I never made it into the Wooster on Spring Street Collective show last weekend (I heard there was a 2 hour wait – I would not have waited that long last Sunday, so I’d don’t think I’d have seen it if I did find the line). 

However, there’s an excellent YouTube Online Video that Pierce Mattie Public Relations blog picked up that really gives you the inside tour to the Wooster on Spring Street Collective show.   I feel like I was there just by watching the video.

“….Event Alert! THE CANDLE BUILDING New York City. A new face on NYLON TV, NYLON editor Jared Flint skips the line at 11 Spring St, the canvas for the Wooster Collective’s street art show. He talks to Sara, one part of the Collective, about how she wrangled together over 40 international artists to tag up the walls of this historically graffiti-splattered building and, a street art aficionado himself, points out his favorite works from the likes of Dark Cloud and Shepherd Fairey.

Last weekend I went over to the ITP Program Winter show at New York University instead.

I got to take my son Adam with me to paint this afternoon; getting into Brooklyn Artists Gym was not so easy today – both entrances were locked – but I managed to get the landlord to buzz us in.

I can’t say my work today worked out as well as I’d liked, but we had fun and I even got my soon to be 14 year old to paint something.

Here’s what I ended up with – a portrait of my son Adam.

Here’s the sketch I did before starting -

 

Now it’s time to rest and take in Christmas.

I was over at the Whitney yesterday for about two hours – maybe I’ve seen enough art for now and need to create some of my own.  

The Mark Grotjahn show in the Anne & Joel Eheenkranz Gallery on the first floor was interesting – I passed it on the way out and I see that picture represented on the Whitney’s site is the one I liked the best.

“…on view September 15, 2006 – January 7, 2007
Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Gallery, floor 1
Conceived for this exhibition, Mark Grotjahn’s cycle of “perspective drawings” pulls the viewer into a dynamic interplay between the large-scale works and the gallery space. A sense of space is evoked by the drawings’ multiple vanishing points, a convention used since the Renaissance to create the illusion of depth and volume. These perspectival referents both create the structure for and become the subject of Grotjahn’s art. The works’ formal organization finds a counterpoint in the modulations of color that play against the vanishing points to create vibrant, three-dimensional surfaces.”

The Albers And Moholy-Nagy exhibition was cool – but not really my kind of work – I can’t embrace it as much because it feels to much like a series of exercises or “experiments” that is more illustrative than actual painting (though I liked many of the Albers color field paintings anyway).  It’s sorta like the prevailing beliefs of the day were to experiment with colors and shape fooling the eye and brain into reading depth into totally flat color arrangements.  Fact of the matter – there is an “implied depth” in Joseph Albers paintings – but he does not push it as far he could have (by varying the sharpness of the edges between colors.  To me, if he had done that – his paintings would look less like “exercises” in color mixing and more like an interpretation of space.  But that’s just my opinion.

The Picasso and American Art show I have already seen twice and I briefly walked by but felt a little overpowered yesterday – got slightly dizzy but it all and went off to a different part of the museum and then saw the Hopper paintings on the 5th floor before leaving.

I also saw a few art openings on Thursday – nothing much worth writing about.

I have maintained, for  quite some time, that most of Rembrandt’s paintings were much cleaner looking when they were created than what we see in today’s museums. 

In fact, I have had a long going “laugh” when passing by the Art Student’s League in NYC, for example, that imitated Rembrandt’s dirty and low light colors when it was effect of age they were imitating.  I’m not saying there’s no reason to paint dark, low light painting – only that Rembrandt would not recognize, or approve of most of his work if he saw what it looks like today.  But that’s equally true of much of the art of the past where oils and varnish changed colors and transparency over time.

Well, here’s a Rembrandt that kinda looks like it did when it was first painted in 1661 and it’s being auctioned off at Sotheby’s here in NYC next month, January 2007.   The Photo is care of Sotheby’s, BTW.

“…This extraordinary painting is certainly one of the most important works by Rembrandt that Sotheby’s has ever handled. Over the past 20 years, the vast majority of pictures by the artist that have appeared on the market have dated to the 1630s and 40s – it is exceedingly rare to have one that dates to the 1660s. Works of this period, the last decade of Rembrandt’s life and a time of personal turmoil, are extremely intense, soulful and introspective.”

I got the information from Inside Art at the New York Times.