If you’re looking for a terrific art-related DVD then I have a great one for you. It’s a film by Marion Cajori on artist Chuck Close.

I honestly didn’t know what expect when I ordered this as I sort of did on a whim but it was so good I’m on my third viewing.

I understand that some of you may or may not know who Chuck Close is. For the record he is a contemporary artist who paints people’s faces as his subject matter. if you want a quick overview then head on over to Chuck Close on Wikipedia.

The scenes and closeups of him painting as some of the best I have ever seen (and I have seen a lot!) One segment even has the brush appear like it had a camera on it – who knows, maybe it did but it was so cool to see art via this unique angle.

The film also interviews a lot of his contemporary art friends and colleagues. Big names in the art world, like: Brice Marden, Elizabeth Murray, Dorothea Rockburne, Lucas Samaras, Alex Katz, Janet Fish, and other art world heavyweights.

The interviews are really excellent and very well done. As an added bonus you typically get to see them in their own studios so you can get a glimpse of their working spaces and they also feature some of that artist’s work.

If you don’t know Chuck’s story and the many hardships he has endured in his life I won’t spoil that for you. All I can say is that’s it’s immensely interesting. It’s just amazing how productive he is and how he has created an environment to support him.

Also, if you are not familiar with Mr. Close’s process you will be in for a real treat. I was completely fascinated with how creative he is given the methodology he has set up for himself. It’s such an ingenious way of getting the work done. You’ll see.

Finally, the film just left me inspired. To see what he has struggled with and how he continues to paint “portraits” of such raw beauty will downright floor you. I highly recommend it for yourself and/or a gift. It’s that good.

Find it here on Amazon: Chuck Close

Abstract art versus realistic (or figurative) art has been going on for most of the 20th century and continues to today. Is one really better than the other?

I know a lot of abstract artists (I am thinking painters) and I know just as many figurative painters. To me, personally, it doesn’t matter. Art is big enough (again, in my opinion) to encompass both.

A lot of people (including me) have much more of a feel for abstract art but I could really care less what form or style of painting you choose to practice. Why? because it’s really about a type of visual language that you choose to develop and engage in.

So many people tell me, “Abstract art’s crap. It’s just a bunch of squiggly lines on a canvas. Hell, my kid could do that!” I go back a ways so I have heard this (in multiple forms) more times than I care to think about.

Does it bother me? Nope, I don’t care. I know art as an artist (the making of it) and I know the history of art a lot better than most. I can tell you why and who is associated in movements of art from Fauvism to Cubism to Dada to Pop art to Abstract Expressionism to Minimal art to the new expressionism and beyond.

Not trying to brag. I just know this stuff and have been fascinated with it for a long, log time. And, so I know where modernism (The period from roughly 1860′s through the 1970′s) comes from and why it evolved.

To me, it was always the same thing. Paint on canvas. I don’t care whether you’re talking about DeKooning or Peter Paul Rubens. It’s all the same stuff. Pigment on canvas. In my own work I never wanted to hide that. It always felt a bit fake to me.

Why would anyone paint in an abstract manner anyway? Again, as I mentioned, it is a way to create a unique visual language where one can explore other aspects of pictorial space. I never could get at that doing representational work. It didn’t work for me.

I started drawing when I was about 6 or 7 and soon learned I had a kind of aptitude for it. I could create a visual representation of an object in space. I had an innate sense of visual proportion and pictorial balance. Kids even paid me in candy (my favorite, Strawberry Twizzlers, of course!) in grade school to draw pictures for them. I seemed to them (I think) kinda magical.

But as I progressed in my art education I started to see other pictorial possibilities because I started to be exposed to artists like Matisse, Picasso, Cezanne, Degas for starters who began to really question and expand what painting could be. That really clicked for me.

The question for me (and I’m sure a whole bunch of other artists) was, “Now what?” So I could really draw and represent objects in space with real facility, but, “Now what do I do?”

Just trying to represent reality didn’t do much for me. I didn’t just want to create “pretty pictures.” I wanted a much more raw experience. I didn’t want to do coloring book art to impress my friends – that was gone. I wanted to be visually surprised when I worked. And I wanted to acknowledge in a real direct way that I was working with materials (whatever they were – whether it was paint or not)

That became my working methodology – trying to create the painting as I went. To discover. To have the process reveal the painting. Not knowing the end result was fine. That was cool to me. That is still cool to me.

Conversely, what bothered me about representational art was that it can be too easy. That all you have to do is see what’s in front of you and accurately depict it. I never got that. It was too easy. I could already do that.

The problem I ran into and which I think a lot about now is really developing a visual language. I think that trips up a lot of people. You really need some type of visual pictorial vehicle to communicate with. I used to bounce from here to there, different materials, different process and you can really scatter yourself very easy.

Artists like Cezanne and Matisse and Picasso and women artists like Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler (just some examples off the top of my head) provided us with a rigorousness of thinking about pictorial space. They were up for that challenge. And it brought out the best in them.

Bottom line is – whether you work with a figurative language or an abstract one, what does it matter? What matters is that your work can be continued so that it provides you with a vehicle to dig deeper as an artist, to not settle for the easiest solution but to really expand YOUR notion of what art can be. When you can do that – then you start to play a new game. A serious game.

Top Image:
“River” 1989
Joan Mitchell
oil on canvas/diptych
© Estate of Joan Mitchell

Second Image:
“Ville d’Avray” ca. 1867
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art

I have always been a fan of Elizabeth Murray’s paintings. Maybe it is just the fun, the outrageous forms and colors, the silliness, the fine art – everything sort of coming together in one piece.

And they always look (and feel) like they were fun and engaging to work on. It is the sheer physicality of her paintings that really impress upon you when you see them “live.”

She always felt to me what a committed painter should be – smart, daring, resolute. And she pulled from everywhere – from Cezanne, from Pollock, from comic books, cartoons, to ordinary, everyday items like plants and coffee cups. Nothing was out of bounds.

She left the art world way too early (at 66) a number of years ago.

The painting above, called Excavation, by Willem DeKooning was the painting Elizabeth mentioned in the video above.

There is some additional info and an insightful interview with Elizabeth about her early painting influences at the site below.

Elizabeth Murray Interview

Elizabeth Murray Biography

Elizabeth Murray, 66, Artist of Vivid Forms, Dies

The great Color Field (and in my opinion, one of the most underrated colorists of the 20th century) artist Kenneth Noland died a few weeks ago. I was always a fan of his work as well as the other seminal Color Field painters like Jules Olitsky, Helen Frankenthaler, Barnett Newman and Morris Louis.

I always liked the sort of “impersonalness” of it (hey, did I just make up a word?) but it really was fostered by a kind of reaction to abstraction expressionism with it’s bold gestures, bravado, physical paint.

I have had the same thoughts about Ellsworth Kelly’s work as well. It is a kind of painting that seems utterly devoid of human contact. No paint slashing, broad gestures, emotional subject matter.

“Just” large areas of precisely laid color. They feel as though they have no beginning and no end. It just looks liked they just appeared out of nowhere.

Color Field painting is generally associated with “staining” and large fields of pure color. “Staining” can be found in many work but Arshile Gorky was one of the first to use the “staining” technique, creating large fields of unbroken color.

But THE painting that changed it all for the Color Field Painters was a huge painting (measuring 7 by 10 feet) called “Mountains and Sea” by Helen Frankenthaler in 1952. It has the effect of a watercolor but it is actually created with oil paint done thinly and in washes. (see another beautiful work by Frankenthaler below)

Both Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland saw this painting in Frankenthaler’s New York City studio and it had an immediate and profound effect on their own work.

But back to Noland. What was interesting about Noland was that he used “Series” as formats for his output. Some of his major series were called Chevrons, (see image below) Targets and Stripes. This really gave him a structure to explore color and it’s relationship to it’s support.

Really to experience these works you have to see them in person. Reproductions, obviously, give you visual details but it is seeing the scale, the color, the immediacy, the canvas, that Mr. Noland’s paintings really sing.

There is such an unassuming and somewhat strange beauty to his paintings that, to me, anyway, is like no other. Now that is is no longer with us I predict his work will get the due it deserves.

I wanted to write a little something about one of my favorite artists, David Hockey, on the occasion of his first exhibition of new oil paintings in New York in 12 years at Pace Wildenstein Gallery.

Lot of people either love him or hate him. They find him too eccentric or too campy or too gay or too something. But you have to admire the pure visual beauty and virtuosity of his work and his prolific output. That he has had amazing success doesn’t hurt either.

The guy has pretty much used any and every media including photography, photo collage, fax drawings, full stage opera stage sets and recently paintings on his iphone among others. But this series of work returned him to oil painting and the landscapes of his youth in East Yorkshire, England.

There is just something brilliant about the freshness of these pieces. This might sound strange to say but I always feel happy when I look at this work. There is just something very life affirming about his work. Reminds me a lot of Mattise who spoke of his art being like “a good armchair”

Hockney began painting plain air in the English countryside back in 2005 – often producing 3-4 canvases a day and painting in all seasons. As Hockney explains, “It’s only having seen a tree’s inner structure, with its branches laid bare in winter,” Hockney explains, that one “learns to experience, and then to render, that tree’s subsequent summer fullness—and then vice versa.”

Hockney devised a intriguing method for painting large scale canvases outside that were impervious to rain, wind and other natural elements. He also did the landscape in multiple canvases which he then assembled and completed in his studio (you can see this with the image above – painting is in 4 panels)

I am always interested to see what Hockney’s up to particularly at the later stages of his career. You can check out some additional visuals of the paintings (which are scheduled to be up through end of December 2009) at Pace Wildenstein.