Kinsey Art

Thank you Neil Kinsey Fagan for your blog post and video featuring some of my paintings. I am truly honored and humbled by your kind words :)

Creoddity video

Here's a video from @Creoditty featuring some of my paintings:



And here's the write-up on the "Art Day" gallery profile page. Thanks very much Anna :)

New Photography

I recently watched Finding Vivian Maier, a documentary about a nanny who compulsively took photographs on her daily walks.

Curiously, most of her pictures remained undeveloped in her lifetime. Maier's work was discovered a few years ago during a liquidation sale of her storage holdings. Since her death on 2009 her photos have received critical praise and found a wide audience though the internet and international exhibitions.

The film inspired me to try some photography during our two week break at the National Academy. Unlike Maier, I couldn't bring myself to photograph strangers on the street, not in any recognizable fashion anyway. I limited myself to abstract compositions in an effort to resolve a new set of pictorial issues that had nothing to do with figurative painting.

I have a Nikon DSLR but found it too clunky to carry around. I used my iPhone instead and online photo editing programs.

I took many pictures, deleted most of them, but thought I'd share a few images. Art class resumes this Saturday but I'll probably continue my photographic experiment. It's a new way of looking at things. I find myself mentally cropping everything I see in order to distill my daily life into its abstract essence.

Christophe

I recently watched one of my favorite art films, Love is the Devil. starring Derek Jacobi as Francis Bacon and a very young Daniel Craig as his lover George Dyer.

The film is an intense meditation on the creative impulse as an expression of the libido. While you won't see any of Bacon's paintings in the movie, the director filmed it with much distortion and strange lighting, evoking Bacon's artistic style and nihilistic frame of mind.

For our latest model, Christophe, I attempted something Bacon-esque, i.e. an abstracted head study against a dark background. I did the painting in one three hour session beginning with a drawing using acrylic on linen:

Then the application of color and, for lack of a better adjective, "angry" brushstrokes:

Here's the final image:



It was weird trying to channel Bacon. I became quite unnerved in the process but I think this was worth the exercise. I lost the drawing a bit, due to distortion, but still consider it a portrait since Bacon's portraits of Dyer weren't meant to be realistic or conventionally recognizable.

Maybe I'll try to imitate Lucian Freud next week.

Adam Sheffer on Galleries and the Art World

Adam Sheffer, a partner at the Cheim & Read Gallery (whose roster includes Louise Bougeois, Robert Mapplethorpe, Joan Mitchell, and Jenny Holzer, among others) talked about the ins and outs of the big stakes gallery world at the New York Academy of Art's Professional Practice Series on September 11, 2012.

Sheffer had a lot of valuable advice for young artists who are seeking to cultivate contacts with dealers (hint: network like crazy but don't be too pushy). There were also some interesting questions from the New York Academy students, particularly on the economics of art exhibits.

Shaffer has a wonderfully engaging personality with lots of anecdotes about both struggling and famous artists. This 75 minute video was a pleasure to watch. It's essential viewing for anyone who is curious about the scene behind the gallery scene, and how dealers go about choosing contemporary works that could possibly change the course of art history.

Alex Kanevsky at the New York Academy of Art

 

Art exists in thie weird gray area between your competence and your incompetence. You know they kind of intersect. If you're always doing what you're competent in, then you're not terribly creative. Dentists do that. They don't need to be creative, they just need to drill teeth well. So they learn a set of skills and then they practice. On the other hand you don't want to be completely incompetent either because then the results are not very good either. But somewhere in between there is a small gray area where one wants to be. And that requires openness to experimentation and at the same time a certain ruthlessness with your own work.  

- Painter Alex Kanevsky, New York Academy of Art, September 26, 2012.

J.F.H.

48" x 48", oil on board

Step Up to the Plate

Step Up to the Plate (Entre les Bras) is a new movie about the Michelin three star restaurant Michel et Sébastien Bras in Laguiole, France.

The restaurant is situated on a hill about 300 miles from Paris in a modern glass structure with sweeping views of the countryside. Just like Jiro Dreams of Sushi, the film focuses on the father Michel passing the stewardship of the restaurant to his son Sébastien.

The documentary is divided into four segments named after the seasons and features snippets of Michel's and Sébastien's daily life: selecting vegetables in the market in the early morning, preparing for dinner service, and after hours relaxation.

The film is also about the creative process and how childhood shapes one's culinary preferences. It opens with Michel explaining and assembling Gargouillo, his complex herb and vegetable course. The most interesting sequence shows Sébastien developing a new dish based on a childhood snack prepared by his grandparents, and then reinterpreting the dish in Hokkaido using Japanese ingredients.

Step Up to the Plate is essentially about food as art, the lifelong dedication that goes with it, the dynamics of tradition versus innovation, and familial heritage. It's a must-see for foodies and anyone who appreciates the hard work that goes behind a great dish.

This inspiring documentary is currently playing at the Quad and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas.

Wagner's Dream on PBS

Last night PBS presented Wagner's Dream, a documentary by Susan Froemke about Robert Lepage's new production of Richard Wagner's Ring cycle for the Metropolitan Opera.

I've seen all four operas over the past two seasons and very much enjoyed Lepage's technical wizardry and pioneering vision. It was courageous of him to even conceive of such a high-tech, futuristic production for the conservative Wagnerian audience at the Met.

Predictably, critical reaction was hostile, particularly Anthony Tommasini's dismissive review for the New York Times. But this didn't affect my enjoyment of the Ring at all. Over the years I've come to realize anyway that music critics don't really have the qualifications to assess theatrical innovation in a knowledgeable manner. Let's just leave it at that.

Wagner's Dream features Lepage and his team conceiving and working out the various problems of this hugely expensive production, particularly the logistics of the main setpiece consisting of oscillating planks with digital projections.

Deborah Voigt, the most affecting Brünnhilde that I've ever seen in a live performance, is featured in extended interviews, and it was fascinating to watch her and Lepage negotiate some of the trickier aspects of the blocking and direction. I've also never seen the backstage of the Met before and was fascinated by scene behind the scene.

PBS will be broadcasting the entire Ring starting with Das Rheingold this evening, Die Walküre tomorrow, Siegfried on Thursday, and Götterdämmerung on Friday. The operas, including Wagner's Dream, are also available on DVD at the Met Opera Shop. I'm glad that this visionary production is finally getting a wider audience.

Ornette: Made In America

My friend Joe, a music producer and hardcore jazz expert, once told me that most people don't "get" jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman on first hearing. Indeed, it took Joe several years to form an appreciation of the musician, whom he now considers his hero. Joe even took an Ornette Coleman class at Jazz at Lincoln Center's Swing University last year.

As a recreational jazz fan, I'll have to admit that Ornette Coleman's music is quite challenging. It's not accessible "smooth jazz" at all. Rather, Coleman's music is discordant, dissonant, cacophonic, and a bit grating as far as my nerves are concerned.

I decided to check out Ornette: Made In America, a recently refurbished 1984 documentary, just to see what all the fuss was about. The film is structured around a 1983 concert where Coleman's band performed with the Fort Worth Symphony.

Shirley Clark, the director, made a film that visually matched Coleman's music. The documentary isn't straightforward or even all that informative. Instead it focuses on improvisation, going off in many elliptical tangents - flashbacks, voiceovers, interviews, psychedelic visual effects - totally incoherent yet somehow perfectly suited to Coleman's groundbreaking and uncategorizable musicianship.

Did it change my mind about Coleman? Yes, in a way. The music seemed so indecipherable at first, but by the end of the movie I felt like I was listening to Stravinsky. Perhaps I was beginning to understand Coleman's genius.

See it for yourself. The documentary in currently showing at IFC Film Center.

Ai Weiwei at IFC

A few weeks ago I came across a photograph at the Museum of Modern Art showing an outstretched hand giving the finger to the skyline of Hong Kong. The young lady next to me started giggling. She said, Did you get it?

I wasn't sure. It looked like dissident art of some sort, saying something against Chinese politics. But it seemed so crude and simplistic that I couldn't figure out how it ended up at the MoMA. I looked at the wall caption which mentioned an artist whose name did not ring a bell, Ai Weiei.

I must have been living under a rock for the past decade. After some research I found out that Ai Weiwei was one of the most esteemed, and controversial, artists of this generation. ArtReview placed him at the top of its Power 100 list, and the artist has exhibited at the Tate Modern and other high profile venues.

So last Friday I went to see Alison Klayman's documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry at the IFC Center. This absorbing film featured extensive interviews with Ai and traced his development as a conceptual artist including his years in New York in the 80s.

Apart from the MoMA photograph I haven't seen any of Ai's work in the flesh, but the film provided an overview of his most famous pieces. Regardless of scale, his works have a strong, legible graphic element with overt references to Pop Art. His messages are instantly comprehensible. There isn't much nuance, subtlety or ambiguity here, which totally suits Ai's temperament and objectives.

The documentary's main theme, however, was art as political expression: in this case Ai's dissatisfaction with the state of Chinese bureaucracy and artistic freedom.

The film raised some interesting questions: Is it enough to make "pretty" pictures or decorative pieces? Should art be used towards political ends? Does silence equal complicity? Where do you draw the line between art and propaganda?

The United States has its own legacy of political art as seen in  Hide/Seek last year at the Brooklyn Museum and  Sharon Hayes currently on view at the Whitney. But Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry takes it to a whole new level.

I would recommend this documentary to all artists regardless of his or her preferred medium or genre. It will make you reassess the power of online media in disseminating your work and communicating ideas that could change lives, as well as history.

Gerhard Richter at Film Forum

Film Forum is showing a documentary about Gerhard Richter through March 27.

Even though I sometimes feel that his work can be sterile and mechanical the film is an absorbing look into his process and development. Definitely worth seeing. I realized that he's just an ordinary guy who likes to paint, just like the me.
 

Jiro Dreams of Sushi

Jiro Dreams of Sushi is wonderful documentary about Jiro Ono, the 85-year old chef of Tokyo's 10 seat Sukiyabashi Jiro which has been awarded three Michelin stars.

I'm not a sushi afficionado (except for 15 East) but was nevertheless engrossed with the themes of art, discipline, filial piety, and simply what it means to serve delicious food. It was a glimpse into a world that I knew nothing about. The climax was a gorgeous progression of sushi filmed during the course of an actual meal. Let's just hope that I get to try the restaurant in my lifetime.

The film is playing at Lincoln Plaza Cinema. Catch it if you can.