What Meets the Eye

Jasper Johns Talks to Me

April 16, 2019

Often in the last year upon awakening, but with my eyes still closed, I see myself sobbing. The death of a friend, white supremacists, climate change, I don’t even know. But more about that in a minute. I’m not getting critics who see painting [...]

Adam Simon and Object Constancy

March 28, 2019

After dropping my wife at the A train, it was too early for Harry’s* and I passed McDonalds, thinking about Simon’s show, the ultra-recognizability of the golden arches and stopping off for a sausage biscuit and how wrong that would be—my age! [...]

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and the “Sweetness of Doing Nothing”*

March 24, 2019

As you know if you follow my remarks at all, I’m no fan of the hasty painters and the painting-a-day folks, in which camp Yiadom-Boakye squarely resides. But Holy Provocations is a wonderful surprise, a painting in which one person looks [...]

Dana Schutz and a World of Anxiety

February 26, 2019

After conversations with other painters about this show, the consensus seemed to be admiration for Schutz’s work as a whole, for the energy and ambition and the mad rush of it—and not so much about individual paintings, what they are about, [...]

Maya Brym, the Pleasures of Occultation* and Illusion

January 26, 2019

*“Occultation,” used primarily in astronomy to describe the passage of one celestial body in front of another, also means interposition, overlapping in laymen’s terms—one object blocks another. This is the main monocular clue to depth [...]

Wrestling, in the Dark, with Delacroix

January 8, 2019

Delacroix does not “do it for me.” Btw, have you heard “Lord, Do It For Me,” with its increasingly fervent request? The James Cleveland version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daKpXBT6vyA However, he did it for Van Gogh and other [...]

Nathaniel Mary Quinn: Family Portraits

November 8, 2018

There is so much manipulated or copied photographic content in the galleries these days that I’ve begun to ignore it. I have even begun to wonder if artists are so happy in their studios sifting through the internet that Plato’s Allegory of the [...]

Malcolm Morley: the First and the Last

November 5, 2018

Cristoforo… is not literally Morley’s first work. It was painted in 1966, after a correspondence art course (from prison), the Camberwell School of Art and the RCA and also after he had moved [...]

Rackstraw Downes: A Peek Behind the Curtain and Perspective (almost) without Orthogonal Lines

October 16, 2018

So, a raw sienna underpainting, possibly with a touch of burnt umber ? —scrubbed or is it scumbled onto the canvas, a grid of pencil lines—unfinished? A study or was it just so beautiful as is that Downes decided to leave it and show it—with [...]

Summer is not over until 9/23! : A Time Before We Were Born: Visions of Arcadia in Contemporary Painting

September 19, 2018

Do we still dream of Arcadia? A secluded pastoral idyll, idly herding goats and playing the pipes invented by Pan—and Arcadia invented Pan (really). We could frolic with the fauns and the nymphs in an unspoiled mountain forest. In Arcadia, life is [...]