Does something important, something spiritual, get lost when realist painters work from digital images instead of directly from life? This was the question that the distinguished painter Richard Schmid, former Chicagoan and author of “Alla Prima,” placed before a panel of fellow romantic realists at this year’s “Weekend with the Masters” in Monterey, sponsored by American Artist Magazine. Some of those artists, like Scott Burdick, Rose Frantzen and Dan Gerhartz had studied with Schmid in Chicago. Others, like Jeremy Lipking, had read his books and admired him from afar. And all of them, like Schmid, paint the truth, as they see it, about what they love: interesting people, places and things. Read the rest of this entry »

Whereas Impressionist figure painting is about how people look, Expressionism is about how they feel, and usually, like Edvard Munch’s screamer, they have felt pretty bad, and didn’t get any better as recognizable features were left behind by the Abstract Expressionists of the 1940s. But picking up where Ab-Ex left off, Chicago painter Julia Katz has introduced action figures into the foreground and they seem to be expressing the joy of movement. She began, a few years ago, with kids running and splashing around, and now is inspired by the “rhythmic movement of breath, as well as the idea of yin and yang energies” concurrent with her practice of Yoga and Qi Gong. But are recognizable human figures necessary, or even useful for this inward-turning project? Read the rest of this entry »

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Albeit largely monochromatic, there’s a lot to enjoy in the fanatically perverse visuals issuing from the unholy twenty-year legacy of Scandinavian black metal. There are the band logos, which incorporate traditional Nordic and Celtic design elements with expressionistic lightning cracks and blood splatters; there’s the album art, featuring epic landscapes, cryptic pagan diagrams and shadowy photos of musicians made up in ghostly black-and-white “corpsepaint,” contorted rapturously under the weight of medieval accessories. Read the rest of this entry »

John Santoro, "Godzilla"

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In 1845, J.M.W. Turner reportedly joked: “Indistinctness is my fault,” in response to an American collector who despaired finding many recognizable details in one of his atmospheric seascapes. In some of his magnificent swirls, nothing was recognizable at all. Was Turner an early Abstract Expressionist? Not if you distinguish the epic struggle of man against nature from the psychological struggle of self against the world. Curiously enough, a similar Romanticism has recently emerged simultaneously in the work of two painters now exhibiting work in adjoining galleries at 835 West Washington. Read the rest of this entry »

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It’s a wild and crazy world out there, and it seems to be the mandate of the School of the Art Institute to make sure we all know it. Defiance, despair, humor and social criticism are some of the predictable expressions. But the crazy-beautiful paintings of 2008 graduate Andrew Holmquist seem to be celebrating the chaos, as if to say, “yes, it’s a train wreck, but isn’t it a beautiful one?” Or, more like an explosion at a fireworks factory, brilliant colors in random patterns stream across the sky in a celebration of technology gone berserk. But the beauty of an aerial explosion vanishes in an instant. It’s only a few paintings that continue to feel that way for as long as they hold your attention. Holmquist has the rare talent to make that happen, whether by adding something unexpected, like a big, blue grid to one of his larger works, or by whipping together whatever he can paint, or find, in his small, daily studies. Interestingly enough, he credits some of his success to recent experiences with paintings by Titian and Rembrandt at the Louvre. Obviously he’s a guy who haunts art galleries. Read the rest of this entry »

Philip Pearlstein, "Two Nudes and Four Duck Decoys," oil on canvas, 1994

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What do the objects in a painting mean? This is a very important question for historians who study art made for the sake of religious or political ideologies. But when art is done for the sake of art, success often depends on what they don’t mean, especially in the post-war American art world that reacted so strongly against the idealism that accompanied two world wars. Philip Pearlstein (born 1924) and Ellen Lanyon (born 1926) are two artists, and friends, whose careers emerged at the beginning of that era, and their contrasting strategies for an engaging meaninglessness are currently facing each other on opposite walls at Valerie Carberry Gallery. Read the rest of this entry »

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Parents often show love by giving us too many things, so even after we’ve grown older, nothing can be quite so comforting as the clutter of useless junk. And unlike everything that’s always changing, clutter can be permanent and reliable. Which may explain Mary Lou Zelazny’s pictorial world, where, as the “Cake Lady” herself, she offers up an armful of comfort food. We all know that the manufactured pastry, whose garish advertising images she has cut and pasted, is not very healthy, so one might conclude that she is also offering up a pointed critique of modern American life. But if eating chocolate cake makes you feel good about yourself, why stop? And feeling good about yourself seems to be this artist’s mission, especially in this exhibit of recent paintings that focus so often on the female face and body, not so much how it looks on the outside, but how it feels from within. Read the rest of this entry »

"Rock City"

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An acknowledged Samuel Beckett fan, the Abstract Expressionist painter Joan Mitchell answered questions with either non-sequiturs or other questions in a series of 1980s interviews in BOMB magazine. In the Abbott-and-Costello rhythm of “Waiting for Godot,” Mitchell spoke of will and emptiness, pertaining to her often colorful expanses of furious brushwork. “It’s hard to squeeze paint if I don’t feel like it,” she said. “If I don’t feel what I’m doing there’s no point in it.” Her “blank spaces” she refers to as “like a restroom on the auto route. Isn’t that a wonderful word, ‘restrooms,’ where you go pee?” Read the rest of this entry »

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Mary McCarthy describes her new paintings as a metaphor for the “general conflict between order and chaos.” The same could be said for everything under and beyond the sun, but what distinguishes her work is that the conflicts she creates are thrilling and almost beautiful. In each painting there seems to be something that doesn’t quite fit, yet belongs there anyway. Like the chunk of one-by-six pine board that’s been defiantly nailed to the corner of “Beatrice (The Kiss Off),” holding together what otherwise seems to be an explosion of conflicting, overlapping polygons. Is this also a metaphor for the break-up of a relationship, as the title might suggest? The artist speaks of her work in strictly formal terms, but she seems to be presenting the active, challenging life of an ambitious young woman in the city. Read the rest of this entry »

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In 1999, Janet McKenzie’s “Jesus of the People” was selected by Sister Wendy Beckett, the BBC television art docent, from among the ten finalists in the National Catholic Reporter’s “Jesus 2000” project to discover “who Jesus might be for our time.” As Sister Wendy wrote: “This is a haunting image of a peasant Jesus—dark, thick-lipped, looking out on us with ineffable dignity, with sadness but with confidence.”

Using a young African-American woman as the model and symbols associated with American Indian and Taoist spirituality, the piece has generated more controversy than veneration, which was presumably that independent newspaper’s intention. Read the rest of this entry »