Brett Baker: Forest and the Trees

Studio Table, 2014-15, 14 x 24 inches

Things start to happen when you look at Brett Baker's paintings. Like entering a forest, we have to adjust our eyes to their light, to their terrain, to what's happening. At first we see the forest, then we see the trees, then we start to notice things.

Studio Icon, 2014-15, oil on canvas, 20 x18 inches

Things like movement. What's not moving, and what is. Maybe everything seems like it's moving. His paintings are like that. Then there is direction. A lot of it. Straight up, but sideways. Oblique, and off and running. Marshalled. We are all going one way, and then it shifts. Like wind on a wheat field. Like soldiers marching, like popsicle sticks side by side, but then something trips it up, messes up the order, things turn, they fork, they about-face, they pivot, they leak off in some other direction, spooked, or just contrary. Herd resistant. Maybe just one duck that won't row.

Night Table, 2013-15, oil on canvas, 7 x 5 inches

And they are moody. Rothko moody. And then they clear. We make a turn and find a clearing. Sunny and warm. But it is still all about the forest. Light in the forest. Shade in the forest. Exacting tone and temperature to the color. Thick paint. Juicy paint. Earthy paint. Ripples. Rippling textures. Tuned. Tuning. Generating light from within. Radiance of being.

Russian Novel, 2013-15, oil on canvas, 5 x 4 inches

"I just like painting," Brett Baker says, "making paintings, looking at them, sharing them..."

Night Table, 2014-15, oil on canvas, 9 x 12 inches

It shows. This work stays close to the bone. Small canvasses. Intimate. Intimate abstraction. A feel for paint. The feel for paint. The poetry of paint. The poetry of abstraction. The simplicity. Patterns. Repetition. Deviation. The deviation, again, so pivotal. The crowd. The crowded field. Then the odd duck or two. The outsiders. Creating just the right amount of tension. Creating change. The flies in the ointment-- those things that are the irritation that sparks the pearl. The deviation that sparks diversity. That renews the blood. That sparks our engine. That gets us going. That makes our story. That makes Brett Baker's paintings.



Addison Parks
Spring Hill, 2016

BRIAN WASHBURN: Mechanical Mayhem

Brian Washburn, Ceci n'est pas une pipe, oil on paper

When you meet Brian Washburn's work, you meet him. He doesn't just stick his neck out, he puts himself out there, and even does a little turn and lets you see him in the round. Take a good look. This is who he is, this is what you get, take it or leave it. If you get into a staring contest with this work, it won't blink.

Mr Twister, 2007-2008, oil on paper

This matters. Brian Washburn calls his work something like nonchalant drawing. Which is to say that you get what you get, no more, no less. When you see a lot of his work you come to expect this. That also says a lot. Like a visual Bernie Sanders, he says what he says, and never strays. He has it down because he is not making it up as he goes along. It is who he is. It also reveals another aspect of the work and the artist: just how unexpectedly precise Brian Washburn is.

Jig-N-Pig, 2008, oil on paper

With that out of the way, we get to simply engage each work, these drawings, oil on paper, these at once elegant and comical cartoon contraptions, with their rough texture, with their jaunty demeanor, with their implied third dimension and pent up motion, on their own terms.

Deep Tail Dancer,  2008, oil on paper

Part characters, part happenings, part appartions that spring from his head roaring and ready to unleash themselves upon the world, his images take on a life of their own. He invents them from the everyday around him: little frankensteins.

Untitled, 2011-2012, oil on paper, 40 x 29 inches

They have personalities, they have engines, they have places to go and mischief to perform. Like some Cat in the Hat, Maxwell's silver hammer, artist as wizard, Brian Washburn populates the world with his fiesty, beasty machines that frankly look like they may be up to no good. They roust a dull world. They wake it up. They make it take notice. They serve notice. Delightfully so. They make it laugh. They gun their engines. They honk their horns. They thumb their noses. In our general direction. These are Brian Washburn's Ambassadors. His wacky, whimsical, whirling dervishes. Beware. And have a blast!

Brian Washburn, St Malo, oil on paper

Brian Washburn, Smoke Sparkle Lizard, 2008,  oil on paper

Addison Parks
Spring Hill, 2016

Brian Washburn, Hulk Smash, 2016,  oil on paper

Brian Washburn,  untitled, oil on paper, 2016/ in progress

Brian Washburn, The Expectant, 2016/ in progress,  oil on paper

Brian Washburn, Sea Anchor, 2016/ in progress,  oil on paper

INSIDE OUTSIDE THE BOX

Addison Parks, Syrian Kat, 2015-2016
 oil on linen, 14 x 11 inches

Call it a contradiction, call it a paradox, but every artist knows deep down on some level, that to get outside the box, you have to go inside the box.

Addison Parks, BrickaBrock, 2016, oil on linen, 16 x 20 inches

That is the challenge, that is the quest. It is also every artist's salvation. Inside the box is the one place that is outside the box. Everything in the world is inside the box. The box, the canvas, is a kind of black hole, or better, wormhole. The canvas becomes the hole in the donut. It is the hole poked in the box that gets outside the box. It is freedom.  Sanctuary. Frontier. Unchartered territory. Portal.

Addison Parks, LoveyDovey, 2016, oil on linen, 20 x 16 inches

This is the great irony about all of the outside the box talk in creative circles. Outside the box is right there in the canvas. The portal that can take you anywhere at any given moment. You have only to walk through it! Wow!

Addison Parks, Love in the Long Haul, 2016, oil on linen, 16 x 20 inches

Addison Parks, work-in-progress, 2015-2016
 oil on linen, 14 x 11 inches

Addison Parks
Spring Hill, April, 2016

Etel Adnan and Good Natured Painting

I have to say, I like Etel Adnan's paintings. I like them in the way I like Paul Klee's paintings, Arthur Dove's paintings, Helen Frankenthaler's paintings, and Milton Avery's. I want to say Serge Poliakoff, Sonia Delauney, and Nicholas de Staël too. A kind of flatish, shape-oriented, spiritual abstraction rooted in nature. Still, her paintings are wholly her own. She made them that way.

I often heard it said long ago when I was in school that painting was an old person's profession. It was also said that you had to make a lot of paintings(800 to be exact) before you could make a good one. Etel Adnan would seem to bear this out. At 91 she is making her best work. At 91, she is nailing it.

I have to confess, I am biased. I relate to her. We both have Greece and the French language in our vagabond youth. We both found asylum in the language of paint. We both found sanctuary in nature. We both like to paint like a cobbler making shoes, a tube of wonderful color, a painting knife, a table top, some morning sun, sometimes a small canvas in the lap.

She has integrated it all. She is in the zone. Atuned to color and shape, orchestrating the space, coalescing the energy, finding new perspectives, shuffling the deck, making new music, hitting different notes, new harmonies, discovering new shapes and new shape relationships, new colors and new color relationships, embedding warm sunlight like paint photosynthesis. Paintsythesis.

I was trained in the arts. When you showed talent, that's what you did. And then of course the challenge became all wrong: the challenge became to distinguish yourself, to get to the top. To succeed. This is where school messes you up. You fight for the top and you are rewarded. It is vertical. But art is anything but.

So the focus is wrong. Too much on self. Too much on who the painting is by. Too self-conscious. When left to one's own devices the focus is where it belongs, on the world around us, on the wonder around us. Klee, Dove, Frankenthaler, Avery, and Adnan, this is what they have in common. This simplicity. This clarity. This integrity. This center. This heart. This inner light.

I haven't read Adnan's work as a writer or philosopher(she was trained at the Sorbonne, Berkeley, and Harvard), but I would bet the house that her pure place is her paintings.

By the way, I am not blaming the system for ruining artists so much as making a case for people who made art not to make something of themselves, but to make something of life. The irony is that we all know full well that to really make something of yourself, well, you make it with what is true. Etel Adnan's paintings are true. Some people might call that good natured, and I would have to agree.

Addison Parks

Spring Hill

Happy Birthday Larry Deyab

L A R R Y  D E Y A B

1 9 5 7  -  2 0 1 6

Larry Deyab was a careful observer's careful observer. Sadly I say "was" because he passed away after shoveling out of a snow storm this past winter. He kept great company wherever he went, and in an art world where observation is prized above all else, Larry Deyab was king. He will be dearly missed.

Guten Abend, 2010, oil on linen, 28 x 43 inches

It is worth mentioning also that Larry was, for the most part, far too much the gentleman to impose those observations of his on anyone else. No, instead he reserved them for his paintings, and in this regard, he was no gentleman at all. A man who was gentle and kind in his life, became ferocious and terrifying in his art.

Balzac, 2004, oil on canvas, 100 x 40 inches, L'Imagerie, Lannion, France

Larry Deyab's paintings were that reasonable combination of both him, and the crazy world he witnessed around him. They were sharp, searing, caustic, witty, ironic, comical, brutal, unapologetic, brave, shocking and beautiful. They seemlessly fused an elegant education in Boston and New York with the raw power and grit of the back city streets; like some Quentin Tarantino comic strip graffiti artist; his narratives seemed simultaneously ripped from the socio-political stratosphere and pop, ethnic, literary, fashion cultural zeitgeist, and then spilled and splashed and sprayed across his linen canvasses like a drive-by postmodern-day Toulouse Lautrec.

LAST SHOT(Brooklyn), 2006, enamel on canvas, 32 x 44 inches

Religion was not spared either, although one could argue that his Christ paintings only reflect poorly on the human race. The blacks in them are bottomless. Their pain is his pain. It is beyond palpable.

Crown of Thorns, 2012, oil on linen

Larry was incredibly knowledgeable, thoughtful and well read about everything, not just art. He smoked the best Cuban cigars and drank the finest brandy. He hated talking on the phone. He was Larry, never Lawrence. You wouldn't have batted on eyelash to hear that he once knew someone like Gertrude Stein. He got around. He exhibited more abroad, and spent time painting there, mostly in France. He was passionate and beside himself about the tragedy and devastation happening in Syria, the mythical homeland of his parents. He was patient and contemplative, with a warm and ready smile and a searching gleam in his eye. He had had his big heart broken one too many times. It had taken its toll. He carried the weight of it around with him.

Consolatory Virgin, 2007, spray paint on canvas, 100 x 100 cm

His art world stories were treasures, windows to a time gone by. For example he once found himself giddy in a drinking contest with the legendary Joan Mitchell. He was also the willing and trusted confidant of the revered Milton Resnick, right up until when the great artist took his own life at age 87. Once, his artist pals hadn't believed him that he had just bumped into the one and only Bill de Kooning wandering down West Broadway with the sun in his eyes. At every art world event he enjoyed the companionship of his teacher and mentor, the painter, the rock, Bill Jensen. He spent years as Ronald Bladen's friend and assistant, building his fantastic sculptures, and only he knew their quixotic secrets. He affectionately parsed and debated with his buddy, the art critic, Robert Storr. Strangely enough, in 1982 he attended an opening for Seven Americans at the Washburn Gallery on Greene St that I was in but missed because my first son Rory was being born.

2012, Dadian Gallery, Washington DC, Artist talk

Despite all the people and friends that linked us for most of our lives(our mothers had both been friends of Resnick's, for example), we wouldn't meet for the first time until 2009 when he walked into the Bow Street Gallery in Cambridge and introduced himself. We had a lot of catching up to do. Brothers. Fast friends. He had finally come home, after roughly 30 years in the New York art world, to live in peace. Like everyone who knew him, I am so glad to have been his friend. Happy Birthday Larry. Rest in peace.

Black Flowers, 2005, spray and enamel on canvass, 38 x 78 inches

Addison Parks, Spring Hill, March 29,  2016

CAROL HEFT AT THE BLUE MOUNTAIN GALLERY

C A R O L   H E F T : 
W o r k  o n  P a p e r
March 2016

Carol Heft, Untitled, 2016, on paper, 18x24",
collage w/ watercolor, gouache, charcoal, pencil

Carol Heft starts a marvelously spirited conversation in her new collage work on paper. It is a fascinating  discourse shaped by all kinds of invention and possibilities, filled with mercurial passion, tempered by profound intellect, deftly guided by feeling, fueled by whimsical imagination, and overseen by a keen and seasoned eye.

Carol Heft: Work on Paper, Blue Mountain Gallery

There is no mistaking the diverse interactive tapestry of visual experience launched by Carol Heft: Work on Paper at the Blue Mountain Gallery in New York this March. Now the viewer has a chance to jump into the conversation, and this back and forth gets elevated to such a wonderfully lively intensity.

Carol Heft, Untitled, 2016, on paper, 18x24",
collage w/ watercolor, gouache, charcoal, pencil

Carol Heft, Blue Mountain Gallery installation, March 2016

Carol Heft, Untitled, 2016, on paper, 18x24",
collage w/ watercolor, gouache, charcoal, pencil

This is the nature of her work; her sensibility dictates that we are part of the exchange. It doesn't completely work if we are not. There is a bit of Lauren Bacall when kissing Humphrey Bogart in To Have And Have Not: "It's even better when you help."

This is the gift of Carol Heft's work. The give and take. We get to listen in. We get to join in. But the truth is, it is even better when we join in. If and when we do is critical to the experience.

Carol Heft, Untitled, 2016, on paper, 18x24",
collage w/ watercolor, gouache, charcoal, pencil

"I’m happy with the process and the product," Carol Heft says in talking about her work. "It is an extension of my recent experiments with collage, drawing and painting. The paper “overlays” are like stencils and add a kind of relief sculpture element, with shadows, to the surface, which I find interesting."

Carol Heft: Work on Paper, Blue Mountain Gallery

Abstract and semi-abstract 2 and 3D elements are at play in this work. Drawing and collage converse wildly; shapes loosely move in and outside the lines, there is rapid fire gesture, there is layered history, there is revelatory clarification, and in most cases highly animated color gets the party started.

"The combination of drawing, scribbling, painting, collage, layering lines, using the shadows," she explains, "these are the most exciting aspects of some of the “Window” pieces that have a stencil like overlay which is then worked and reintegrated into the overall picture plane and space. I see this as an endless source of inspiration, using an infinite range of design elements in the process."

Carol Heft: Work on Paper, Blue Mountain Gallery

Engaging the works on paper up close, we enter into her world. We are not just located, we are on board.

"The work in this exhibition is all relatively small, 18 x 24 mostly, and on paper. The humble materials, some recycled drawings that are layered with stencils, and the stream of consciousness imagery, are all part of a direction I have been working toward; one of freedom and new ways of conceiving composition."

Carol Heft, Untitled, 2016, on paper, 18x24",
collage w/ watercolor, gouache, charcoal, pencil

In this Work on Paper, all done in 2016, we get an endlessly unfolding experience. Part puzzle, part pop-up, part Mardi Gras parade, part board game, part live band, we enjoy a shifting, moving, energetic, illusory, baffling roadmap to someplace we have never been, where the signs point every which way, and some pills make you larger and some pills make you small. Welcome to Carol's Wonderland.

"The uniformity of the scale of the work and my attitude about relative scale and size has opened up a bit. Whether the work is an object, window, screen, field or portal has always interested me. How the space experienced in the picture plane depends on many factors, including the relationship between the size of the work and the size of the human body."

Carol Heft, Untitled, 2016, on paper, 18x24",
collage w/ watercolor, gouache, charcoal, pencil

Here is the quiet riot and brilliant fun of these beautiful works. Carol Heft invites us to sit down to her Mad Hatter's Tea Party.  Pass the marmalade.  Let the celebration begin!  Laissez les bon temps rouler!

Addison Parks

Spring Hill, March, 2016

Carol Heft, Untitled, 2016, on paper, 18x24",
collage w/ watercolor, gouache, charcoal, pencil

Carol Heft: Work on Paper

THE BLUE MOUNTAIN GALLERY

530 West 25th Street  4th Floor, New York, NY 10001 tel: 646.486.4730, infor@bluemountaingallery.org

The Blue Mountain Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of work by Carol Heft from March 1 – 26, 2016.  The exhibition will include collage, drawing, painting, digital images, and constructions in a variety of materials. Ms. Heft’s work is inspired by an exploratory approach to materials, and the interchange of two and three dimensional space on flat surfaces. Her new work combines physical and illusionary layers of space populated by imaginative formal combinations. Careful attention to composition born of random arrangements are juxtaposed in compelling designs.

There will be a concert and gallery talk on March 26, Saturday, from 2:00 – 4:00  at the gallery performed by The Bill Warfield Hell’s Kitchen Funk Orchestra.

Born in 1954, Carol Heft studied painting with Robert Brackman, National Academician, from the age of 12 – 16.  She then attended the Rhode Island School of Design where she studied with Lisa Chase, Leland Bell, Judy Pfaff, and other visiting artists and instructors.  After graduating in 1976, Ms. Heft moved to New York City, where she currently lives and works.  Carol Heft teaches drawing, painting, 2 dimensional design, and technical drawing at Muhlenberg College, and Cedar Crest College, in Allentown PA, and St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn, NY.  Contact Marcia Clark at the gallery for further information

Carol Heft, Untitled, 2016, on paper, 18x24",
collage w/ watercolor, gouache, charcoal, pencil

Carol Heft, Untitled, 2016, on paper, 18x24",
collage w/ watercolor, gouache, charcoal, pencil

HELEN FRANKENTHALER Just Is

Helen Frankenthaler, 1963, THE BAY, 81 x 82"

Helen Frankenthaler transformed the interior landscape as abstract painting in a way that no one else has before or since. Her epic and panoramic expanses hold true to a world and universe unfettered and uninfluenced by man or men. It is a place devoid of ego, and free from everything that that entails. Despite its correspondence with land and sea and sky it is a pure abstraction that we haven't seen since Popova, and may never see again.

Helen Frankenthaler, 1973, HINT FROM BASSANO

It reflects a place unique in the aesthetic experience of 20th century modernism. A kind of non-intellectual dialogue that is difficult for most of us to grasp. Something Zen. Where there is no "there there." *  The sort of wonderful liberation of form from self and purpose that befuddles most of us.

Helen Frankenthaler

Plenty of abstract painters have sought this kind of painterly nirvana. Pollock, Resnick, Seliger, Poons, Louis, de Kooning, Hofmann, and of course, Motherwell, to name just a few. But somehow THEY were always present. Their will. Their mission. Their agenda. Their mark.

Helen Frankenthaler, 1990, RED SHIFT, 60 x 70"

What makes Frankenthaler so magnificent is that she was able to make a world that we knew was hers without leaving her stamp on it, that she could sidestep the paradox, that she could compose without being the composer. That like Bruce Springsteen's street poet, could just "stand back and let it all be."

Charles Seliger, 1995, TEMPEST, 14 x 14 "
Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery

An artist like Charles Seliger indeed tried to tread ever so lightly in his ethereal abstractions, and did, but couldn't help but leave the tiniest trace, a footprint here, a fingerprint there, a stain, an overall perfume. He tried to get so small, to leave himself behind, and said in effect, just ignore little old me and look where I am pointing. See the cosmos that I see. He got so very close, but again some paradox kept getting in the way. Some catch 22.  The law of attraction. It became a snag. Mortal like the rest of us.  How could he elude the "there there?"

Bill Jensen, 2010-11, LOUHAN(Dark Angel), oil on linen, 28 x23"
Courtesy of Cheim&Read

Twenty years or so ago one of the best living American painters, Bill Jensen, crossed over that threshold and has never looked back. He parked his ego and got out and walked. We are still watching. His paintings intrigue us in this very way. They flirt with that edge. Maybe they are there. Maybe they are long gone.

Mark Rothko, 1951, BLUE, GREEN AND BROWN

Over sixty years ago Rothko gave us a misty place, but it was still a kind of figure of sorts, something profoundly ontological, a question, a prime mover, a God. Western Man has this hang-up: themes; man vs nature, man vs society, man vs himself, man vs God. Man, man, man!

Helen Frankenthaler
Here she is the figure in her paintings that are the ground;
When we view her work we stand in her shoes. 

Frankenthaler, one of the great but often overlooked abstract artists of the last century, gives us none of this. Just a ground. Just an invisible frame. A wide open window. Something like the weather. A view to uninhabited space. A view to a beautiful but savage universe.

Helen Frankenthaler, 1972, CHINA II, 80 x 105"

This is what is also so interesting about the work. As it seems so non-intellectual we assume that it is governed by emotions. So "just like a woman." That it is a rich emotional landscape. Overflowing with clichéd "feminine feelings." Positively dripping with them. Watery. Colorfully so!

Helen Frankenthaler, 1950-1959, Gagosian installation(2013)

Ironically, nothing could be farther from the truth. Instead it is rather a heartless world. A pitiless, uncaring world. So like nature itself. A world to which we become the witness; we become the figure on the ground. An infinite world of power and change and growth and decay and survival and consequence without human attributes or sentiments like justice, and fairness, and what is right and wrong. Which is what makes the work so awesome and terrifyingly beaufiful. It just is.

Helen Frankenthaler, 1979, CAROUSEL, Installation Palm Springs Art Museum

Helen Frankenthaler, 1969, BLESSING THE FLEET

Helen Frankenthaler

Addison Parks
Spring Hill, Feb. 2016





*Gertrude Stein, when writing about her hometown of Oakland, California