Not so naive

I am certainly enamoured by butterflies and their potential for conceptual play...this work has an obsessive quality which I am drawn too, but a balance of one main character and many subordinate characters...sometimes Tony Fitzpatrick's work becomes a bit formulaic...but, I think there's a strong evolution that counter's the similarities...my favorite works are the baseball card series he did earlier in his career...the other elements that resonate with me are the commercial suggestions and the everyday images from the past and present...it fits nicely with the Chicago, Harry Who, imagist style...

The patterns are beautiful in the butterfly, balanced and unique...the strong, central image creates focus and allows the other floating forms to remain fixed in the picture plane...Tony's work mimics, naive artwork, or Art Brut, but you cannot run from formal training...it digs into your brain and soul and will not let go...

Ode to Klee

A playful and simple work by Cole Morgan...I like the contrast of open space to the intimacy of the small areas of detail...some of his work looks at fruit and the grid...this piece struck me visually because of its texture and the incidental mark making...the surface is aged and worn and I am always drawn to the presence of time...as if the work has secrets and has experienced things I will never know.

That is what I enjoy most about walking an art museum, the cracks and aged surface of Gothic and Renaissance art, what that world must have been like and the imagery of that period embodying its place in history...this work has that sense, manufactured and manipulated, but built on the Klee's, Twombly's and Da Vinci's...when the world is minimal, any contrast is heightened and visible for all to see...warts and all.

Stop Heart Ache

The combination of unconnected things...by placing items next to one another it visually confirms, "guilty by association." Images relate to each other in harmony or disharmony by proximity...

Repetition of objects, the lamp and the figure becoming the lamp...using color to tie areas of the picture plane together, foreground objects and ambiguous open background space...flattened space...

Odd couch fellows

The gentle open hand draped over the back of the couch is a visual invitation to a raised modern figure...both hands are passively connected, the other hand fixed on the wall...fingers pointing stiffly down...the angles of the arms connect these two different people...Sarah Small, does an excellent job visually connecting the unrelated...this photograph is a great example of these explorations...

A neutral backdrop is the perfect environment for a pale, peach female form...costumed in red heals, referencing her skin, nipples and lips...The yellow and black dressed male figure is balanced by the larger neutral, reclining pink female and the silver arm forms fixed on the wall pushing the eye toward the right...the angles are imaginative and interesting...colors are simple and skillfully selected...

More questions than answers

Nature crying over the death of one of its own...the inside of the bird form is playful and colorful...gum balls rolling out and onto the floor...the figurative, monster/tree like form is holding the bird in that traditional Lamentation scene, done so many times in the Gothic and Renaissance periods. This piece by Matt Furie leaves much open for interpretation.

The context and style could also be seen as referential to that time period, stylized and referencing realism, but not quite there...The open negative space is more contemporary, more and more I see artists eliminating that part of the composition, at first I thought maybe it was just an issue in execution, but now I wonder after repeated confrontations...Is this blank background a statement, a clear signal by the contemporary artist of a current universal truth...visually, the absence makes a strong statement. It also allows the image to move from context to context, like a figure in front of a green screen, or a tattoo...Many artists are influenced by body art. I will leave that answer to time.

Dorian Gray

Ivan Albright has a unique way of painting. dirty surfaces, layered and dense with information but balanced by large defined shapes that break up the patterning...the implied texture is visually appealing and luxurious...this is based on the story of Dorian Gray, a man who didn't want to get old, made a wish to stay the same age, yet his portrait would age in real time...a perfect conceptual collaboration with the style of Ivan...he could push his method of painting in the context of a portrait...he also did an extensive series of self-portraits, getting older and older...a chronology of the physical man...






The style has a rhythm to it, with intense colors and lurid hues...the figure is centrally located, to pull all of our visual focus into it...the horror of what he is becoming, unable to die, just breaking down in front of our eyes...there is also a conceptual space created when you know the story, a relationship between the physical man, trapped in the same time staring at the visual man he is becoming...what emotional reactions must be happening? In this piece, we are Dorian, watching the future unfold right in front of our eyes...the inevitable, the always present, holding hands with life, creating an ever-increasing shadow over our existence in the physical world...