Violet Baxter

Signs, 2008, Oil on Panel, 12 x 12 in.

Nightlights I, Oil on Panel, 14 x 11 in.

Watertower Still Life, 2009, Oil on Panel, 16 x 20 in.

Byron Thomas

Pine Trees, 1946, oil on canvas, 40" x 28" in.

Paintings I would like to see in person:

"Tear Gas and Water Hoses," Edward Biberman,1945.

"Movies-Canton Island," Paul Sample, 1943.

"Night Hauling," Andrew Wyeth, 1944.

Harry Leith-Ross

Gloucester Wharf, 1935

Flag Station, 1945

Wish I had seen this show: George Ault

To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America, was at the Smithsonian American Art Museum from March 11 – September 5, 2011.

To Make a World captures a 1940s America that was rendered fragile by the Great Depression and made anxious by a global conflict. Although much has been written about the glorious triumph of the Second World War, what has dimmed over time are memories of the anxious tenor of life on the home front, when the country was far distant from the battlefields and yet profoundly at risk. The exhibition brings viewers back into the world of the 1940s, drawing them in through the least likely of places and spaces: not grand actions, not cataclysmic events, not epoch-making personalities, posters, and headlines, but silent regions where some mystery seems always on the verge of being disclosed.

Fabulous quote from Peter Schjeldahl

In this week's New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl reviews a Cindy Sherman retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. He also puts into words something that I have been struggling with for years-- the ability of art language and art writing to suck the life out of art. He starts off by quoting the wall text:

"Masquerading as a myriad of characters, Cindy Sherman invents personas and tableaus that examine the construction of identity, the nature of representation, and the artifice of photography." The images do no such thing, of course. They hang on the walls. The pathetic fallacy of attributing conscious actions to art works is a standard dodge, which strategically de-peoples the pursuit of meaning. Such boilerplate language has trailed Sherman since her emergence, more than thirty years ago, in the "Pictures Generation" of media-savvy artists who tweaked conventions of high art and popular culture, sometimes in tandem with theory-bent, iconoclastic academics and critics. The association made for a rich episode in the history of ideas, and a spell of heady distraction in that of art. The intellectual vogue is long over, though the pedantry lingers, presuming that the mysteries of Sherman's art-- photographs that are like one frame movies, which she directs and acts in-- demand special explanation. (She is remarkably tolerant of interviewers who keep asking her what she means, as if, like any true artist, she hadn't already answered in the only way possible for her: in the work.)

The rest of the article is pretty great too.

Favorite art words used this week in spring midterms:

Parallax

Syntax

Relational Aesthetics

Agency

Dichotomy

Ethnographic

Effulgent

Indexical

Synthesis

Favorite art words used last semester:

Emphatic

Solipsistic

Axiom

Hegemony

Shibboleth

Reification

Pedagogy

Reflexive

Praxis

Materiality

Social Practice

Inchoate

Morass

Kurt Solmssen

There is a great interview with painter Kurt Solmssen on the painting perceptions blog:

http://paintingperceptions.com/landscape-painting/conversation-with-kurt-solmssen

He paints outside, from life. His paintings have wonderful, dark shadows and a mix of crisp and loose lines.