Pat Steir's Winter Paintings at Cheim & Read

I wish I had had a camera with me for the opening of Pat Steir's Winter Paintings at Cheim & Read, so that I could show you up close how well the layers of rich colors overlay each other in these two-tone canvases.

Her latest waterfall paintings--note the textured drippage--use a lot of metallics. The gold felt especially luxuroius. Waterfalls where paint is dripped and poured down the canvas have been a signature of the artist's since the 80s. The layering gives a real saturated and deep coloring to these large canvases, and the waterfall effect encourages contemplation.

Compared to the Nearly Endless Line exhibition of the artist's I saw about a month ago, these seem remarkably traditional works, but they remain immersive and focused with an in interest in subtle manipulation of one or two elements.

Coke Wisdom O'Neal's Boxed in Nudes

Installation view, Blue Nude

Coke Wisdom O'Neal has a really nice photography show up at Mixed Greens in Chelsea at the moment. Continuing his work with boxes, he photograped his subjects inside tight, clear plexiglass boxes and them mounted the prints with a plexiglass frame that mimics the models enclosure in the image. The result is beautifully fleshly and vulnerable. Rarely does one see faces, and the focus turns more onto the hands or hips of the person. There is a great luminous quality to the skin tones that really adds to the little details: the little rolls of a sotmach or the wrinkles of an arched foot.

I love see the flesh pressed against the glass, reminding one that these contorted figures are indeed contained. Its makes for a nice study of the human form, although within the models limp poses it suggests more along the lines of captivity and restraint, freedom and identity than pure aesthetic study.

Installation View, Blue Nude

The single figures also speak of lonliness.

Guernica 2.0

Picasso's Guernica looks like this
            OR
(as I discovered when I was looking for help in re-designing this blog)
 it can  look like About War and Bananas with some CSS coding.

Tara Donovan's Pin Drawings at Pace

Drawing (Pins), 2010

While out for some openings in Chelsea last night, I noticed Pace had kept its doors open, so I got to take a close look at Tara Donovan's latest work. As always when I see her work in person, I love it. Her use of materials manages to be subtle and simple but transformative. I originally thought when I saw the press release that these were graphite drawings, but as you can see below, they are made by sticking pins into gatorboard.

Not only do the pins create line and shading, but there's a nice depth to the varying degrees of how deeply stuck the pins are. The pins themselves have a sheen to them, which picks up nicely in the light as you walk around them, and at 96" x 96" these large works leave some room to walk.

These pieces really don't reproduce well in photographs, so if you have the chance to get over to Pace before March 19, I recommend it. The circles drawings, like the first image, are my favorite, but most of the works are  clean and perfect gradients like these:

Kiss

The first onscreen kiss was captured in 1896 by the Edison Co. in "The May Irwin -- John C. Rice Kiss," showing a couple kissing and talking. They were dressed formally, and he sported a large mustache. Audiences were scandalized."The spectacle of their prolonged pasturing on each other's lips was hard to bear," fumed publisher Herbert S. Stone in a review. "Such things call for police interference." Warhol's 1963 film Kiss is a 54 minute long view of different couples kissing.

More on kissing, from The Science of Kissing: 

• Do you tilt your head to the right when you kiss? 90% of the world does.
• 90% off the world kisses with their mouths now, though the custom has spread from European civilization as recently as the 20th c. 
• There here is a 50% chance that a first kiss with a person will be the last--people use the information gleaned from a kiss, like the genetic compatibility indicated by their smell, to take it or leave it.
• Only 13% of prostitutes' clients demonstrate an interest in French kissing, presumably because kissing involves more than physical pleasure 

Dutch Winter Landscapes are full of skaters

Hendrick Avercamp, Winter Scene on a Canal

Pieter Breughel, Winter Landscape with Skaters

Johannes Pieter van Wisselingh, Skaters in a Dutch Winter Landscape

These lovely ideals make me long for a world where winter is playful, joyful, and beautiful. Not to mention full of some of the most gorgeous trees. Then, however, for comparison's sake, I google "new york city winter." 

It looks like some ideals persist.

Rilke and Rodin

If you haven't yet met Lorenzo at The Alchemist's Pillow, then I highly recommend you pop over for a lovely series of posts on the relationship between the poet Rilke and the sculptor Rodin.

I would suggest starting here, and then exploring more here, and then keep reading his lovely blog.

Death of Chatterton

I have now carried Schiller's On the Naive and Sentimental in Literature around for two weeks now, thinking that no doubt soon I would finish it--say, if my subway car was stuck somewhere overnight. That did not happen, I did not delve much further into his distinction between naive and sentimental poets, and now it is due back at the library. And that is that.

Death of Chatterton, Henry Wallis, 1856

Getting a work appraised: the family David de Noter

Kitchen Interior, 1845, Oil on panel

Rather like the current exhibition at the Hermitage (thank you Google Art Project), my family has a de Noter on view-- at home in our living room. It's a charming scene with an elegant woman in a yellow dress feeding a spaniel a treat. Its been hanging there for just about forever, or at least since we inherited it from my great-Aunt Charm in Atlanta.

Woman peeling an orange

David Emile Jospeh de Noter was a Belgan painter in the 1800s who did still lives and interior domestic scenes, and there are some examples still lives up his up for auction currently at Sotheby's and Christies. Apparently he was quite prolific and remains popular; a quick Google search will give you many opportunities to buy posters of his works.

I'd be interested both in learning the value of the painting, especially for insurance purposes. How does one go about having such a work appraised? Do we just take photos and email them to someone at an auction house?

Sunny days are here again

Literally. I can see the buildings across the way clearly, I did not have to hide my face under a hood and umbrella this morning, and subway performers are getting better-dressed by the day. There's even a tad bit of light left in the sky when I get out of work.

Spring must be coming.

Google's Art Project

...is amazing. Have you explored it yet?

Right now rather than trudging through the slush of New York, I am walking through the galleries of the Hermitage. While it also has really excellent, high-resolution images of the artworks and details about them, I think it is navigating the galleries that I most enjoy. Museums as places are special in themselves, and being able to navigate the space in such a real way, while having more information about a work of art a click away, is maybe the next best thing to being able to visit them.