Wendell Castle
Music Stand (1964)
Oak, Brazilion Rosewood
55.5″ x 25″ x 20″

I just discovered this great blog post about an artist/craftsman named Wendell Castle at Emily Evans Eerdmans’ blog.  Wendell Castle has been creating amazing furniture for over 50 years.  He has ten “Adopted Rules of Thumb” for staying at the top of one’s creative game that I find very compelling:

1. If you are in love with an idea, you are no judge of its beauty or value.
2. It is difficult to see the whole picture when you are inside the frame.
3. After learning the tricks of the trade, don’t think you know the trade.
4. We hear and apprehend what we already know.
5. The dog that stays on the porch will find no bones.
6. Never state a problem to yourself in the same terms it was brought to you.
7. If it’s offbeat or surprising, it’s probably useful.
8. If you don’t expect the unexpected, you will not find it.
9. Don’t get too serious.
10. If you hit the bullseye everytime, the target is too near.

To find out more about Wendell Castle, and view more of his amazing creations, visit his website at wendellcastle.com

I just learned that Ray Yoshida, one of the Chicago Imagists and one of my painting teachers at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, passed away this week.

I studied with him in an advanced painting studio for one semester: he once told me my work was “too sentimental.” (Thank goodness!).

I’m sad and very nearly speechless. So, let me just quote from the NYT article:

“He was very important to a lot of people there,” said Robert Storr, dean of the Yale University School of Art and a student of Mr. Yoshida in the mid-1970s in that school’s master of fine arts program. “As a teacher he was mysterious and witty. The mystery would draw you in, and then he would say something funny but with an edge that would make you think — kind of like his paintings.”

And the Chicago Tribune wrote a nice story on the life of Ray Yoshida.

But if you want to really get a sense of what it was like to have Ray for a teacher, artist Laurie Fendrich captured it beautifully.

How true. We’ll miss you, Ray.

Painting by Matthew Ritchie
“Self-Portrait in 2064″
2003
Oil and marker on canvas
80 x 100 inches

That quote is from an interview with Matthew Ritchie.

Better yet, I found this wonderful post by Vera Mitchell about Matthew Ritchie:

His work takes a basic line and takes it farther in meaning, in space, and in motion. He enlarges the line design to get a reaction from the viewer. He makes a drawing three dimensional and becomes a transcriber to a gesture and retains the one idea to free it and make it live in the world. He is interested in filtering out all the noise of life and focusing in on what is important. I never thought about it this way, he says that if one thing has a story, then the millions of things we see everyday have a separate story, and if we tried to see them all at once then nothing is seen or noticed. We tune it out. What he is trying to do is try to see a bit more deeply into things. Not just what is on the surface.

Read the rest of it at: Vera Mitchell’s blog.

Or check out more of Matthew Ritchie’s work at his website.

I like his point of view. 

Painting by
Adam Cvijanovic

See a lot more of Cvijanovic’s colossal spectacular work online at the Bellwether Gallery.

Elevating a motorcycle rally to art by moving it indoors and placing it on a stage.

“You” by Urs Fischer

Today I look at how various artists over recent time have reacted against the idea that developed through the history of art of the gallery as a sacred place, and the art within as items to be worshipped.

A recent installation in New York by Urs Fisher takes place inside a gallery, while some of his antecendents had moved their work outside the gallery.

Urs Fischer has reduced Gavin Brown’s Enterprise to a hole in the ground, and it is one of the most splendid things to have happened in a New York gallery in a while…A 38-foot-by-30-foot crater, eight feet deep, extends almost to the walls of the gallery, surrounded by a fourteen-inch ledge of concrete floor. A sign at the door cautions…intrepid viewers can, all the same, inch their way around the hole.

It is the gallery deconstructed and “makes you look at galleries in a new way.” Read more about it in this New York magazine article.

Conical Intersect (detail)
by Gordon Matta-Clark
1975

Gordon Matta-Clark deconstructed whole buildings. “It’s all about evolution,” he said.

Disappearing Act, Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s Lost Public Art…

from Karen Rosenberg:

…in the early seventies, Gordon Matta-Clark made transformative, transgressive art out of New York’s desolate corners. Without permits or any official support, the former Cornell architecture student hacked into the walls and floors of derelict buildings (of which there were many), turning shadowy wrecks into light-filled sculptures. “I don’t like the way most art needs to be looked at in galleries,” Matta-Clark once said, “any more than the way empty halls make people look.”

Read more of this review of Matta-Clark’s recent retrospective, or read this interesting personal story about Gordon Matta-Clark by Ned Smyth.

Robert Smithson
Spiral Jetty
Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah
April, 1970

History is representational, while time is abstract; both of these artifices may be found in museums, where they span everybody’s own vacancy. The museum undermines one’s confidence in sense data and erodes the impression of textures upon which our sensations exist…Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void. Hallways lead the viewer to things once called ‘pictures’ and ‘statues’.

Excerpt from “Some Void Thoughts On Museums” by Robert Smithson. See and read more about Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty at his website, which has fabulous photos of this and other earthworks, and links to his mirror works, drawings, other writings, and more.

Take a look at “The Broken Kilometer” by Walter De Maria, of Lightning Field fame. (all photos of this work are claimed by the Dia Art Foundation, so I cannot show it to you here).

Five hundred gleaming gold-coloured rods, receding into the distance, laid out majestically in a five-sectioned plane…And all De Maria had been wanting to do was create something enduring and especially beautiful to anchor in some small way the viewer’s perceptions, in an attempt to counter the trend of that time…

To this day this supremely gleaming work is still where it ever was in New York. The whole room seems to be filled with a simple splendour…Even Barnett Newman’s “zip” paintings, Dan Flavin’s fluorescent tube installations or Henri Matisse’s captivating chapel in Vence are not likely to fill the viewer with such wonder…De Maria’s installation has caused the art world to divide just as the Red Sea once did, allowing those with eyes to see to make out a light at the end of the tunnel.

Read more of this excellent history about this amazing work, written by Thomas Kellein, at the Tate.

“City” and “Double Negative” by Michael Heizer – earthworks in the Nevada desert.

The sheer size of Double Negative also invites contemplation of the scale of art, and the relation of the viewer the earth and to art itself. How does art change when it can’t fit in a museum? How does one observe an artwork that’s a quarter-mile long?

See and read more about Michael Heizer’s earthworks at the website Double Negative.

“Samson,” a gallery expanding installation, by Chris Burden

Chris Burden has been called ‘one of America’s few really scary artists.’ He is the artist whose early works involved placing himself in personal danger, such as when in 1971, he had himself shot in the arm by a friend. Another time, he himself shot at a 747: Chris Burden shooting at a 747, 1973. Read some recent information on him here.

Which brings me to “A Matter of Time” — an essay from the Tate, spring 2007:

The ability to play with time, stretching and quickening it, is a distinctively modern phenomenon, since the advent of photography in the twentieth century, and the idea of mathematical time introduced with the emergence of secular humanism after the Enlightenment.

Read more at the Tate.

Painting by Karen Jacobs
“Hope Ridge”
mixed media on canvas
30″ x 30″

Here’s another really gorgeous abstract landscape — makes me wish I were there (kind of like Robin Williams in “What Dreams May Come” or that bit in Akira Kurasawa’s movie (I think it may have been called “Dreams”) where Van Gogh wanders through his own paintings.

Anyway, I’d love to roll in a field of paint that looks like this. Luscious!  View more of Karen’s Work at her website.

Painting by Cheryl McClure
“Little Pieces of Land IX”
acrylic on canvas
36 x 36″

Favorite painter of the day: Cheryl McClure, whose beautiful abstract landscapes I found online at the Jezebel Gallery. This is my favorite! Gorgeous colors, and I love how it works as a landscape and also as purely abstract shapes. I’m really led into and through the painting by her use of color and shape.

See more of Cheryl’s work at her website; read her blog here.

Painting by Karin Jurick
“An older gentleman viewing an abstract painting in the de Young Museum in San Francisco”
Oil on Masonite
8″x10″

A Painting a Day

I Stumbled Upon this artist’s site today: Karin Jurick — through a ‘painting a day’ blog.  I love her beautiful tiny representational paintings; I especially love her paintings of people looking at art.  She has done lots of them, too.  Click on the Karin Jurick’s Museum Goers to see hundreds of her gorgeous little paintings, and read her story…very interesting and inspirational.

Art by Christian Rohlfs

Aim for the Big Look:

• tough
• brutal
• uncompromising articulation of imagery & idea
• extremes of technique, like most sensitive line ever, or thickest body of paint.

The need must find the idea & method.

These notes are from “Notes for a Young Painter”, by Hiram Williams, Prentice-Hall, 1963.

Read some notes on the web from Hiram Williams.