While looking through some older posts on ARTchipel, one of my favourite blogs, I found some lovely paintings of abandoned spaces by Philadelphia, PA artist Morgan Craig. His work is pretty amazing, actually – he makes quite large paintings (oil on linen at that), and as I’m partial to representational realism as well as the aesthetic of abandoned spaces I think it’s pretty safe to say that I am in awe.
This Heartbeat of America 72” x 54” (2011)
Here’s what Craig himself has to say about his work:
I believe that architectural structures act as both repositories and as vehicles for memory by profoundly influencing culture and identity and by providing a tangible framework through which facets of a society can be expressed. I have been inspired to build a body of work dealing with how identity is influenced by the types of architectural edifices present in a given landscape. All must take into account the forgotten factory, asylum, or prison. Neglected, ignored, or often instilling rancor in the public, these buildings paradoxically offer one the most scintillating of subject matter: how beautiful the bitter pill. My work is not merely a method of documentation, but a visual forum where one may question what it is about these edifices that instills such emotion in people. While evidence of these pasts or present-day difficulties may not be pleasant, I feel it imperative that societies realize their impact on the past, present, and future concepts of identity and history.
– Morgan Craig
Nothing But Driftwood, Caught In A Riptide – 72” x 54” (2012)
Sold! I love the idea behind these paintings. Like I said, I too find abandoned spaces inspirational, though instead of painting, my preferred medium is photography. As I said in an earlier post:
I like to go into abandoned buildings and look around, especially old factories and commercial buildings, often taking photos. What I find most inspiring about these places is not so much the decay, but the traces of life. Every time I am in an abandoned space, I like to imagine what it was like when occupied; the people moving and talking, the sounds and colours of a busy workspace or public space. There’s a kind of weightiness to realizing how people used these spaces day after day, year after year – and now they are no longer “for” anything, they simply “are”.
Shared aesthetic interest aside, though, the craft involved in Craig’s work puts it into an entirely different category. Coming from a fine art background myself with many, many hours of painting in oil under my belt, I really appreciate the skill and virtuosity of Craig’s work. I’m always thrilled to see anyone painting at all these days, let alone representational realism in oil, let alone work this good. I’m gushing like a schoolgirl, I know, but it’s warranted.
Morgan Craig has exhibited throughout the U.S.A. Canada, Europe, and Australia, including OK Harris in New York City, SPACES in Cleveland, the Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts and the Australian National University. Craig has received numerous awards including, the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (2007, 2011), and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship for 2006 and 2008. He has also been invited to several residencies including, Atelje Stundars in Finland, the Macdowell Colony, and Bemis Center for the Contemporary Arts. During the fall semester of 2010, he was the visiting artist at the Australian National University.
– Saatchi Online
Trickle Down 72” x 54” (2011)
If you would like to see more of Craig’s amazing work (and why wouldn’t you), check out his website or his Saatchi Online portfolio. He’s also currently exhibiting in group shows at Cazenovia College Art Gallery (until Dec. 7) in Cazenovia, NY, and at the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington, DE (until January 2013). Craig is also currently exhibiting a solo show on at Penn State (the Gallery at Penn College) until December 16. Go check out his work if you get a chance!
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John Baldessari is pretty epic, a towering figure in art (literally and figuratively) . Conceptual art is pretty funny to me; I suspect he also has a sense of humour about it, too.
- I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art
- The Pencil Story
- Stonehenge (With Two Persons) Blue
- Throwing Three Balls In The Air To Get A Straight Line (Best Of Thirty-Six Attempts)
Anyhow, Baldessari has been around for long time and he’s a big deal. Still not convinced? If you aren’t impressed and charmed by the 6 minute short film narrated by Tom Waits at the end of this post, you are probably dead inside.
As described on the youtube page:
The epic life of a world-class artist, jammed into six minutes.
Narrated by Tom Waits.
Commissioned by LACMA for their first annual “Art + Film Gala” honoring John Baldessari and Clint Eastwood.directed by Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman (http://gosupermarche.com/)
edited by Max Joseph (http://www.maxjoseph.com/)
written by Gabriel Nussbaum (http://www.bankstreetfilms.com)
cinematography by Magdalena Gorka (http://magdalenagorka.com/)
& Henry Joost
produced by Mandy Yaeger & Erin WrightThank you to John Baldessari and his studio. (http://www.baldessari.org/)
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I’ve written about Chuck Close before. He’s amazing, in short. He has worked with really large portraits of peoples’ faces worked in different kinds of grid treatments since the 60s, really playing with the line between theory and craft. It’s a fascinating exploration of what it means to be a painter in the contemporary art world, especially given his longevity as an artist and the great decline of painting as a force in art since the 60s. Imagine my excitement when I came across this great article in Design Milk, as Chuck Close is having a new show at Pace Gallery in New York!
Chuck Close – Phil (2011-12) – work & detail
Arguably the greatest painter alive, Chuck Close presents amazing new work at Pace Gallery in New York. His ability to calculate color is super-human and his perseverance in the face of dyslexia, prosopagnosia (face-blindness), and partial quadriplegia (!!!) is nothing short of incredible. Google him to your heart’s content…. though I would suggest starting with The Colbert Report)
– David Behringer for Design Milk
Obviously Close is still working with new approaches as this is essentially his hallmark, but when I read this, my jaw literally dropped open:
His newest process: computer-aided watercolor. For these, Close selected and arranged swatches of watercolor squares from over 14,000 he hand painted separately. The finished works are printed on watercolor paper WITH watercolor paint in several layers of ONLY cyan, magenta & yellow. Inches from these, you can see the halo of colors that builds up each square.
Chuck Close – Kara (2012) work & detail
UH WHAT. The mind boggles. Once again I am both inspired and awestruck.
For those of you lucky enough to be able to go, the show is currently on until Dec. 22 at Pace Gallery on West 25th in NYC. For the rest of us, there’s the internet and books. If you are the bookish type, Chuck Close: Work
“Chuck Close: WORK” is a definitive piece that fills in any small holes about the story of this artist that might be obscured in some out of print catalog, as well as talking heavily about his process. If you are in the market for a book that gives the full Chuck Close biography while supplementing itself with beautiful illustrations and plenty of dialog about his process, do not hesitate to purchase this book.
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Scott Conary is a painter originally from the east coast but now living & working in Portland, OR. It seems like every American painter I’ve noticed over the last year lives in Brooklyn or Portland. In any case, I was hanging out on Pinterest and saw a great painting of a cut of meat that I pinned to my own board immediately. I’ve been going back to look at it for a week or two now and it still captivates me. Unlike many artworks on Pinterest, this one was correctly attributed and even linked to the artist’s site, so here we are, Scott Conary. Lo and behold, not one painting of meat, but lots of them – these are 3 of my favourites – click on the thumbnails to see larger versions.
- Scott Conary – lamb chop 4
- Scott Conary – lamb chop
- Scott Conary – wall chop
- Rembrandt – Carcass of Beef – 1657
- Soutine – Side of Beef 1924-5
The meat paintings are, understandably, the pieces that elicit the most questions. The first is usually, “Why meat?” The glib answer is “you can only paint so many pears.” The longer answer is that the meat is beautiful and mildly evocative. We have a much more complicated reaction to a hunk of lamb than we do to pepper. The meat is the stuff of us. We are, after all, meat. The smell shifts while I work. The color changes. I have vivid memories of meals with family and friends built around meat.It’s beautiful, desirable, and it’s unclean.
– Scott Conary
It’s hard to look at a painting of meat and not think of Rembrandt and Soutine, of course. Which is not to say that Conary’s work is deriviative, but rather that it exists within a tradition of still life that goes back centuries.
- Scott Conary – lamb chop 4
- Scott Conary – lamb chop
- Scott Conary – wall chop
- Rembrandt – Carcass of Beef – 1657
- Soutine – Side of Beef 1924-5
The French term for “Still Life” is “Nature Morte“, which translates literally as “dead nature”. Seems fitting here. There is a lushness to paintings of meat that is simultaneously attractive and repellant, gruesome and beautiful. There’s something kind of transcendant about that, to me. That said, Conary’s oeuvre is substantially broader than paintings of meat. Conary’s work, while very painterly, rests strongly within traditions of representational realism which I find reassuring to see in this age of installation and performance art. I suggest you check out his portfolio site, there is lots to like.
Is Instagram Conceptual Art?
So, I was talking with a friend today about conceptual art and it got me to thinking. Before I go on at great length, it’s worthwhile to briefly describe what conceptual art is. In 1967, Sol Lewitt, one of the original great proponents of the movement described it thusly:
To grossly oversimplify, the premise behind conceptual art is that the artistic concept is more important than the art object, to the extent (in some cases) that the art object itself is not only secondary but essentially unnecessary. This, for example, is a conceptual art “painting” by Joesph Kosuth.
Joseph Kosuth – Art as Idea as Idea (1967)
Personally I look at most forms of modernism and especially conceptualism as a “get it?” moment. It’s not that this kind of art is a joke, but that it relies on the same reflex of juxtaposition and inversion as a joke does. Modernism is essentially reactive. Conceptualism is the event horizon of modernism as defined by such “great men” as Clement Greenberg who advocated art for art’s sake, claiming that painting (for instance) should avoid anything except “pure” painting – no perspective, no external subject, no picture plane, no frame… Essentially conceptualism goes one step further and has no object. Get it? I mean, yes, it does make me laugh, but I understand that it’s serious. There’s an undeniable undercurrent of humour, but hey, much of wit and cleverness is based in humour to some extent.
Throwing Three Balls In The Air To Get A Straight Line (Best Of Thirty-Six Attempts) – John Baldessari
Within conceptual art the role of photography is traditionally documentary (see the Baldessari above). Art photography is another thing altogether. When looking at art photography, a lot of it simply seems to be “well this may look like a snapshot to you but I intend it as art”. To me, this sounds like conceptual art. This bears some explanation. Not to be confused with conceptual photography, where the photographer is setting up scenes or whatever to communicate a specific idea as opposed to documentary art photography (not to be confused with photography used to document art as in the Baldessari above) . Documentary art photography is stuff like the work of Ansel Adams, while conceptual art photography is stuff like the work of Cindy Sherman.
Ansel Adams – Yosemite | Cindy Sherman – Film Still 21
Back to my earlier comment – positioning work that looks like snapshots as art simply because that’s your intent sounds like conceptual art to me. For instance, talking about art photography, I’m really into surfaces, and I look for interesting juxtapositions of form and texture, often incorporating light and reflection. It’s not documentary photography, I don’t think, in that I’m capturing fleeting impressions. I do call it art. However, I’m often snapping pics on auto with my cheapo point-and-shoot or instagramming off my iPod (not even an iPhone) so it’s not like the shot is about craft – especially as my main means of dissemination is through social media. These, for example, are a few of my instagram shots.
On instagram you can tell the art photographers from the snapshot takers, and it’s all about the image, right? You can tell the difference between the what-I-ate, my cat, duckface , vacation shots types and the “art shots”.
This strikes me as a stance pretty closely aligned to “it’s art because I say it’s art” à-la Duchamp, which is essentially what conceptual art is all about (at least in one sense) – especially if there’s no real photographic “craft” involved.
What I’m getting at is that conceptual art is generally derided outside the fine art world, but art photography that resembles conceptual art (in a formal sense) is very much praised and celebrated, especially in social media. I’m still uncertain how this came about, but I do think that this counts as a populist expression of conceptual art.
In any case, it’s certainly food for thought.
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