New Beginnings

Studio wall 2017

I began this blog in 2009 with "some of this and that about art " and also featured artists working their studios. I have always been interested in artists' inspirations, story, personal history,point of view and studio life.

What inspires you? What makes the hair on your neck go up? What do you take pictures of? What is your personal history? What artist's work turns you on and why? What do you see outside your window in the studio? What's on your bookshelf? What do you listen to? Thoughts in the studio?

Those are the kind of questions I will be asking myself and others again.
Stayed tuned but meanwhile here are some interesting posts from the past:

Mine from 2009
Steven Alexander,Paul Benke,Hannalore Baron,Rebecca Crowell,Diane Englander,Lorrie Fredette,Brenda Goodman,Matt Langley ,Lucy Mink,Diane McGregor,Tim McFarlane,Nancy Natale
Leslie Neuman,Sue Post,Fran Shalom,Titles,Inside/Outside,Etiquette of the Studio Visit

"Talking" 48 x 38 pigment sticks on panel 2016    R&F Handmade Paint Collection

Barbara Fisher

I went to visit Barbara Fisher's studio when I was in Asheville this July and found a huge shift going on in her work. Known for her colorful iconographic gridded imagery, the work has moved to a dark, mysterious, atmospheric space with merging marks and forms. It feels like a thinking space on a chalkboard. Have a look:

All are oil, oil stick, charcoal, pastel on birch panel

Tangled Thoughts - 30 x 30

Hubris - 16 x 16

Evidence - 40 x 40

Unwinding - 16 x 16

Barbara lists her Influences: early ones include Van Gogh, Gauguin, Klee.The German Expressionists,  Guston.  New Image painters of the early '80's (Jennifer Bartlett, Susan Rothenberg).
Non artist influences - Carl Jung and other psycho-philosophers. Contemporary physicists - Mario Livio, Brian Green.

She is currently in  Southern Abstraction: A New Look at the Mobile Musuem of Art. In 2013 a solo show is planned for the Hickory Museum of Art, Hickory NC.

For years my artistic language consisted of iconic shapes and symbols, reduced to their simplest forms. I gradually began to break them up into what felt like pieces of images.  Recently they have disintegrated further into fragments of thoughts, gestural marks, and scribbles – hovering in undefined, unrestrained atmospheric spaces.   Switching from canvas to birch panel resulted in a dramatic shift in the work’s physicality. Spontaneous marks provide a history of transformation and change.   The paintings are worked over a long period of time, giving the appearance of old walls that have been written and drawn on for years.

 The history of process and transformation evident in the finished paintings continually reminds the viewer of the inevitability of change and the impermanence inherent in all things.   The wood surfaces are sanded, scribbled on, painted over, wiped off and otherwise distressed.  The essence of my creative inquiry is to dissect and examine again and again my perceptions of truth, reality, and the Self that derive from external sources, turning that experience into a visual record.

Thinking About Some Favorites

I have been updating my powerpoint about my work for teaching purposes and have been sneaking in some artists that I feel have influenced my work over the years. The power point is still in progress but I am expanding outside the idea of influences to adding work that speaks to me. Here are a few.

Henri Matisse

Eva Hesse

Joan Synder

Ree Morton

Susan Rothenberg

        Alberto Giacometti

                                                                                  

Edward Vuillard

Mark Rothko

 Rembrandt

     Paul Cezanne                

                                                         

                                                

Hannalore BAron

Giotto

Brenda Goodman

Philip Guston

Hans Hoffman

Joan Mitchell

Jackson Pollack

Brice Marden

Judy Pfaff

Martin Puryear

Paul Rotterdam

Amy Sillman

Julie Mehretu

Daniel Sroka, Art Influences

Daniel Sroka is a photographer living in NJ. This May, he was named a nominee in the Abstract category of the 3rd Annual Photography Masters Cup for his photograph Mask ( fallen leaf) His work is represented by Artful Home, one of the preeminent online art galleries.
His blog offers the male perspective of trying to raise kids at home and make art at the same time.

I like what he says about his blog :"Watch behind the scenes as fine art nature photographer Daniel Sroka tries to make a living from his art. "



Glass Slipper (abstract of melting ice. 20x25)

"I am inspired by the quiet voices of nature. Every season, I walk through my neighborhood and collect the leaves, sticks, flowers, and seeds that I find along the path. These fallen leaves and seeds are like fossils, preserving a record of the passing seasons.

Every stick and flower is uniquely formed by the life it experienced, and as they dry and fade, they tell stories about their lives. Stories about the intensity of the summer light, the periods of rain and drought, and the attacks of insects they endured. I try to tell these stories through the abstract, dream-like portraits I create of these small and usually unregarded parts of nature."

Influences:

Alexander Calder I love the story of how Calder showed up for a solo exhibit at Harvard with no art. When the students who came to pick him up asked where his art was, Calder pulled out of his pocket a spool of wire and pliers. He then proceeded to create the entire exhibit of wire sculptures from scratch.

Marcel Duchamp The guy knew how to poke fun and have fun. Art can be so pretentious, and his work never fails to make me laugh and remember the sensory pleasure that art should always be.

Charles Shulz (cartoonist): He may be "just a cartoonist", but more than any fine artist, his work has has a deep and personal impact on my life. I love Schulz’s ability to express a gut-felt emotion through a simple image and a focused story. I also find myself inspired by uncompromising work ethic, and his ability to find balance between his work and his family.


Haruki Murakami (novelist): Murakami is one of my favorite writers. The worlds he creates are deceptively simple, elegant creations, with massive geologic flaws running straight through them. In his stories, very normal people encounter very odd situations, but it all seems real and natural.

Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison (photographers): I was simply blown away when I first saw their work at the Eastman House. They showed me what a photograph could achieve in the telling of a story or capturing of a mood.

Ted Orland (photographer): I had the pleasure of being in the same galley as Ted for a short time. I love the simple expression of mood and place he expresses in his work. And his books on life as an artist (such as "Art and Fear") are clear, honest, and inspirational.

John Chervinsky (photographer): A witty combination of science and art.


Dragon (abstract of fallen leaf. 17x25)






Unravel (abstract of a fallen leaf. 25x17)

Who are your influences? Steven Alexander

I am familiar with Steven Alexander's work from his blog, website and the show at Denise Bibro Platform, New York City, "Blogpix" (Curated by Joanne Mattera) He is represented by Gremillion & Co. Fine Art, Houston. He lives and works in eastern Pennsylvania.

I love his color.



Lonely Fire 56 x 36 acrylic on canvas Steven Alexander

My work is an exploration of relations that reside in the constant flux of pure sensory events. I am interested in the interaction between the painting and the viewer's imagination and experience; in the painting's catalytic potency - it's potential to generate unspecified mobile meaning.
Color operates in this work and in the world as a kind of pure energy, dynamic, capricious, evocative. The surfaces emphasize the sensual rather than analytical nature of the painting process, and attest to the pervasive presence of time. Within the structures of the work, archetypal relations of male/female, earth/sky, internal/external are inevitably implied; not as opposing forces, but as interdependent aspects of an animate whole. In this sense, the paintings might be regarded as open-ended cosmologies, or as chunks of raw reality, unencumbered.
I am trying to build, out of color and substance, a place for the viewer's consciousness - where unexpected associations and resonances may occur, where past and future merge with the present moment, and the stuff of life, love and desire has corporeal presence - states of being, embodied in paint.
Steven Alexander 2009

Calypso #4 24 x 24 acrylic on canvas Steven Alexander


Steven writes:
This is really hard!

Here are some influences -- in no particular order:

12th century Tantric paintings
Duccio
Giorgione
Henri Matisse
Piet Mondrian
Pierre Bonnard
Mark Rothko
Giorgio Morandi
Agnes Martin
Jasper Johns
Brice Marden
Blinky Palermo
John Cage
James Brown check out this video- (or maybe you meant the painter?)
Ornette ColemanA few days later I received an email from Steven:
"Twombly!!!.....I forgot Twombly".
(I found a great "undercover" video of Twombly's opening)



Shift #5 12 x 144 acrylic on canvas Steven Alexander

What artists have influenced you ? Marie Vickerella

"Outside" 42" x 42" oil

The first person I met when I got to the graduate program at Bard was Marie. She was there for painting and I was there for sculpture. We had neighboring studios for three summers. I remember the smell of her oil paint, hearing the swishing from the brushes on her canvases, our conversations, breakfast every morning at the diner and of course, her wonderful paintings. She is one of the reasons I am a painter.

You can see her work at the Chace- Randall Gallery in Andes, NY. The gallery has a new blog that you see here. She will be having a show at the Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago, ll. this September.



"Cloister" 32" x 28" oil


"Space Between" 60" x 42" oil

Paint, graphite, wax, and fabric all materials I use to create. Make a mark and cover it up, wipe away and retrieve part of it back. An on going process, helped along by the materials I use, what I see and think on a daily basis. How I allow myself to find the simplest way to put what I see into visual form.


With a minimal amount of shape and line, allowing each, to work off the other to create a sense of tension, or place, at times a sense of suggestion and metaphor. Allowing my daily experience to seep into each painting, just as a viewer looking at a painting, will bring to each painting all the experience from their lives and see the painting from their own perspective.


Painting runs along a parallel line with life. Every mark put down, rubbed away and brought back to create a painting, are similar to events that happen in our lives, which are
put into our memory, add up and are brought back to the surface to create who we are.
It’s a simple process, which when you can rid yourself of the noise and clutter that is attached to life, becomes quite remarkable.

Here are Marie's influences:

1. Giorgio Morandi
2. Richard Tuttle
3. Brice Marden
4. Paul Rotterdam
5. Susan Rothenberg
6. Eva Hesse
7. Vija Clemins
8. Agnes Martin
9. Richard Serra
10. Cy Twombly
11. Giotto
12. Michal Rovner

"Silence the fence around wisdom" 42" x 42" oil