Buy Art, Not Cocaine: The Cheaper Show 8

Saturday June 21^st was The Cheaper Show No. 8.

I found out about the show in the free paper my partner handed me. It sounded like a good premise, evening the playing field and I looked it up to submit. I put in Multiples, Heroic Strains, and Roller-skates. They loved the pin up girls but said that Heroic Strains was less refined. I was very surprised to find I got in, after not hearing from them for so long. I painted 2 paintings special for the show, and put them in the Roller-skates. They put in the skates, and it sold. I’m glad to get the other two paintings back – I didn’t photo doc them!

There was a line when I arrived at 9. It went around the block. I was meeting a friend there, and we got in right away because I was an artist. There was a DJ, we had beer and looked at all the art. It was great. As the night moved it got really crowded and hot in there. I couldn’t believe so many were there because of art. There’s a special feeling in going to art events. This was the best art sale show I’ve ever been in. I’ll be looking forward to the next one.

Attilla Richard Lukacs was supposed to be in that show, I couldn’t find his work. Adam Dodd was too, I own a drawing of his I bought at the Gaff Gallery that’s now closed. I found Robert Mearns crotch shot figure, that was his only piece in the show. These are artists I’m looking at, as they are part of the Vancouver art scene. I won’t consider them my peers until I have a few solo shows here.

Elizabeth McIntosh at Blanket Gallery:

pyramidal enigma

Elizabeth McIntosh’s latest paintings are large crystalline candy. Playfully coloured, these deliberately clumsy geometric compositions illuminate outward from the gallery wall. However the imposing scale of mostly 75” by 90”, takes on the smothering seriousness known to mid-20^th century abstraction. She wants the viewers to be transformed. Like a contemporary Rothko, her paintings are vessels of self-realization without the baggage of lofty semi-religious experience and universal primitive emotion. These new painting’s physical presence, vibrancy, and non-illusionary flatness would certainly hold up such transcendental potentiality.

McIntosh’s current exhibition at Blanket Gallery in Vancouver is only her second solo show and includes six oil paintings and one framed collage. The impressive paintings fill up the modest space. The installation made categorical sense with the three large 75” x 90” paintings on west wall, three smaller 30” x 40” paintings on east wall, and the single framed collage on the south wall.

Untitled (multi-coloured vertical stripes) (2007) brings to mind non-figurative Orphism of Sonia Delaunay. But instead of concentric circles, these large colorful structures are nearly entirely built up with triangles. There is a push-pull of positive and negative shape, as viewing breath in and out between triangles of rich colour and washed charcoal black. This is the kind of viewer experience that non-representational painting has to offer. Instead of being relaxed and satisfied by what the painting is of, the mind is at state of activity trying to make sense of these new and fascinating objects.

These works are designed like a do-it-yourself Hard-Edge Abstraction painting. It’s easy to feel how process oriented her practice is. Untitled (silver with geodesic shapes over colour) (2008) and Untitled (negative black triangles on silver ground) (2008) show repetition of triangles over on metallic silver paint. There is an obsessive one after the other placement but controlled with a knowledgeable restraint for the composition. The other two 30” by 40” works named Untitled are painted with saturated, bright and even neon colour applied much thicker than the rest of those exhibited. These works take on the appearance of unfolded origami. But even under the gaze of the most analytical eye, the structures always unravel back to its original position for new and infinite combinations.

The bright and sunny piece called Untitled (yellow) (2007) shows off the painterly brushstroke common throughout. Even though these are on canvas, the slightly transparent and directional paint application gives the impression of wood grain. This tactility becomes one of the ways McIntosh naturalizes a mode of painting that is usually static, solid, and industrial.

The scale, repetition, paint application, and edible coloration make for very welcoming artwork. Once ushered in, the viewer’s mind can grabble and work over Rubik’s cubes of triangles. This could be how McIntosh expects the audience to find transformative experience. This abstraction goes further than the empty promises of the stark flatness in Modernist abstraction. She starts here and moves on to build diamonds of unsolved puzzles begging for the viewer’s brain-play and participatory photism. It’s an open-ended art does not dictate meaning to us. McIntosh applies the kind of inventiveness and dedication that gives abstraction a valid place in the future of painting.

Taralee Guild

Presentation: Wilhelm Sasnal

For my presentation on a contemporary painter I’ve chosen Wilhelm Sasnal. He was born in Tarnow, Poland in 1972 and graduated from Krakow Academy of Fine Art in 1999. Today he is about 30 years old and has already gained international notoriety in the contemporary art world.

He remains in Poland – living and working in Cracow. This locality seems important to him, since he has drawn inspiration and imagery out of Poland’s political past – such as communism, pre-war modernism, post-war life, and the Holocaust. Sasnal doesn’t completely dismiss this interpretation, as it’s hard to ignore Poland’s past while living there. But at the same time he contests that his work is often misunderstood. Sasnal generally lets people think what they want and states that art isn’t necessarily the best medium for making opinions known.

Sasnal says he’s very western oriented in taste, and uses the internet for source materials – which in turn makes him global. He maintains that his surroundings do not affect his work since he finds sources by “Googling”.

It is said his paintings are a responses to the abundance of imagery in Eastern Europe that emerged after the fall of communism in 1989 - which might be partially true if not combined with the fact the internet was popularized when Sasnal was in art school in the mid to late 90s.

Wilhelm Sasnal is often spoken about in comparisons with Luc Tuymans and to a lesser extent Gerhard Richter. However, he wholeheartedly disagrees about the “Luc Tuyman Effect” attributed to his work. But understandably, he shares with Tuymans a certain visual look, and also Richter’s command of paint materiality.

TECHNICAL ASPECTS

Sasnal finds painting sources from mass media circulated images turning paintings into an interpretative tool. He has a great range of subject matter and methods. But the most reoccurring visual qualities have much to do with lost visual information which is in turn replaced with the “idiosyncratic qualities” of painting. Lost information can be explained in a number a ways, depending on the artwork:

A lot of the time, the loss of information is colour – Sasnal’s achromatic paintings. He has painted butterflies, portraits, figures achromatically – which are all things known for lots of colour.

Sasnal loses information by exploiting the contrast. More subtle tonality between high and low key are cast off.

He also leaves out areas of the painting. A face is smeared or the ground under the figures dissipate into brushstrokes - unfinished as if the painter was interrupted. Other times the compositions are oddly cropped or even nonsensically rearranged.

All this shows Wilhelm Sasnal is treating painting as a reductive process, an economy of information. It’s obvious that he is interested in other analog image making forms, like print, silk screening and especially photography (in regards to black and white and overexposure.) He accepts the filtration of imperfect imaging tools and manipulates it as a new and interesting ways of seeing. Despite running with photographic qualities, brushstrokes are prevalent and at times his paintings dissolve into abstraction. Therefore, on top of it all, he uses the materiality of painting as a visual effect on his subjects. It results in a push-pull effect between representation and paint.

“Images are pared down to their barest essentials and estranged from their original context and meaning.” What’s left is an image far removed from any real scene, person or happening in the past. Considering Sasnal’s sources are pre-existing mass circulated pictures – making the image strange through his decontextualizing process – let’s us rethink the already known. That means he can be spoken about in terms of memory. Memory essentially defined as recreating the past.

Things I’ve related to/found useful about Sasnal’s work

Showing the materiality of paint isn’t a dated look, for example impressionistic, it can be contemporary. Falling short of an image isn’t a bad quality. Things considered flaws in the picture can be used as a visual tool.

More information and detail doesn’t necessarily mean its better. Establishing an economy of visual elements, how much is needed to make its point, it actually gives the audience more to do, it’s more interesting and memorable that way.

Using the internet, or other known imagery, for painting sources isn’t wrong.

Ultimate Reality

I went to a music show last night, and it was a spectacle of weird. Ultimate Reality with Jimmy Joe Roche seriously outdid Dan Deacon, if I can be so bold.

The reason I posted this for my art blog, is because it was crossed over into what I consider art. On a huge screen, a narrative psychedelic mirror image hybrid of most Schwarzenegger movies unraveled... while two drummers bang away to melodic synthesizers.

The experience was so weird... and ironically profound.

It really draws my attention to music video art. Multi-media, who'd of thunk it?

Their video as follows:

Art Shop

Blindness

For some reason in the wee hours of this morning, I was thinking about blindness, the idea of going blind at this point in my life. I decided I would not give up art, maybe do music more... but I would still paint.

Blind painters are a bit of a novelty, I've looked at a few. They're always trying to be representational, they work it out to fake painting recognizably. This is such a mistake. It ends up looking kitsch. Basically not being able to see lends nothing to trying to represent realism.

However... if they knew anything about conceptual art, it's actually an opportunity to make important work. It would be about abstraction, movement and the process of painting. Someone not cluttered by visuality doesn't have owe anything to it. Or maybe it could be about the memory of seeing.

They're catering to the dumb masses by not exploring abstraction (the only art they could do), shackled to the representation. So far I've seen blind painters basically do colour by numbers. It's child's play. I wish they'd get more conceptual about it, it's rich with noteworthy possibilities.

I'll try a blindfolded painting, maybe it will work into a project at school. I'll post what I come up with, ABSTRACTION that is. Although, if something representation came out of it miraculously, that'd be really cool.

That is that....

The Rabbit Catcher

Here's my pride and joy. Possibly my best large scale painting thus far. I've done some work to touch it up because there's a painting competition at Emily Carr coming up. The first image is the old version, the latter the new.





You'd be able to tell how much I improved the body of the female figure and the path if you saw it in full form. I'm happy with it. I just hope I get into at least the Concourse show related to this competition.

Wish me Luck!