Helen Frankenthaler, 1928–2011

1956

... The method and the scale of it was, of course, borrowed from Jackson Pollock's procedure, but it was totally devoid of Pollock's angst-ridden search for the sublime. Frankenthaler said later that, fresh from the north Atlantic, she painted from the memories absorbed into not only her mind but her wrists as well. Painting became once again, as in many of its best periods, an instinctive coalition of hand and eye and controlling intelligence.


www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/dec/28/helen-frankenthaler
www.nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/12/jerry-saltz-on-helen-frankenthaler-1928-2011.html?imw=Y&f=most-emailed-24h5

John Chamberlain, 1927–2011

© John Chamberlain Lo An, 1966 urethane foam and cord 12 x 18 x 18 in.
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Within a decade of becoming famous as the crushed-car sculptor, he grew weary of both the heavy metaphorical baggage usually hung on his pieces — that they represented the wreckage of Manifest Destiny or of the American dream itself — and the endless automotive questions. “What the hell — do you talk to a painter about what kind of paint he’s using?” he bellowed, sounding both menacing and comical, like Warren Oates doing a Walter Brennan impression. “It’s boring.”


www.nytimes.com/2011/05/09/arts/design/john-chamberlain-the-crushed-car-sculptor.html?pagewanted=all

Joan Mitchell

The Last Decade
11/3 - 1/4/12

... the late work still evinces a distinct confidence of gesture and mark-making, it is further characterized by an increased sense of freedom... a loss of “restraint,” an “abandon,” a “paring down.” Often presented in diptych format, Mitchell’s expansive late canvases remain evocative of the landscape...

http://www.cheimread.com/exhibitions/2011-11-03_joan-mitchell/#

Jeff Perrott

Coil

RW 45 (Crown)

... So the movement of the line is at once controlled and deliberate, and carefree and meandering; its sense is determined but unconcerned. It doesn’t seek the catharsis of action painting, opting instead for a slower, more deliberate, vulnerable movement of the hand. It talks about the possibility of a continuous painting, where each successive shift in color or momentum or direction is the result of an interplay of contingency and intuition, much like the successive moves that accumulate to form a day in the life.

www.jeffperrott.com/

Eve Armstrong

Run Off 2007

Arrangement: Gush 2007

Sarah Cale

Besmear, 2011 acrylic on cotton/linen blend

Agitate, 2011 Acrylic on linen

www.sarahcale.com/

Clare Woods

Black Vomit, 2008

Cold Garden, 2008

http://www.hepworthwakefield.org/what-s-on/event-3/

more Grant Cornett

... there’s something about a one person narrative that comes out of a long look at a place with no other initiative other than just being there then seeing what grows.


http://www.thisisthewhat.com/

Grant Cornett

Grant Cornett, photographer

http://grantcornett.com
http://thelivest1.com/

Lascaux Bull: On Savage Liberations and Their Tamings

... 
All words occur after looking; they are autopsies of seeing. In the best cases, these perceptual post-mortems can sharpen our understanding of what must have occurred in the moments of seeing (including clues about how and why seeing stopped); they build the experience retroactively, or they go on building it, by reformulating it; and, when they reach their limit, they provoke the viewer into more looking. They return the eyes to their object. 
...
Mike Barnes
http://notesandqueries.ca/lascaux-bull-on-savage-liberations-and-their-tamings/

Sigmar Polke Agate Window

Created in 2009 for the Grossmünster, in Zurich.

“I can accept the power of nature as religious,” Polke says.

www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/.../080512craw_artworld_schjeldahl
www.grossmuenster.ch/fileadmin/content/presse/media_Release_sigmar_polke_e.pdf

HOWARD HODGKIN  And the Skies Are Not Cloudy All Day  2007-8

Hodgkin’s paintings are indeed richest in episodes when pertaining to the intellectual life pictured through the color and texture of his panels. Aside from the personally oblique importance imbued in each picture, what remains in Hodgkin’s work is an intensely intellectual and formalized relic of color, touch and composition. Memory and emotional aside, what matters are instantaneous moments in the studio where the artist must make a specific decision regarding what color will be placed where and how.
http://www.thoughtsthatcureradically.com/
http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2011-11-03_howard-hodgkin/#

George Saunders

Photo of George Saunders by George Saunders of George Saunders by George Saunders, etc., etc.

... whatever I’ve learned is at such a weird, subtle, sub-verbal level that I can’t really articulate it. I imagine it might be something like being a good athlete (and here I really have to imagine. . . ). What does a really good tennis player know? There is, of course, some basic conceptual knowledge—the grip, general strategies for pacing oneself over the course of a match, or whatever. . . . but what really distinguishes that player from the (lesser) player he/she was five years earlier is a series of neurological/muscle impulses and responses that he/she has “learned” in some sub-verbal place.

My feeling is that it’s similar with art. You put in thousands of hours at the writing desk and the result is some refinement of your hundred-a-day micro-decisions. I am more convinced than ever that the talking and the doing are miles apart—probably mutually helpful in some complicated way, but still, miles apart.

The only thing I’ve really come to believe is that it’s all about putting in the hours. The poet Jon Fink related this story to me awhile back and it’s stuck with me. Robert Frost was apparently doing a college visit back in the 1950s and a student asked him some complicated, technical, conceptual question, of the “how must the poet proceed?” variety, and Frost answered: “Don’t worry, work.”

Now, at first this struck me as a little bit easy. (Hey thanks, Mr. Most Famous Poet in the World, I’d never considered not worrying before! That’s super!) But it’s starting to make sense to me. I’m a person who has always done a lot of thinking and worrying and planning and strategizing vis-à-vis my writing, but as I look back at the last 20 years, I can see that all the real big leaps, such as they were, took place in a sort of extra-conceptual place—they came at-speed, while writing, or over many days of writing—but in any case, through work, through the hours and hours of work, when the subconscious is being given free rein and hence can do the crazy things only it can do. That is, I never “decided” anything about writing that did me much good, that I can remember.

http://bombsite.com/issues/1000/articles/4996

Eija-Liisa Ahtila

VAAKSAUORA - HORIZONTAL, 2011
6-CHANNEL PROJECTED HIGH DEFINITION INSTALLATION; 6 MIN; DOLBY DIGITAL 5.1

...“Horizontal,” a video installation presenting a tall spruce tree rotated 90 degrees, is almost Minimalist by contrast. Displayed by six vertical projections, each showing a section of the tree, it spreads more than 35 feet across one wall. With its wind-blown branches heaving and swaying and its trunk whipping up and down, it looks more animal than plant, as if were a great, arboreal whale. A beautiful complement to the comparatively complicated “The Annunciation,” it makes a compelling case for the proposition that the miraculous may be just a shift of perspective away.

By KEN JOHNSON

Published: November 3, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/arts/design/eija-liisa-ahtila.html?_r=1

Karen Kilimnik

... For “Psyché,” a new production choreographed by Alexei Ratmansky for the Paris Opera Ballet, Kilimnik started from a selection of pre-existing paintings to create five massive, dreamlike backdrops, including an enchanting, moonlit forest and a garden resplendent with clouds, flowers and perfume bottles. She then augmented these with rhinestones, glitter and, for good measure, a host of two-dimensional objects like the five-foot snail that enters and exits the stage at various points during the performance...


http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/setting-the-stage-for-romance/

Turner, Monet, Twombly: Later Paintings

Moderna Museet

http://www.modernamuseet.se/

... Their late work has a looseness and an intensity that comes from the confidence of age, when notions of finish and completion are modified. A review of earlier preoccupations and a strong sense of mortality are also common characteristics of this period of life...

Poul Gernes

It was a question of keeping art’s social moral dimension in mind. In response to this problem, Poul Gernes was an incurable moralist. In an interview with Jens-Jørgen Thorsen, he constructed a model of comparison with other professions. “A doctor is there to repair a broken arm. A bicycle mechanic is there to put on a new crank. A carpenter repairs the broken leg of a chair. An artist is there to repair a broken morale.” (Aktuelt Weekend, July 15, 1962)

Mara Korkola Opening at Douglas Udell Gallery, Vancouver

Winter was hard 37, triptych, oil on panel, 14" x 11"/panel


Natural Response: Mara Korkola, Harry Savage + Robert Guest
Opening October 15
Douglas Udell Gallery 
1566 West 6th Avenue, Vancouver 

Red at the NGA, DC

Still Life with Asparagus and Red Currants
1696
Adriaen Coorte

The Girl with the Red Hat (detail)

c. 1665

Johannes Vermeer