Carla Goldberg at Skylight Gallery

Strata

I was looking forward to Carla’s show with enormous anticipation. It puts a great burden on an artist to meet this level of expectation. Well, the wait is over – and this show is a revelation, simply spectacular.

Apparently, I’m not the only one that thinks so since the show almost sold out on opening night. Aside from having excellent eyes, her collectors are in good company as one of Carla’s pieces was recently acquired by the South Western Minnesota University Art Museum for their permanent collection. Carla’s last show sold out entirely and this one has almost sold out (the last pieces may be gone by now). She’s an artist on the move and I do believe that Carla will achieve the international acclaim her work deserves.

As I mentioned in an earlier article, Carla’s work is driven by the experiene of water. In the front room, the pieces were all about about drops of water on a liquid surface. They are 3-dimensional with the plop providing the merest hint of color. As always, shadow is an intrinsic component in the pieces,

In the middle room, you could imagine yourself snorkeling on a Caribbean reef. (Sorry, no pictures.) The clarity of the water is interspersed with bright darting objects. Obviously, the color points in the paintings aren’t moving, but you can think they are.

But the best was in the back room – the totally clear paintings. I realize this is a contracdiction in terms – how do you have a painting with no color? Well, the answer is rather easily if you take a clear acrylic sheet and used pour resin to achieve shodows and depths. The inspiration comes fom even imagining a clear painting.

There are two standout totally clear pieces. Forgive the photos because it’s very hard to capture these pieces well and these deserve to be well photographed.

The first is diptych and a wonder of swirls and eddies. In an odd way, it is reminiscent of van Gogh’s Starry Night in the shapes of the whorls and swirls. But it is more immdiate. You want to put your hand into the water. Picture yourself under water looking up or floating on the water looking down.

The other is called Strata, which makes sense when you consider a top layer a middle area and a bottom layer (top and boottom layers have ground glass added to the resin). But I think of it as looking out from behind a waterfall, the kind of thin, somewhat trickly waterfall like Haines Falls in the Catskills. To my eye, this is the gem of the show.

Each of these pieces have a common thread – they are energizing and calming simultaneously, no mean trick to achieve. Perhaps it’s the result of a high energy personality giving us the inner peace we crave. Or perhaps she simple espoused Kandinsky’s strictum of painting your inner essence. Either way…does it matter when Carla Goldberg’s work is so good.

The show is on view through November 12. Skylight Gallery is at 538 W 29 Street between 10thand 11th Avenues.

JONGWANG LEE AT SUSAN ELEY FINE ART

Resurrection

Ecstasy

Nirvana iii

Resin paintings seem to be in fashion nowadays. Understandable since they provide a liquidly immersive experience different from other mediums.

Jongwang Lee has been in New York for the past 15 years, painting at his studio in Long Island City. He is ethnically Korean but was raised in Tokyo so he uses the influences from three cultures in his work.

Lee’s work is all about depth; nothing is on the surface. Using a painstaking process he layers clear or colored resin, adds a painted element, layers more resin and so forth until the piece is done. He achieves stunning luminosity.

This show included abstract paintings, ethnically focused pieces and an entire series of portraits of Abraham Lincoln with a variety of eye colors. Curiously, this caused great debate. No one knew which were historically accurate. Courtesy of Lincoln himself. the answer is … grey, the one color not used.

But back to technique. Lee uses stretched canvas as the base for his paintings. In his most recent work, the canvas faces forward, as we most usually would expect. Even in these, there are many, many layers of resin and paint. We have two examples: Nirvana III (one of the ethnic pieces) and Resurrection, an abstract. In Nirvana III, you have an excellent descriptor of Lee’s technique: swathes of transparent color, and oil details, all layered with intervening levels of resin to achieve depth and draw your attention further into the piece. There is somehow greater clarity using this method.

The older work has the canvas in the rear, using the wooden frame as a basin holding the resin. Ecstasy is the best example of this process. Fortunately, Lee used yellow so that the detail of his technique is clear. You not only see the clear resin bubbles and the paint (affected of course by the color of the resin) you also see the depth and shape of the framing. This piece is at least ¾ of an inch thick, so imagine the number of layers and the hours of work involved.

In all honesty, I’m not sure that I like this body of work, but I’m fascinated by the process. Lee has started a dialogue and I’m curious where he goes with it.

PEGGY ZEHRING AND HER STUDENTS AT MONTSERRAT GALLERY

Bender's Lapis

Frances’s Eroding Foundation Tableau 3

Margo Spellman work

Cooper’s Duck

Zehring’s Reiki Corkscrew

There’s a museum quality show at Montserrat Gallery showcasing the work of Peggy Zehring and several of her students. Peggy is a Colorado based artist. Before moving to Colorado a couple of years ago, she lived in the Seattle area. She has been conducting painting classes since 1979 – now 2 weeks in Colorado and 2 weeks in Seattle.

Zehring is a firm believer that, to do good work, an artist should strive for inner truth, not prettiness. In her classes, she forces her students to delve into their cores and create that which is them. As a result, her training has little to do with formal technique and much to do about finding the essence of the artist.

In this show, accompanied by 11 of her students, she proves her point.

Zehring’s own standout piece is a diptych which will be heading to a new museum home. Zehring crosses boundaries between painting and sculpture. She uses lightweight plastic sand and other materials to create sinuous dimensional objects which she adheres to a backing, molds and uses as a foundation for painting. Her colors are strong and distinctly oriental in feeling.

I did mention that Peggy’s students took classes with her, some coming year after year. Each is an excellent artist in their own right. You may not respond to someone’s work, but you can recognize the quality of the work. This is evidenced in this show. Here are a few highlights but please note that the images of Spellman’s and Bender’s work are not in the show and are included as examples of their styles.

Margo Spellman’s large triptych in the white to black palette with jolts of color is outstanding.

Karen Frances presents most interesting ambiguous pieces, which were textural, narrative and abstract simultaneously.

Fred Zehring shows a glorious abstract which glows and entices.

Mary Sewell Cooper is an anthropologist, reflected in her work which is closest most of us can come to owning cave paintings.

As I said, not a weak piece in the show. The artists’ styles vary as does their subject matter, media and techniques but the quality of the work from everyone is simply excellent

Montserrat Gallery is at 547 W 27 Street, NYC on the fifth floor. Put this on your must see list – open through Oct. 22.

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INTERVIEW WITH CARLA GOLDBERG

Carla has a show opening next week at Skylight Gallery. We had a long, interesting conversation about her work in mid-June.

According to her, Carla has been painting forever, even before studying formally.

Her bio shows that she’s very, very popular overseas with exhibits in Germany, South Africa, Switzerland, Turkey, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and the UK. She’s been showing in the US too and is gaining traction with her American audience.

I’ve talked before about being fascinated by the creative process and development of style. As a graduate of a university art program, Carla was trained in the classical method, learning to use a variety of media: oil, ink, watercolor, acrylic, and so forth and learning to compose in figurative and abstract styles.

Carla is a deep, multi-faceted woman and so her influences are also complex. She’s a vibrant personality, with an engaging and ever present laugh, highly intelligent, and intensely creative.

As with so many women artists, having a family interfered with her time to paint – and so painting was put aside in favor of her children, her husband and an old house on the Hudson that needed restoration. Interesting that the house should be a source of inspiration. There was an old bathroom that needed a new floor, preferably tiled, but the economics were such that they put down plywood and painted it. Actually, she painted it time after time because the paint would get scratched from normal where and tear. One time Carla painted the floor in stripes and, liking the effect (after all, she is an artist), decided she needed t preserve it somehow. There was a can of clear resin around … and that was poured over the striped floor, very successfully preserving it with a shiny finish that looked somewhat different in different lighting. (The striped floor was also very slippery so it’s no longer with us). So there is one piece of the influence puzzle: the effect of light and shadow.

Besides being an influence, this discovery of resin inspired Carla to start working again, luckily for us art lovers.

Carla husband is very involved with reclamation of the Hudson River to an earlier, pristine waterway that won’t dissolve the kids if they go swimming. Have you ever known someone who lived by the water who isn’t fascinated by the way water moves? Another influence: the movement of water.

These two things led Carla to conclude that she should be using resin as the basis for her paintings since they would provide motion, depth, clarity and dimension. Initially, she would use a very thin removable base on which she would paint and pour resin. It went very well, the pieces were lovely and she was developing a real body of new work. Then it got hot, immensely, intensely hot – and the paintings melted. Oops, there was a downside to trying to have resin stand on it’s own, without a backing, in the heat.

It’s wasn’t fun for her to lose so much work, but it’s intriguing to see ideas develop. Nowadays, there’s a permanent acrylic sheet as the lowest layer of the paintings – and no issue with melting.

One of the things that has always irritated me about women artists (before you scream, most of the art I own is by women artists) is when they absorb themselves with “women’s” subjects: child-bearing, babies, households, and so on. For instance, there’s a painting at Montserrat Gallery that I abhor – a skeletal pelvis with a golden orb. You know exactly what that artist thinks is important – her reproductive organs, not her ideas, not her heart.

This is why I was disappointed in Carla’s earlier work – female torsos that somehow flowed under the water. I could see the quality, but I was disappointed in the vision. But last year Carla emerged from this female-focused cocoon and started doing work based on broader based ideas using color, clarity, depth, flow and shadow as manifestations of those ideas. You can see the spontaneity of the moment coupled with the eternity of the inspiration. Excellent work and, I hope, the mechanism to bring Carla Goldberg to the top tier of recognized artists.

Carla’s show opens on October 13 at Skylight Gallery on W. 29 Street between 10th and 11th Avenues.

Ladies & Gentlemen: A Conundrum: Antique or Forgery?

Isn’t this a lovely example of a Han dynasty cocoon vase? Might be one of the most attractive examples I’ve seen – and in the past few days I’ve looked at virtually every one available on the internet. The material is the usual grey ceramic and the form is perfect, the residual pattern and colors are lovely, and there are no cracks or chips. All things considered, a gem of a piece from circa 200 B.C.E.- 220A.D.

The only problem with it is that testing reveals that it was last fired in 1890 +/- 320 years, making it most likely a Ming or Qing Dynasty piece. Fascinating that the Chinese of the time perceived a market for Han antique forgeries. Were they meant to be sold to newly wealthy Chinese clients who could afford antiques or were they meant to be sold to western buyers?

Here’s the conundrum. The piece is a forgery or perhaps we should call it a reproduction, except that it was sold to it’s current owner as a Han cocoon jar.

At this point in time, it’s old enough to be an antique. Not a Han antique, but still an antique. It has intrinsic value as an antique, but not the value of a Ming or Qing vase and certainly not the lesser value of a Han jar.

This is a puzzle that I’d love to flesh out. If anyone can add knowledge, we’ll include it for our mutual enlightenment.

Dr. Jorge-Luis Maeso Madronero at Skylight Gallery NYC

There’s very little as interesting as watching the creative process in action. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about astrophysics or art, the process whereby something new and inventive emerges is simply fascinating. Luckily for all of us, Dr. Maeso’s current exhibit at Skylight provides a window into this process.

You wouldn’t know it from his name, but Dr. Maeso is a German painter, one of a group of five close friends, all artists, who live in close proximity and who work influences each other. His parents moved the family from Spain to Germany in the early 1950’s; he is the proud product of both cultures.

Normally, he works in traditional methods and media, oil or acrylic on canvas. One day, he had a brainstorm. What would be the results if he tried working in pure pigment? The issues: how to make the pigment adhere, how to create texture, how to create depth? Time to experiment.

As he described it to us, here is the process. First, he puts a layer of adhesive as a ground. Then he shakes, pours, tosses the powdered pigment onto the adhesive surface. But that’s not nuanced enough so then he sprays water onto his painting and moves it around to see how the water runs off and affects the pigmented areas. Better – more interesting but adhesion can still be a problem on some pieces. What’s the best way to make something stick to glue – add weight, of course. In this case, Dr. Maeso turns the pieces over and walks on them! Every step in the process is a discovery.

The results are glorious, superb paintings with color, texture and dimensions you’ll see if you’re lucky enough to see this show before it closes at the end of August. Here are nuances to look for:

The black painting entitled Oscuro was influenced by Caravaggio who used darkness to create light.

In the orange painting, Gitana, the brilliant cobalt provides dimension because the pigment adhered as nodules and didn’t diffuse into the base color.

The green painting, entitled Mosque, continues the theme of darkness leading to light in a peaceful way while the blue painting, entitled Mar, uses darkness in a somewhat bleak way.

Dr. Maeso’s creative experiment is a success; each of these paintings is superb in its own right. As a group, they are powerful and simply excellent.

Alas, he is now returning to traditional methods having done 20 of these pigment paintings.

But do try to see the originals. It’s well worth your time. Skylight Gallery is on W29 St. between 10tth and 11th Avenues.

Sale of Peter Bocour’s paintings and drawings to benefit the Leukemia Society.

Dubaigne Fine Art, in conjunction with Skylight Gallery NYC, is hosting a show of Peter Bocour’s paintings and drawings.  Proceeds from the sale of his work will benefit the Leukemia & Lymphona Society.  The show will run for approximately three weeks. The opening party is August 4 from 6pm to 8pm.  Bocour’s work is also available on-line through Dubaigne Fine Art at http://dubaigne.com.

Peter Bocour died in late June of complications from a lengthy battle with leukemia.  Peter grew up in the Greenwich Village art scene of the 1950’s and 1960’s.  His father, Leonard Bocour, was the founding partner of Bocour Artists Colors.  As a child, he spent a great deal of time in his father’s paint factory, particularly enjoying the ribbons of paint emerging from the paint guns and filling oil, watercolor and acrylic tubes sold under the names Bocour, Bellini and Aquatec.  He told stories of his father giving tails of paint from the tube guns to artists such as Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning in the days before they were successful and receiving paintings by them in thanks.  Peter himself studied art, receiving his undergraduate degree from New York University and his MFA from the University of California at Berkeley.  He also studied painting at the Skowhegen School and at the New York Studio School.  Bocour was an abstract artist who loved to use color and hated to draw, leading to his expressive visual vocabulary.  He showed professionally from 1977 through 2008 at galleries in Chelsea and in New Jersey.

The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society was founded in 1949 with the mission of funding research.  They have awarded more than $750MM in grants since 1954 resulting in treatments that have quadrupled life expectancy for people with leukemia.

Skylight Gallery focuses on works by experienced artists in the New York metropolitan areas.  Virtually all of the artists have an extensive history of showing professionally in the US and elsewhere.  Styles range from abstract to realistic and include both paintings and sculpture.  The gallery’s director is Carla Goldberg, herself a talented painter.

Dubaigne Fine Art is an outgrowth of The Second Hanging, originally founded as an internet-based vehicle for secondary market art sale.  Dubaigne continues the web gallery for emerging and experienced artists from all continents while The Second Hanging focuses on critical reviews and writings about art and the artistic community.

Questions should be directed to Christine Debany at 917-838-5533 or cd@dubaigne.com or Ralph Westerhoff at 917-842-2678 or rjw@dubaigne.com .

News about The Second Hanging

We started The Second Hanging with the intention of selling art we owned in the secondary market. The funny thing is that we still have those paintings, but The Second Hanging became a consuming passion. Artists wanted us to show their work, and we did, giving them global exposure. Part of our marketing approach was to interview the artists about their technique and their artistic choices.

We’ve posted those articles on The Second Hanging’s blog at http://secondhanging.wordpress.com/. We’ve also been reviewing openings at a number of different galleries in New York and posting them as well on our blog. It’s been difficult for us to explain the two parts of The Second Hanging without creating confusion. Gallery owners want us to review their shows but wonder why we’re doing it and not trying to steal their artists. Artists are perplexed because we aren’t trying to steal them for the gallery.

So it’s time we recognized the evolution of our world.

From now on, the gallery will be known as Dubaigne Fine Art – and you can see the work at http://dubaigne.com. The gallery has added exceptional work, some of it exclusive to Dubaigne, and will be expanding its marketing footprint. With this in mind, let me introduce Suzanne Bean, an exceedingly talented artist who is creatively exploring the color white – http://thesecondhanging.com/bean1.html. I particularly like The Many Hues of White #6. We would be happy to tell her we have a buyer for one of these pieces which are exceptionally well priced.

The Second Hanging is going to continue as a place to read about artists and their work. We’re hoping to add reviews by contributors and expand coverage in general. It’s still not clear to us whether the blog will continue as a blog (http://secondhanging.wordpress.com/) or evolve into more of an on-line publication but we’ll see where we go. Certainly, we welcome submissions and suggestions.

So please keep an eye on what we’re doing. We’re excited and hope you will be too.

SASHA MASLOV AT SPUTNIK GALLERY

Photography is an amorphous medium. Some of the most powerful yet beautiful images come from no attempt to produce beauty. Steve Curry was a war photographer when he took his famous picture of Sharbat Gula, the 12 year old Afghan girl. Yet this is one of the most amazing and lovely photographs.

Sasha Maslov has accomplished something similar in his study of a Ukrainian mining town. Maslov was born in the Ukraine, although he currently lives in Brooklyn, and a strong feeling for the region.

You have to respect him; he moved to this Ukrainian town for several weeks with the intent of documenting the lives of this community on the periphery. In so doing, he obviously won the liking and esteem of the miners and their families. They opened their world to him. You’ll see that there are no children and it seems that everyone who can simply leaves.

He has created an excellent documentary record of the townspeople. It is a reminder that the lives of the working class in the former Soviet Union are much like the lives of the working class in the US.

These miners’ lives are dark and grim and they hold out no hope of bettering themselves. You see this in Maslov’s photography. The images are dark with a grainy feeling that isn’t really there. He has treated the people and places with sensitivity. In so doing, he’s given us a beautifully compelling body of work and proven once again that visual reporting can be more alive and more memorable than work created solely to be art.

This excellent presentation of Maslov’s work will be at Sputnik Gallery through September 3.

In honor of Peter Bocour, we’re reposting this interview, originally posted on 7-27-10

So you’ve seen Peter’s painting at The Second Hanging. Curious about the guy whose work is so vital? Well, you’re not alone.

Peter grew up with artists. (Remember Bocour Paints, the original acrylic tube paints? They were developed and manufactured by his father who also manufactured artist oil paints.) Well, a lot of now famous artists were always visiting Peter’s father, looking for handouts of paint, which they got. Peter describes them as miserable people, every one of them – miserable, unhappy, cranky and not people you wanted to be around.

Tough dilemma for a happy kid who always knew he would be a famous artist – and who trained at the New York Studio School. He knew he would be a famous artist but the artists were unhappy miseries and the one thing Peter is not is a misery so how was he going to be an artist? Besides, Peter wasn’t very good at figurative drawing and didn’t especially care about getting good at it.

So what’s a lad to do?

Just what you would expect, of course. He went to work for an architectural magazine, starting as an office boy and becoming an editor. Then he became a showroom designer. Then he couldn’t stop himself any longer; he just had to paint. Now Peter is a painter and a superb one at that.

I wanted to chat with Peter because I was curious about how artists find their voices. Sometimes you hear stories of traumas, sometimes stories of careful development of technique. Peter’s voice is simply a reflection of his personality.

Peter is a happy man who laughs a lot and loves his life. (Not that there haven’t been difficulties, bit those are another tale for another day and they’re Peter’s story to tell anyway.) Peter’s work reflects his outlook. He laughs, he pours, he drips, he splashes, he throws, he splatters. He has a wonderful time when he paints and loses himself when painting.

Peter doesn’t usually start out with an image of the finished work in his mind. He is more of an emotional painter than an analytical one – not that he doesn’t think about his work. He usually begins with is an idea of a color scheme (remember the showroom design background). He usually pours the background. Then he gets mischievous – a drip, a splatter, a pour. Even some brushwork. if a work doesn’t go well, he sets it aside until a person makes him think of a specific problem painting. Then he uses their personalities to understand how to finish the piece.

Peter recently was commissioned by Bobbi Brown to create a painting. She wanted something that reflected the lushness of the Caribbean and the tranquility of a spa. Presented Peter with a problem since he’s not a figurative painter and his work isn’t precisely tranquil. In fact, it’s full of sparks and energy. But the painting he created for her inspired a series of eight more using the same and related color palettes.

Peter’s work is extremely vibrant, even when he uses a pastel background. I suspect that Peter’s earlier work used white and pastel backgrounds with later ones using black backgrounds. Bright color bases are his latest pieces.

Well, Peter is as vibrant a personality as his work. Isn’t it wonderful? Do we call him an abstract expressionist or does he earn his own style?

(And did you know that his paintings are named after amusement park rides?)