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.
Tag: Gordon Fraser
Recent posts: Two Coats of Paint
Mary Jones’s risk and rigor
Contributed by Elisabeth Condon / Mary Jones pushes divergent visual modalities to – but not beyond – the breaking point in “Reservations” at High Noon Gallery, combining abstraction, décor, and photography in a lush chromatic range and challenging what painting can be or do with digital imagery.
Immersion at Fugue Gallery
Contributed by Will Maddoxx / At first, Fugue Gallery’s new Chinatown space seems like an apartment gallery or DIY space: the walls are brick, the windows are curtained, soft music plays on speakers, a few paintings and photographs hang on the wall. The works by the 16 artists in the inaugural show “Forbidden Fruit” are strong. The first to catch my eye was Justin Wood, an oil painter enamored with academic painting, chiaroscuro, and Baroque still lifes. His Purple Grapes recalls Rachel Ruysch’s work, rendered with immaculate technique. Rotting Apple, referential to Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit, expands upon his adoration for art history with perfect paint application. Alexa Huang’s Rehearsal for a Forgotten Tableau is pastoral and open, its paint handling not unlike Cecily Brown’s and its palette like that of a Tiepolo. Vincent Sachtler’s Comarum palustre is firmly contemporary – a mesmerizing moving light à la Dan Flavin and Olafur Eliasson.
Peter Bradley: Pleasure and provocation
Contributed by David Rhodes / In Peter Bradley’s third solo exhibition with Karma, all the paintings are from the previous 12 months, ranging in size from 36 inches square to 104 x 82 inches. They feature a thrilling abundance of color and paint, reaching the senses of both sight and touch. The regularity of the dimensions and emphasis on the square to rectangle format sharpens the comparative extremes within each painting. Lean, empty areas sometimes transition slowly, sometimes abruptly. Anomalous space – that is, pictorial space played off against real surface, canvas and paint – is always synchronous and flowing.