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Outside-in, landscape paintings in New York galleries
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Cu Chullain
Apr 28, 2003, 1:39:10 AM4/28/03
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On a recent trip to New York I had the fortune of seeing a good amount
of shows in which painters were taking the landscape seriously and
having some fun with it too. Uptown and downtown galleries were
brimming with the out of doors, From Louisa Mathiasdottir's icily hued
paintings of Reykjavik to Gerald Marcus' pictures of a serene New
Mexico and the grassy Adirondack Mountains there is simply an
overwhelming amount of landscape painting being shown this month. I
guess this is what New York does in the spring, it goes outside, and
when it has to be inside it wants paintings of outside. After this
harsh northeastern winter I say bravo and thank you.
Gerald Marcus is a painter whose work I have only recently come
to know, actually this is the first time I've seen or heard of him. I
have to say from the paintings on the wall at the Prince Street
Gallery in Chelsea he's a force to be reckoned with. Mr. Marcus gives
us the landscape, sure, but he gives just a little bit more too, he
invents freely with nature and lets color do that thing that color
does in good painting. He arrives at a lot of his paintings 'in
nature' where he makes quick color sketches, and he arrives at other
larger painting in his studio, retaining all the bravura and
spontaneity of the natural world. Marcus is a painter 'in' nature as
well, he finds something of himself, his own voice in beautiful
variations on color and light within a square or rectangle and while I
am sure he takes the landscape seriously he has a lot of fun playfully
inventing and crafting these paintings. Surely he's worth a look, to
me the show was a bit like coming across the smell of cut grass in a
dreary place like Jersey City, a swath of nature's essence in an
otherwise oppressive dungeon of a town.
Temma Bell has a show of her paintings up at the Bowery Gallery
next door to Prince Street and a peek into this room is a must.
Temma's paintings are bright responses to the landscapes of Reykjavik
and Delaware County. She is playful with her color and shape and she
makes a somewhat delicate argument for her strange canvas sizes. Most
of the landscapes in this show were extremely wide and quite short; it
is always nice to see someone trying to keep up the rhythm and dynamic
of this sort of scale. It's a scale many have failed on but Temma
comes mighty close to the kind of tempo needed to keep our interest
here.
Temma's mother Louisa Mathiasdottir is at Salander O'Reilly
galleries. I have always liked Louisa's work and this show of
self-portraits and still lives is vibrant as usual. I hesitate to
mention this but one thing that comes to mind now is the enormous
strain the younger Bell must feel with her mother's paintings being
shown uptown. It's kind of an odd juxtaposition in the art world that
I hope happened accidentally. Louisa is a powerhouse painter, Temma
isn't, not yet, nobody seems to want to say this save in private
circles, but it's true.
Louisa's paintings looked their best, there were a few I didn't
know here too, some fine paintings of the canals in Paris as well as a
few streetscapes from Iceland and one large self portrait in which
Louisa has lots of fun costuming herself. Also there were some large
and largish still life’s of the variety we've come to know and
love from this painter. Ol' Louisa paints in Paris eieio, with an arch
arch here and an arch arch there, e-i-e-i-o.
Downstairs at Salander O'Reilly were a slew of small paintings by
Lindy Guinness, another landscape painter I don't know. This show,
hung almost to overcrowding, is a surprising bonus, obviously worth a
look. Guinness paints in Northern Ireland but to me her work isn't
distinctive of that area alone. I felt at home with her cows and farms
while the few interiors offered had all the warmth of houses my
friends and family live in here in the northeast. Lindy Guinness takes
risks with paint handling and succeeds, she can model a drapery and
build a mountain with the same easy strokes she uses to articulate
cows and trees in a field. I'm looking forward to perhaps seeing some
more canvases from this lass, as what she offered at Salander was a
spectacle indeed.
Wolf Kahn, who doesn’t know Kahn's work? In fact judging
from the attendance at his opening at the Ameringer & Yohe galleries
who doesn’t know him personally? I've enjoyed his paintings
tremendously in the past; I remember a show at the Bedleston galleries
a few years back where I came across his work for the first time.
Those paintings were enormous in the space they occupied, at Ameringer
& Yohe his work had room to breathe, of course I didn't as there were
too many socialites doing their uptown thing to really enjoy the
paintings. That's not a complaint though, that's what openings are
about, I'd have been surprised if the place were empty. I may go back
but from what I could see he's being a lot more ephemeral these days
and that's just not the Wolf I love. I like him to paint his big bold
colors and to play them on fields of subtler tones, he's after
something else here, I think it's his "old master" phase. If that's
the truth then it's a forced old master he's being, or maybe a worn
out one, we expect more, hopefully he can deliver.
So that was the landscape, indoors and out, uptown and down.
Landscapes, hmmm... they're nice but something's missing. Landscapes
can be lonely without figures. Sometimes it's nice to be alone, or to
feel alone, especially in a big cranky city like New York. Of course
if you want people and crowds in your gallery there are always the
shows at the met, some Spanish and French guys, I dunno, I still like
them alot too. There are some fine Zurberan and Velazques paintings,
and some nice Manet's too, on loan for the blockbusting
Manet/Vesazques show. But that's a different story for a different
day, a rainy day, when the landscape doesn’t look so appealing.
of shows in which painters were taking the landscape seriously and
having some fun with it too. Uptown and downtown galleries were
brimming with the out of doors, From Louisa Mathiasdottir's icily hued
paintings of Reykjavik to Gerald Marcus' pictures of a serene New
Mexico and the grassy Adirondack Mountains there is simply an
overwhelming amount of landscape painting being shown this month. I
guess this is what New York does in the spring, it goes outside, and
when it has to be inside it wants paintings of outside. After this
harsh northeastern winter I say bravo and thank you.
Gerald Marcus is a painter whose work I have only recently come
to know, actually this is the first time I've seen or heard of him. I
have to say from the paintings on the wall at the Prince Street
Gallery in Chelsea he's a force to be reckoned with. Mr. Marcus gives
us the landscape, sure, but he gives just a little bit more too, he
invents freely with nature and lets color do that thing that color
does in good painting. He arrives at a lot of his paintings 'in
nature' where he makes quick color sketches, and he arrives at other
larger painting in his studio, retaining all the bravura and
spontaneity of the natural world. Marcus is a painter 'in' nature as
well, he finds something of himself, his own voice in beautiful
variations on color and light within a square or rectangle and while I
am sure he takes the landscape seriously he has a lot of fun playfully
inventing and crafting these paintings. Surely he's worth a look, to
me the show was a bit like coming across the smell of cut grass in a
dreary place like Jersey City, a swath of nature's essence in an
otherwise oppressive dungeon of a town.
Temma Bell has a show of her paintings up at the Bowery Gallery
next door to Prince Street and a peek into this room is a must.
Temma's paintings are bright responses to the landscapes of Reykjavik
and Delaware County. She is playful with her color and shape and she
makes a somewhat delicate argument for her strange canvas sizes. Most
of the landscapes in this show were extremely wide and quite short; it
is always nice to see someone trying to keep up the rhythm and dynamic
of this sort of scale. It's a scale many have failed on but Temma
comes mighty close to the kind of tempo needed to keep our interest
here.
Temma's mother Louisa Mathiasdottir is at Salander O'Reilly
galleries. I have always liked Louisa's work and this show of
self-portraits and still lives is vibrant as usual. I hesitate to
mention this but one thing that comes to mind now is the enormous
strain the younger Bell must feel with her mother's paintings being
shown uptown. It's kind of an odd juxtaposition in the art world that
I hope happened accidentally. Louisa is a powerhouse painter, Temma
isn't, not yet, nobody seems to want to say this save in private
circles, but it's true.
Louisa's paintings looked their best, there were a few I didn't
know here too, some fine paintings of the canals in Paris as well as a
few streetscapes from Iceland and one large self portrait in which
Louisa has lots of fun costuming herself. Also there were some large
and largish still life’s of the variety we've come to know and
love from this painter. Ol' Louisa paints in Paris eieio, with an arch
arch here and an arch arch there, e-i-e-i-o.
Downstairs at Salander O'Reilly were a slew of small paintings by
Lindy Guinness, another landscape painter I don't know. This show,
hung almost to overcrowding, is a surprising bonus, obviously worth a
look. Guinness paints in Northern Ireland but to me her work isn't
distinctive of that area alone. I felt at home with her cows and farms
while the few interiors offered had all the warmth of houses my
friends and family live in here in the northeast. Lindy Guinness takes
risks with paint handling and succeeds, she can model a drapery and
build a mountain with the same easy strokes she uses to articulate
cows and trees in a field. I'm looking forward to perhaps seeing some
more canvases from this lass, as what she offered at Salander was a
spectacle indeed.
Wolf Kahn, who doesn’t know Kahn's work? In fact judging
from the attendance at his opening at the Ameringer & Yohe galleries
who doesn’t know him personally? I've enjoyed his paintings
tremendously in the past; I remember a show at the Bedleston galleries
a few years back where I came across his work for the first time.
Those paintings were enormous in the space they occupied, at Ameringer
& Yohe his work had room to breathe, of course I didn't as there were
too many socialites doing their uptown thing to really enjoy the
paintings. That's not a complaint though, that's what openings are
about, I'd have been surprised if the place were empty. I may go back
but from what I could see he's being a lot more ephemeral these days
and that's just not the Wolf I love. I like him to paint his big bold
colors and to play them on fields of subtler tones, he's after
something else here, I think it's his "old master" phase. If that's
the truth then it's a forced old master he's being, or maybe a worn
out one, we expect more, hopefully he can deliver.
So that was the landscape, indoors and out, uptown and down.
Landscapes, hmmm... they're nice but something's missing. Landscapes
can be lonely without figures. Sometimes it's nice to be alone, or to
feel alone, especially in a big cranky city like New York. Of course
if you want people and crowds in your gallery there are always the
shows at the met, some Spanish and French guys, I dunno, I still like
them alot too. There are some fine Zurberan and Velazques paintings,
and some nice Manet's too, on loan for the blockbusting
Manet/Vesazques show. But that's a different story for a different
day, a rainy day, when the landscape doesn’t look so appealing.
-CM
J's Place
Apr 28, 2003, 9:21:10 AM4/28/03
to
In article <bbc3d844.03042...@posting.google.com>,
CuChu...@volcanomail.com says...
CuChu...@volcanomail.com says...
> Gerald Marcus is a painter whose work I have only recently come
>to know, actually this is the first time I've seen or heard of him. I
>have to say from the paintings on the wall at the Prince Street
>Gallery in Chelsea he's a force to be reckoned with. Mr. Marcus gives
>us the landscape, sure, but he gives just a little bit more too, he
>invents freely with nature and lets color do that thing that color
>does in good painting.
You're reference to Marcus's New Mexico landscapes
caught my attention and I looked up his work and
found representative examples at:
http://www.princestreetgallery.com/artist.html?artistID=38
I find his use of color much too timid for my
tastes. He's no Georgia O'Keefe when it comes
to capturing the essence of New Mexico. Perhaps
his knowledge of NM lighting is based on too
short of an exposure to it. As for Marcus being
a force to be reckoned with - well - that's also
a matter of opinion that I don't share. I live
in New Mexico and can point you to some really
outstanding landscape artists who have an intimate
feel for the SW and it's bright light.
I refer you to my own feeble efforts in this regard:
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