A wonderful interview with Wayne Thiebaud in the Brooklyn Rail

There are so many good quotes in this interview, but I have to share this one about value. I've been saying this to my students for years:

Thiebaud: That kind of painting, I think, is what led me to something like Fauvism in my landscapes. Fauvism represented something very crucial to me in terms of how it was possible to do paintings like that with color—particularly Derain's great Collioure paintings. And what the Fauves do when they're successful is they get the value right. If you get the value right, the darkness or the lightness, you can then use almost any color, hue, or intensity, to fit into that value structure. And that's, I think, a really great human invention. I don't think machines can do that . . . yet. [Laughs]

read the whole Brooklyn Rail interview with Wayne Thiebaud here

Closing Dance Party for Windows, Doors, and Mirrors

If you missed the closing of my show, Windows, Doors, and Mirrors at Roman Susan Gallery, here are the highlights from the dance party. 

Cleve Carney Art Gallery: On Anxiety || Curated by Gwendolyn Zabicki

On Anxiety at the College of DuPage-- August 31st to October 13th, 2018

I curated a show at the Cleve Carney Art Gallery at the College of DuPage titled, On Anxiety. 

ON ANXIETY
AUGUST 31 - OCTOBER 13, 2018

Reception: Saturday September 8, 3 to 5 p.m.
Curator Talk: Monday, September 10, noon to 1 p.m.
Artist Talk Moderated by Scott Hunter: Saturday October 6, 1 p.m.

Some artists make funny paintings, some make sexy paintings, and others make serious paintings. This however, is a group show about anxious paintings. The work in this exhibition was not created to help us deal with the anxiety we may have. Instead anxiety is baked into the work and is largely responsible for its content. This show may answer questions like, “What are some of the causes of anxiety and what does anxiety tell us about ourselves? Does anxiety have a purpose? Can it be funneled into something useful?” There is plenty to be anxious about right now-- health care, immigration status, reproductive rights, and the environment are just a few subjects that might occupy your thoughts. But what about that low-grade, ever present anxiety, the kind that you wake up with and have learned to ignore? Soren Kierkegaard wrote extensively about that kind of anxiety and the danger of losing yourself. If you lose your wallet or your keys, it doesn’t take long to realize they’re missing, but when you lose yourself you can go months or even years without noticing.

Featuring work by: Matthew Bollinger, Alexander Bradley Cohen, Jennifer Dierdorf, Ethan Gill, Justin John Greene, Mika Horibuchi, Hai-Hsin Huang, Ben Murray, Veronika Pausova, Celeste Rapone and Brandi Twilley.

Hai-Hsin Huang, Birthday Party, oil on canvas, 2014

I was written up in the Chicago Tribune:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-ent-on-anxiety-show-dupage-20180820-story.html

Windows, Doors, and Mirrors-- September 1st - 22nd, 2018

My solo show, Windows, Doors, and Mirrors, opens September 1st from 6 to 9pm at Roman Susan Gallery and runs until September 22nd. It was chosen by Bad At Sports as a top five weekend pick!

What color is a mirror? A perfect mirror is white, but real mirrors are not perfect. Real mirrors have a slight greenish tint that is barely perceptible, but we don’t really see that. The color of a mirror appears to be the color of whatever surrounds it. Making a painting of a mirror is an attempt to paint the unseen and unnoticed. It is an exercise in looking and an attempt at real awareness.

When systems function well, we hardly notice them, but when they break they become visible. For example, our bodies work continuously to maintain homeostasis, but when we become ill is when we become aware of all of this invisible effort, of how good we used to feel. Mirrors become more visible when they are dirty or dripping with streaks of glass cleaner, when the mirror is not functioning how a mirror is supposed to function.

In these paintings, a window is reflected in the mirror. A window is another framing device. It is an object that is hard to see. We don’t see the window, but we see through it and we see the things around it. We are compelled to look out a window, even if the view is not picturesque. Schopenhauer wrote that when we look out a window that view lets us forget our striving for a moment. The light hits our eyes and we use that moment to relax. The window is a respite from the struggle to see the mirror and makes the mirror understandable.

These mirror paintings come from of a larger series about cleaning. They deal with surface – streaky wet mirrors, glassy windows, and sun-streaked floors. They also reflect what is just beneath that surface – that women give thousands of hours of unseen physical and emotional labor to the people around them. Learning to paint is about learning to see – to notice the hue, saturation, and value of the objects around us. But I would add that painting is also about learning to acknowledge these things that are right in front of us and to care about them.

–Gwendolyn Zabicki

Women Painting Men reviewed in the Chicago Tribune

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/museums/ct-ott-0525-see-it-now-20180521-story.html

Crushing the patriarchy with one look

Gwendolyn Zabicki is one of six painters interrogating ideas about "the female gaze" and images of masculinity at the Riverside Arts Center. (Gwendolyn Zabicki)

KT HawbakerChicago Tribune

Crushing the patriarchy with one look

In her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey coined the term “the male gaze” and then argued that “the female gaze” is always mediated through this dominant, patriarchal lens. Fast-forward to 2016, when “Transparent” showrunner Jill Soloway offered their own definition of the female gaze, and like Mulvey, broke it down into three parts:

“Part One: Reclaiming the body, using it with intention to communicate Feeling Seeing.”

Then,

“Part Two: I also think the Female Gaze is also using the camera to take on the very nuanced, occasionally impossible task of showing us how it feels to be object of the gaze.”

​And finally,

“This third thing involves the way the Female Gaze dares to return the gaze. It’s not the gazed gaze. It’s the gaze on the gazers. It’s about how it feels to stand here in the world having been seen our entire lives.”

So, how exactly do you solve a problem like gendered gazes in visual art?

While Soloway was addressing practicioners of the moving image, “Women Painting Men,” currently on display at the Riverside Arts Center’s Freeark Gallery and Sculpture Garden, is an example of how contemporary visual artists dig into notions of the female gaze.

Featuring the work of six female painters and curated by Gwendolyn Zabicki, the show offers portrayals of masculine imagery that “run from sexual to sympathetic to sentimental.”

“Is the female gaze simply a reversal of the male gaze – that is to say, men rendered as sexual objects for the viewer’s pleasure,” reads the show’s press release, “or is the female gaze best understood as a new generation of women learning to look at themselves and others in a new way?”

Attempting to answer this question with Zabicki are artists Karen Azarnia, Mel Cook, Katie Hammond, Jessica Stanfill and Celeste Rapone. Their styles of painting range from devastatingly figurative to kitchy punchlines that needle Picasso in his grave, pointing towards the limitless ways femmes and women have always met each other’s gazes inside of art spaces. Through June 23, Riverside Arts Center, 32 E. Quincy St., Riverside; www.riversideartscenter.com

Women Painting Men

May 20 – June 23, 2018
Guest Curated by Gwendolyn Zabicki

Gallery Talk: Saturday June 9 at 2pm

Featuring paintings by Karen Azarnia, Mel Cook, Katie Hammond (Halton), Jessica Stanfill, Celeste Rapone, and Gwendolyn Zabicki.

Katie Halton @beast4thee Missing you already Acrylic and fabric on canvas 48 x 48 IN 2018 

Karen Azarnia. “Field,” 2018. Oil on canvas, 42 x 60 inches.

Mel Cook. “Fruit Punch II,” 2015. Acrylic on canvas, 16 x 20 in.

Mel Cook. “Fruit Punch I,” 2015. Acrylic on canvas, 16 x 20 in.

Celeste Rapone, “Rider Husband,” Oil on Canvas, 42” x 48”.

Jessica Stanfill. “Gabrielle and the Swan,” 2015. Oil on canvas

Gwendolyn Zabicki, “Tree Trimmer,” 2015. Oil on canvas. 32 x 24 inches.

“Women Painting Men” is a group exhibition featuring the work of six female painters.

In this show, we see portrayals of men that run from sexual to sympathetic to sentimental. This exhibition asks viewers to consider: is the female gaze simply a reversal of the male gaze–that is to say, men rendered as sexual objects for the viewer’s pleasure; or is the female gaze best understood as a new generation of women learning to look at themselves and others in a new way?

Laura Mulvey coined the term “the male gaze” in her 1975 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In the essay, she states that the female gaze is women looking at themselves through the eyes of men. More than 40 years have passed since Mulvey wrote her still powerful essay. Do alternative modes of seeing and representation exist in the world, or are artists and viewers alike still trapped in a binary of active and passive?

Nothing Is Ours But Time

I curated a show at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art titled Nothing Is Ours But Time. Go see it before it closes. 

The show runs February 9th - March 25th, 2018

Featuring artists Melody Saraniti, Erin Washington, Matthew Metzger, Christine Han, Selina Trepp, Daniel Schmid, Jenn Dierdorf, Mel Cook, Karen Azarnia


How many times have you been unable to sleep at night thinking about all the things left to do? Going over what you were able to accomplish and what tasks were postponed and how much time was wasted on chores, commuting, and procrastination. How many of us have compared our success to that of our friends and felt panic, jealousy, and dread? 

Almost 2000 years ago, Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote letters to his friend Lucilius Junior warning him that "while we are postponing, life speeds by." There is some comfort in knowing that even brilliant philosophers of ancient Rome suffered the anxieties of daily life. However, in his letter, Seneca reminds his friend that "nothing is ours except time."

The act of painting is an attempt to capture a moment, to preserve a gesture or an image in a suspension of pigment and oil. The artists in this exhibition use painting as a way to mark time and to contain it. Their work is focused on capturing fleeting everyday moments. Selina Trepp uses and reuses only the materials currently present in her studio to make work. Ultimately, she will leave behind little more than digital images for her descendants to contend with. Mel Cook is a modern-day Vanitas painter, reminding the viewer of his or her own mortality. Through painting she responds to inequity and death with uncorked anger. Karen Azarnia's triptych of paintings documents a handprint on a window that disappeared over the course of an afternoon drive. Erin Washington maintains no illusions that her work will serve as a lasting legacy after she is gone. Her drawings and paintings, done in chalk and fugitive pigments, are designed to fade, smudge, and fall apart. Time still slips through our fingers, but every moment spent in an act of creation is one that we can count as ours.

-Gwendolyn Zabicki, 2018

From Seneca, Volume IV, Epistles 1-65, Harvard University Press:
Greetings from Seneca to Lucilius

Continue to act thus, my dear Lucilius—set yourself free for your own sake; gather and save your time, which until lately has been forced from you, or filched away, or has merely slipped from your hands. Make yourself believe the truth of my words—that certain moments are torn from us, that some are gently removed, and that others glide beyond our reach. The most disgraceful kind of loss, however, is that due to carelessness. Furthermore, if you will pay close heed to the problem, you will find that the largest portion of our life passes while we are doing ill, a goodly share while we are doing nothing, and the whole while we are doing that which is not to the purpose. What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years lie behind us are in death's hands.

Therefore, Lucilius, do as you write me that you are doing: hold every hour in your grasp. Lay hold of today's task, and you will not need to depend so much upon tomorrow's. While we are postponing, life speeds by. Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time. We were entrusted by nature with the ownership of this single thing, so fleeting and slippery that anyone who will can oust us from possession. What fools these mortals be! They allow the cheapest and most useless things, which can easily be replaced, to be charged in the reckoning, after they have acquired them; but they never regard themselves as in debt when they have received some of that precious commodity—time! And yet time is the one loan which even a grateful recipient cannot repay.

You may desire to know how I, who preach to you so freely, am practising. I confess frankly: my expense account balances, as you would expect from one who is free-handed but careful. I cannot boast that I waste nothing, but I can at least tell you what I am wasting, and the cause and manner of the loss; I can give you the reasons why I am a poor man. My situation, however, is the same as that of many who are reduced to slender means through no fault of their own: every one forgives them, but no one comes to their rescue.

What is the state of things, then? It is this: I do not regard a man as poor, if the little which remains is enough for him. I advise you, however, to keep what is really yours; and you cannot begin too early. For, as our ancestors believed, it is too late to despair when you reach the dregs of the cask. Of that which remains at the bottom, the amount is slight, and the quality is vile. Farewell.

Karen Azarnia

Karen Azarnia

Mel Cook

Jenn Dierdorf

Jenn Dierdorf

Christine Han

Christine Han

Matthew Metzger

Matthew Metzger

Matthew Metzger

Melody Saraniti

Daniel Schmid

Daniel Schmid

Daniel Schmid

Daniel Schmid

Selina Trepp

Selina Trepp

Erin Washington

Erin Washington

How to Buy Art

Jason Foumberg recently wrote a piece for Chicago Magazine on how to buy art. Rule Number Four, Look Up From Your Cup, mentions my work currently hanging at Lula Cafe. I am lovingly referred to as a "rising star." I'll take it.

http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/September-2017/How-to-Buy-Art/Rule-No-4-Look-Up-from-Your-Cup/

Not Knowing

I curated a show at Heaven Gallery titled Not Knowing. It runs until October 14th, 2017. There is an artist talk on Sunday, October 1st at 1pm.

You can see photos here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nvaughn/sets/72157685492414691

Writing is a process of dealing with not knowing, a forcing of what and how. We have all heard novelists testify to the fact that, beginning a new book, they are utterly baffled as to how to proceed...At best there is a slender intuition, not much greater than an itch.
--Donald Barthelme, Not Knowing

An artist embarks on her task without knowing what to do. There is some kind of energy that she is manifesting as she works, and it has a larger form. To know in advance as to what that form is, is to reduce it.
--George Saunders on Not Knowing

When inspiration strikes, it feels as if it comes from outside oneself. The process of making art involves a kind of subtle foreknowledge, an awareness of the work before it exists, and communication with neurological processes deep within the wordless mind. In the search for answers, an artist finds more questions lingering in that uncomfortable place of not knowing. The result of that discomfort, according to Barthelme, is the possibility that the artist might show the viewer, “the as-yet-unspeakable, the as-yet unspoken.” 

Good art is hard. An artist can over-think and become paralyzed, but to Barthelme, “Problems are a comfort” because it is through problem solving, or making choices, that the artist moves from not knowing to finding a unique and defining style. Take for example, the story of one of Chicago’s great culinary achievements-- the Italian beef sandwich. Essentially, poor entrepreneurs on Maxwell St. figured out how to turn salt, cheap cuts of meat, and stale bread into an inexpensive, delicious meal. They were constrained by cost and by what ingredients were readily available. Similarly an artist responds to and creates constraints, imposing limitations or rules within the work. Paradoxically, it is within these constraints where freedom and innovation are found.

Being an artist is to live within a series of constraints and limitations. Today, an artist must make her way in the world within structures that are in the process of collapsing, dissolving, or becoming irrelevant. The rigid gender roles of the past, normative definitions of family and caretaking, are all being renegotiated. The particular methodologies parent artists (and female parent artists in particular) have to come up with in order to continue to work while parenting are not yet standardized or obvious. They must be hammered out individually. The artists in this exhibition make a different kind of work-- thoughtful and contemplative art made alongside working, teaching, and raising a family. Overlapping limitations and opportunities define their style. They embrace “not knowing” in the way they make their work, but also in the uncertainty and the freedom of living in this state. They are: Claire Ashley, Karen Azarnia, Clarissa Bonet, Robin Dluzen, Dan Devening, Andreas Fischer, Celeste Rapone, Melody Saraniti, Ann Toebbe, and Noah Vaughn.

http://www.heavengallery.com/node/2524