Rebecca Jacoby, "Bubbles." Oil, Acrylic, Pastel Collage on Canvas. 32” x 38”. 2010

The natural and nonobjective forms in Jacoby’s works are reminiscent of plankton or aquatic creatures swimming in some primordial soup. Bubbles and globules ebb and flow on her canvases much in the same way that her process reveals itself to her.

Unintentional marks that occur whilst preparing her canvas serve as the starting point for other forms. Jacoby says that “these marks are catalysts from which I expand on imagery and move the work forward.” She then works and reworks the pieces to completion, mirroring real evolution not only in biological appearance, but also process.

Miriam Singer, the other featured artist, makes a good contrast to Jacoby with her intricate drawings. Whether traveling around town or sitting in airports, Singer often carries her art around with her, working on her drawings much in the same way one would approach a sketchbook. Using whatever writing implements she may have available, she builds small urban environments across her pages.

Miriam Singer, "Fords and Tires 4." Pencil, silkscreen, acrylic, marker, monotype on paper drawing. 39" x 50". 2010

Once at the studio, Singer applies various screen printing and woodblock techniques to the drawings. The printing surfaces’ limited size (as well as frequent folding of the paper for portability purposes) gives her larger works a grid-like composition and additional depth.

These little landscapes have distinct neighborhoods of their own that are reflective of the diverse and colorful nature of real cities. Often geometric and sometimes crowded, the subtlety of every pen stroke and idiosyncrasy makes these little communities dynamic enough to feel real.

Over at the Bridgette Mayer Gallery, most of the space is dominated by Charles Burwell’s large-scale studies of that tenuous place between the geometric and the organic. These paintings involve layering and dripping paint and shapes over one another to construct intricate patterns of great depth. These are op-art excursions that would put even Hunter S. Thompson’s wardrobe to shame.

Charles Burwell, "New White." Oil and Acrylic on Canvas. 59" x 59". 2010

Aside from their scale, they are impressive also for their sense of movement. The direction of that movement, however, is anyone’s guess. Flower-like forms seem to spin over curved lines, which dip beneath bulbous forms and slide under more lines, all of which lie beneath stripes of striking hues.

Burwell’s compositions seem wild and random, but upon closer inspection it is evident that they are extremely calculated and precise. The only thing more mind-blowing than these heavily-saturated explosions themselves is the realization of how much time they must take to produce.

More humble, and in this instance truly random, are Clint Takeda’s prints in the back vault of the gallery. He was happy to explain the background of each, and they all have curious individual narratives behind their creation, like dropping ink-covered rubber bands over wood prints or dripping iodine onto paper.

Clint Takeda, Oil & Water Experiment. 2010

What emerge are unique, yet strangely recognizable natural forms. Some are celestial and distant while others look curiously figurative. They are all created rather randomly, and at least one utilizes the old oil and water adage in practice to shape an image that is otherwise irreproducible.

While these shows run the gamut of styles, there is a reminder in their divergence: that process is the backbone of visual – and perhaps any – creative endeavor. Whether explicitly or not, the journey is just as important as the destination.

Painting by Paul Demuro, whose work is at Jolie Laide this month

Go for Brian Bellott’s collages, which bubble over with color and rhythms and wild, id-fueled energy; and for Tyler BFA (and Rutgers MFA) Paul Demuro’s paintings.  Demuro paints like he’s decorating abstract birthday cakes while tripping on LSD.  Go for Liz Markus, Tyler MFA, who paints her feelings in drippy, ghostly quasi-realist works.  (Recently, her portrait “Frank is much better than this painting” appeared in the “Thanks, Frank” show.) Take in these exuberant and idiosyncratic works by these emerging New York artists, some with Philly connections, and save your Bolt Bus money for another weekend.

De-Nature, Nov. 5-Dec. 1. Opening Reception: Friday, November 5, 6-9PM Jolie Laide Gallery, 224 N. Juniper St. 267 603 1295

Charles Burwell, Overlay 2 Oval, OilonPanel, 30x24." Burwell's work is at Bridgette Mayer gallery this month

Charles Burwell’s colorful, heavily-patterned abstract paintings are all about relationships.  What types of relationships, you ask?  While not clearly spelled out, we’re talking every kind, including interpersonal, historical, biological, technological and formal artistic relationships — all writ large in the interplay between color and shape, with hard-edged lines and biomorphic forms circled by sweeping lasso-like arcs. Burwell’s oil paintings are dreamy and meditative and built up layer by layer freehand and with stencils and templates.   Both psychedelic and harmonious, the works reveal and revel in their depths, which suggest never-ending bright-hued conversations – not arguments – where passages echo and answer like married couples finishing each other’s sentences.  As with jazz improvisation, there are underlying rhythms that ground the works (the stripes, the repeat cloverleaf shapes) and risky solo moments with swooping lines or large passages demanding attention.  From cool mint green to acid yellow-ochre, Burwell’s colors surprise.  Nine new works are on display at Bridgette Mayer this month.  Go.

>>Charles Burwell: Structuring Desire/Desiring Structure.  Nov. 2-Dec. 17, Opening reception, Nov. 5, 6-8:30 pm.  Bridgette Mayer Gallery, 709 Walnut St.  215 413 8893

Read this article at Philadelphia Weekly.

Anne Seidman (2008 fellow), Untitled, 2006, water based paint, 15”x13” Photo courtesy of Pew Fellowships.

Melissa Franklin of the Pew called us up to give us the scoop.

“We’ve thought about this for a while. We’ve had it on our minds that there has to be a better way to review materials. We want to put into place a more thoughtful and thorough review process” She also said the context for the grant making has changed because the art has changed.  We asked her if applications were down and she said they were down slightly and we think that has to be a concern.

Franklin said the grant criteria will remain unchanged.  Pew will award grants on the basis of artistic excellence, artistic commitment and on the impact of the grant on the artist and impact of the artist’s work on society.

The traditional categories into which they forced artists to define themselves have been given the heave-ho.  ”The categories have always been problematic for a lot of artists. We have artists who have to squeeze themselves into categories. Others work in ways that defy the categories. Now we’re looking at any artistic discipline this year.

Jennifer Levonian (2009 fellow), still from You, Starbucks, Watercolor and White-Out on found map, size varies. Photo courtesy of Pew Fellowships.

As for the application, it’s been changed as well.  ”Our old questions are not very good. For example, we don’t need to know what people will do with the money.  But what we do need to know is what they’re thinking about and where they want to go with their art.

“Another thing, in the past we’d give $60,000 and say ‘See ya.’ And that’s not good enough. We need to engage more deeply with the recipients. We’re going to work out what each artist needs, whether it’s to make connections or introductions or technical assistance.”

The nomination process.

In the new nomination process, 30 nominators will select 2 artists each. The artists who are nominated are invited to apply. The categories will be literature, visual arts, dance and music, etc. (see all the categories on the Pew website).  The nominators — who Franklin said will be people with deep knowledge of the arts in the region — will change every year and they will be anonymous to protect them from undue influence and pressure from their friends. The nominators will have to write the reasons for their selection and that narrative will become a part of the information about the artist as they go through the selection process. ”An outside person can often talk about the work better than the artist.”

Charles Burwell (2008 fellow), Red Line with Three Figures, 2006, oil on canvas, 36”x36” Photo courtesy of Pew Fellowships.

After the nominated artists apply they will be evaluated by  experts around the country, who will look at the materials. Only those artists ranked high enough will go to the final interdisciplinary panel (same as now).

“The old open application assumes it’s more egalitarian and it also assumes people know about us. But some people may not even apply to us.”  (Pew historically had a 97% rejection rate of all applicants –that gets around and people who ought to be applying sometimes get discouraged).

Now the 60 nominated applicants have a 20% shot.

“This new method gives us the freedom to be proactive about people doing interesting work right now.” We asked if she could give us an example of who that might be and she mentioned King Brit and young artists in general.

We asked if the names of the 60 artists nominated would be made public each year and the answer was no. When the 12 grants are announced Pew will release the 12 names and the names of the final evaluators.

Anthony Campuzano, Pew Fellow. Photo courtesy of Pew Fellowships

Franklin told us she’d been working for a year on this overhaul. She said she worked with Cynthia Mayeda, head of external affairs at the Brooklyn Museum on the review. Franklin also said she consulted with USA Artists, Creative Capital and artists who had been on the Pew panels in the past like Amy Sillman and Kevin Young.

Over their 18 years in operation, Pew Fellowships has had 7,900 applications and has given grants to 237 artists.

“We hope people will welcome this change,” Franklin said.

For more information about this big change check the Pew Fellowships website which has a FAQ page and other information.

Claude Clark, We Are Sisters, 1949

Lewis Tanner Moore’s collection of African-American art, on view at Woodmere Art Museum, is chock full of great work by artists whose names you’ve probably never heard and whose art you’ve probably never seen.

Raymond Steth, Institution Series #1, 1980. lithograph

African-American artists are often excluded from the mainstream art world. A local collector and the grandnephew of Postimpressionist painter Henrey Ossawa Tanner, Moore grew up surrounded by art. But he noticed there was no connection between the art he saw at home and the art he saw in school.

Dox Thrash, Sunday Morning. @ 1939 etching

Catalyzed by this realization, the youngster organized an exhibit of African-American art at his high school in 1969 with borrowed works. The show was a turning point for Moore, who said it was “the moment at which art became the organizing force in my life.”

Henry Ossawa Tanner, Algiers, oil on canvas. 1912

“In Search of Missing Masters,” the 100-work show organized by Woodmere’s curator of collections Douglass Paschall, includes academic figure and landscape paintings and sculpture, expressionism, African-influenced totems and grafitti-esque abstractions. It’s an unabashedly humanist show with many images that evoke people doing everyday tasks. All this comes in many small works that pack big visual moments.

Installation shot with James Brantley’s painting (top), Louis Sloan (middle) and Leo Robinson (bottom)

Take James Brantley’s painting Man with a Horn (1996). Imbued with an otherworldly quietude and optimism, the work—which shows a group of people in a desolate landscape—raises thoughts of Moses’ monumental journey through Egypt. Conversely, Barbara Bullock’s cut paper Ethiopian Winged Figure (1995) is all grace and joy.

Another noteworthy piece in this show is Donald Camp’s photograph Brother Who Taught Me to See—Herbert Camp (1992), which shows the sober face of a man of experience. The aging visage of Herbert Camp in the distressed photo is a document of a life.

The late Claude Clark’s impastoed painting We Are Sisters (1949) (top image) is an almost cartoonlike profile portrait of two women: one black, one white. The work is fresh in its style and paint handling and hopeful in its sentiments.

Installation shot with William t. WIlliams’ piece above Charles Burwell’s.

Hung salon-style, the show groups works to make comparisons come to life. William T. Williams’ calligraphic Monk’s Tale (2006) sits above Charles Burwell’s Bio Labyrinth #9 (1997). Williams’ fugue of dancing white curlicues on a black ground is as optimistic as Burwell’s ominous petri dish image is perturbing.

The big show has a beautiful catalog with full color reproductions of the works.

“In Search of Missing Masters: The Lewis Tanner Moore Collection of African-American Art”
Through Feb. 22.
Woodmere Art Museum, 9201 Germantown Ave.
215.247.7229.

In the middle of artist Matt Fisher‘s talk last week, I thought, gee, this is interesting. So I pulled out a pad and started taking notes.

Matt was speaking at Untitled, Jenny Jaskey Gallery‘s brand new forum on contemporary art that she hopes will help “people to appreciate (and buy!) contemporary art (and works made locally!),” Jaskey wrote us in an email.

This first event, organized around her current exhibit The Drawing Narrative, featured talks by Fisher, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Curator of Modern Art Robert Cozzolino, and Gallery Joe Director Rebecca Kerlin. The event drew in more than 100 people at the gallery, and they gamely stood through the whole thing or sat on the floor. Somehow, the standing made the contact between the speakers and the listeners more intimate–and also may have shortened the comments, which meant things moved along quite nicely.

By time I got my pen rolling, Matt Fisher was nearly done, so I don’t have much of what he said. He did say that although his work is narrative and the narrative is not the main reason for his making the art. “There’s enough openness for the viewer to fill in exactly what they want,” he said. He also said he thinks of himself as primarily a painter, and his drawings supported his paintings.

Rubens Ghenov, “An Unpruned Vine, A Lonelier Monk,” Sumi ink, Charcoal and graphite on paper; image taken from matthewstheyounger.blogspot.com

I did get many of the things Becky Kerlin said. Kerlin’s Gallery Joe shows mostly works on paper, and Print Center Curator John Caperton said this about her earlier this year in an interview: “Another person I admire is Becky Kerlin [at Gallery Joe]–she found a niche and operates in that niche that she’s really excelled at. They do great shows. If you bought one piece from each show, you’d have an amazing collection!”

After giving tribute to Anne d’Harnoncourt (see post on her death), Kerlin said, “As I learned the business, I began seeing I was more in tune with drawing [than other art forms]. …I think it has something to do with being the daughter of an architect.”

Kerlin said she grew up with a house full of drawings, and switched her gallery to drawing in 1999, after seing a Mark Lombardi show at the Drawing Center. “If this is drawing, if this is art, then this is what I want to be involved in,” she recalled saying to herself. Drawing burst on the art scene as a field of its own in the ’90s, she said, partly because of the Drawing Center‘s presence.

Sixty percent of Kerlin’s sales are outside Philadelphia. She does one or two art fairs a year to get her artists out in the world and “to validate what I’m doing.”

Rob Matthews, The Great Disappointment #4, 2007, graphite on paper, 11×18.25, image–one of the images in The Drawing Narrative; image courtesy the artist

As for me, I say, Yo, Philly, what’s with you? Buy art and buy it here in town.

Cozzolino staked his ground as the de facto drawing curator at PAFA because he is the only curator there right now. That drew a laugh. When he landed at PAFA, he got thrown into the mission of creating an enormous works on paper show for the 200th anniversary of PAFA, showing work dating from the 1700s to the present from the collection. “I looked at every work the Academy owns on paper.” Here are links to our posts on the show:
libby’s post
roberta’s post

Cozzolino cited Alfred Stieglitz, who made no hierarchical distinction between drawings, sculpture and painting. “It’s the idea of the thing that matters.”

The delicacy of drawings, though, raise questions about how to show them without degrading them, and how much to spend on them. He’s been asked when proposing to buy a drawing, “‘Do we really want to spend $25,000 on a drawing we can only show every few years because of preservation issues?’ Or do we spend that much money on a painting?”

His own view is, “Go for the great object, no matter what medium it’s in.” He also said that we can’t look into the future and know what kinds of lighting and conservation advances will be made. Perhaps perservation will not be an issue. He did mention that PAFA will be looking for a way to cover the skylights in the historic building to protect drawings on exhibit.

Astrid Bowlby drawing

Cozzolino also talked about his personal taste. His first love was 15th century Flemish paintings. The 20th century works he loves now include symbolism, narrative constructivism and mystery–which all refer back to the Flemish work. He likes work that is visceral, creates its own parallel world, and is personal. He mentioned that Astrid Bowlby‘s and Rob Matthews‘ work both have that (Matthews is one of the artists in Jaskey’s The Drawing Narrative exhibit; the others, besides Fisher, are Holly Coulis, Rubens Ghenov, Ridley Howard, Robyn O’Neil and Charlotta Westergren).

The question and answer session brought up some other issues in drawing:

Question on validity of digital drawings
Cozzolino would include them as legitimate drawings. He referred to recent Pew winner Charles Burwell’s recent work using computers as an example. Fisher said he himself uses Google images to search, as part of his process. Kerlin held back a little, saying she hadn’t yet seen computer work that interested her, but that things in the last five years have gotten more interesting.

Charles Burwell, Flood, 21 x 21, archival digital print, created on the computer and shown in October at Bridgette Mayer Gallery.

Question on the seeming increase of interest in drawings
Kerlin suggested that it may have had to do with the influence of cartoons. “I have a son, a drawer. And he is not alone. …There was a tremendous amount of stuff they [her son and his friends] were doing that had to do with superheroes, drawing action on paper. …It allowed the figure to come back into art in a way that wasn’t precious.”

Cozzolino agreed. He also credited the graphic novel. “Also the graffiti boom of the ’80s and the ’90s spilled over into the art world.

And Fisher talked about drawing being more affordable than a painting. An art lover “can buy a drawing for a tenth of the price.”

Abington Art Center Curator Sue Spaid (in the audience) added the influence of Raymond Pettibon, Paul McCarthy and Martin Kippenberger, as well as Ed Ruscha, may have increased the interest in drawing.

Cozzolino also added that the DIY aesthetic may have contributed.

Question on how define drawing.
Cozzolino said, I don’t define drawing. I let the object tell me what it is. I let the artist tell me what it is. Even Lightening Field, that could be a drawing directly lightening to make marks in space.

Fisher, applied the old line about pornography to drawing: When you see it, you know it.

Kerlin said people can imagine the time it takes to make a drawing. They can imagine how it was done, how long it took to make each mark.

Art critic and curator Judith Stein mentioned The world’s Largest Drawing, a YouTube phenomenon, in which an artist draws his self portrait on the earth, using the trajectories of a series of airplane trips as the medium.

While I was answering a cell phone call during the talk, someone asked how people kept up with everything going on in Philadelphia, and Cozzolino answered, Roberta and Libby. This tidbit from Roberta. I had to put that in to sort of make it real because I missed it!

This being the first of the Untitled forums, it was free and open to one and all, but Jaskey is creating a (nominal, I think) membership requirement for the events, and promises behind-the-scene tours of area institutions, visits with private collections, and talks by contemporary art experts and enthusiasts. When I ever get through to Jenny (I’ve been trying for days) I’ll add it to the post. She probably was busy with last night’s fundraiser for Art Briefs, a Philadelphia art calendar in the works that she has been working on with others, including David Kessler, Annette Monnier and Rebecca Saylor Sack.

Last week, Pew announced its 2008 Fellows, recipients of the coveted $60,000 awards for artists in the 5-county Philadelphia area. These are the largest grants in the country that individual artists can apply for, according to Pew. This year 323 applied and 12 received the awards including 4 in painting and the three who we know who’ve been working in Philadelphia a long time we’re really excited about. Matthew Cox is a new name to us. Here’s who:

Anne Seidman painting
Charles Burwell painting 
Matthew Cox painting
Mauro Zamora painting 
Felix “Pupi” Legarreta folk & traditional arts
J. Rufus Caleb playwriting         
Russell Davis playwriting   
Katharine Clark Gray playwriting
Nana Korantemaa folk & traditional arts 
Vera Nakonechny folk & traditional arts
Venissa Santí folk & traditional arts        
Edgar J. Shockley III playwriting  


This is the 17th year Pew has given out the awards for a total of 220 fellowships totaling more than $11 million.

Anne Seidman
Untitled 2008
waterbased paint on wood panel mounted on wood.

We thought you might like to know who was on the jury (we wanted to know). The interdisciplinary panel members, who make the final decision, are listed below.

The layers of Charles Burwell’s new work in his one-man show Continuum at Bridgette Mayer Gallery have taken on a new physical presence and a sense of freedom. The new paintings of oil on canvas suddenly are juicy with unrestrained overlapping lines and intense, drippy color — so drippy that the paint corrugates the bottom edge of the canvas.

Charles Burwell, Mergers, 59×60 inches. This one, with its reliance on the drips and a horizon line, pitches the painting out of the drawing room and into a landscape or cityscape; yet it still manages to suggest a second reality or a reflection below the yellow stripe.

The under layers peek through Burwell’s signature repeating shapes, systematically applied like wallpaper patterns on the canvas. The outlines of those shapes, layered, broken up, and tangled remind me of the Pop Jonathan Lasker’s caligraphic tangles; but Burwell’s marks hew to their decorous system and never quite jump into Pop. The work behind the top layer peers through not just visually, but physically, creating ridges and planes beneath the top surface. Burwell has always had work suggesting layers of reality, and he’s always had a system, but the new works give meaning to the layers more successfully than past work. At the same time the work is more tactile than I remember from work past.

Charles Burwell, Flood, 21 x 21, archival digital print. I love the way the ovals become floating objects and then, with a shift of the eye, become portals. I also love the shadows and light, as if I’m looking at a sandy ocean shore on a sunny day.

The black and white digital prints too are interesting and surprising, even though they do not have physical layers. The layers are trompe l’oeil, and full of tension as top shifts to bottom and bottom to top. Again, Burwell makes some use of his elegant decorative shapes, but to new purpose and new concept. More compelling in these works are not the decorative shapes but the technological and biomorphic shapes–references to a reality that has not previously had such a strong presence in his work.

Charles Burwell, H2O, digital archival print, 21 x 21 inches; the shadows in this one are more specific–the belong to the black lines, thereby suggesting a grille protecting what is underneath. I also like push-pull, from front to back and back to front, suggested by the shadows around the edges of the striped areas. Sometimes they are the uninflected back layers, and sometimes they turn into some kind of menacing blob, like drops of mercury.

Both Flood and H2O make use of map imagery to create another world beneath or on top of the decorative forms, a sort of natural world poking up through the constraints of Burwell’s repetitive shapes. Other prints pile up tiny sea shells to suggest an underwater second world about to take back the human landscape. The bold lines that cut across the top of the works–also derived from Burwell’s vocabulary of shapes–take on an ominous tone of power and repression and desire for control.

I immediately thought of New Orleans, looking at these works, although I doubt that was what Burwell had in his mind.

In a way, what’s happened in this show is that Burwell’s systematic use of constrained marks has found its opposite–freedom and nature–and the works are strengthened by the contrast. While I was in the gallery, Mayer mentioned to me that the prints were developed using an archive of computer images that Burwell has been collecting for more than a decade.

Suzy Brandt’s Dam

In the vault space at Mayer is an installation, Dam, by artist Suzie Brandt, strata of fabric stacked up to cover the back wall of the compressed space. I liked how it called attention to the arched shape of the wall, and I liked Brandt’s colors–as ebullient as always. The edges of the fabric and their irregularity had such a strong physical presence that they emphasized the here and now of the space occupied, and overwhelmed any sense of representation or metaphor.

Although this space is so unlikely a venue for art, Mayer continues to find artists and ways to use it to good, surprising effect.

“The Red Show”
Through Dec. 23. Bridgette Mayer Gallery, 709 Walnut St. 215.413.8893.

Michael Manuel’s Kyoto, stained glass and audio, from The Red Show.

”The Red Show” has more alizarin per square inch than any show in town, with the possible exception of “Tesoros,” the PMA’s roundup of colonial Latin American art. While “Tesoros” runneth over with blood-red hearts and flowing red robes, the Mayer show—commissioned new works by 13 gallery artists and one outsider—is mostly abstract.

Kate Davis Caldwell’s painted Polaroids

By design or by serendipity, the show suggests the season’s festivities: bubbles and ribbons, ebullience, love and optimism.

Tim McFarlane, All that could be

Tim McFarlane’s big, bold All That Could Be—a monochromatic work in shades of pink and wine—continues the artist’s motif of overlapping ladders that suggest teeming masses of people. Contemplative like Rothko but more generous and community-spirited, this piece may have antiwar underpinnings. For me, the title nods to the Army’s old “Be All You Can Be” slogan, and the flow is tinged with blood.

Neil Anderson, Red Dancer

Also notable in a solid show are Neil Anderson’s eye-popping Red Dancer and Charles Burwell’s Red Line With Three Figures. (Burwell is a new artist with the gallery.)

Charles Burwell, Red Line with Three Figures

Kate Davis Caldwell’s faux Polaroid paintings and Michael Manuel’s eco-themed stained glass with audio component by Clint Takeda are reminders of beauty’s fragility. Excellent show.