favorite artists ... culled from Facebook ...

some folks to look at ...


Ad Reinhardt
Ellsworth Kelly
Alfred Jensen
Le Corbusier
Tom Nozkowski
Jackson Pollock
Mark Rothko
Gene Davis
PBS - Remembering Abstract Color field Painter Kenneth Noland
Sam Gilliam
Larry Poons
Pat Steir
Rudolf Stingel
Jack Whitten

Donald Judd
Richard Serra
Anish Kapoor
James Turrell

Giotto
Sassetta
Petrus Christus (portrait of a Carthusian monk)
Master of the Osservanza
Memling
Caravaggio
James Ensor
Philip Guston
Ed Ruscha
Frederick Church
Degas
Vincent Van Gogh
Charles Burchfield
Mauricio Lasansky (the Nazi Drawings)
Willem DeKooning
Robert Rauschenberg (especially erased DeKooning Drawing)
Larry Rivers
Anselm Kiefer
Arnulf Rainer
Basquiat
Kerry James Marshall

Marcel Duchamp
Gertrude Stein
Joseph Beuys
Laurie Anderson

Eva Hesse
Yayoi Kasama
Robert Smithson
Hannah Wilke
Ana Mendieta
Yoko Ono

Jeremy Blake
Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Cai Guo-Qiang

Mel Chin

Lillian Beyond Reach

... engage

I am reengaging this blog ... and I hope others will too. I'm posting those things which privilege art and the thinking that goes on around art. So much distracts from this, it seems appropriate that there be spaces like this where this is the only focus. So links, resources, musings ... Saul Ostrow sent me a link to Tom Huhn's recommended reading list. It's a monthly list that you can subscribe to ... the readings are awesome. I wish I had more time to spend with them. Tom Huhn, Ph.D. Reading List

Exhortation to make remarkable – September 14, 2011

Our chief charge as artists is to bring ourselves to our work … to extend through this work to an audience that which elicits passions within us … This is to some degree the nature of ambition for artists. How do I “take to the next level” … elevate above the expected those things I wish to give to my audience?

Every opportunity to make work, every opportunity to engage an audience, is a challenge to our ambitions. How do we achieve these? How do we make remarkable that which we do?

It is to us to exceed our own expectations, to exceed that which is adequate … to make exceptional.

relevant quotes

"... I would like to ask a question about the exact involvement in a work of art. What kind of love or grief is there in it? I don't understand, in a painting, the love of anything except the love of painting itself. If there is agony, other than the agony of painting, I don't know exactly what kind of agony that would be. I am sure external agony does not enter very importantly into the agony of our painting." - Ad Reinhardt statement: Artist's Session at Studio 35 (1950) taken from p. 298,

_New York School Abstract Expressionit: Artists by Choice_ by Marika Herskovic

"[Pat] Steir exemplifies the old rule that the best painters are always engaged in a learning process, at which they almost always get better." - Stephen Mueller, "Pat Steir: Cheim & Read" (Review), _Art in America_, June/July 2011, p. 186

Cheim & Read - Pat Steir Artist's Page

practicing ...

It is a practice. It is all a practice. Each day is filled with subtle adjustments edging infinitesimally toward the goal of a project destined for failure. It is ever this striving that moves us … and I mean us … the collective … forward.

I have thought for a long time on the meaning of “goodness.” What can it possibly mean? In some limited way it is a measuring against some criteria. People say over and over again, all meaning many different things … “Is it a ‘good’ painting?” is he or she “a ‘good’ painter.” You would think, used in this context that “good” would have no real ethical content, that it would simply refer to some quality … some ascertainable quality.

I have known for some time that art is so much religion and that the conceptions of it inspires as much passion as any religious belief. There are attached to our definitions a vigor that spills over into the world with righteousness. With that “good” represents clearly a passing of judgment on something other than the quality of a work – or in addition. The appellation of “good painter”, “good artist” transcends these limits and extends to the quality of humanity … to be revered … or conversely … “a poor painter, a bad painter” … to be reviled.

I am as fervent in these opinions as all my associates.

A good painter:

• A commitment to the practice – a love and a longing to take up the challenges of that history and that material.
• A dwelling on a goal … ever moving forward … a program within the work – (for me it has been the goal of making manifest in material ideas in the same kind of why that the Gothic Cathedrals embody the ideas of Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Abbot Suger. So that my work is not an illustration but a body.)
• For the work to be driven by an internal dialogue, which incorporates and responds to the external but which has a subject of its own.