3 painting exhibitions of lesbigay interest

[rri...@east.sun.com]

Some Current Painting Exhibitions of Gay Interest

Folks,

Boston and New York currently have a couple of exhibitions of paintings of
possible gay interest:

contemporary openly gay painters Ken Beck and Thomas Woodruff
contemporary painter Jane Smaldone, who has made use of what seems
to be generic female imagery in her abstract paintings

Here are the details:

Ken Beck, "Trompes and Tropes," September 5-30
Galery NAGA
67 Newbury Street
Boston, MA 02116

The first Ken Beck picture I saw was a stunning, and enormous,
canvas of a giant baseball cap, done in a complex thatch of color
and tone recalling impressionists and abstract expressionists,
and looming darkly like a figure by Seurat.

Beck has done series of paintings, drawings and prints, well-known
in Boston, of monumental visored caps, teddy bears, fire plugs, and
male nudes. I think some of the work depicts leathermen.

To me, who had never seen a roomful of his paintings live before,
the current show looks like a further step toward abstraction and
maybe surrealism. It evoked the mysterious large everyday objects
of Philip Guston's late work, or the biomorphic pictures of Arp
and Picasso.

But the pictures lack the sourness of these painters. They exude
optimism: they're bright and blatant, open compositions that
scintillate with broad flecked fields of gaudy color. A public
kind of painting with nothing institutional about it.

The works include large canvases of bollards (huge bulbs of iron
attached to wharves that tether large ships?) and other massive,
simple but imposing industrial shapes; an abstract gay love
painting; a series of paintings that pose questions about painting
as a vocation that include imagery of palettes and blackboards.
Plus some more monstrous caps.

Each of these objects is elevated to celebrity status, given
center stage, regally alone in jokey majesty, and blankly
radiating the hot kliegs of Beck's chiaroscuro, resplendent
in a rainbow raiment of his modelling.

Beck is openly gay as a painter, and has been interviewed at
length in the past in Bay Windows, a Boston gay weekly paper.

Jane Smaldone, "New Paintings," September 23-October 21
Nielsen Gallery
179 Newbury Street
Boston, MA 02116

Smaldone's previous painting has been abstract: dark glowing
canvasses with large recurring shapes that tunnel into glowing
depth and suggest female genitalia, among other things. The
paintings have a curious power of evocation: they sustain
a feeling of mystery as you look at them.

Her current show is completely figurative and a single motif
is used for all the works: a vase and flowers on the sill
of a window framed by lace curtains.

The compositions of these paintings inherit the shapes, colors
and moods of her previous abstractions, though they are flatter.
But the flatness is relieved by a translucent ghostlike application
of oily paint which is new but adds to the older sense of mystery.

It is also relieved by other features continued from the earlier
work: a view into depth, now pictorial; a tactile quality, which
is not just the physical texture of paint---dark matte mass and
crusty lights, but depicting different surfaces: the intricacy of
backlit lace, the dark velvet mass of a petal, the shallow transpa-
rency of shadows on polished vase, table, promontory or sea.

In this show the symmetrical contours of the vase and the drooping
curve of the gathered curtains supply vaginal and maternal, opening
and enveloping, metaphors.

The flat, dark and oily surfaces, fixed subject neatly framed by
window and curtain, disarming naive depiction, and the use of
tiny but ancient motifs such as lone insects recall Flemish and
Dutch flower painters and Matisse.

But it's a dark, northern variation on Matisse. The eerie contrast,
twilight lighting and color, and envelope of mystery and quiet makes
you think of Albert Pinkham Ryder and colonial American painters.

Thomas Woodruff, "The Secret Charts" at P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York City
(have no address or dates)
September 1995 ART IN AMERICA has a review by Michael Duncan
on page 110

I haven't seen this show. I saw about half a dozen of Woodruff's
paintings in "The Anxious Salon" show at MIT's List Gallery last
year or so. These were done in the style of Dutch 17th century oil
portraits on panels. They were all monochromatic and carefully done.

One group showed a weeping circus clown, each painting a different
color. The other group showed strange heraldic emblems, including a
severed human heart pierced I think by darts or nails. The captions
to these pictures said the paintings memorialized the suffering and
death of people with AIDS.

The NYC show, whose name comes from a Leonard Cohen song, consists
of 26 brilliantly colored and intricately rendered oil paintings on
linen, one for each letter of the alphabet, each with a "weathered
scroll" in the center holding a schematic face.

Around the central emblems whirl a motley of imagery, "from tattoo
design to Tex Avery cartoons to Fra Angelico's San Marco frescos" says
reviewer Duncan. The painter told him the scroll-faces represent
"wacky spirit-guides." The series expresses Woodruff's reaction to
the death of a friend from AIDS.

There's a tiny color reproduction of the "Figure Z" in ART IN AMERICA.
It is covered with exquisitely painted bluebirds, cardinals, mourning
doves and other birds, swooping across a windy sky of broken blue and
clouds. Some of the birds carry tiny "hobo-like" parcels on poles.

For me the birds strongly and weirdly invoked the big colorful
pictures of backyard birds in the nature books I was given as
a small boy. Except that Woodruff's avian landscape looks like
it was painted by Constable.

Regards,
Ron