The reunion is with an older painting that had been stored in various homes for 20 years, a friend returned it last night. One of my favorites, it’s wonderful to have it back and I plan on hanging it in the living-room where it will span one entire wall.
Moonrise. Oil on canvas 51″ x 102″, 1990.
Skater Aid – a friend of mine is coordinating this worthy benefit and invited many artists to participate. I had the chance to see some hanging in the Beacon Hill Arts Center last weekend. The benefit auction comes up on September 25th, but all decks will be displayed at Decatur’s Brick Store Pub beginning August 28th . Mine is called ‘Blue Highway’. This photo was taken while it was in progress:
Gardening notes – My nose found a huge mound of white clematis paniculata climbing on an old fencepost bordering my yard, a fragrant and lovely sight in the heat and humidity of an Atlanta August. I hope it transplants well, I’m going to see if I can’t have it completely encircling the old cattle ranch barbed wire that passes for my fence here.
Tomatoes are ripening.
And the Buff Beauty rose prunings transplanted nicely in at least three different spots in the yard, hooray!
Salvia from my friend Casey is happy in the herb garden bed.
The Brooklyn artist Chris Martin is showing immense works at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Here, he talks briefly about the artist’s identity and how no artist, not even those in arts education, really knows what he or she is doing. The passion of working in whatever medium enthralls us is the real key to calling one’s self an ‘artist’.
I believe art counts. I believe in its delicious, fibrous, textural insights. In the way it helps us understand the complexity of ourselves. I want to be a part of that. I step away for a deep breath, and I’m at it again. – Nicole Livieratos
This past Saturday I saw Origami at the Inman Park White Space gallery – a solo performance work by Nicole Livieratos with direction by Patricia Henritze. The partnership functions under the umbrellas of Livieratos’s Decatur based Garden House Dance and Proximity, their ongoing series of works. In talking to the two women after the performance, I discovered that Livieratos works with local schools to get kids moving (do they ever leave their computers anymore?) and collaborates with teachers in varied curricula; physics, chemistry, languages, on movement-based lessons.
Henritze said that their intent with this series is to make the type of performance work they do more accessible, and by offering small sequences to incorporate art into more of our daily routine. Susan Bridges generously donated her space for the free performance that was scheduled for 15 minutes each at noon, 2pm, 4pm and 6pm on both weekend days. I attended the first at noon.
The intimate setting was the back room of White Space, the perimeter fitted out with chairs for the audience that included a couple of young and rapt children. Interactivity with the spectators included spoken word, projected text from a Bob Hicok poem and multitudes of white paper boats, a few of which the performer gave to lucky folks at the end.
The performance evoked memories, proximity (of where we all are in our lives) and mortality. Origami offered both solemnity and wit in the dancer’s interaction with the audience, and the interpretation of poetry through her juxtaposition of fluid and deliberate movements.
Although it may be difficult to literally ‘get’ a poem or text through a single performance, these lines could have been an obvious reason for why Ms. Livieratos initially chose Hicok’s work:
 i won’t be a man, despite what my anatomy
                insists.
it insists
        that i overcome a sense of resistance when i move,
        that i move
as long as i am able to move, and when i am unable
                to move, that i stop.
Livieratos began the performance by asking us to close our eyes and only open them when she instructed. Sitting in a chair, she clasped her heart hard three times, then reached out to the audience. As she walked and swung a basket (of paper boats?) across the floor, she spoke a fragment of the poem, “I cried”, to her own sound effect of wind rushing by.
These are my notes, since I forgot to pack my camera –
2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3 – Performer is speaking the numbers in fast succession. She empties the bucket of paper boats and carries one boat as if she were on the sea, walking slowly and waving her open palm with the little boat bobbing gently up and down.
Crouches down with hands on floor, slowly picks up boats and places them on her back, walking across floor, bent over, while sound effects of glass breaking plays on an iPod.
all photos above by R.L. Humphreys.
She crawls slowly on her stomach toward us with an outstretched arm, opening and closing her hand – an offering? The dancer now carefully walks on the small white boats, covering her eyes. Then she moves rhythmically to an operatic aria, and finally skips a stone across the brick floor.
I was fortunate enough to receive a part of the poem handed out during the performance; I don’t know what that something is but it would be free.  I couldn’t help but think of Eiko and Koma’s emotionally charged work, both moving so excruciatingly slowly on a stage floor in an early San Francisco performance.
These pieces bring us closer to the connectedness and spirituality of body as art. Art as the freedom to act, to take risks and the coincidence of everyday circumstances that intervene and cross into it. All combine to make beauty that is both ephemeral and lasting beyond a single fifteen minute timeframe.
More Garden House projects:
Elongation – preview
 Â
photos courtesy Mark Teague
photo courtesy Doug Hall.
History of Origami, by Bob Hicok.
two women in three days
cried on the green bench in the park
                where i found a dollar
                folded into a boat.
i thought it was the crying bench and cried
        on the crying bench
                when it became available.
i cried
by thinking of all the people
        who’ve never broken a shop window, not the baker’s
        window, the bead-seller’s,
                who sells beads for purposes
                i find hard to list: necklaces,
                        the hanging of strings of beads
        in doorways, the owning of beads
                                                just in case.
breaking a shop window with a piece of shale
        the size of my heart, a piece of shale
                on which i’ve drawn my heart, not my actual heart
                        but my feelings of my heart,
                                                since i’ve never seen my heart,
        would set something free.
i don’t know what that something is
                but it would be free.
and my heart would have survived its travels
        through glass, its jagged voyage
        through my reflection.
you see now why i cried: none of this is real.
until i can answer yes to the cop who asks, is this your heart
                among the ruins of your reflection?
                  i won’t be a man, despite what my anatomy
                insists.
it insists
        that i overcome a sense of resistance when i move,
        that i move
as long as i am able to move, and when i am unable
                to move, that i stop.
it would be free and look like a bird, an actual bird
        or a dollar folded into a bird, a dollar bird
                        in a dollar boat.
which is to say
                i believe origami arrives
                        when we need it most.
i can’t prove this but i can’t prove
                you’re a good person though i suspect
By far, one of the most charming galleries now in Atlanta is White Space, in Inman Park. Run by Susan Bridges, who lives in the grand brown and white Victorian at the front, the renovated 1893 carriage house has exposed brick walls and an entrance of oversized wood carriage doors. Old license plates still hang in back, along with early 1900’s scrawled pencil markings.
Architects Brian Bell & David Yocum received the 2007 AIA Georgia Design Award for their renovation of the space. Hanging panels are framed in steel to hold large paintings, and one can rotate 90 degrees for installations.
I went over yesterday afternoon for the first time to see the last day of Michele Schuff’s exhibit, ‘Metronome’ and just missed her artist’s talk. I had the chance to meet her and discuss her work. Some very large and heavily textured bas-relief encaustic works on wood panels hung next to smaller works. Influences include Agnes Martin and Mark Rothko, especially his paintings for the de Menil Chapel in Houston. This particular show offered works that were created in reference to time; the metronome a double metaphor for keeping the beat and a meditation on existence/mortality. In talking about working on a grid, I was reminded of Jennifer Bartlett’s early masterpiece, Rhapsody.
Photos courtesy Michele Schuff:
Big Blue, 2011. Encaustic on panel, 77.5 x 94.5 x 4.5″
49 Beats, 2011. Encaustic on wood panel, 16.5″ x 18.5″ x 4″ framed
Perfect Attendance, 2011. Encaustic on wood panel, 18.5 x 22.5 x 2.5″ Framed
From the gallery blurb about her work: Featuring artist Michele Schuff’s series of encaustic paintings, guests were introduced to her most recent works using three-dimensional cast forms. Schuff captures the invisible process of time through the use of repetitive heat-fused brush strokes and forms, suggesting the metronome as a metaphor for the meditative beat of life’s fleeting moments. Â
Watch this TBS produced video of White Space founder Susan Bridges.
Check out White Space’s next show this coming weekend: Origami, featuring short dance performances by Nicole Livieratos of Garden House Dance. Free at Noon, 2pm, 4pm,, and 6pm on July 30th and 31st.
I spent a brilliant and unseasonably cool Saturday afternoon exploring the Westside Arts district in downtown Atlanta. Several gallery spaces and the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center are all within walking distance of each other. Add a great coffee  house and a few restaurants that seem very popular with a young clientele et voilà – a burgeoning arts scene.
I have old history with two of these spaces; ACAC is in the original Nexus Press building, an early artists’ cooperative in whose Biennales and exhibits I participated during the 1980’s. I also showed work at Portfolio Gallery, now Sandler Hudson and run by the same two founders; Robin Sandler and Debby Hudson.
Sandler Hudson is exhibiting an ambitious young artist, Yanique Norman, whose graphite and wash works the High Museum of Art had exhibited in a 2010 group show in conjunction with the Dali exhibit, ‘Persistence of Memory’. Catherine Fox wrote a blurb about Norman’s work on ArtsCriticATL, in her post about that show. The museum also recently picked up a couple of her pieces from the SH show. I missed Yanique’s artist’s talk but had a chance to speak with her yesterday. Largely self-taught, she has spent the past six years exhibiting and is now returning to school. Her work has obvious surrealistic imagery, she admitted to being influenced by Magritte and Kara Walker. Watch a video of her discussing her ideas and a 2009 exhibit here.
Photo courtesy Sandler Hudson Gallery.
My next stop was the Kiang Gallery and the summer show, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, nicely curated by Karen Tauches. Find the ArtsCriticAtl review here. I particularly liked Amandine Drouet’s untitled piece constructed of piano keys strung together, one of the elements hanging  from the ceiling and the other four grounded to the concrete. Audio of a toy piano tinkling out notes might have added to the information/digital theme of the show.
I also liked Annette Gates ‘Cross Pollination (Veiled Diffusion)’, a grouping of what looked like exquisite surrealistic sea creatures made of porcelain.
The Emily Amy Gallery, across the street, is a wonderful open space. A young gallerist, Amy has an experienced eye for painterly gestural abstraction and color – and she carries a favorite artist of mine, the late Carl Plansky. He had been scheduled for an interview on this blog shortly before his untimely death in 2009. Three of his works were hanging in Amy’s summer show. All are highly gestural and textured, with the chroma befitting a painter with an allegiance (at least in the paints he once made for her) to Joan Mitchell. Photos were difficult, because his works were placed either close to a window or without enough room for me to grab a full frontal shot from afar. A savvy collector should snap up both these oversized floral works and the smaller landscape on paper. Stunning.
Carl Plansky, Carnival in  Venice. Oil on canvas 72″x48″.
Carl Plansky, Carpathia. Oil on canvas, 60″x48″.
Dorothy Goode, Paintings I Wrote on. Egg Tempera and gesso on wood.
Melanie Parke, Between Midnight and Noon. Oil on canvas 60″x72″.
The Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center is now one of the best spaces in town to see innovative and striking works of art. A 30,000 square foot warehouse built in the 1920’s, the outside terrace ringed by rosemary and plantings offers an urban industrial feel, while the outdoor sculptures and artist made stepping stones echo ACAC’s past as a co-op.
Curator and Artistic Director Stuart Horodner coordinates the space’s exhibits and even offers monthly 15 minute artist critiques to members. Horodner has held director and curator positions at art centers and universities including the Atlanta College of Art Gallery, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in Oregon, and Bucknell University Art Gallery in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Â I think we’re lucky to have him.
Currently up until mid September are two exciting shows. The first is Material Deposits, in tandem with the Artadia Awards, a San Francisco arts endowment non-profit.
Material Deposits is a group exhibition focusing on the physical world—what it is made of and how it can be experienced and understood. The participating artists work in painting, sculpture, drawing, installation, and video, and they each combine elements of the real and the represented.
Material Deposits features four recipients of the 2009 Artadia Award in San Francisco (Nornberg, Rosch, Shows, Teruya), alongside artists from Atlanta (Reilly), Los Angeles (Billera), and New York (Shaw). This is the second exhibition at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center developed in partnership with the Artadia Exhibitions Exchange program.
The second exhibit, Inside & Out, was developed in association with the National Black Arts Festival. It showcases two artists in their mid-seventies; Melvin Edwards and Peter Saul.
I especially responded to Edwards’ welded metal sculptures – ‘that may suggest African masks’ but ‘carry with them… the memory of function’. His work is elegant, emotionally charged and moving. His wall series begun in the 1970’s is called Lynch Fragments. The artist was at ACAC talking to Horodner when I first arrived. I sure wish I could afford just one of those wall sculptures.
Peter Saul is a hoot. I was reminded of all the old Robert Crumb Zap magazines my brother ‘borrowed’ from me, back in the late 1970’s.
Finally, the NY programming director, Ute Zimmerman, was at ACAC yesterday afternoon, offering an informational session about the Artadia Awards 2011, which will feature 7 Atlanta artists. I had to leave early, but the application is online and open to any artist living in the area. Deadline to apply is September 15th.
I had known about this blog back when the founder and artist Brett Baker began it. Now it’s really expanded to include many of the arts writers’ blogs that I’ve been following for a few years. My recent interview on Neoteric Art was picked up, so that was pretty cool.
I had heard Philip Glass’s 1979Â Mad Rush (renamed from his original Part Four, Fourth Series) at the Woodruff Arts Center’s Sonic Palooza a couple of weeks ago and started a sketch on site that was primarily horizontal lines, in response to his elegantly patterned piano piece.
On the day that I began the painting, I had just suffered what I discovered later was an acute vitreous detachment in one of my eyes, leaving a lot of ‘floaters’ in my vision. Coincidentally, I was also listening to John Tavener’s The Protecting Veil with Yo-Yo Ma as the cello soloist. Which seems somehow apropos for the title in homage.
This one is in progress.
The Protecting Veil. Acrylic on canvas, 26″x40″, 2011.
Summer Lawns. Acrylic on canvas panel, 10″x8″, 2011.
Norbert Marszalek and William Dolan offer a series of interviews with artists on their blog, including a recent one with me. Go to Neoteric Art for the full interview.
John Marin‘s (1870-1953) watercolors, early etchings and a few oils are on exhibit at the High Museum here in Atlanta from now until September 11, 2011. The exhibit was originally organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, Â which offers a good image selection on their site, in addition to themes within Marin’s work and his biography.
A New Jersey native, in 1905 Marin traveled to Paris and stayed for five years, using his Montparnasse studio as a base to explore Europe. An admirer of Whistler, he sold etchings to dealers in Europe, Chicago and NYC and had the first opportunities to show in public.
I could see Robert Delauney’s influence in this 1912 painting:Â Movement, Fifth Avenue. Alfred Stiegletz Collection. (all photographs courtesy Art Institute of Chicago, except where noted)
Tour Eiffel, 1911. Robert Delaunay. Solomon Guggenheim Museum of Art.
The show is chronologically laid out, but a few of Marin’s early works are as abstracted as his later pieces. He wasn’t interested in absolute abstraction, as separate from landscape, according to a Kennedy Galleries catalog of their 1981 exhibit, John Marin’s New York. However, the art historian John Baur claimed that Marin’s 1903-04 small oils known as Weehawken Sequence, could have been the earliest abstracts done by any artist either here in America or abroad, if those dates are correct. Roberta Smith thinks the same thing in her February 2011 NY Times article on the series, saying that this “must have given Kandinsky scholars the willies.”
Two are shown below, not included in the exhibit and I can’t find provenance for them except from this writer’s blog.
Was Richard Diebenkorn’s perspective flattening 1960’s series of San Francisco cityscapes informed by Marin’s dramatic way with perspective? I’ve never read anything about him attributing Marin as an influence, and yet it would be hard to deny the similarities.
Movement No. 24- Pertaining to Deer Isle – The Road. Alfred Stiegletz Collection.
Richard Diebenkorn, Cityscape 1, 1963. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Marin and his wife Marie Hughes first visited villages on the coast of Maine in the summer of 1914. After that most prolific year, the couple and their one son spent summers in Maine, winters in NY and NJ. In 1933, the family moved into a summer house on isolated Cape Split, Maine – with glassed-in porch on two sides and views of the sea; the perfect studio for Marin. He said, “The house is so close to the water I almost feel at times that I am on a boat.” He worked up until his death at this home in 1953.
Here’s a good video from the Art Institute of Chicago site that describes how Marin gained recognition as the numero uno American artist during his lifetime:
A reclusive artist who didn’t hide his feelings and spoke bluntly, Marin’s ability to express motion in his work precedes the New York Abstract Expressionists by decades. The emotionally charged content of these paintings makes some of the current trends of irony and heavy handed conceptualism seem in contrast, bereft of all feeling and unsuccessful at reaching the viewer.
To  his old friend and patron Alfred Stieglitz, who gave Marin his first show, he once wrote:
It’s been a beautiful world—it is a beautiful world—it’s the only world we’ve known—Our work was done in this world—Our friends have been of this world—and we have fared moderately well and we have enjoyed the living moderately well with some Swell moments.”
Sea Movement- Green and Blue, 1923. Alfred Stiegletz Collection.
The Sea, Maine. (no provenance from the site this was on)
Approaching Fog, 1952. Estate of John Marin.
I’m already dreaming about a Cape Split painting trip for the fall….
Wheelbarrow. 8″x10″, acrylic on canvas panel, 2011.
Solstice. Acrylic on canvas panel 10″x8″, 2011.
Alhambra. Acrylic on canvas panel, 8″x10″, 2011.
My Vitreous, pencil drawing 2011. A sketch based on a posterior vitreous detachment in my right eye. That eye also has a 20 year old cataract. The floater is called a ‘Weiss Ring’ and is quite amazing to look through. It’s like a mesh veil with a dark brown circular area that has radiating spokes, partially obstructing vision in that eye. I’m working on a new painting that is based on this experience, while listening to John Tavener’s ‘The Protecting Veil’, with YoYo Ma on cello.
