Vienna (2011)

Vienna (2011) oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches

Syracuse (2011)

Syracuse (2011) oil on canvas, 18 x 14 inches

Phillyscape (2011)

Phillyscape (2011) oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches

Ab-Ex with Clyfford Still

The Abstract Expressionists were never a unified voice, and characterizations are invariably fluid, as each artist developed one or more signature styles.  Painters sought to avoid predefined limits and to express the greatest possible range of meaning through their own visual language ... by the mid-1940s Clyfford Still was developing his signature style of colour fields that join in jagged interfaces.

- Image and text from The Art Museum (2011) Phaidon Press, p. 381

Clyfford Still "1957-D No.1" (1957) oil on canvas, 9 ft 5 in x 13 ft 3 in

Ab-Ex with Lee Krasner

This canvas presents a series of tightly packed forms and enclosed shapes, characteristic of the work of Krasner (1908-84).  An invigorating tension exists between the looseness of her expressive brushwork and rhythm, and the underlying sense of order and direction.

- Image and text from The Art Museum (2011) Phaidon Press, p. 381

Lee Krasner -Another Storm (1963) oil on canvas, 7 ft 10 in x 14 ft 8 in

Ab-Ex with Joan Mitchell

The mural-sized paintings of Joan Mitchell (1926-92) echo the scale of other Abstract Expressionists.  Their most distinctive quality is their relationship to landscape, an amalgam [or blend] of Abstract Expressionist concepts and Impressionist and Post-Impressionist ones.  Here, four panels combine to create a flat image that oscillates between four separate views of one large panorama, the effect of which compels us ultimately to dismiss coherent landscape and immerse ourselves in the reality of color.

- Image and text from The Art Museum (2011) Phaidon Press, p. 381

Joan Mitchell - Salut Tom (1979), oil on canvas, about 9 ft by 6 ft 6 in

New Body of Work (2011-present)

Since grad school, I have watched my work veer towards the non-objective. I can't explain it in words just yet, but Georges Braque (1882-1963) can. In 1955, he said:

"I have made a very great discovery - I no longer believe in anything. Objects do not exist for me except if there is a harmonious relationship between them, and also between them and myself. When one arrives at this harmony, one arrives at a space of intellectual nothingness. In this way, everything becomes possible, everything becomes right, and life is an eternal revelation. That is true poetry."

- quote from The Art Museum (2011) Phaidon Press, p. 372

Photo taken inside studio on 1-11-2011

 

Romeo (2011)

Romeo (2011) pencil on paper, 8 x 10 inches

Four new paintings (2011)

Cold Fire (2011) oil on canvas, 24 x 20 inches

Light House (2011) oil on canvas, 24 x 20 inches

Eiffel Tower (2011) oil on canvas, 15 x 30 inches

Circus Head (2011) oil on canvas, 30 x 20 inches

Reading with Joan Mitchell

There is no quiet in this town.  No quiet in this house.  No quiet in my head.  There must be a solution, a way to silence this noise.  I would move to the county if I could.  Almost daily I daydream about waking up to the sound of nothing.  No trucks.  No cars.  No crowds of humans walking by.  No cell phones.  The only sound I want to hear is an unplugged one. 

Joan Mitchell (1925 - 1992) UNTITLED 1957, Oil on canvas, 80 x 57 inches

Fall is here and for the first time in four years, I am not taking a class at Temple University.  Simply put, I finally graduated.  However, I still have library privileges, something I plan to abuse as long as I stay in Philly.  Campus was mad today.  Had to pay $14 for parking.  Was pissed about that, but then I quickly celebrated the fact that I am no longer committed to commuting to campus.  I traded in thirty pounds of books and left with forty.  I rid myself of the books with words that I used to write my master’s paper.  I wanted large picture books.  I am teaching a small class of adults to paint in acrylics so I grabbed books on Johannes Itten, Josef Albers, and Hans Hofmann.  Then another tome caught my eye, Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter.  The book was brand new, 2011, wrapped in a calm ultramarine blue cover.  I would be the first reader.  I got goosebumps.

Lee Bontecou (b. 1931) UNTITLED 1962, Welded steel, epoxy, canvas, fabric, saw blade, and wire, 68 x 72 x 30 inches

The day I truly discovered Joan Mitchell was September 21^st, 2008.  I say truly, because I am sure I knew her name from passing but I had never seen her work in person.  Although I see many paintings in books, the experience of seeing a painting in person is a decisive moment.  Cezanne and Matisse amaze me in books, but in person, I feel less.  Van Gogh is okay in books but in person, he rocks.  Painting is textural.  It is not illustration.  It is not print.  It is not meant to be experienced on a computer screen.  Painting is visceral.  Painting is blood and guts.  I was in New York City at the Jewish Museum wandering the exhibit, Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976 (NYTimes Photos).  Joan Mitchell is no exception when it comes to mansize paintings.  I stood immobilized between her aggressive brushstrokes from 1957 and Lee Bontecou’s 1962 sewn metal sculpture. They faced each other and I stood between them, feeling, "This is it.  These are my ladies."

A few pages into my new book, I felt assured of my selection: 

Having come of age as an artist on New York’s Tenth Street in the 1950s and reveled in its marvelous “community of feeling,” Joan Mitchell has been written into the mythology of Abstract Expressionism. She knocked back beers with the boys at the Cedar Tavern, caroused in the Hamptons, hung out with hip cats at the Five Spot, and felt the pain and thrill of belonging, or nearly, to the little band of rebels operating below Fourteenth Street … Yet, despite her personal and artistic self-identification with Abstract Expressionism, Joan’s art confounds textbook classification.  It has to do, she said, with memories of her feelings – feelings about “love and death and all that crap” – ensnared in lakes, trees, rivers, clouds, sunflowers, bridges and so on.

 

I was like, “Oh crap, that is what I do,” and then I laughed because Joan said crap.