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
Lois Dickson: Tenacity, curiosity, and persistence
Contributed by Bill Arning / Years before Hudson became an international art destination, there was Time & Space Limited, a cavernous space on Columbia Street, […]
Taryn Simon: Declassifying the world
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / It’s the contrast between the stately simplicity of On Kawara’s plangently arrayed dates and the complexity of the days on earth they mark that makes them so moving. Time passes with spartan uniformity, but what happens within the neat artificial boundaries – hours, days, years, decades, centuries – is extravagantly messy. In her osmotically provocative conceptual exhibition “Father Country I Do Love You” at the Guggenheim, Taryn Simon takes the z axis through the observed world into events many of us don’t want to know too much about lest we walk in fear. While that cryptic title may slant towards the my-country- right-or-wrong, love-it-or-leave-it jingoism turbocharged by MAGA’s willful purge of American history, the show itself waxes consistently ironic and inflects the title with more wistfulness than defiance. The “do” seems grudging.
Anna T. Gregor’s shattered compositions
Contributed by Milan Michaud / Anna T. Gregor’s paintings, recently shown at D·D·D·D· Pictures, have a way of changing as they are pondered. Although their strategically shattered composition makes it initially unclear whether they are observational, she does paint from life, albeit by way of distorted mirrors, while also engaging with art history. Rendered in oil paint, rabbit skin glue, tempera, shellac, marble dust, metal leaf, the paintings seem to fold and bend as decorative shapes abruptly give way to convincing depth before conceding images. At that point, the historical paintings stamped into the work also become vaguely apparent. In After the Annunciation, for example, there is a graphic specter of Philip Guston’s early work Martial Memory. Both trick the eye into experiencing depth and flatness simultaneously and substantively reference transformative events.