Recent Posts
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.”
Recent posts: Two Coats of Paint
Farrell Brickhouse: The beat goes on
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Farrell Brickhouse’s recent paintings, on view at JJ Murphy Gallery, embody aging and stamina and the grungy inventiveness that comes with them. In these terms, perhaps the signature piece is Summers End II, tucked away all by itself in the gallery’s rear alcove. Just a foot-and-a-half square, it is a still life of Rauschenberg-grade grit that holds court, depicting what looks like a vase of motley flowers on a stand, waning but defiant in the face of time. Distressed as they are, they look not just alive but capable of aggression. The work is textured in the extreme, Brickhouse having affixed to the canvas the congealed detritus of students’ pigment and painted thickly around it. It’s as though Chaïm Soutine or Frank Auerbach had possessed Morandi and gone to town.
Mary Carlson: Timelessly medieval
Contributed by Adam Simon / I happened to visit Mary Carlson’s exhibition “Garden” at Kerry Schuss Gallery the day I finished reading Titus Groan, the first of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels, written in the 1950s. I’m not usually drawn to fantasy fiction – this book was a gift – but Peake’s dreamlike rendering of a forbidding castle with clinging ivy and bizarre inhabitants had me in thrall, primed to receive Carlson’s medieval world and its symbiotic relationships between plants and people. One of the characters in Titus Groan uses the ivy to scale the castle walls, while two others take tea on a tree that grows horizontally out one of the windows. While not exactly ivy, vines fashioned from copper piping figure prominently in “Garden,”often dwarfing the mostly female glazed porcelain saints that sit on modest carved wooden shelves. The untamed power of the natural world, and humanity’s marginal presence in it, is an underlying theme in “Garden” and very like the world described by Peake.
What makes a good painting?
Contributed by David Carrier / What is the present state of painting? For as long as I have been writing art criticism, that question has been much discussed. Some critics have said painting was dead, perhaps to be replaced by Minimalist or conceptual art. Others have argued that because painting is an inherently bourgeois art form, it can continue only as long as it is politically tinged. The Milwaukee Art Museum’s show “50 Paintings” takes an essentially empirical approach to the question. Co-curators Margaret Andera and Michelle Grabner gathered mostly mid-sized recent paintings by artists well-known in the New York art world and demonstrated how varied and how good painting is today. There are abstractions by Peter Halley and Mary Heilmann, a landscape by April Gornik, and figurative paintings by Cecily Brown and Nicole Eisenman. It’s natural for a visiting critic to pick favorites. Mindful of the unhappy fate of Paris, whose judgment about which goddess was most beautiful triggered the Trojan War, I dare to name mine.