Contributed by David Carrier / Over the years, I got to know Graham Nickson, the splendidly original English figurative artist who ran the New York Studio School and recently passed away, visiting his studio and writing a catalogue essay for him. Starting in the late 1980s, I lectured now and […]
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Few artists – even among those dedicated to the landscape – would look at a body of water and think, “OK, I’m going to spend the next 30 years painting this.” Yet, year by year, Eric Wolf has done just that, driven by a fascination with the daily transformation of water’s surface, its complementary relationship to air, its connection with people, and the peculiarly seductive power of black ink on paper. “Two Waters,” on view at Abri Mars, spans three decades of Wolf’s en plein air ink painting, which he did exclusively at two sites: a pond in Chatham, New York, and a lake in Rangeley, Maine.
Contributed by Bill Arning / “Self Made: A Century of Inventing,” now on view at the American Folk Art Museum, asks a thorny question: Why does the descriptive term “self-taught” continue to resonate so strongly with dedicated fans of folk and outsider art? At its most basic, the term describes artists who did not attend traditional art schools. To be sure, these institutions embody uneasy contradictions. Tasked with encouraging free expression, they simultaneously prepare artists to attract patronage by targeting the moneyed class. But at their best, they embed young artists in an ongoing, object-based cultural conversation. So why are we so drawn to work that emerges outside their influence?
Contributed by Sharon Butler / In May, Two Coats of Paint welcomes the return of Gyan Shrosbree from Fairfield, Iowa. Gyan, who had residencies in 2016 and 2017, makes clothing that she combines with twentieth-century modernist painting in an idiosyncratic and inventive practice that includes collaborative activities like sewing with her mother and staging exhibitions in the form of fashion shows. The closet, she declares, is her field of possibility. For Shrosbree, clothing is both practical and symbolic. It protects our bodies from the environment while projecting something about our inner life. It’s this duality that gives her bold paintings their emotional charge.