The Educated Eye, More About NFTs, Zooming with Karen Wilkin
 
In 20-plus years of writing reviews for ARTnews and The Wall Street Journal, I seldom stopped to question what right I had to pass judgment on the art under consideration. I was asked to render an opinion, that was the assignment, and I felt fully qualified after years of studying art history and flexing my critical faculties to say something intelligent about the work at hand. But a post I made on Facebook about Amy Sherald’s portrait of Breonna Taylor, as you will read, brought me up short when a barrage of comments asked who the hell I thought I was to say anything negative about the work (in truth, it was Sherald’s sexy pose that probably annoyed me more than the portrait). It’s a legitimate question. So I posed it to some critic and writer friends to ask what it was that made their eyes superior to the average art lovers. What does it mean to be a critic? Why is your judgment any better than most? I got about eight carefully considered responses, enough that the post deserves being published in two parts. So this week I present Part One of “The Educated Eye,” which I hope will offer a little insight into how critics arrive at their points of view.

 
Franklin Einspruch’s parody of the photo of Amy Sherald in Vanity Fair

I truly, sincerely hoped the whole NFT mania would quietly disappear after the flurry of reports about the sorts of money this internet-based phenomenon was commanding earlier in the year. But now Damien Hirst has jumped into the fray with “a collection of 10,000 NFTs which correspond to 10,000 unique physical artworks stored in a secure vault in the UK. The works are now brought to life through their launch on the blockchain,” according to an online source (you can get one for a mere $2,000). My guess is it was relatively easy for Hirst to move into NFTs, what with a team of assistants that probably rivals Jeff Koons’s (and will he be next?). Not so for ordinary mortals and artists, as Sandra Filippucci has been demonstrating in her series of “Blockhead Adventures with Blockchain Art.” In Part Three, she takes us further into the mysteries of crafting one yourself, tackling issues of submission, “Plotaverse,” animation, music, and other bells and whistles. This is about as step by step as you can get, and I am eagerly awaiting the realization of her “Chess Series.” I hope she makes a bundle.

Detail from Sandra Filippucci's Red Queen

And now on to news from our members…
 
Claire Seidl, Nancy Manter, and Gelah Penn are all part of “Here and There,” curated by David Row, at Cove Street Arts in Portland, ME (through September 11). The show celebrates the work of “well-established New York artists with strong ties to Maine,” says the announcement. “My contribution is an abstract painting,” writes Seidl. “To me, it feels like Maine but I wouldn’t say that describes it! I’ve been working in the western mountains of Maine in the summers (now extended to five months per year) for 35 years. But, instead of becoming more responsive to the landscape, my painting has remained abstract. After a decade, though, I began to take photographs of the woods, sky, nighttime, and the camp and its inhabitants. I think I was able to express what it was like to be up here. The photographs are not abstract, being based in reality, but viewers often see them as abstract.


Claire Seidl, Not Another Word (2021), oil on linen, 54 by 38 inches
 

Gelah Penn, Stele #8 (2019), mixed media
 

Nancy Manter, Edge #5 (2020), flashe on panel, 52 by 40 inches
 
Through this summer, Carole P. Kunstadt is participating in a collaborative show called “SALLY” at the Wellfleet Historical Society in Wellfleet, MA. The project “brings together artists, writers, historians, and the local community intrigued by the narratives of women, like Sally Hemings, whose destinies are inextricably interwoven with those they knew, and whose lives have often been erased or forgotten A primary theme in SALLY is how artists, through their methodologies, confront myriad issues of agency, and use collaboration to undercut the status quo, and construct lives of integrity and purpose.” Says Kunstadt of her work below: “I have combined fragments of pages from a book published anonymously in 1791 with antique sad irons, textiles and thread. Hannah More (1745-1833) was an abolitionist, social reformer, philanthropist, writer and feminist. More's convictions were moral, social and political, inspiring us to raise one's voice to injustice.” Carole’s installation, “Pressing On,” is below.


 

Jane Guthridge’s work is featured in “Light Affects: Encaustic Colorado” at the Loveland Museum in Loveland, CO, through September 25. “In its simplest form, encaustic is a combination of beeswax, a little damar resin, and pigment,” explains the museum’s website. “The mixture is brought to a molten state and applied with a brush to a rigid surface. Once it has cooled, this top surface is reheated so the wax melts into the layers beneath. It is this layering that gives an encaustic piece its unique depth, as well as allowing for interleaving other materials that make it so versatile.” The show gets its name from the way the medium captures light, almost suspending it, and the works of the four artists included “explores and celebrates the wide variety of style and subject matter possible in this luminous medium.”


Jane Guthridge, Floating Garden (2021), encaustic on layered translucent mulberry paper, 48 by 42 inches

Through July, Kate Petley is part of a three-person exhibition (along with Lorraine Tady and Liz Trosper) at Barry Whistler Gallery in Dallas, TX. “The artists incorporate technology into their work through digital photography, scanning, printing and rescanning, and the digital assembly of painted fragments,” Petley writes, “Their work conveys the persistent presence of the hand but with very different outcomes.” Petley adds that her process “combines sculpture, photography, and painting with references that include the still life, portraiture, and the history of the luminous surface.” An installation view of Inseparable and After All (archival print and acrylic on canvas, each 48 by 52 inches) is below.




Jeannie Motherwell is showing new work at the Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown, MA, through August 10. Her works, she says in her artist’s statement, “often carry me in directions I cannot anticipate. I like to think of my paintings as an ‘event’ or an ‘occurrence’; that is, an action that emerges in the here and now—where the subject matter symbolizes the images and mysteries of creation.”

Jeannie Motherwell, In Tangled Life (2021), acrylic on cradled panel, 30 by 75 inches

 
"Through clients and friends, I recently received a collection of personal letters, bank notes and bills from the 1800s, stock records from the 1920s, current 3d printer remnants and discarded paintings, photos and fruit labels spanning over 200 years of collected detritus and data for a small section of America's long history,” writes Jemison Faust. “I was intrigued with the notion of presenting it all together in artworks—the layering, the flow of time, the reoccurrence of historical moments. I love working with the specificity of the time they represent, from the delicate calligraphy of the old letters to the annoying stickiness of our current fruit labels." Faust’s solo show, “Span of Time,” continues at the Atelier Newport in Newport, RI, through August 8


Jemison Faust, Span of Time #21 (2021), mixed media on board, 36 by 48 inches


What to do with those old blue jeans? A juried show, curated by Vincent DiMattio, at Monmouth University’s Center for the Arts, offers some clever ideas. As the website for “The Fine Art of Denim” notes, “denim, with all its symbols and dualities, is a common item of clothing that unites many around the globe….With so many styles available and ways to accessorize/manipulate the fabric, denim has historically allowed for a freedom of expression representing both individuality and shifts in cultural movements. Denim comes in a wide range of blues and other colors, washes, fades and textures making it a perfect, but not obvious, medium to create fine artwork. Denim that was discarded can open up a new way of looking, a startling way of seeing past the everyday. What we have abandoned, will be presented again, re-purposed from the lives we lived, to moments we experience together ‘forever in blue jeans.’” The show includes fanciful and engaging works selected from more than 100 entries, including V21 member Leah Poller’s fancifully trimmed telephone, below. Through August 14 at the Pollak Gallery in West Long Branch, NJ.


Leah Poller, Morning Joe, Part 1: Ma Belle…Corona Hotline, plastic, fabric, beads, glue, 6 by 12 by 11 inches


Ellen Weider has six paintings in the exhibition “Truth, Beauty, Freedom, Love” at the Painting Center in New York. “After the year we have had, what else is there?” ask the show’s curators. “In the face of tragedy, artists and poets have characterized these Bohemian ideals over and over again, saying that in spite of everything, have faith in truth, joy in beauty, hope in freedom, and above all things, trust in love. Curators Andrea Kantrowitz, Donna Scarpa, Kristin Osterberg, and Randi Reiss-McCormack chose artworks by sixteen Art File artists for the brilliant season finale celebrating the resilience of the human spirit.” Says the website about Weider’s contributions: “The ironic humor present in Weider’s work suggest spaces/houses free from humans and now inhabited by lively animated objects.” Opening reception, July 22; through August 14.


Ellen Weider, Bedecked, gouache, acrylic, and graphite on linen, 16 by 20 inches


Two Vasari21 members, Francie Lyshak and Francine Tint, are featured in a show of abstract paintings called “Space and Being” at the Joyce Goldstein Gallery in Chatham, NY, through August 15. "Both artists are united as non-objective color-field painters<" says the press release.
"However, the similarity ends as the two artists diverge: Lyshak’s paintings are paced and meditative while Tint’s canvases are full of emotive choreography. The glowing pigment fields in Francie Lyshak’s canvases, scraped with sculptural marks, create a surface relief that interacts with the ambient light. Francine Tint’s broad, gestural brushwork ‘roils with color eruptions and lyrical flows.’ As a color-based painter, Tint’s work explores emotion through high and low-key color achieving the luminous effects found in nature whereas Lyshak's textured oils are discrete objects in and of themselves. Lyshak and Tint channel their love of painting with such fierce energy that this experience inevitably envelops the viewer and compels us to join them in their worlds of space and being.”


Francine Tint, Star Wars (2021), acrylic on canvas, 21 by 17 inches

Francie Lyshak, Tidal Pool (2020), oil on linen, 22 by 29 inches
 
McKenzie Fine Art on the Lower East Side in Manhattan has a boffo show called “Colored Pencil Redux” featuring nearly 50 works by 16 artists. “The exhibition is a continuation of ‘Colored Pencil’ (2019), which explored the remarkable range of artistic expression that can be achieved with this ubiquitous, inexpensive, and portable art material,” says the gallery’s website. “With its huge range of colors and the ability to create hard or soft lines, liquid-like translucent fields and dense and waxy opaque surfaces, the colored pencil is a favorite drawing tool for many artists. While the first iteration of the exhibition featured both representational and abstract works, here the focus is on abstraction.” Definitely worth a visit. Through August 20.


Nancy Blum, Drawing 116 (2021), colored pencil on black paper, 12 by 9 inches



Richard Tinkler, Untitled (2021), colored pencil on paper, 13 by 9.5 inches
 
While gallery cruising over the weekend, I had the good fortune to catch works by Bruce Hamilton and Susanna Carlisle at a pop-up gallery called Kouri + Corrao in Santa Fe. These are new videos, two of them, called Birds and Bees, projected onto fanlike surfaces on the wall. Both video sculptures address “the consequences of climate change and man’s impact on the environment,” the artists write. “Many members of both species are threatened and their numbers have diminished substantially in the past several years. Both birds and bees are primary pollinators of plant life and without them there would not be many flowers or different varieties of plants and vegetables. The diet of all living animals would be seriously diminished not only in variety, but also in nutritional value of available food sources.” Like so many of Hamilton and Carlisle’s other video works, these manage to make something gorgeous and compelling from ecological disaster.


Susanna Carlisle and Bruce Hamilton, Bees (2021), video projected on to structures made of birch, plywood, and silk, 48 by 72 by 8 inches
 
V21 member Paula Castillo also had a beguiling intricate small sculpture in the same show.


Paula Castillo, Bund (2018), individually hand-twisted wire, 7 by 9.5 by 7.5 inches
 
And speaking of Hamilton and Carlisle, I have an interview for Sculpture magazine with their talented son, Jamie Hamilton, a sculptor, draftsman, and high-wire performance artist I first wrote about five years ago. The q&a appears this month in the print issue, but is not yet available online. Here’s a spread from the generously illustrated 14-page article.


 

Phil Garrett, another resident of Santa Fe, has an open studio August 7 and 8, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day, at the Lofts Building 700, 3600 Cerrillos Road, SF. The work, he says, includes “small paintings that I have been working on during the pandemic and several series of monotypes done with Hand Graphics master printer Michael Costello before 2020.” 


 

I still have a few slots left for the Zoom meeting with Karen Wilkin at 5 p.m. EDT on July 26, a week from today. Among her many accomplishments, Karen is an independent curator with a specialty in mid-century Modernism, a teacher in the master of fine arts program at the New York Studio School, and a critic for The Wall Street Journal, The New Criterion, and The Hudson Review. I have many questions to ask her, and I’m sure you will too. Email me at ajlandi33@gmail.com to reserve a place.

WHY DOES MAILCHIMP MYSTERIOUSLY CHANGE THE TYPEFACE TO YELLOW HERE? WE DON'T KNOW,  AND EVEN AFTER FOUR TEST EMAILS I CAN'T SEEM TO FIX IT!
But I hope you’ve all been following my adventures in Rotten Romance on Substack, a painfully funny account of my post-divorce encounters and relationships of the last 25 years. A friend asked me why I was writing these, did I find the experience cathartic? I’m not sure. Joan Didion once remarked that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live…. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” And then sometimes we tell ourselves stories just because they are damn good stories. You can sign on by clicking on any post in the archive here. The reviews from readers have been overwhelmingly positive: “This should be a Netflix series!” “This should be a book!” Yes, yes, yes!

See you in a couple of weeks.

Top: Odilon Redon, Eye Balloon (1878), charcoal and chalk on colored paper, 16.5 by 13 inches