What Meets the Eye

What’s Behind the Papered-over Windows at Outlet Gallery: NSFW | Male Nudes by Female Painters

April 18, 2016

OK, the women are finally getting their day, turning the objectifying tables and whatnot, and now we’re going to see some female subtlety and range of emotion. However, when I take a hard look (haha), it stands (haha) to reason that what women are [...]

“Nice Weather” on the Upper East Side at Skarstedt

April 5, 2016

I was considering going to the Met Breuer “Unfinished…” when I walked into “Nice Weather”, and that is probably why I started wondering if these paintings were finished. The Met has pitched a curveball at contemporary art– or do I [...]

“Darkness of My Life”, too. George Condo in “Nice Weather” at Skarstedt Gallery

April 1, 2016

Do you ever experience a dream that’s like falling down steps in the dark? And one time I fell off a country road down a wooded hill because I was looking at the moon, which is just an aside and was nothing like this except that it was falling [...]

Liz Gargas and Brent Ridge at the New Art Center in Newton, Mass.

March 15, 2016

In a two-person show I look for what connects the painters. Well, actually, I am always looking for connections between painters (as well as ideas I might use myself) because for the most part, these days, painters work alone and don’t often [...]

The Second Time Around at “Greater New York” at PS1

February 23, 2016

…is better than the first time. The reason? Lowered expectations (possibly the key to happiness in all things.) So I didn’t hurry from room to room in search of something else without knowing what that something else should be. Others did, [...]

Important Conversations: Fred Valentine at Schema Projects

February 9, 2016

The Pumpkin Festival and Other Portraits” is a show of large and small scale portraits in charcoal that Valentine made 1989-91. The large scale portraits drew me into surprisingly intimate conversations. Actually they are not exactly portraits, [...]

Sifting “Thru the Rabbit Hole” at Sideshow Gallery “Nation IV”

January 31, 2016

Walking the quiet weekday streets of Williamsburg, a bit stunned from a marital battle more pitched than usual, I turned into Sideshow Gallery’s “Thru the Rabbit Hole,” the 15th annual loosely uncurated show of all the painters of NYC. Or [...]

Something Wonderful and Something Awful

January 18, 2016

The wonderful: A series of drawings and poems about a boy looking for a wayward ox. He searches, he wrestles, “With all my energy, I seize the ox,” the ox struggles and charges and disappears “and there he stays, deep in the mist.” Later the [...]

Meg Hitchcock and My Religious Intolerance

January 14, 2016

A story (but where did I read it?) about two lamas sitting on two stones by the campfire one night. A lion roars and one of the lamas jumps up and the other one says, “Oh, so you still have that?” The next morning the lama who jumped gets up [...]