Even though making art is often an experience that happens in the solitude of one’s studio, it rarely occurs in a vacuum. Artists rely on each other for support, reinforcement, inspiration, and challenge, forming communities to avoid feeling like fish out of water in this world. Tim Gowan was one of those artists who cherished being part of a community and played a role in its formation.
Louise McCagg, a member of the A.I.R. gallery, exhibited widely, both in the United States and internationally. She also collaborated with a new generation of Hungarians on many projects, one of them being part of the Hungarian Pavilion of the 2009 Venice Biennale.
Contributed by Medrie MacPhee / Susanna Heller and I have been friends going all the way back to the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design [NASCAD] in Halifax from which I graduated in 1976, and Susanna in 1977. Our first studios in New York were our first apartments, mine on 3rd St. in the East Village and hers on 5th. Our lives consisted largely of many a night of visiting each other’s studios, museum and gallery visits, and talking painting, painting, painting.
By the time Paul Vexler chose to pursue his art full time in 2006, he already had decades of experience and a unique command over his favored material. Observing nature and the movement of trees, Paul understood the flexible properties of wood and created sculpture of remarkable elegance and beauty with seemingly impossible arrays of loops and knots.
Conrad Vogel grew up in Briarcliff Manor, New York, graduated from Sarah Lawrence in 1977, traveled in Italy, and then moved to New York City where he lived as an artist for more than forty years.
Contributed by John Mendelsohn / Fred Gutzeit died on January 3, 2022 at the age of 81, leaving a legacy of inventive paintings, watercolors, prints, and installations. Over six decades, his art embodied a love for the visible world, and a spirit of inspired enquiry into the invisible energies that lie beneath it. This notion of exploring “deep nature” and the discoveries of modern physics were animating forces throughout his career. He spent his life as an artist in Lower Manhattan, living and working in a loft on the Bowery, and was a vital part of the downtown art scene from the 1960s until his passing.
Contributed by John Fritsch and Jen Pepper / Shari Urquhart, artist and educator, died on November 21, 2020. She was born in Racine, Wisconsin and grew up in Kenosha, just a few miles south. Although her first media were painting and printmaking, she ultimately found her true medium in fiber to express her take on popular culture and art history.
Throughout the last decade, Robert completed over one hundred and fifty paintings in a limited palette ranging from white to soft gray to black, often incorporating raw canvas or linen as a compositional element of the work.
Contributed by Carol Diamond / Admired and respected by her artistic community, beloved by friends and family, Lynn Kotula passed away in February 2021, after living with stage IV cancer for more than six years. The following is a 2022 catalogue essay written by John Goodrich on the occasion of “Lynn Kotula: A Life in Painting 1984–2020,” her final exhibition at Bowery Gallery.
The Blind Swimmer: Gordon Grant Fraser (December 2, 1975 – November 1, 2020)Two Coats of Paint has recently learned of the death of Gordon Fraser, a talented artist and art blogger who penned The Blind Swimmer, of a heart attack after undergoing a series of treatments for colon cancer.
Bushwick’s Tim GowanEven though making art is often an experience that happens in the solitude of one’s studio, it rarely occurs in a vacuum. Artists rely on each other for support, reinforcement, inspiration, and challenge, forming communities to avoid feeling like fish out of water in this world. Tim Gowan was one […]
Siri Berg: A life in colorSiri Berg, 98, died April 8, 2020 in her home, in New York City. Born in 1921, in Stockholm, Sweden, Ms. Berg was an accomplished painter and artist of mixed-media who enjoyed a late-career renaissance in her final two decades. In recent years, her work was the subject of several […]
April Kingsley (1941-2023): Art Historian, Critic, and CuratorWritten by Tom Recchio of The Provincetown Independent / An art historian, curator, scholar, and critic, April Kingsley of Wellfleet and Truro lived her life amidst art. “I wouldn’t go anyplace if there wasn’t art to see,” she once said. She explored American Abstract Expressionism, including the work of African-American […]
Cora Cohen (1943-2023)New York-based painter Cora Cohen died at a hospice in Brooklyn on June 22 at the age of 79. As Barry Schwabsky wrote in ArtForum International reviewing her 2022 exhibition at Morgan Presents, she was “one of the most underrated painters in New York.”
Contributed by Jason Andrew / With her paintings fetching millions at auction, Shara Hughes has been on a tear. Since 2020, she has had nine solo shows, presenting work from Shanghai to London, Åalborg to Luzern, Aspen to Manhattan. All but three of the 17 paintings in her first show in Los Angeles, titled “Light the Dark” and presently up at David Kordansky Gallery, were made in 2023. Fueling Hughes’s remarkable pace is an unrelenting embrace of paint, with which she balances descriptive and imaginative motifs. Notwithstanding her commercial success, she retains a fearless approach to dismantling conventions, the paintings a cutting edge. As she noted in a 2020 interview, the more she attempts to control the creative direction in her paintings “the worse they are.”
October is a special month for Two Coats of Paint because we will be hosting our first annual Hudson Valley Gallery Crawl on October 14 and 15. More than thirty galleries are participating, offering an array of special events and activities. Please join Sharon Butler (publisher of Two Coats of […]
Contributed by Sharon Butler / “Reaching for Something High,”Leslie Smith III’s first NYC solo show, on view at Chart, is a virtuosic blending of influences and themes, reflected in the delicate complexity of eight shaped paintings on thick stretchers floating with trenchant awkwardness on the wall. Each painting comprises many smaller, oddly shaped canvases, each of them individually constructed and stretched and, for the most part, lightly painted.