Some recent painting shows of gay/lesbian interest
rri...@east.sun.com
Some Current Painting Exhibitions
Folks,
I'm going to try to regularly post announcements about visual arts events I
manage to see (or not) and which make an impression on me.
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 appears
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 seems like a further step toward abstraction and
maybe surrealism, and evoked the mysterious large everyday objects
of Philip Guston's late work or Picasso's and Arp's biomorphic studies.
The paintings include large canvases of bollards (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 the
painter's life that include imagery of palettes and blackboards.
Plus some more monstrous caps.
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 suggest female
genitalia among other things. The paintings have a curious
way of holding your view; a sense of mystery is sustained as
you look at them.
Her current show is completely figurative, a vase and flowers
on the sill of a window framed by lace curtains is the motif
for all the paintings. But their compositions inherit the shapes,
colors and moods of her previous abstractions. Yet they are flatter
than her abstract works, but with a translucent ghostlike application
of oily paint that varies the continued sense of intense mystery.
This time the symmetrical contours of the vase supply vaginal
metaphors.
The flatness, fixed subject matter, framing by the window, disarming
naivete of the rendition, and the use of little motifs such as insects,
etc. recall Matisse and the Flemish and Dutch flower painters. While
the eerie contrast, twilight lighting & color, and envelope of mystery
and quiet makes you think of Albert Pinkham Ryder and 17th and 18th
century American "naive" 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
Thomas C. Waters
rri...@East.Sun.COM () writes:
> Beck is openly gay as a painter, and has been interviewed at
> length in the past in Bay Windows, a Boston gay weekly paper.
Thanks for the post Ron. You bring up an intewrsting, IMHO issue.
What is Gay art (or to be more PC, GLBT art), and what makes some work
of interest to gay people specifically??? If Jason Hutto is still on
lone, I know he will have some opinions about this, Hi Jason if you are
still around...)
As an openly gay artist myself, my work has dealt heavily with self
expression.. what it is like to be a gay man in this era of AIDS,
beauty and homoeroticism, stuff like that. But I have never seen my
work as intended for a gay audience. In fact, I seem to get a better
response from straight people.
I wonder if there is such a thing as gay art (or gay/lesbian art) or if
artists make work which is based in their personal identity and some of
those artists happen to be gay?
Your description of Beck's work seems to mew to have little to do with
gay imagry, andf I would guess a straight person could/would enjoy it
very much. So what is it that makes the work "of gay interst??"
Likewise, why is AIDS work always seen as of interest to Gay people?
Thomas C. Waters
twa...@pitt.edu
I always assume someone is gay unless they tell me otherwise. Straight
people have been doing the same in reverse for ever and I'm tired of
it.
"When evil men plot, good men must plan. When evil men burn and bomb,
good men must build and bind. When evil men shout ugly words of
hatred, good men must commit themselves to the glories of love."
Martin Luther King Jr.