Wangechi Mutu

Wangechi Mutu: artist, painter. I saw her work at the Weils contemporary art museum in Brussels. The show blew me away. Justin and I were really excited by the show and came back to the apartment and made watercolors all night.
I was reminded of her work by meandering googling, and since this time I have an internet connection, please look. It's all really gorgeous. Her craft is amazing, her imagery, spot-on.

Artist spotlight: studio visit with Julia Dzikiewicz

Julia Dzikiewicz: “Ms. Stevens visits Ms. Paul” Mixed media encaustic,  50"x30"

Yesterday I had the pleasure of visiting Julia Dzikiewicz's studio at Workhouse Center for the Arts. Julia paints in encaustic, spending months building up layers of pigmented wax. The result is luminous colors & textures, which she puts to work to send a message of freedom and equality. Her current work explores the history of American suffragists, the women who fought for voting rights. 
Julia writes,
"As a woman artist with a studio at the Workhouse Arts Center, a former prison, my work reflects upon the Suffragettes who were sent here. They were force-fed, put into solitary confinement and sleep deprived for demanding the right to vote. I often wonder how they awakened to the idea that they deserved basic human rights, in a time where this was considered absurd.  These paintings combine images of women from that era, portraits of figures in the suffrage movement, and icons of their oppression and their struggle for freedom."

Julia Dzikiewicz: "Awake" Encaustic, 14"x42"

Julia has been making political work for the past ten years. The seriousness of her political message is made more inviting by her playful style and sense of humor: one deceptively humorous picture depicts a suffragist bleeding psychadelic-colored paint from the nose. The sculptural additions to the frame à la Jasper Johns include the feeding tube that the imprisoned suffragist was force-fed with to counter her hunger strike. Other paintings incorporate zombies and dinosaurs into the stories.


Julia has exhibited widely in Virginia and elsewhere. Earlier bodies of work include meditations on global warming and 9/11. Visit her website to learn more, and check out the Workhorse Center.

Julia Dzikiewicz: "Martyr and Hero" Mixed media

some josh smith ......

I can just look at anything and paint it. Maybe not perfectly, but can do it. I can make a really good painting. Last year, I started making paintings of fish that way. I thought it would he nice to have a big painting on the wall of a fish jumping. That is exciting. It makes you wonder why it is there. It makes you proud of seeing it. There's a stupidity to it-and then again, it's nature. Courbet made a career out of that.
.......
I recently found a leaf, which I've been working with. I was in Pennsylvania, and I picked up this leaf and thought, "This will be easy to paint." I always try to paint things that are easy to paint. I never want to get hung up on trying to render something.

yves

Yesterday night, Wednesday, we went into an abstract café… the abstractionists were there. They are easy to recognize because they give off an atmosphere of abstract painting, plus you see their paintings in their eyes. Maybe I’m delirious, but I have the impression I see things like that. In any event, we sat down with themÉ. Then we began speaking of the book Yves Peintures. Later, I went to get it from the car and I laid it down on the table. At the very first few pages the abstractionists’ eyes began to change. Their eyes lit up and in the depths, pure, beautiful single colors appeared.

women

Maureen Gallace

Francesca DiMatteo

Kristen Schiele

Josephine Halvorson

Peter Doig

Aha, found the picture I was looking for:

Briey (interior) 1999 oil on canvas 98 1/2 x 77 inches

Happy New Year

Hi! Happy New Year! My apologies for the radio silence. I hope all have enjoyed a happy holiday. I have- I flew back to the states for two weeks to visit friends and family. I am now back in Paris, ready to get to work. Once I have some materials I'll be starting two large paintings. Finally the Centre Pompidou is no longer on strike, so I'll get to see Paris' modern art collection.

Some recent paintings, made and seen

Window, oil on canvas, something like 32x36"
Comes from my old appartment in Brooklyn. A literal reading: the light coming through the window in the morning, in summer. What I'm interested in pushing: reduction to squares/shapes; "void"/field of color (green), especially within a pictoral image; plants taking over; disintegration of image.
It's more or less done, though I want to make the grey a little thicker and richer. This probably wouldn't show in a picture, anyway.   :- /  The new paintings I'm starting should be descendents of this: semi-abstracted interiors, loving geometric shapes but not necessarily hard-edged, thinking about perspective, invite lines/colors to have a life of their own.

Expensive Chair and Kate Moss and Nightorchids, each about 12x14" and preferred seen as diptich.

Little paintings, in which I'm thinking about scale, perspective, and creating moods.

There's a few more in progress, but I'll wait on them, save the aforementioned Two Girls Brushing Their Hair:

 which seems particularly obnoxious to photograph: 

This is the blue color from Old Holland, which is over yellow and so looks even more vibrant. ("Scheveningen Blue Light")

Oh, and the girl on the right does not have zombie arms, it's just not painted yet!
This picture has a long and troubled history, so I'll be glad to be done with it.


 _____________________

 There's several artists I have on the brain:
Peter Doig

 

David Hockney

  

  

Yves Klein

 

Useful links:
Centre Pompidou 
David Hockney 
Yves Klein Archives 
Peter Doig at Gavin Brown's Enterprise 
Peter Doig at Saatchi

Out and about, Musee D'orsay again

They had this really nice John Currin!

 sike :-/