Praeterita

  Beginning in June, I went back to my sketchbooks in search for inspiration for a new path for my painting. I've always carried a sketchbook with me, particularly on my frequent travels (I still have a few pages from sketchbooks from the 1980s!). So the new paintings were derived from drawings that have one foot in something observed. Landscape, even. But my drawing style has always been very fluid and quick, consisting of lots of looping strokes of the crayon and overlaid colours. That's what I've tried to carry over into oil paintings: a sense of energetic movement as the eye looks around and the hand tracks what the eye sees. Here is one of the videos of work in progress that I've posted on my YouTube channel:

My wife, Patty, left Tucson for the Midwest in May to spend the whole month directing and teaching at writing retreats in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan. Seeing as I was alone at home for all that time, I decided to use the four weeks as an at-home artist's residency. A real residency, of course, means you go to a location where you are given the use of a studio for a period of time to spend almost all of your time working. The advantage of such a retreat is that you leave the routines of your daily life behind and concentrate on making your art. The at-home residency, while I still had to do some freelance work and do the shopping and chores each week, is an opportunity to tune in to the same state of mind, if not from the same state of semi-isolation. My goal was to see if I could find a new path forward from the Crow and Hands series I've worked on for the past three years. The image at the head of this blog post is one of the first results: using the same imagery and mar...

Manhattan Sky , oil on canvas, wax and gold leaf, 24 inches x 48 inches x 2 inches Part 44 of an interview series in which artists reply to the same six questions. Lorelei French Sowa is a painter located in Florida, USA. Her paintings, whether they refer to landscape, birds, or abstract patterns, are marked by a strong sense of shape, bold execution, and multilayered textures of paint or collage. You can see more of her work here . Philip Hartigan : What medium/media do you chiefly use, and why? Lorelei French Sowa : Paint is my primary medium, but within the scope of 2D, I vacillate between acrylics and oil. I love the problem-solving that 2D provides. The world is full of depth and shapes, and organizing that space on a flat panel and understanding the limitations and the possibilities of the medium paint requires intense creativity. The problem of how to depict something is an interesting one. There are a thousand and one ways you can go about it. There's no set rule. Philip Ha...

"More", oil on canvas, 60" x 48", 2018 Artist Sarah Stolar's large-scale paintings are currently on show in a group exhibition at the Elizabeth Jones Art Center for Social and Environmental Justice , in Portland, Oregon. The title of the exhibition is Power Positions: A Dismantling of Phallacies , and as the pun in the title suggests, each of the artists presents work that questions patriarchal power structures by concentrating on women and female expression. In the words of the exhibition prospectus, they "explore themes of misogyny, intersectional feminism, body politics, sex and sexuality, power/empowerment, and systems of oppression." Stolar contributes eleven paintings that nearly all share common themes and method of making. "More", from 2018, is a good example of this style: a woman staring directly at the viewer, her pose and gesture indicating confidence, possession of her own body, even defiance (for example, the gesture of the righ...

  DUTCH SHOES, 27 inches high. Clay, wood, objects, charcoal, graphite Melissa Stern is a New York-based artist and writer who is exhibiting work at Firecat Projects in Chicago, in a solo show titled Does She or Doesn't She? The art consists of paintings, drawings, ceramic sculptures and found object assemblages, in all of which we see a common feature: hair. Specifically, a female face or head or form with the hair styled in every imaginable fashion (and probably some beyond imagining). The theme is both playful and serious. Serious, because the idea underpinning the subject matter is the way in which a woman's hair has, since time immemorial, been one of the key ways in which female identity is determined. The title of the show derives from an old advert for hair products, and the unsubtle message that when a woman "fixes" her hair, her personality is completed, which comes with the opposite corollary that "unfixed" hair leads to a socially incomplete wom...

I recently watched a documentary about the Danish painter Per Kirkeby, Man Falling . It's available on Amazon's Prime Video streaming service (for members). It documents his attempts to continue painting after he suffered a fall down a flight of stairs and landed on his head, that left him partially paralysed and with occluded vision. The film is a moving testament to the difficulties endured both by the patient in these cases, and the people around him. It's also one of the best films I've seen about the process of painting itself. Because even though Kirkeby talks about the fact that he can't really see the left side of anything he's working on, nevertheless with the guidance of assistants he adds marks on those areas of the canvas or paper, too. And the mark-making is just as intricate and beautiful, seemingly, as the work he produced when he was able-bodied. This suggest to me that for artists who have been working for a long time, particularly ...

Baselitz is a German artist who is in his seventies. I got to know his work about twenty years ago, and the photo above is from a book about his work that I bought back then. He began painting images upside down in the 1980s or thereabouts, and that's been the well he's gone back to ever since. Whether he's painting/sculpting/printmaking the right way up or the wrong way up, his style is derived from German Expressionism, all violent, crude brushmarks and clashing colour harmonies. His reasoning for painting things upside down, he has said, is that it forces him to think harder about what he's looking at it and how to render it. A few years ago, he gave an interview in which he said that there are no good women artists, and that women could never be great artists. Quite rightly, this caused a furor in the art world, with calls for his work to be boycotted because of his sexism. I have to say, I'm not entirely convinced that that's the right move. I mean, I p...

I went to the Highland Park art center last week to speak with the director about the new position I am taking there, as Master Instructor in Printmaking. The center is a handsome building near the center of this affluent north shore town, with classrooms in the lower ground floor, and two exhibition spaces on the main floor. Currently there is an exhibition of high quality paintings in the bigger of the two spaces: My favourite one was by Krista Harris. Tight organization of space, balance between drawing and colours: I also like this one by Erick Sanchez. It's like an Anselm Kiefer extravaganza but with birds rather than snakes: And this painting, by Shar Coulson. The different kinds of brushmarks and textures don't come across well in my photo, though you get the sense of her feeling for colour harmony:

I'm in Paris, France, for three weeks, teaching on Columbia College Chicago's study abroad program. The students don't arrive until the weekend, so I'm just relaxing in the city and our rented apartment in Montparnasse, on an easy schedule of one museum per day followed by a nap and a light dinner (with wine, of course). On Wednesday, we went to the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, near the Place de l'Alma. Half of the permanent collection was closed, but I still saw some seminal twentieth century works. From the first third of the century, there was the giant canvas-mural La Danse, the second version, painted for an American patron in the early 1930s. Inside the vast room that housed the works, there were two small cabinet with some fascinating photos, such as this one of Matisse sketching the mural: When you enter the hall where the paintings are displayed, you first see the sketched version: On the right, you can just about see one of th...

1 . This is the fifth year that the giant exhibition hall at the end of Chicago's Navy Pier has hosted the Expo Chicago art fair, and according to its organizers and PR people, it was the biggest and most successful of all, in terms of participating galleries, attendance, and sales. 2 . I could not tell whether the impressive, shiny, well-produced art on display was any different from what I saw on the walls last year, or the year before that, or the year before that, or the year before that. But a couple of things with lots of texture and loose execution caught my eye, nevertheless: Rose , Donald Baechler Mica Painting (Sunflowers) , Catherine Howe 3 . The special projects, ranged around the sides of the hall, were dedicated to more experimental works created by exhibiting artists. I liked this piece by Cody Hudson: Hold It Up to the Light , 2016 4 . Why does anyone go to art fairs? It's about as much fun as going to Walmart. Yes, there is a lot of contemp...

"Andersonville Water Tank," oil on canvas (click to enlarge) As a foreigner living in the United States, I can attest that one of the most striking features of the urban landscape in America is the water tower. European cities may have walls built by the Romans, medieval palaces, and grand eighteenth-century neo-classical boulevards, but as far as I’m aware you can’t look up from a street in Paris, Rome, or London and see these giant wooden cylinders with their little caps, standing on a rickety framework and silhouetted dramatically against the sky. The Chicago water tower, for example, may have been referred to by Oscar Wilde as “a castellated monstrosity with pepper boxes stuck all over it,” but it is revered in the city as one of the few buildings to survive the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and it’s just one of several hundred that are still dotted around the city. A century ago, almost every apartment building had a water tower sitting atop the roof. As modern pl...

Two weeks ago, I made my first visit to the Detroit Institute of Art to see a collection that has to be described as 'fabled.' My first art history class was in my teens, and some of the very first pictures my teacher made me look at and consider are housed in the DIA, and here I was, many decades later, finally getting to see them for the first time. The collection is also great enough to catch the rapacious eyes of the city's bankruptcy manager, so perhaps this might be the last opportunity I get to see the collection in one place. The first painting that caught my eye is this one: Clearly the Renaissance (perspective, depth of planes, rounded modelling of figures, close attention to the detailed surfaces of things), probably from the Low Countries, good enough to be by Van Eyck or an earlier master. But the painter is virtually anonymous, known only by the name "Master of the Embroidered Foliage." So what is decoration, and is it more than just patterni...

Uffizi, partial view of the tribuna (sculture corridor), taken when the fascist guards' backs were turned. Corn' io divenni allor gelato e fioco, nol dimandar, lettor, ch'i' non lo scrivo, pero ch'ogne parlar sarebbe poco. How weak I now became, how faded, dry -- reader, don't ask, I shall not write it down -- for anything I said would fall far short. Dante, Inferno , Canto 34 I read these lines in the Inferno late yesterday evening, after a day that included my first visit to the Uffizi art museum, and they struck me as appropriate to the cumulative effect of seeing so much familiar art for the first time. We are fortunate to have been given an apartment that is a five minute walk from the Uffizi, though we didn't set off until after midday, on a Saturday afternoon, in July. Possible forecast: raining human beings, take immediate shelter elsewhere. Big surprise: once again, the Amici card permits you to go in through a reserved door, and on...

( Last Blog Post for a Month: Part 2 ) Artist Susan Shulman, who has been a guest blogger here before, recently went to New York City, where she had an “amazing weekend of non-stop interaction and injection of some much needed creative juice.” Here are her impressions of the visit. SKETCHBOOK MAYHEM For the past three years, I have participated in the travelling library of the Brooklyn Sketchbook project. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised when I entered the storefront in Brooklyn accompanied by fellow artists William Evertson of Connecticut, USA, and Heather Mathews who was visiting from New South Wales, Australia. We came to find our own moleskine artworks of the past few years and discover some of our friends’ creations as well. These sketchbooks travel around North America, visiting different cities, allowing the public to explore and read these unique artist’s books. Some of my artist friends had voiced their concern about the artist paying a fee to create original a...

(L) Jan Chenoweth: 'Graves on a hill', Acrylic on canvas, 24" by 24"                                                             (R) Roger Halligan: 'Fortune Flowers I', 11" x 4.5" x 4.5"                     When I was in Chattanooga last weekend, I visited a number of artists' studios on the south side, an area that has been transformed in recent years by the arrival of painters, sculptors, glass artists, furniture makers, and other creative people. The two artists who impressed me the most were painter Janet Chenoweth and sculptor Roger Halligan , who have a building near Main Street that combines a large workshop and studio area at the back with a beautiful gallery area at the front. They were kind enough to agree to a joint interview, and I began by asking them to talk about their wo...