Wishlist Wednesdays, II

Wishlist Wednesdays–I’m just going to go with it–Part Deux!

This week I’m totally obsessed with (ok, it’s been longer than a week) ceramics by Scott Duncan. 

View fullsize

Fresco, Pompeii, ca. 70 ACE

Duncan, aka @ol_slamzee on Instagram, is a ceramicist, but again, woah, what an understatement. Are you familiar with the term, trompe l’oeil? Trompe l’oiel is a French term that literally translates to “fool the eye”. You’re actually probably more familiar with it than you think: any kind of optical illusion can fall under the umbrella of this term. Traditionally, it applies to the presence of said optical illusion in an artwork, often, using two-dimensional imagery to express a three-dimensional object. The muralists at Pompeii employed trompe l’oeil to depict believable, seemingly tangible, doorways and windows, bowls of fruit and naked nymphs, all on a flat, 2-D surface. 

Duncan is a sculptor who creates both functional objects and objet d’art (another fancy French term meaning “art objects”) out of ordinary clay that he imbues with all of the characteristics of cardboard. When I first happened upon his work, I thought I had found an amusing and surprisingly endearing take on cardboard-as-art-media, which was maybe, a commentary on the Capitalist culture in which we live or the cycle of disposability it requires. I was, and am still, thoroughly astonished by the fact that Duncan’s pieces are completely rendered of clay. The skill with which he is able to impersonate a cardboard box that once transported bananas to the grocery store in clay, replete with little snags and tears, staples and stickers, is extraordinary. The sculptures are mind-boggling in their attention to detail, humor, and personality–how could you not love that little banana dude (Rusty Banana)?!– and I am utterly enchanted. I cannot wait to add a piece to my collection, but for now, I’m content lusting after them and posting the occasional “🔥” in Duncan’s Insta comments. My advice, go do the same, his feed offers a literal treasure chest of truly remarkable work.

Scott Duncan, Rusty Banana | Image courtesy of the artist

Scott Duncan, Saturn Devouring His Son (After Goya), 2021 | Image courtesy of the artist

Scott Duncan, Face Ripper, 2020-2021 | Image courtesy of the artist

Wishlist Wednesdays

Is that too cute? “Wishlist Wednesdays”? I was trying to think of something pithy, and catchy, but mainly, “Wishlist Wednesdays” sounded better than, “This-is-what-I’m-totally-obsessed-with-and-dream-about-adding-to-my-collection-all-day-long”. . .

This week: Erica Lee Sears

Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo

Sears is a painter, to put it as concisely and understatedly as possible. She is a master (that’s not a word I use lightly!) of the quotidian, a master of the banal, of taking midnight trips to McDonald’s and me-time in the bath and late-night snack runs to 7-11, of whipping it up like Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother getting her outfitted for the ball, and making it shine.

Wayne Theibaud, Sandwich, 1963

Sears’ style offers a study in texture–her reflective surfaces, are burnished so that you can almost find your face in them–and in light–contrasty and direct, serving to elevate the ring pop, or orange slices with multi-colored seeds, wine glasses, and the invasive cat from next door, to the heroic. Her still lifes conjure whispers of Wayne Thiebaud’s cakes, of his gumball machines, and his sandwiches, which are similarly positioned, alone or in groups on spare backgrounds of gently gradated pastels. I cannot aptly convey her facility for color in words but is simultaneously mindful of its impact, and completely unabashed of its undeniable beauty. It was her use of color that initially drew me to her work. That and her commitment: A. Painting. A. Day. Folks. If that’s not deserving of praise in this very weird moment of “let’s applaud that we got off the couch today,” then I don’t know what is.

I am well and truly enamored of them. Check out her Instagram, follow her for daily doses of deliciousness, and dream about adding them to your collection. Here are some of my favorites.

Erica Lee Sears, Silver, 2020 | Image courtesy of the artist

Erica Lee Sears, Chocolate and Fries, 2021 | Image courtesy of the artist

Erica Lee Sears, Match, 2021 | Image courtesy of the artist

Erica Lee Sears, Ringpop, 2020 | Image courtesy of the artist

Poor Munch

Edvard Munch, Madonna, 1895-1897 (?), Oil on canvas

“Celebrities, they’re just like us!”

This is the real title of a section in a popular gossip rag that prints photos of celebrities going about their lives–grocery shopping, picking up their dog from the groomer, going to the dentist. The public is consumed with these mundane comings and goings; obsessed with the celebrity that admits they too suffer from seasonal depression or self-doubt, fear and uncertainty. Cavities and broken bones, addiction and psychoses, seeming imperfections, help to break the spell cast by the fact of their celebrity, help to restore the ordinariness to them.

Nearly as old as celebrity itself is the tortured artist trope. Passed around, collected, and hoarded like currency are stories of an artist’s self-destruction–Van Gogh’s ear, Mark Rothko’s suicide, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s overdose. Fitting snugly within their ranks is Edvard Munch, the man responsible for the best-known depiction of a psychotic episode, The Scream. Munch was haunted by ghosts. Possibly he was schizophrenic, but he was perpetually spooked by the shadows in corners, by whispers real and perceived, by memories. Munch coped with his near-constant anguish by laying it all out in brush strokes and colors reminiscent of the hallucinations from which he often suffered. The resultant imagery feels profound, rife with emotion, fever dream-like, saturated, and phantasmagoric. His figures peer from below hooded lids, eclipsed by their secrets, to which we are only superficially privy. They look just beyond us, just behind us, just through us, we’ll never be party to the reveries in which they’re engaged. We’re onlookers, invited only to gaze at their beauty and not into their private worlds. His 1903 lithograph, Die Brosche, Eva Mudocci, in all her gorgeous, fiery glory is my pick of the week.

Edvard Munch, Die Brosche, Eva Mudocci, 1903 | Image courtesy of bG Gallery

Lightning in my Eyes

Shut your eyes. Shut them tight.

Tighter still.

Calethia DeConto, Shakti Rising II, 2018, Cyanotype and acrylic on paper | Image courtesy of the artist

What do you see? Colors? Shapes? Craggy lightning strikes? Press the heels of your hands into your eye sockets; do those colors and shapes and lightning strikes intensify? Can you witness the whole prehistoric pattern of light right there in your own little atrium? Do these colors and shapes transport you? How do they make you feel?

I see lightning, interplanetary weather, in great, electric purples and greens and blues. So extraordinary are these colors that I can feel the ionization of the air, hear the crack of thunder, and smell the atmosphere around me. The experience is replicated in Calethia DeConto’s work, which is simultaneously supernatural and witchy, mysterious and emotionally charged. DeConto’s work lives in instantaneity, the shifts of mood from one to the next, in love with each iteration of the self. She claims that her work “whispers”, but I hear it shout. I feel the longing, the profundity of the journey on which each of our souls as human beings embark every day in DeConto’s graceful mix of photography with cyanotype and acrylic paint. Magic lives there, and with the barest of gestures, the most simplistic representation of the human form, and the sparest of palettes, Calethia DeConto captures that ever present magic with unparalleled sensitivity and conviction. Her piece, Her World, is my pick of the week.

Calethia DeConto, Holding her Ground, 2019 | Photograph and acrylic paint

Chiquita? Chicana.

I am the daughter of a Mexican immigrant. I am first generation on his side. I am the first woman from his family to have attended college and finished. I am the first women from his family to have been awarded an MA. All of these firsts aside, my identity growing up never felt particularly chicana. We visited with our family in DF less often than we really should have, spent holidays making tamales and tortillas and tiramisu (believe it or not) with our cousins in the suburbs, but that was largely the extent of my mexicanidad.

“Al”, age 17

My father arrived to the US with his mother, older brother, and younger sister when he was 12, desperately poor, and with no language. His story is not different than those of today’s immigrants–his family sought better circumstances, they sought the ”American Dream”. He taught himself English on the football field where he found his peers more easily overlooked his Mexicanness in favor of his athletic ability. He went by “Al” rather than “Alfonso” because it was easier to pronounce. He stopped speaking Spanish. He assimilated. Years later when his daughters were born, he, like all fathers, wanted to give them the whole world. He wanted them to live lives full of possibility and open doors and yeses rather than nos. He wanted his American-born daughters to live American lives where their heritage was a factor of who they were rather than the fact of who they were.

Andy Warhol, Banana, 1966

For many years, I was afforded the immense privilege of sameness–I am light-skinned and fine-haired. I never looked for anyone who looked like me because I didn’t look all that different from those around me. It was in my early teens I began to understand my otherness, faintly as it dawned on me, I began to want my background, to seek out my roots. I recognized the impulse so handily captured in Linda Vallejo’s work to turn the whole world brown and make it make sense to me from a Mexican perspective. Make it make sense to everyone else, that without brown, white cannot exist. Linda’s piece, Chiquita, a riff on Andy Warhol’s banana image, is a succinct comment on that desire, and is my pick of the week.

Chocolate Buddhas or Keith Haring part two

Keith. I could talk about your work, talk about you, endlessly. You are the original great equalizer. The original plays-with-his-shapes and plays-with-his-colors the way that no one has since been able to replicate. The original gone too soon. Your dance inspires me.

Keith used to dance while he painted, used to paint while he danced. The two actions intrinsic and inextricable–painting as dance, organic and involuntary. While painting any of these large scale works–a tarp, a room, a wall–Keith’d turn up the music too loud and use a single line to connect every THING to everything else. In making that line, that continuous flow of paint or ink, he choreographed a ballet and a mambo and a waltz, all at once. That line, so audacious in its boldness and its weight, became Haring’s trademark and his vehicle. The vehicle to convey the feelings that were too big to keep in and which instead he spilled out over blighted urban parks, onto subway stations’ walls, and even onto bodies. I’ve tried, on numerous occasions, to reproduce a line like that and my hand does not have the confidence of his; I stop and start too often, and despite my best efforts to control the shakes, my lines are scrabbly and scritchy. That line effortlessly expresses kindness, anger, hope, and fear, and it is legible the world over, its message language-less and simultaneously language-full. Chocolate Buddha #1 from 1989 is my pick of the week.

Keith Haring, Chocolate Buddha #5, 1989 | Image courtesy of bG Gallery

Post-Election Crumbles

Hoo-boy!

It’s been a week.

Gray’s Anatomy of the Human Body (1858)

Do you feel that? Do your bones feel as tired and brittle as mine? I feel wrung out, my edges feel crumbly. What a thing this life is, what a joy, what a terror! I am awed by its majesty, it’s power. I am awed by this confusion of creation, this accidental existence. It is so truly extraordinary that we are all made of the same stuff–marrow and tissue–and yet that we are so diverse. That somehow chains of chemicals dictate that our hearts should beat on the left sides of our chests and that we should have two lungs, but that these self-same chemical compounds also build mountains and form deserts. We are forged from iron, made of carbon, we are so incomprehensibly big. Does the assembly of our bones differentiate us from one another? Or do our bones connect us? I wonder. Curiosity fuels understanding, we know; it fuels anthropology and technology and all the other -ologies, it fuels creativity. Curiosity fueled Jean-Michel Basquiat in his constant, albeit short-lived, exploration for understanding. When he was six he was struck by a car and broke several bones. While in the hospital, he was introduced to Gray’s Anatomy of the Human Body, which he then recreated later in life in a series of drawings adapted from the text. This piece, Thyroid, feels like an appropriate homage to us, to humanity. Underneath everything else, humanity is bone and humanity is carbon. Humanity is like Basquiat’s line etched on paper–irrepressible yet finite. Basquiat’s 1982 Thyroid (from Anatomy Series) is my pick of the week.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Thyroid (from Anatomy Series), 1982 | Image courtesy of Anina Nosei Gallery

PS, WE DID IT, BABIES! Here’s to the future.

The Tattoo Bug

I have two small tattoos on the inside of my left wrist–both memorial pieces–but I want more. I got the first nearly 15 years ago, and I was struck, bitten by the tattoo bug, and I still want another. I am fascinated by the endless possibilities presented by the concept of skin as canvas, the intricacies tattoo artists can render on a seemingly unforgiving surface, the idea of carrying around my own, singular piece of artwork forever. I also cope with the near-constant onslaught of tattoos and tattoo imagery in my daily life: on the corner, about to cross the street is a woman with an actual garden painted from shoulder to fingertip, a man with an assembly of skulls and words and spiders and stars and pin-up girls across the flat of his bare back, a girl with gems and delicate chains flung over the expanse of her collarbone, and I can barely restrain the impulse to pull them near and trace my fingertips over the avenues of imagery on their skin. I am so curious and so affected by the beauty of their personal paintings. 

Linda Smith, Modern Aphrodite, 2014, Ceramic, 22 x 13 x 9.5 inches | Image courtesy of the artist

I am relieved to know that I am not alone in this fascination, that were she here in New York with me, Linda Smith would be standing there gawping at them, too. Perhaps more constructively, Linda uses members of the tattooed population as inspiration for her work, immortalizing them in ceramic and preserving the art on their bodies forever after. I love the aura and the attitude of this piece, Modern Aphrodite, a contemporary reinterpretation of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty. That’s why it’s my Pick of the Week.

Peanut Butter and Glitter

The Italians have such wonderful things: La Dolce Vita!, gelato, language that tastes like candy, wines that make EVERYTHING taste like candy, birthplace of the Renaissance, and many, many, many, of art history’s most effusive terms. Everyone learns, in Art History 101, about contrapposto, a positioning of the legs as if one were mid-stride, found in sculpture dating as early as Ancient Greece all the way to modern-day, which serves to both create a dynamism of movement and also as a subtle balancing-tool. Italian can also claim chiaroscuro (a quality of light and dark in paintings), sfumato (a filmy, smoky-like atmosphere in other paintings), and finally, my favorite, impasto. Impasto describes the way that paint is built up, the texture of visible brushstrokes, the physical shape the paint takes as it is layered and scraped and piled onto a canvas. Impasto reminds me of taffy. Of delicate peaks of whipped cream. Of peanut butter plopped onto a piece of bread. Impasto proves that paint is not only a vehicle for imagery, but also a tool to shape that imagery in a tangible, three-dimensional way.

Simone Gad, detail

Painter cum performance artist cum actor, Simone Gad, understands impasto better than most and spreads layer after layer of acrylic paint (and glitter! Oh my god, glitter!), to give her paintings real heft and depth. The canvases are alive with color and shape that make me want to reach out and stick my hand in it to see what that world might feel like. She captures the kitsch and the neons and the vibrant textures of LA’s Chinatown with vivid and fearless abandon. Simone’s painting, Black Dragon Society, delights me, and it’s my pick of the week.

Captain Shiny-Fins

RIP, Captain Shiny-Fins

How many of us have won a goldfish at the fair? How many of us then dealt, three days later, with that same beloved fish’s untimely death? My sister won one once. I think she was all of eight years old, at our school’s version of a carnival called “Bazaarnival”. I don’t remember much else, so he must not have lasted all that long. Long enough, however, to go to extreme lengths to deck out his fishbowl-home with all the multicolored gravel and neon plantlife he could ever dream of. We weren’t really a fishkeeping family (apparently that’s what it’s called when you have fish, “fishkeeping”), so our foray into it didn’t last. I was though, and am still, fascinated by the teeny worlds people put together for their fish to live in. Worlds replete with treasure chests and sunken pirate ships, mini bubbling fountains and magic castles, divers and mermaids.

Kimber Berry doesn’t paint aquariums, doesn’t paint portraits of Captain Shiny-Fins for posterity’s-sake, though her paintings are reminiscent of those great little neon worlds. What she does do, is paint pictures representative of our–Americans’–tendency to overstimulate, oversaturate, and overindulge. Highly conscious of our effect on the world around us, Berry employs great swoops and swirls of psychedelic fluid color to comment on the increasingly blurred lines between illusion and reality, manufactured and natural. Her irreverently titled piece, I Think My Guardian Angel Drinks is my pick of the week

View fullsize

Kimber Berry, I Think My Guardian Angel Drinks, Mixed media, 60 x 40 inches | Image courtesy of the artist