Franny Golden: La Vie en Rose

Franny Golden is a painter. Seems like an obvious thing to say about someone who puts paint to canvas with a brush, but there is a spirit to painting, and Franny Golden embodies that spirit. Someone who translates everything around them into painting. Some who lives and breathes and shares that in painting. Someone who sees the best in everything around them and shares that in painting. That is a painter!




Her paintings have a watery diaphanous quality that is both jubilant and poignant, brave and optimistic. Whether portrait or abstraction, still life or landscape, they are all made of this. Of hope. Of belief. Of care. Of love. They carry her paintings, like her paintings carry her, and us.




Franny Golden's beautiful watery paintings wash over us. Their iridescent colors are likes scarves over a lamp, her lines like hangers that support them. The light shines through. La vie en rose.




It should be no surprise that Franny Golden now lives in France after a lifetime in and around Boston and on Cape Cod. It is where she belongs. It is who she is. A painter.





Addison Parks
Spring Hill, Summer, 2016






Franny Golden

Bill Thompson's Excellent New Adventure

Mandarin

32.5 x 33.75 x 7 (83 x 86 x 18cm) urethane on polyurethane block 2016

Carroll&Sons Installation

You have to love Bill Thompson's new work, it is so much fun. It is as though his older work from the last few years just had kids. It is also as though he has been reborn. The work feels so fresh. There is something happy contagious about the energy which bounces off the walls in these latest biomorphic reliefs. You just want to take one home.

beetle 3, 28 x 16.5 x 7

  urethane on polyurethane block 2015

The most important thing that happens in them is that instead of one color, there are two. This takes us back to his work 25 years ago. Those were flat rectangular surfaces. Two colors, two shapes, talking. The new work comes off the wall, sensuously wheeling in space, with two colors having it on, having us on. Laughing!

Monkey, 2016, Urethane on polyurethane block 25 x 26.5 x 7” 

As much as I appreciate and admire the earlier monochromatic reliefs, I am sorry, I can't help it, I like these new non-metallic paint polychromes even more. The second color opens up the work like opening up a window. Brilliant. There is the warmth of sunshine. The sounds of birds and children playing, sounds like "boink" and "splat," and "ssssssss." You can almost taste them in your mouth. Bubblegum. M&Ms.

Sailor

27 x 29 x 7 (68 x 73 x 18cm) urethane on polyurethane block 2016

beetle1

20.25 x 11.5 x 6.5 (51 x 29 x 17cm) urethane on polyurethane block 2015

Addison Parks
Spring Hill, July 28, 2016

Carroll&Sons Installation

Carroll&Sons Installation

June 18 - July 28, 2016

CARROLL AND SONS
450 HARRISON AVENUE, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02118
PHONE: 617-482-2477 FACSIMILE: 617-482-2549
INFO@CARROLLANDSONS.NET

Alisa Henriquez: Museum of Art, University of Maine

Makeover Culture Disfigured No. 7, 2016, Digital prints, found paper, foam core, resin on wood panel

Alisa Henriquez (The Constructed Body; The University of Maine Museum of Art) forces us to gather ourselves. With her formidable visual compilations, her collage aesthetic, her large mounting walls of horizontal oval surfaces, like mountain pools breeding new life, she wows us with a complete arsenal of explosive form and meaning.

The world she puts before us is many things: analog and digital; found, appropriated, photographed, and painted; graphic design, text design; flat and then richly suggestive of three-dimensional space and form; black&white and dynamic color, psychological and sensual. Shocking and daring. Intimate and unnerving. Apocalyptic Venus Fly Traps. Unblinking gender-political discourse.  A powerful and compelling in your face challenge to a dehumanizing consumer practice and endgame. Stops and starts. Twists and turns. Body parts that feel bent through a distorted lens. A socio-media fun house mirror. A lot of fun but razor sharp edges. Dramatic changes in focus. A vision kaleidoscopic. Dazzling optics in every sense of the word.

Makeover Culture Disfigured No. 3 2016 digital prints, magazine images, found paper, acrylic paint, glitter, fabric, synthetic hair, resin on wood panel 52” x 68”

Alisa Henriquez is making something happen for a brave new world. To push outside the box. To get beyond painting and embrace the possibilities that a more installation oriented art creates. To make so many things happen at once. To celebrate the vibrant complexity that is our lives. 

Like some fierce investigator, she is trying to figure out what's going on. In that spirit, we are right there with her. Shapes and images collide, and crash, in a wonderful cacophony of Babel-like collage chaos that she orchestrates, that she pulls together, that like some postmodern-day super hero, she saves the day.

Her works pile up like totems, or friezes, like sumptuous Mary Shelley Frankenstein figures of a sort, but with her own radical brand of social and cultural criticism, her own art lexicon, that we can read and discover and piece together, forcing our eyes upwards, dwarfing us, like Surrealist wall carvings or paintings, but from Ancient Greece or Egypt. We marvel at them. We recognize some fragment, and then another, and might wonder how they fit in the puzzle beautifully spread out before us. Bits and pieces of design and art history and art flotsam and jetsam driving home her vision. A vision fast and furious in Alisa Henriquez's brilliant patchwork tsunami warning of what's to come.

Addison Parks

Spring Hill, July 2016

Floaters No. 2, 2015, Digital prints, magazine images, acrylic paint,
 resin, glitter, fake fur, vinyl, rubber on wood panel, 54 × 27 in

Floaters No. 1, 2015, Digital prints, magazine images, acrylic paint,
 resin, glitter, fake fur, yarn on wood panel, 66 1/2 × 32 1/2 in

Alisa Henriquez, 2014, Eclipse, Digital prints, magazine images,
 acrylic paint, oil paint, on wood panel, 58 1/2 × 23 1/4 in

Alisa Henriquez

The Constructed Body

May 13 - September 10, 2016

The University of Maine Museum of Art

Bangor, Maine 



Alisa Henriquez was born in Kingston, Jamaica and raised in Vancouver, Canada where she first studied at Emily Carr College of Art and Design. She went on to earn a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and a MFA in Painting from Indiana University. She also attended the Yale Summer School of Music and Art with the support of the Ellen Battel Stoekel Fellowship. She is an Associate Professor of Painting at Michigan State University. A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, NY exhibits her work.

Victor Lara: Passion in Paint

Victor Lara, Untitled painting; acrylic on canvas, 
7ft 9in x 12ft 10in, 2010 – 2015

Detail

My own sense when looking at Victor Lara's most recent paintings is that once where there was turmoil, now there is a garden. What was once an abstract reincarnation of something like Michelangelo's Last Judgment, with all of its writhing layers of humanity, ascending and descending, we now enjoy something more serene, more pastoral, and while possibly more layered and complex, more Giverny, more Monet's water lilies.

Victor Lara, Untitled painting; acrylic on canvas, 
7ft 9in x 12ft 10in, 2010 – 2015

Detail

One has to appreciate both, but the latter is easier on our blood pressure. This most recent work recalls Lara's small water colors of more than thirty years ago. 

Victor Lara, Untitled, watercolor,
4 x 6 inches, 1982, private collection

Victor Lara, Untitled, watercolor,
4 x 6 inches, 1981, private collection

Victor Lara, Untitled, acrylic on canvas,

 48 x 24 inches, 1992, private collection*

Victor Lara, Untitled painting; acrylic on canvas, 

6ft 6in x 4ft 6in, 2005–2012

The recollections start with the color and light, but also the delicate but powerful spirit of nurture/nature. Coupled with the raw finger-painted energy of the mammoth paintings of the 1990's we now find ourselves riding his undulating masses of shifting forms on sumptuous abstract waves of rich and fertile revelation.* These new paintings are impossibly alive, bursting with affirmation, ripe and glorious with unfolding vitality and invention, like some place we have never been, teaming with effervescence and the kind of magic and miracle that we might find at the bottom of the ocean or in some hidden valley or on another planet. 

Victor Lara, Untitled, acrylic on canvas,
RISD 2011 Biennial

What Victor Lara promised in his drawings 40 years ago he has delivered in his painting in this new millennium. And more. Victor Lara is a great painter. It may be one thing to mention Michelangelo or Monet, but Lara is a great painter for his time, our time, all time. His paintings unfold like the night sky. They unfold like a box full of Russian nesting dolls, one after another. They unfold like a lotus flower inside of a lotus flower inside of a lotus flower. Or better, a universe inside of a universe inside of a universe. One day a very big fuss will be made about his work.

Addison Parks

Spring Hill, July 2016

Victor Lara, Untitled painting; acrylic on canvas, 
8ft 6in x 6ft 7in, 2003-2015

Victor Lara, Untitled painting; acrylic on canvas, 

8ft 6in x 6ft 7in, 2003-2015

Victor Lara, Untitled painting; acrylic on canvas, 

6ft 7in x 5ft 7in, 2005–2009

Victor Lara, Untitled painting; acrylic on canvas, 
11ft x 9ft 6in, 2001–unfinished

*Unfortunately I only have an example of a medium small painting from the 1990s.

Born in Austin, Texas, Victor Lara was educated at the University of Texas, Austin, the Cleveland Institute of Art and Yale University, where he received his MFA in 1967.  He has been a professor of art, teaching painting and drawing at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) since 1973. 

http://www.victorlarapainter.com

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