Saturday, December 29, 2012

Blogged on COLOSSAL, Art and Visual Ingenuity

Christopher Jobson featured my Artforum Series on his smart and visually centric blog, COLOSSAL, Art and Visual Ingenuity. According to Christopher, "Colossal is a Webby-nominated blog that explores art, design, and photography, with a focus on work that is non-digital in nature," so it does not surprise me that my Artforum work, with it's tactile nature, caught his eye.

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

MIAMI HIGHLIGHTS: BASEL AND AQUA

Miami Highlights: Basel and Aqua by 
New American Paintings
Eleanor Harwood Artists highlighted by
 New American Paintings Blog:
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Laura Paulini (NAP #85), Eleanor Harwood Gallery
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Laura Paulini, Eleanor Harwood Gallery
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Mel Davis (NAP #55), Eleanor Harwood Gallery
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Francesca Pastine (NAP #91), Eleanor Harwood Gallery
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Francesca Pastine, Eleanor Harwood Gallery
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Paul Wackers, Eleanor Harwood Gallery





























Monday, December 3, 2012

AQUA ART FAIR IN MIAMI


I will be participating at the Aqua Art Fair in Miami through Eleanor Harwood Gallery. She'll be in the largest booth on the second floor to the back of the hotel, Room 214. Come and visit us.

She has made a catalog of work presented in the fair. Be in touch for inquiries and higher resolution images if you are not able to attend. 
  
  

 
 
Aqua Art Miami 2012: Dec. 5th - December 9th 

Aqua 2012 Exhibiting Artists:
James Chronister, Mel Davis, Niall McClelland, Francesca Pastine, Laura Paulini, Jill Sylvia, Paul Wackers

Location:
1530 Collins Avenue (south of Lincoln Road) Miami Beach FL 33139

Schedule:

Wednesday,  December 5, 7:30 - 11pm
- VIP Preview Opening

Thursday, December 6, noon - 9pm
Friday, December 7, 11am - 9pm
Saturday, December 8, 11am - 9pm
Sunday, December 9, 11am - 4pm

For inquiries, e-mail eleanor@eleanorharwood.com, or call 415-867-7770  


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Aqua 2012 Exhibiting Artists 
   

James Chronister
  
James Chronister

As a group of work, Chronister's paintings work together with the loose over arching theme of appropriating mass images and channeling them through a hand made process; a human maker. The process includes starting with mechanically produced images and filtering them through the eye, hand and brain of the painter. Chronister likes to think of the paintings responding to one
another the way songs on an album might. Even if the paintings (songs) may appear dissimilar upon first strike, he strives for a unifying mood, approach and overall sensibility. Together, the paintings work with one another to create a more complex meaning. The disparate subjects stir deeper questions about their connection.

His use of color is also meticulously thought through with layers and layers of color creating the background "grey" in his paintings. When the paintings are seen as a group the backgrounds turn into a subtle color field series with the images in black carefully dotted on top of the various colored grounds. 

James Chronister is based in San Francisco. He grew up in Montana graduating from University of Montana with a BFA. He then moved to San Francisco where he earned an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2004. He received a SECA nomination from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and his work is in the collection of the Berkeley Art Museum in Berkeley, CA and in numerous private collections on both the East and West Coasts. He is the winner of the Richard K. Price Scholarship and the Lux Art Institute Residency award.
   

Mel Davis

Mel Davis

Davis had been working in color fields up until 2009 and the shift in her painting practice was prompted by a desire to apply new discoveries in her work.
Previously her monochromatic paintings achieved a singular tone; one that was concerned with wonder. With these new works, Davis strikes a multiplicity of
attitudes: fast, tender, sweeping and bold. Her approach looks effortless and is evidence of an artist in the studio experimenting and enjoying the pleasure of paint and the actual act of painting.

The pieces feel fresh and modern and quick. In actual fact Davis' painting are often worked on and amended numerous times in the months they are in the studio with constant refinement and small alterations slowly adding to the finished pieces.

Of her work she points to the poet Galway Kinnell discussing Walt Whitman's tendencies toward revision in his late poems. Kinnell states that Whitman loses the courage he had from when he was younger. That Whitman would take out the 5 lines that revealed an "inner experience", edited out the "things that are embarrassing to the self", concerned now in becoming the poet for the masses. Kinnell strives in his own poetry to put those 5 lines in. Leaving those 5 lines in is the task Davis sets for herself. Mel Davis is a Berkeley, California based visual artist. She grew up in MontrĂ©al, graduated from Concordia University in 1998, then moved to the Bay Area to complete her MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2005. She is part of numerous private and public collections, some of which are Hyatt, Capitol Group and Wellington Management and she is the winner of The Canada Council For The Arts Grant and the Irene Pijoan Memorial award for Painting.

 


 
Francesca Pastine
  
Pastine is excited by the potential of material and its transformation through the process of handwork. Her work speaks to the physical act of the hand creating, not in the sense of 'gesture', but through intimate care and attentiveness to detail.

Pastine began using ARTFORUM magazines as a medium for her work in 2008. She considers her repurposed ARTFORUM magazines as unsolicited collaborations with the artist featured on their cover. The reconfigured magazines map out a tangle of associations, unique contradictions, and paradoxes that combine to imbue the inanimate object with emotional power.

Maintaining a strong connection to the physicality of drawing, her X-acto blade mimics a pencil, subtracting rather than adding. She eschews glue or other manipulations that change the inherent character of the magazines. In this way, they retain their association to what they are, carriers of information that have been handled, earmarked and scuffed over time.

Her newest body of work uses the same techniques but applied to mutual fund pages from the New York Times newspaper. With these she has created masks that have been cut and metal-leafed, dramatically transformed from their original shape. The forms suggest archeological curiosities from tribal sources, toying with our notions of antiquity and present-day meaning.
Francesca Pastine was born in New York City. She earned her BFA in 1993 and MFA in 1996 from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is the winner of Kala Fellowship award and the Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant, and has work in numerous private collections and the Kala Institute's Print Collection.
See available work by Francesca Pastine

 
Laura Paulini

Laura Paulini's paintings and drawings are created over long stretches of time, each stripe and each dot meticulously rendered by hand in multiple layers of
paint on panel or ink on paper. Due to the juxtaposition of minute changes in hue and value, the picture planes appear to vibrate. Waverings, absences, and misalignments in the mark-making contribute to an optical effect, while the simple, iconic, and symmetrical compositions retain a sense of stillness.

Exploring the tension between harmony and chaos, growth and decay, Paulini's work evokes imagery as varied as woven textiles, Braille lettering, and pixilated
graphics. Reviewers have consistently responded to this duality, most recently among them Kenneth Baker of the San Francisco Chronicle who summed up Paulini's recent solo show, SHIMMER, at Eleanor Harwood Gallery this way: "In her painstaking
work, this East Bay painter goes hand to hand with the challenge posed by digital imaging to viewers remaining sensitive to the human touch." 

Paulini grew up in Wisconsin receiving a BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, Milwaukee, WI. She received her MFA from Mills College in Oakland, CA in 2005. She has shown extensively throughout the USA. Her work is included in prestigious private collections and the Juniper Networks Corporate Collection. She is a winner of the Jay DeFeo Prize, an SFMOMA SECA award nominee and a Kala Art Institute Artist-in-Residence Fellowship awardee.
 
 
  
Jill Sylvia
  
Jill Sylvia's work is made out of ledger sheets. These papers are traditionally used to record the financial transactions of a business or an individual, hosting the data necessary for accounting information to be compiled, and for analysis in
determining profit and loss. They are the material of economics.

In an attempt to understand our need to quantify transactions, Sylvia employs this paper. She uses a drafting knife to individually remove tens of thousands of boxes from this paper, leaving behind the lattice of the grid intended to separate the boxes. She involves herself in this routine of trying to make time and labor palpable while communicating its loss.The skeletal pages drape and accumulate, demarcate the time cost for their creation, and become the buildings for which they have laid the groundwork. In her other work, her "Reconstructions", grids are produced using the excised bits of paper in order to create a new sense, a new value. The boxes become the units of the picture plane, the medium of color fields. With each piece, the notion of "value" is called into question - be it the value of our quotidian pursuits, the relative value of labor, or the implicit values of economic advancement. 

Jill Sylvia grew up in Massachusetts. She received a BA from Bard College in New York in 2001 and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2005. Her work is in the de Young Museum's permanent collection, San Francisco, California, The Anderson Collection, San Francisco Bay Area, California, The Frankel Foundation for Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, The Fidelity Corporate Collection, Boston, Massachusetts and numerous other private collections.
See available work by Jill Sylvia 
 
   
Paul Wackers

Paul Wackers paints landscapes and still-lifes that are both familiar and alien. His paintings reinterpret and reorganize mundane reality into rich juxtapositions
of colors, objects, shapes, patterns, and structures. In Wackers' view, the works
"offer a glimpse into the way the world is constantly being reloaded with opportunities
and options for reinterpretations and impressions." His earlier work, although pattern rich, featured perhaps more recognizable elements and structures, while his current series of "still lives" are mashed-together amalgamations or arrangements of partially recognizable objects on shelves.

Wackers has exhibited widely nationally and internationally. He is the recipient of a SFMOMA SECA award nomination and a grant winner from the San Francisco Art Institute and the winner of the prestigious Tournesol award at the Headlands Center for the Arts. Wackers received his BFA from Corcoran College of Art and Design in 2001 and his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004. He is included in numerous private collection around the world. He lives and works in New York.
See available work by Paul Wackers 
 
  
Niall McClelland
 
For Niall McClelland working in black and grey scale allows the viewer to connect more easily with his process.  This transparency about the process, a system of mark making through folding and xeroxing, fosters an immediate connection between seeing and understanding, and evokes a kind of "back to basics" mentality about art making.  Stripped of embellishment, the simplicity and starkness of the work point to the truth behind any art piece - the hand of its maker.