Jaclyn Shoub. Near Airport #2. 1997
Oil and Toner on Mylar Mounted on Masonite.

Jaclyn Shoub. Monochromatic #2. 2006

Jaclyn Shoub. Untitled. 2001.

Among my favourite contemporary Canadian painters, Jaclyn Shoub's pale, altered photocopies are printed onto transparent mylar and fixed atop swipey, drippy monochromatic oil paintings. The similarity to Turner is unmistakable. However they remain non derivative. She lacks Turner's ambition, and the paintings serve as subtle atmospheric notations of that rarefied passivity one feels waiting in airports or in transit. A kind of suspension of the ordinary laws of humdrum interaction with reality. But is the technique -- photographic decals as counterpoint to abstraction -- too easy?

There are artists from the old world, whose work we encounter so often in print that it's easy to take their greatness for granted. Leafing through an old pile of New Yorker's I read what is, to my mid one of the most accurate and thought-provoking critiques of the paintings of JMW Turner.

...Unlike John Constable, his quieter, more profound peer, Turner conveys only irritable ambition. We must never forget to admire him. This tires. Turner’s style is synthetic, leaning on picturesque convention (never more so than when most nearly abstract) while brazening arbitrary audacities. He overlays splooshes of paint with passages of tidy drawing like bathtub decals.

Schjeldahl, Peter. "Heavy Weather". New Yorker. 7/28/08.

J.M.W. Turner. Peace - Burial At Sea. 1842

And of course...

J.M.W. Turner. Rain, Steam and Speed. 1844.

Waiting Crowd

Wayne Gonzales. Waiting Crowd. 2009.
Acrylic on Canvas.

Is the gathered group receiving a warning? Watching a performance? The answer’s unclear, which is just as Gonzales intends it. His paintings probe the evidentiary nature of representation, casting doubt on the adage “seeing is believing.”

Edouard Manet. Music in the Tuileires. 1862

The spectacle has evolved beyond the point of engagement...




Wayne Gonzales at Paula Cooper Gallery through December 18th...

Dot Matrix

M. Chevreul. From De la loi du contraste simultane des couleurs
(Photograph by Dominic Tschudin from the RCA Website)

In The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours Michel-Eugène Chevreul (d. 1889) made major scientific contributions to the fields of chemistry and colour. Among other works, he invented a three-dimensional colour classification system, which he used to manufacture a colour atlas showing colour circles and monochrome lightness scales.

Damien Hirst. Untitled (Spot Painting). 2007.

Chevreul on Colours. Plate IX.

Chevreul on Colours has been digitized by Google.

A Considerable Distance

Vija Celmins. Rhinoceros. 1965.

[Vija] Celmins is a painter of nature who operates at a considerable distance from her subjects. She works from clippings of reproduced, usually black-and-white photographs, some of them decrepit or blurry, and builds her labor-intensive paintings with many glazed and sanded layers of alkyd or oil on wood-backed linen. ... She has convincingly demonstrated that photography, far from being the "death of painting," can give the medium a foundation on which to reëstablish its exclusive powers.

Schjeldahl, Peter. "Dark Star" New Yorker. 6/04/2001.

Albrect Durer. Rhinoceros. 1515

Durer's Rhinoceros attempts to illustrate an animal -- which he had never seen -- from a description of it's armour and a sketch by an unknown artist. From a considerable distance to his subject, Durer works, in this case, from an imperfect representation of a very real thing - a clipping. His image was accepted as a true representation of a Rhincoerous well into the 18th century.

Durer's Rhinoceros at Wikipedia...

Capital "R" Romantic

Echoes of Friedrich's Rueckenfiguren (back figures); Untitled (Suit) is conte on cotton and all undemonstrative, contemplative, ephemeral mystique.

Troy Brauntuch. Untitled (Suit)

Troy Brauntuch. Untitled (Emily's Coat on Black Table)


'...figurative wonders so dark that their subjects almsot vanish in the gloaming...'

The Anxiety of Influence

Luc Tuymans. Nape.

Caspar David-Friedrich. Wanderer Above the Sea of Mist.

"[In the Anxiety of Influence Harold] Bloom's central thesis is that poets are hindered in their creative process by the ambiguous relationship they necessarily maintained with precursor poets. While admitting the influence of extraliterary experience on every poet, he argues that "the poet in a poet" is inspired to write by reading another poet's poetry and will tend to produce work that is derivative of existing poetry..."*

*The Anxiety of Influence (2009, June 25). In Wikipedia.

Something About Mammals

Simen Johan. Untitled #140.

Gerhard Richter. Hirsch.

"[Working] the fertile ground between reality and illusion."*

*"Simen Johan." New Yorker, 09/21/09, p. 20