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Langdon Quin La Bottega: A Family Portrait III, 1996, 52 x 104 inches

I was lucky to get the gorgeous catalog for Langdon Quin’s current show at the The University of New Hampshire’s Museum of Art: Acts & Memory: Paintings by Langdon Quin, 1990 – 2010. This show features 35 paintings of landscape, still lifes and large scale figurative works or combination thereof. The show is up until April 8, 2010. I was able to scan a few images from the catalog that seemed reasonable representations of the catalog images. Most of his paintings are quite large and read much better in larger images that I’m able to post here. Be sure to click for the larger views when available. I had hoped to get to the see the show in person but it looks like I will yet again be jealous of the East Coasters.

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Still Life with Some Senses, 2004, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 inches

Langdon Quin’s paintings grow from both observation and invention and use landscape, interiors, figure and still life in which to play out his formal and narrative interests. David Carbone states in the essay for the show’s catalog “Often moving from perception to invention, Quin may begin with a drawing or a “first strike” oil sketch, after Corot’s practice, with the principle aim of establishing the space through light. From such spontaneous works, larger synthetic paintings are developed, where more complex structural ideas are elaborated. Quin’s desire to dwell deeply in what is seen becomes an extended meditation on landscape, still life, or the figure.”

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Ledge, 2006-2007, oil on canvas, 33 3/4 x 37 1/2 inches

Langdon Quin has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally. Since receiving his MFA in Painting from Yale University in 1976, he has had numerous one person shows in galleries on both the east and west coasts. These include the Kraushaar Galleries and the Robert Schoelkopf Gallery in New York, the Alpha Gallery in Boston and Hackett Freedman Gallery in San Francisco.

From his website bio: “He is the recipient of many awards including a Fulbright Fellowship, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and two Ingram Merrill Foundation grants. He is also a member elect of the National Academy of Design in New York City. His paintings and works on paper are in prominent public and private collections both here and abroad. In addition, he has had a distinguished academic career teaching both undergraduates and graduate students in various university settings and professional art programs throughout the northeast.” Langdon Quin recently retired from teaching and is currently a Professor Emeritus of Painting and Drawing at the University of New Hampshire.

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Working from Life III, 2005-9, oil on canvas, 35 x 104 inches

Maureen Mullarkey in a review stated

At first glance, his three-part panel, Working from Life, seems out of sync with the sensibility on view elsewhere in the gallery. But look again. There is the same control over light, more raucous this time but no less measured. There is that same diagonal slant of light that divides the picture plane into zones of brightness and coloristic hush. Dense pigment adds weight to small elements of design. Drawing is deliberate, the placement of objects just so.

But what chaos is on view! Studio clutter is everywhere. Students vie for space to work, some resorting to the floor. A couple waltz with a skeleton, a danse macabre quite suitable to a classroom with its anatomy props. Natural daylight of one panel competes against the glare of studio lights in another. Each panel has its conventional nude model but the central one is . . . a hermaphrodite?

This is the studio as theater, its productions as calculated for effect as any other staged performance. Working from Life is a sly, clever visual essay on the role of art and the process of art-making. The humor of it only partly disguised by the seductiveness of the paint.

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A Studio View, 1988-90, oil on canvas 47 x 82 inches

David Carbone’s essay on Langdon Quin is available in it’s entirety at this link at the berkshirefinearts.com Carbone’s insight in Quin’s work is remarkable, Mr Carbone himself is a gifted painter and writes about the work from a painter’s perspective as well as a poet’s. I offer a few select quotes from David Carbone’s essay that can better frame the context and the process of this compelling work.

“Langdon Quin is a classicizing realist who, over several decades, has steadfastly held to his own path, one committed to the challenges of both perceptual and synthetic representation. For him, the Western tradition has been open and alive. By immersing himself in the art-past, Quin has been able to fortify himself for the difficult task of developing a language for his experience. At the core of Quin’s art is a sense of awe and a deep pleasure in being able to see the world and express it through forms generated out of a late-modernist sensibility.”

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Models: an Allegory of Faith, 2005-2006 , oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches

“This approach was derived in part from his mentors at Tanglewood and Yale: William Bailey, Gretna Campbell, Bernard Chaet, and Gabriel Laderman. All of these artists approached figuration through their understanding of modernism and abstraction; and each arrived at a completely different figurative position. In arranging his own constellation of forebears, Quin has also looked to Piero, Corot, de Chirico, the Novecento artists Felice Casorati and Fausto Pirandello, Bonnard, Balthus, Lennart Anderson, and James Weeks; all of whose influences can be felt in various ways, especially in his landscapes”

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Upstate Spring, Abandoned Farm, 1997, Oil on canvas, 40 x 47 inches

“These works hold illusionism in check through a generalized painterly representation heightened by a prismatic palette of colors. Quin shows himself to be a master of balancing spatial organization and the simultaneous ordering of forms as shapes in the surface. This aspect gives his images a cubist foundation that links his formal concerns with those of Piero, Bonnard, Balthus, and Casorati. Often working with a painting knife, to heighten the material presence of the paint, both as an analogy to the substance of things and as an agent to activate the surface-to-space tensions, Quin pushes his paintings from image toward musical-like structure, and in his best works, to a rapt vision. By lowering the effects of realistic mimicry, Quin is able to give his work a luminosity and effects of luster, a hazy atmosphere of beautifully nuanced tones and color temperatures that veil nature’s forms with his emotion.

Landlines, 2005-6, oil on canvas, 39 x 47 inches

Although these mostly rural scenes are alternately from Troy, New York, Durham, New Hampshire, and Gubbio in Umbria, Italy, where Quin has spent his summers for several decades, the dominant dialogue is with Balthus’s Chassy landscapes. While much of Balthus’s dark tenebrous winter landscapes express a spectral existential melancholy, Quin has sought to rival the languid humidity of Balthus’s spring and summer views with their golden haze and verdant flora. In Quin’s work languor, haze, and greenery express his most ecstatic self and a wistful longing to glimpse the Eden beneath the surface of the everyday wilderness”

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Parish, 2004-5, oil on canvas, 48 x 40 inches

Still Life with Model’s Chair, 2006, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches

Above Baldelli’s, 2004-2005, oil on canvas, 39 1/2 x 39 1/2 inches

A 30-page, color catalog accompanies the exhibition is available for $15. You may order at the UNH website www.unh.edu/moa or call 603/862-3712.

Catalog Cover
Selected images from Acts & Memory: Paintings by Langdon Quin, 1990 – 2010

I just discovered this wonderful video by the BBC and the Philosopher Roger Scrution (in 6 parts) posted on Valentino’s new blog on art and Croatian painting in particular. (Valentino frequently comments here)

A provocative and thought provoking discussion of post-modernism and Beauty. Might inspire a lively conversation here.

Part One of Six – you can view part two and the rest of the videos on youtube or click on the thumbnails on the bottom of the video for part two, etc.

William Barnes (from the Zeuxis show, “The Common Object”)

William Barnes is a follower of this blog who has emailed me on a few occasions with helpful suggestions, such as showing me his wife’s (Linda Carey) pastel paintings who I wrote about. He has work in the current Zeuxis show “The Common Object” I just posted about so I thought it a good time to show some a few his marvelously seen still-lifes, including two from the show.

William Barnes (from the Zeuxis show, “The Common Object”)

William Barnes is a still life painter whose many exhibition’s include a solo show at College of Southern Maryland and Washington and Lee University; and group shows at Lori Bookstein, Denise Bibro and Kouros Galleries in New York City, and Pennsylvania Academy and Rittenhouse Fine Arts in Philadelphia. In New York he was affiliated with the Bowery Gallery, where he had three one-person exhibitions, and since 1997 he has been a member of Zeuxis, an association of still life painters based in New York. He has been a Professor of Painting at the College of William and Mary since 1975.

Table Top with Frying Pan

Table Top with Pumpkin 30×36

From his Artist Statement :

“I am principally a painter belonging to the tradition of still life. I paint primarily for the adventure of looking, because for me, the interaction with raw material offers opportunities to forge connections between myself, the subject seen, and the response in paint. Some of my works are painted straightaway while others are worked and sustained over an extended period. My work does not follow any one path; I select my colors, marks, and touch to represent the character and dynamic of the subject as I respond to it in the moment. In the beginning I intuitively create a limited tonal structure from which color evolves as it clarifies my perceptions of light, form, and space. I move forward and may as often retreat from my first impulse in order to discover an unseen order, a rhythm, and a surprise. I try to test and select suitable elements that accord my work an alive, pictorial whole that is a stand-in for my experience. The objects have no specific narrative and the format varies. All is viewed as a pretext for entering a dialogue with paint as a way of deeply knowing the world. In my specific response I try to realize the image as best I can and conclude a poetic order.”

You can more of his work from this link.

Richard Baker

31 artists either members or guests of the Zeuxis association of still-life painters, agreed to paint a still-life that somehow included an ordinary dish towel (”The Common Object”) that was sent to each artist. It is fascinating to see the wide range of interpretation from being the central focus to barely noticeable. Some of my favorites are the works by Lucy Barber, Anthony Martino, Sydney Licht, Mark Karnes, Elizabeth Geiger, Catherine Kehoe and William Barnes. Zeuxis is an association of still life painters that was started in 1994 in NYC. They have held over forty exhibitions around the country. These shows have included such notable guest artists as Wayne Thiebaud, Nell Blaine, Lois Dodd and many others.

Catherine Kehoe’s excellent blog, powers of observation, has a write up about the show and she links to a terrific album of photos of many of the paintings in the show. There is a great essay for the show, “Giving the Mundane its Beautiful Due” by Imogen Sara Smith that is a good read on the museum website. Here is a brief excerpt from the essay…

What could be more ordinary or more overlooked than a dishtowel? This truly common object forms the unifying element in the present exhibit: each artist was asked to incorporate a dishtowel into a still life for the show. Many felt at first that the assigned object was an intruder in their studios, alien to their vocabularies. It arrived in the mail as a flat, neatly folded rectangle of cloth, new and cheap (Made in China, as the label announces), traced with a grid of color, straight lines crossing at regular intervals to form a pattern of squares. But the soft fabric can be draped, crumpled or sculpted so that folds syncopate the rhythm of the lines, create irregular curves, contours, shadows and highlights. The geometric pattern lends itself to formal concerns, but the towel also has inescapable associations with everyday tasks: washing dishes, drying hands. As a tool and as a visual element, the dishtowel is versatile and absorbent, a bland ingredient that can be molded to many uses. Some painters left it inconspicuously in the background, others made it their whole subject; some depicted it in realistic detail, others turned it into an abstract form. Wet or dry, smooth or wrinkled, clean or stained, it symbolizes the blank canvas, the eternal challenge to make something out of nothing.

This show is currently at the Lancaster Museum of Art, Lancaster, PA — January 8-February 28, 2010 and the Peninsula Fine Arts Center — Newport News, Virginia April 3-July 11, 2010

Lucy Barber

Philip Koch is a fantastic painter who posts comments here regularly and runs a terrific blog. I had another post about his work several months ago that you can read here. I thought I’d mention his new show at the Clymer Museum of Art Ellensburg, WA January 8 – March 27, 2010 in case anyone is near the area, there’s a reception Feb. 5 and an Artist’s Talk on Feb. 4 at the Central Washington University Art Department

Marc Bohne just got back to me with some interesting answers to the questions I asked him previously. Rather than add these to the end of the previous post I am putting them in a new one so people will be less likely to miss it.

Larry:
Many of your smaller paintings appear to be made on site in one sitting, is this the case? Do you tend to paint the landscape as you find it, or do you move stuff around, like trees or other big shapes, to suit compositional needs? Care to say anything about the pros and cons of these approaches?

Marc
I never paint on site. I used to, but the tendency is to become a documentary, and that is not what I want to do. Somewhere in all the written stuff I may have mentioned that the paint relationship to my subjects is more like a conversation than anything. Not lawyer to lawyer, but friend to friend… full of slants and opinions, stretched truth, a little selling, and some fiction and then as much honesty that can survive those things. Like any conversation with a friend. I don’t try to capture anything.

Plus, I paint in many layers, which would be impossible to do in the field. There is also an amazing thing that can happen only in the studio, which is a process where the painting begins to paint itself at a certain point, and the tactile information on the subject is no longer too useful. How I feel about the subject takes over. I wish things could be resolved in one sitting, but the larger ones take many months, and the small ones many days usually.

That said, I think that if you stood in the spot that became one of these paintings, you would have no problem recognizing it.

Larry:
When you paint on site what palette do you use? Anything noteworthy about your color, drawing, or compositional approach or technique other painters may find of interest?

Marc
I suppose this question isn’t pertinent, but I will say that over the years my studio pallete has condensed down to about a dozen tubes, with maybe 10 ancillary ones that I occasionally use when I feel lazy and dont want to mix. I mix everything, and mix it new every day. This trains the lizard brain to know color intuitively.

Larry:
What other contemporary landscape painters do you admire?

Marc
Well, there are a few that I know and whose company I enjoy, but I dont think admiration is part of it. At some point, you stop looking at what others are doing, and just do what your own inner compass tells you to do. I dont want to learn from anyone else these days, I want my own voice to mature in its own track. Most painters that I enjoy looking at are not landscape painters at all anyway. Nathan Oliviera, for example, had a large show a couple years ago at the Tacoma Art Museum, and I went on a rare outing to see it. I can appreciate paint with his work, and raw drawing with Francis Bacon, another that I like to see in person when possible. I really like Greg Gibbons in Albuquerque, (bosquestudios.com) because his paintings resound in me some unique New Mexico genome, that no other canned New Mexico painter can do. I was raised there, and find Greg’s images get under my skin like few others. But we are very different as painters. I like entering parts of the world through the unique visions of people who are different, and in some cases much more successful at what I want to get at than I am. Sort of like appreciating the expertise of another trade. Greg speaks a language that I am too chicken to learn.

Larry:
You make and sell prints of your paintings and a number of online venues carry your work in print form. What kinds of prints do you make? Has this worked well for you?

Marc
I don’t know what anyone might make of the copious prints and posters that have been made, but they started as a response to a lot of ordinary people asking if we could produce some for those who liked the paintings but could not afford originals. I get no significant income from them, some pocket money every year is about it. I dont make them though, they are done by Winn Devon/Canadian Art Prints. They do some limited editions, posters, and some canvas transfers. I do not allow any “enhancements” that confuse people… prints and posters are prints and posters. They were originally done here in Seattle by Winn Devon which was a local company who approached me many years ago now about the same time I was getting inquiries. I figured no harm in it, so I have let them be what they are. Once you open that box, it is hard to close it.

Is that helpful? Also, a correction… I met Stuart Shills in Ireland on his last day there. I doubt he remembers me so I couldn’t say I “knew” him. I met him, but that is about it.

marc

Marc Bohne Clearing Sky, oil on panel, 6 x 7 inches

Marc Bohne is a landscape painter from Seattle, Washington who shows at the Craig Krull Gallery in LA and will be having a show there this May. He also shows at the Meyer East Gallery in Santa Fe and a few other venues.

His website has an amazing number of exquisite landscapes. The smaller landscapes, that appear to have been made quickly from life have an immediacy in his struggle to captures the light but retain a refined color sensibility for the painting itself, not just descriptive color to confirm what we already know. What really impressed me was the inventiveness of his compositions, the careful organization and placement of the large shapes which emphasize abstract design. These don’t just seem like formal constructs, they have a look of real life but also the touch and temperament that evokes a mood and a sense of place. It is wonderful to see such well-painted landscapes that also brings such a modern sensibility. He stated in an email that he was a Ballinglen fellow (at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Ballycastle, Ireland)

Cattle Near Ballycastle, 12 x 10 inches

Looking through his large body of landscapes, each painting seems inventive and fresh, he rarely falls victim to formula or repeating himself. I prefer the looser, quicker and smaller works but a number of his larger and more highly realized works are quite impressive as well. The one big question I have or confusion is that I assumed the smaller paintings were done from life but after reading his artist statement I’m uncertain. He is messing with my head when he says “…I could never be a plein-air painter”

I treat my landscapes more like portraits than snapshots of a place. Portraits contain both subject and observer, and good portraits show some evidence of that intimacy. The places that interest me already seem to contain some piece of me, and I feel compelled to explore that resonance. I revisit them many times in my mind before I commit them to a painting. For this reason I could never be a plein-air painter. We all see the world through the colored glass of our particular experience and it is important for me to process my perceptions, which often need time to form.

I emailed him a few days ago and asked for more information about his process but haven’t yet heard back. Perhaps he is traveling and can clarify this question later on. If so I’ll add the info in this post.

California Hills, oil on panel, 7 x 6 inches

Also, I found some information on his bio at his Meyer East Gallery in Santa Fe that could shed more light

“I love paint,” Bohne enthuses. “If you look closely at the paintings, you see layers of colors. Step back a bit and the layers meld into abstract textures and patterns of light and dark. Step further back and a landscape subject emerges. People bring their own associative content to the landscapes, but to me they are dialogues between the visual, tactile, sensual, intellectual and emotional experiences I had in a place.”

Bohne’s “places” are ordinary locations, enlivened by passing clouds or heavy atmosphere. He discovers them by prowling around natural settings near his home in Seattle, Washington, or during road trips that last up to four weeks. His home on wheels is a Ford E150 van that has 300,000 miles, outfitted with a sleeping berth so he can spend as much time in a spot as necessary.

The Holiday, oil on panel, 7 x 6 inches

“I return to some locations repeatedly,” he says. “Other times, I glimpse something on the side of the road and hunt it down. The objective is to disconnect or minimize myself so that I see deeper into the layers of the landscape, uncovering its harmonies and dissonances, the physical and spiritual tensions. When a certain lighting effect resonates with me, I take photographs and describe the experience in my journal.”

Back in his Saltmine Studio located on the north end of Lake Washington, Bohne lets these experiences “condense, bubble and stew.” His intention is not to document actual topography but rather to reprocess his experience into universal terrain. Eschewing panoramas and dramatic contrasts, he is drawn to quiet idylls etched in narrow ranges of chroma and value.

Haze Near Rosebud, 22 x 26 inches

Albergs Hedgerow, oil on panel, 6 x 7 inches

I also enjoyed reading what he had to say about the energy of an unfinished painting…

I learned a long time ago that there is a certain energy to an unfinished painting, and have thought a lot about that phenomenon. They want you to finish them, and I find this interaction powerful. A painting is more interesting when it is interactive, requiring some participation from the observer. I have found that if I put in just enough dots, the viewer connects them and the experience can be almost conversational. It is that way while painting them, and one hopes that they contain what one puts into them. The challenge is making those dots on many levels, both on the actual surface and on the emotional and even spiritual levels if you can. I think of it like poetry…unpopular when it requires too much work but interesting and sometimes even cathartic when it asks something from the reader.

I’ll stop here and let the work speak for itself. I had a difficult time trying to decide what works to show here, there were so many. I strongly suggest you check out his website as well.

ADDENDUM (I added the answers to some questions I emailed him earlier in the next post)

Cattle Near Eden, 18 x 20 inches

Dry Tracks, 2001, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 inches

Fog on the Rio Grande1, 16 x 20 inches

Along The Platte, oil on panel, 6 x 7 inches

I recently posted about an artist, Larry Cohen, a California landscape and cityscape painter painting large plein air vistas of LA and San Francisco in a painterly realist style. He has shown in some major galleries on the west and east coast. He talked to me on the phone and gave helpful background information about such things as his study with Paul Wonner and the influence of Monet’s early plein air landscape on his work. The article was positive and showed many examples and details of his work.

However, I just deleted the article and comments in response to the artist’s request to take it down. The artist (and his wife) appearently didn’t understand that comments could sometimes be negative as well as positive. The first few comments had some negative criticism in regard to his use of color. I encouraged further open discussion and critiquing in the comments and included some criticism of my own.

Many times I’m not able to actually view the work in real life so I primarily provide background information and quote where I can from the artist or other sources. I may give a positive response to the work but rarely would I write a negative review in the actual post unless I saw the work in person. Most of the artists I write about are serious, professional artists whose work have national reach and interest. Of course I like some work better than others but almost all the artists I post about I respect and admire on some level. However, this is not a blog to promote the artists work or career. It a means to let other painters (and anyone else) see and discuss work they might otherwise not get an opportunity to. The comments are a place where actual criticism can occur, everyone should understand here that comments are based on the imagery posted and not from real life. Also, people should understand that the comments are just opinions.

I decided to remove the post. I will try to figure out a way to better handle the issue of people critiquing professional artists in the comments and to make sure future artists are aware that this is a public “forum” and people are encouraged to speak their minds so we can all learn from the input from the many terrific painters who visit this blog.

Of course, being public also means that some people might say something wacko, mean or even slanderous. That’s where I will have to step in more. One person suggested if there was a questionable negative comment posted that I first send it to the artist to give them a chance to respond. That might work, depending on the artist, but I can see how that might get complicated quickly. (I certainly don’t want to stand in the middle between a famous but touchy artist and some young art student saying something like “this is just couch painting for rich old ladies”!)

However, most people who comment here are very talented professional painters who understand how difficult making a living as a painter can be and the importance of relationships and reputation in the art world. People who comment here have been almost always respectful and fair but find ways to speak their mind about the work. I want this to continue, to give a means for like minded painters to talk to each other about all the various issues central to their art. I am thinking that eventually, in the coming months, I will incorporate a true forum where discussion is far more effective and people can initiate posts on their own.

Henry Finkelstein The Greenhouse III, oil on canvas, 34 x 46 inches
Fascinating interview with Henry Finkelstein on the Jerusalem Studio School blog by Rebecca Harp, he is currently teaching a landscape painting workshop there. Henry Finkelstein graduated from the Cooper Union and the Yale School of Art and is a former Fulbright fellow and has taught drawing and painting at the National Academy of Design in New York. A 2003 Art in America article stated; “… he renders the landscape in a loose, lyric manner that makes him heir to the abstract-leaning, nature-based esthetic of his much-admired parents, Gretna Campbell and Louis Finkelstein.”

From the Bridge at the Bois Brehan II, oil on canvas, 40 x 44 inches

The below quote from his statement on his website reveals some of his thinking behind these compelling landscapes.

Although it may not be the first thing one notices about my paintings, their dynamic is largely influenced by the Abstract Expressionists. I need not to know exactly how a painting is going to come out, or even if it will succeed. I discover the meaning of each painting as I go along. Usually I have a hint of a theme or I know how I want to go about a painting, but the final outcome is always a surprise to me. Nevertheless, unlike strictly abstract painters, I paint mostly from direct observation. Nature offers me a necessary resistance that I find challenging.

I also appreciated what he said in the interview:

How do I define a successful painting? One in which something fresh is arrived at and is clearly stated. A failure? I’m as disappointed by a painting that I know too well from the start as I am in one that just becomes a hopeless mess.

There are a number of high resolution images(click on image) of his recent work on the JSS blog – I find it greatly helps to see the work with the higher resolution versions.

Potting Shed, oil on canvas, 51 x 54 inches

Pond, Sunny Day, oil on canvas, 43 3/4 x 45 3/4 inches

January 28 – February 27 2010
Coleman Bancroft LLC 35 East 67th Street, 4th flr NYC

Sorry but I have no detailed information on this upcoming show of Stuart Shils paintings. If you live nearby please check it out and let us know your thoughts. A website doesn’t yet seem available for this show. You can see Shils recent work on his website.