Finally! Art I want in MY living room!

OK, so there is a lot of art I would want in my living room but this would actually fit in. The work of Roa is multimedia, multidimensional and was shown by White Walls Gallery at Scope Miami 2011.

Roa is a street artist. Lots of them these days but not many bringing gators back to the city streets. To say nothing of giant bunnies (a theme that will be worked today is ...bunnies). You can check out more by Roa, in context, HERE.

_ Two lovely pieces from Aca Galleries booth were Ernest Lawson's Pond in Winter and Jacob Lawrence's The Prophecy. The people at the booth were busy so I didn't chat with them.

It was near the end of a rather brutally long day so it is likely I would have been incoherent.

Lawson was a Canadian-born painter trained in New York and Paris. His main focus seemed to be on the natural side of urban, landscapes not of the wild but of the areas we humans most frequent. The work that pops up most when you look for information on Lawson is Spring Night, Harlem River.

Jacob Lawrence's painting is an entirely different sort of work. It has a very 1920s-1930s feel. It is very John Dos Passos or Langston Hughes. Lawrence was from New Jersey but spent his early years in Harlem. He was educated in a program made possible by the New Deal's Works Progress Administration.

His paintings seem to be primarily tempera and gouache. The Prophecy seems so precise and the colors so forceful it doesn't seem to fit with either medium. His works are also not simply of Harlem. His themes move beyond that geography and even across oceans (there are some paintings of African subjects).

If Luis Bunuel had been a sculptor I imagine he would have made works like Enrique Gomez de Molina. Not just because of the style but the heartlessness involved in making the pieces (I love Bunuel's movies but, they are not warm and fuzzy). If you stood near these pieces for any time you would be sure to notice multiple people--of all ages-- reacting to them. In most cases there were smiles, sometimes giggles. There was one young woman who, looking at the bull, exclaimed; "They don't have horns like that!" At the same moment she noticed this bull also has feathers.

Gomez de Molina's art, his taxidermy, is not without controversy. He pled guilty to importing endangered animal parts for his creations in 2011 and he awaits sentencing in the early spring of 2012. If the artist really feels truly sad, as he says, that exotic creatures are vanishing from the earth, he might consider finding another way to go about making his admittedly remarkable art.

Animals he admits to importing parts from incllude; orangutan, slow loris, Java kingfisher and cobra. He could be fined around $250,000 which is not much of a deterrent as his pieces have sold for six figures. Five years in jail is also on the table. If he were a homeless guy digging up turtle eggs? He might get that sort of time but I expect he has better attorneys.

If you search around enough on the internet you will see many in sympathy with him because the work is so beautiful and suggesting he deserves no punishment. So art trumps the real world? Endangered animals should be gutted and sold so people can hang them in their living rooms? Not sure that makes a great deal of sense.

This work was shown by Bernice Steinbaum Gallery. There was similar work, made without cruelty from Spinello Gallery in Miami last year (either at Art Miami or Scope Miami).

OK so this is the first of what I usually include at the end of the Art Week coverage--pieces I am not sure who they are, what they are titled etc.

Since we are getting near the end, this might as well go here.

I am pretty sure it is a painting by Italian artist, Marino Marini. He was best known as a sculptor so I am a little hesitant to say this is him for sure.

I think it is. It looks like his paintings. I have no notes to back this assertion up. Nor do I know the gallery showing the piece. I thought it was Aca Galleries but it was certainly not them. How is THIS for fine art coverage?

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This piece, Study for a Blue Boot, reminded me, for some reason, of Édouard Vuillard. It is by Whiting Tennis, most of whose work isn't even remotely like Vuillard.

But there is something in some pieces that calls to mind that underappreciated Impressionist master. Perhaps it was something to do with the lighting of this painting.

Tennis, in addition to being a fine sport, is an artist based in Seattle but originally from Virginia. This piece  were shown by Seattle's Greg Kucera Gallery.

_ These pieces, by Alexander Kaletski, are titled, left to right; Girl With A Persian Cat, Tester and Lady Bug. All are mixed media on cardboard. Kaletski is something of a jack of all trades. He is not only an artist but a musician and a writer. Sometimes he juggles chainsaws and gives sound fiscal advice as well (I made these last two up again…I keep doing that).

If you want to read more on the artist, without my pathological lying, please visit his website, www.alexanderkaletski.com.

Joking aside, he is a fascinating character, an underground artist in the former Soviet Union he came to the USA in 1975. His life has included work in virtually every artistic arena there is.

These pieces were shown at Art Miami 2011 by Dillon Gallery based in NYC (Chelsea).

_ Why  Wolf Kahn never seems to spring to mind as a favorite painter of mine is some mental glitch. It has nothing to do with the artist’s work. Every time I see his paintings I am reminded just how much his subtle, subdued work (at least as far as color is concerned) impresses me. 

He is a popular painter but there is something subversive in his landscapes. They are out of kilter with our everyday reality. They evoke some landscape of science fiction but do it in a way that is somehow familiar, somehow makes you feel it is acceptable to hang the painting behind the couch in your living room.His work is realistic and yet also abstract.

Kahn was born in Germany and immigrated to the USA in the 1940s. He finished his BA degree at the University of Chicago in one year. That is not a typo. He has worked in the USA ever since. These works were shown by Jerald Melberg Gallery in Charlotte, North Carolina at Art Miami 2011. For more on Kahn go to the Ameringer McEnery Yohe website.

_ Susan Grossman’s work was likewise shown at Art Miami By Jerald Melberg Gallery. She is a charcoal artist whose works explore New York City. It is a little hard to believe charcoal is her medium. The gallery bio says there is a cinematic quality to the work—which is true.

Her work also captures something of the city beyond the “real.”  Her drawings get at the myth of New York City in a way few have. Grossman currently teaches drawing at the National Academy School of Fine Arts. I would, personally, gladly cut off a finger to take a drawing class with Ms. Grossman.

Meghan Boody's Night is Generally My Time For Walking is a wonderful image. It is, likewise, another one my images do not come close to capturing. You really should see it in person.

Jenkins Johnson Gallery showed the work at Art Miami. I tried. I did. I failed. I did. Jenkins Johnson have two galleries--one in San Francisco and the other in New York. You can see this piece, in a photo taken by one of the higher primates (as opposed to me) HERE. I like the word "grand" to describe this sort of thing. It captures the essence of this better than any other word I can come up with.

When you read me tossing around "grand" it is a high compliment.

Boody is a New York-born artist who has had numerous solo and group shows going back into the early 1990s. Click on her name above to see more.

__ I intended, and in fact did, take more photos and videos of the work of Hernán Cédola. He is a wonderful artist and was shown at Art Miami by Dot Fifty One Gallery in Miami. The aim of this gallery is on the works of emerging artists like Cédola.

I could have sworn I had extensive notes on Cédola. Indeed I would have sworn a piece where I waxed eloquent about his beautiful works, done terrible injustice by this photo. He is from La Plata, Argentina and is an mostly self-taught artist. His work is the sort of thing people sometimes say "I could do that" when they see them. I assure you, you could not. Do not say that out loud either. It just makes you look stupid.

His work is passionate, it DOES, call to mind children's crayon drawings; there is no way around that and also no way the artist didn't intend it. There is also a depth and complexity to this beyond the childlike qualities. Some are going to take the "childlike" as an insult but I have written the same of complex drawings of fairy tale themes. Much of what motivates artists and what is real (in my opinion) in art comes from the child in the artist--from dreams and the inexplicable. This view may just be the innate surrealist lurking in my brain, I admit that. Perhaps the artist intended none of it but that is part of the fun of art; you can have your own reasons for someone else's work. It can matter to you for reasons that never occurred to the artist.

Painter George McNeil passed away in 1996 at the age of 86. He was an important member of that group of artists known as Abstract Expressionists. The group included the likes of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.

As you can see, his work differed stylistically from either of those artists. But that is the case whenever a "school of art" is called out; Impressionists, Post-Modernists, Dada etc. There are usually more differences than similarities between the best artists in any school.

Abstract Expressionists and painters from the 40s and 50s  in general  were well represented at a number of Art Basel Miami Beach satellite shows. A New York Times obituary says that McNeil was prolific and continued painting right up to the end of his life.