawing of the alphabet.  After looking at the curvy letters, the viewer then walks into a large darkened space, that has bent steel sculptures, suspended from the ceiling.  The lighting in the room, is so focused that it produces a specific shadow of each sculpture onto the gallery floor.  These steel sculptures are very large, and it intrigued me, how the artist hung each one relative to the previous.  Ortega also managed to have the works hanging in rows and columns relative to one another.

After contemplating these sculptures, it finally clicked for me, as to why the artist gave so much presence to the shadows.  The shadow of the sculpture in front of me almost made a Y on the ground.  This was very interesting to myself.  As I pondered why this shadow resembled a Y, it then became clear that the artist formed the steel into a shape, that when the light hits the shape at the right angle, it forms a shadow of a letter on the floor.  Ortega, constructed sculptures that produced shadows from A-Z.  He also hung them in left to right order.  This order can only be seen when standing in the doorway of the room.

To get more information about Damian Ortega or his current exhibition click on the link below
http://www.gladstonegallery.com/artist/damian-ortega/work#&panel1-1

Bad Crit? No problem, but how do I make sense of it?

As an artist, whether amateur or professional, one is bound to receive a bad critique now and again.  However, one of the hardest parts of a negative critique, is not keeping oneself composed during the crit, it is taking the criticism and moving forward with it.  But how does one move forward?  One student might find destroying the work in question cathartic.  Another student might take solace in crying.  These methods wont get an artist back in the studio.

One of the biggest questions that I ask myself, after a negative evaluation is what is the reason for critiques.  Reviewing an artists work, while the artist is present, is important, in giving the artist a chance to explain their reasoning behind the piece and for the artist to clear up any discrepancies that a viewer is having.  Assessing work, from a viewers perspective is crucial to artists because it allows a party to point out positives and negatives and give advice on how to find solutions.

Even though its clearer why critiques are essential to artists, its still can be very difficult to move on from the negative, with your confidence intact.  Its okay to give your self a day of pity but no more than that.  After your day of pity is over, its going to take some time to process what has been said and sort through the negative, to pick out the useful comments.  Once you decide what is useful, the artist has to chose, whether or not, to listen to the critic.  Depending on how many different people have viewed your work and the comments you get from them, will really push an artist, in how you listen to viewers.  I also think its important to value and listen to viewers that have been in the art world for many years.

Make work, talk about it and learn from it.  The more one critiques their work, the better an artist they will become.  

Wendell White at Mason Gross

After viewing, On photography: Culture, History and the Narrative, I was very struck by the 28 pigment inkjet prints on paper by Wendell White.  One of my first impressions of the prints, was that they had, an eerie sense of time standing still.  Another feeling I had while viewing this series, is that the viewer was welcomed into the picture.  They are very cold and abrupt which is why, I believe they're not inviting and keep the viewer at bay.  White uses formal techniques such as one and two point perspective and extreme contrast in colors that are juxtaposed to one another, in the prints as well.  Seeing the strong use of perspective shows that the artist was well aware and considered his surroundings in conjunction with formal techniques applied in the prints.  Given the title of the show and the images that these prints are made up of, I believe, that an issue White deals with is Americas past and how it is still looms, in the architecture of the country.  The fact that he photographed specific schools dedicated to colored children and made the school so dark, deffinitly plays in to Americas past.  Also, in the print that focuses on The School for White Children, the artist again uses color to convey on of his reasons behind making this series.  In the Print, The School for White Children, the work becomes overwhelmingly about the US, and how it was once separated by skin color, was the norm.  I also found it very compelling that out of the 28 prints, two of them did not overtly say they were schools in the title, thus prompting me to research.  However, after researching the Whitefield House and Millers Grove, Millers Grove was once the site of an African-American farming community, established in 1815.  The Whitefield house in Nazareth, PA, was once used as a nursery for children of the Moravian community.  This house is also the oldest Moraviam site in North America.  Not only do these prints pertain to communities and children, but they also support the viewers theory that the underlying issue in these works, that have to do with race from America's past.

Sentimental Art: Is that a compliment?

I do not perceive the work I make to be sentimental.  However, If one walks into my current studio, as a critic of mine did this past Monday, they will find two pieces that hold a large aspect of sentimentality to them.  The first, I completed in December of 2012, which is a painting of my grandmother that has, for lack of a better phrase, gone through the ringer, to make her appear as if she is there, but actually is not.  The Second work, which I completed on September 23, came on the heels of my late dog.  I recognize there is a slight pattern but is it not okay as an artist to make work solely for myself?   I mean Goya did it at the end of his life in the fourteen Black Paintings, no one was suppose to see them, and now he's even more brilliant because of them.  Granted I am not Goya, but why is it not okay, for me as an emerging artist, in the mists of experimentation to play around with my emotions?  To help better my understanding of my critic's observation of these pieces, I took to a JSTOR article titled On Kitsch and Sentimentality by Robert C. Solomon.  Solomon, starts off by saying that "These days, its better for a young aspiring artist to offend and disgust the viewer than evoke such gentile and sentimental emotions."  The author also makes it a point to say that now a days it is better to be shocking or sour than sweet.  Well if you look at the images below, I'm not at all certain if the words sweet, wide eyed puppies, and other tender synonyms, come to mind when looking at these images.  Finally, Solomon states, that to call someone a sentimentalist in art, is dismissing both the person and their views from serious consideration.  This brings me back to my first point; since I have a studio at school, that is marginally private, where I'm suppose to be constantly making work, why are my cathartic works dismissed when they were not suppose to be a topic of discussion in the first place?

For the full article, click this link below:

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/431644?uid=3739808&uid=2129&uid=2134&uid=374340001&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=374339991&uid=3739256&uid=60&purchase-type=none&accessType=none&sid=21102654521551&showMyJstorPss=false&seq=13&showAccess=false    

Goya, Saturn Devouring his Son 

Kavanagh, Virginia

Kavanagh, Sambuca Series

The week of September 16

I wanted to share with everyone a few pictures of my work.  My work deals with fabric whether it is two dimensional or three dimensional.  The work I have made thus far, is an in between of sculpture and painting.  Some of the pieces I have made, have taken on a furniture like quality, as noted by my professor Jackie Grendal.  

Some artists that I'm currently looking at are...

Anya Kielar        http://www.racheluffnergallery.com/artists/anya-kielar/

                           I'm looking at Anya Kielar to see different painting installations and work you can move around.  

Steven Parrino    http://www.gagosian.com/artists/steven-parrino

                           Steven Parrino can help me understand my work with fabric better because he'll stretch canvas on the frame and then take it off and then put black enamel on the work.  

Anton Henning  http://www.antonhenning.com/www/Start.html

                          Hennings works take on a sculptural element.  They also incorporate painting directly into the furniture element of his work.  

We All Have the Same Nerves: an interview with Galina Eccles

This interview took place on September 6, 2013.  It was a pleasure to have met and spoke with Galina, who is also a student in the Fall 2013, Thesis and Exhibition class.  I found our conversation interesting in the topics we discussed.  It was also exciting to learn that our work is similar, because she also incorporates texture, painting and sculpture into her photographs.  These elements can be seen vividly in my own paintings.  One of the most comforting aspects that I took away from our conversation is that, I'm not the only one nervous about life after Mason Gross and what is suppose to come next.

Galina is currently a senior at Mason Gross, pursing a B.F.A with a concentration in photography.  She is currently working as a wedding photographer for three studios.  However, she does not want to continue this line of work after school.  She would like to branch out into marketing, fashion or maybe even own her own studio.  Since Galina has an interest in fashion, she is currently trying out for Trim Magazine (a Rutgers fashion magazine), in hopes that it will help her understand what it will be like, to be on set.  Galina has held many internships and jobs in photography thus far, because she understands that after school employers are not interested in a transcript, they are concerned about work experience and who you know.

This year Galina would like to focus and learn more on how to edit her portfolio.  She believes, not only will the thesis class help her with this but Trim Magazine can also bring her knowledge on editing, as well.  She also wants to learn more about her peers work and is open to collaborating with other students in the thesis class, as well.  A few years ago Galina took a sculpture class over the summer and has continued to incorporate the skills and knowledge she learned from that class into her photographs.  The artist also commented on how her work is not just photographs but sometimes crosses over into mixed media, when she combines painting and sculpture with photography.  Galina also plans on lessening her dependence on digital photography this year and wants to get back into the dark room.  When asked what type of photography she enjoys best, she answered, "Black and white because it is simpler, especially when compared to coloring film."

Galina realizes that breaking into the field of photography is much harder then it looks.  Even though she currently earns good money as a student and will come out of college with two years of experience, she also recognizes that there is a lot of leg work involved in making photography a viable career.  Galina is more than willing to devote her time to her passion and sacrifice her weekends for work, as many events will take place during the weekends.  It is still up in the air for the artist as to whether or not she'll wind up working for a corporation after school, but based on the fact that she likes to put her own personal style in the photographs she takes, as oppose to following cookie cutter formulas at larger corporations, I would assume she will not end up at one.

This summer has been a surreal wake up call for the artist and she is nervous, as am I, about getting a job after graduation.  Not only are artist and author on the same page with nerves after graduating but we also share in the same fact that had we gone to a school in New York City, maybe we would have had more opportunities to get our feet wet in real word experiences and more guidance as to applying our degrees to real world jobs.

Galina is not interested in getting her MFA or PHD.  Many of her soureces say "don't go", to graduate school unless you want to teach.  Many experts in her field reiterated the fact that this industry is about who you know and where you have worked.  Even though she is ready to make money, the artist has her reserves about where she'll get her income from.  After hearing the passion and inspiration in the artists voice about her work and photography in general, I have no doubts in my mind that Galina will not only be successful in her final year of undergrad, but I believe she has a long and prosperous future ahead of her in photography.

To find out more about Galina and view her work click on her facebook link below.  However, you wont find this savvy photog on instragram, because she believes in copy right and that everyone's photos should have one.

https://www.facebook.com/galina.eccles?fref=ts