Nontraditional

I deploy this word as a tag on my blog for artists using materials in ways that one would have said, when I was in Art school, “that wasn’t how we were taught to use those in Art school.” Paint on canvas, pencil on paper, etc. Maybe I’ll switch to multimedia eventually…

The context for this observation is that I am in the early stages of working on glass- see below. Glass is definitely a nontraditional support for painting, for a couple of reasons that are obvious to me now- it’s the worst combination of heavy and fragile, and it’s definitely not a permanent substrate for water-based paints like acrylic (all you have to do is spritz it with water and the paint, even if dry, will rub right off). Regular readers will know that impermanence is just fine with me.

While landfill waste diversion isn’t a subject for this work, it is something that matters to me- all of my other installation work, whether the cubes or my recent interactive pieces, employ material reuse. In the later case not only are the cubes reused studies, the supports, including the foam core on which the cubes are mounted, are all upcycled– only the magnets and some “virgin” paint or media are first-use.

There are still themes/ideas of contradiction to work with- the contradiction of paint that appears to be free of a support; the layering of “sides” of the cubes which is undone by them being flat shapes rather than the edges of a solid viewed in perspective. Given my recent re-writing of my artist statement, I like adding another modality (another “and”) to my practice as well. I think eventually the sheets of glass will get stacked in a way that requires the viewer to move so that the cubes “edges” align- I’m intrigued, as a means to center contemplation, by strategies that highlight any requirement for the viewer to be present and engaged.

I am also taking time to revisit work by and words about artists who work with transparent supports- Nathalie Cohen, Helen Pashgian, Susan Meyer, Ivelisse Jiménez, Craig Kauffman, and in particular Ronald Davis and Sali Muller. If dear reader has suggestions I’d love to hear about them.

Michael Brennan

Earlier this month, Two Coats of Paint invited painter Kim Uchiyama to sit down with Michael Brennan to discuss “Floating Weeds,” Brennan’s fourth solo show at Minus Space. In their wide-ranging conversation, they discuss Japanese film, Russell Lee’s photographs, Charles Olson’s poetry, Venetian lagoons, architect Carlo Scarpa, Homer, and more.

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Guillaume Dénervaud

Hyperallergic said Guillaume’s Ozone Station is one of several shows to see in NYC this November. Anchored by a sequence of gateway-like paintings, Ozoned Station features visions of systems and environments that collapse distinctions between the organic and the built, the microscopic and the galactic

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Kim Tschang-Yeul

For 2023’s ADAA The Art Show, Tina Kim Gallery presented a historical presentation highlighting two seminal Asian and Asian-American artists: sculptor Minoru Niizuma (b. 1930, Tokyo; d. 1998, New York) and painter Kim Tschang-Yeul (b. 1929, Pyongannamdo; d. 2021, Paris). When Kim moved to New York in 1965, Pop Art prevailed as the artistic lifeblood of the city. It was in New York that Kim began his earliest experiments into painting the bulbous abstract forms that would later lead to his signature style—the waterdrop.

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Richard Hogan

Richard, who shows with Pie Projects, came to New Mexico as a child when his parents settled in Albuquerque. He was immediately struck by the vast open space of New Mexico, and space would become a major factor in his painting. Art critic William Peterson wrote of Hogan’s work in 2002: ” Hogan’s reductive linear vocabulary implies a return to beginnings, to the inscribing of linear marks as the most archaic of art making activities. Yet, despite his deep interest in Paleolithic and Neolithic art, his inquiry into the basic impulse of drawing is not so much a nostalgia for the “primitive” as it is instead a search for a vocabulary that will read as independent or autonomous, and not as “abstracted.” Following the Modernist tradition of interrogating the formal bases of his art, his achievement has been to make line a medium of painting.”
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Joanne Ungar

FRONT ROOM GALLERY recently presented Part and Parcel —
a solo show of new work by New York artist, Joanne Ungar. Joanne Ungar’s cast wax compositions are created with discarded waste from mass produced products, specifically the cardboard boxes—the refuse that is instantly disposed of once the box is opened.

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