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Tag: Drawings

Daniel Rebour: an appreciation

Published April 23, 2009

There are artists that you think of when you think of drawing, Pat Steir, Jasper Johns, Jim Dine (I’m still blown away by the “Tool” drawings of the seventies) Jack Kirby (for some) and I’ll throw in an extra one, Daniel Rebour.

Daniel Rebour was a French illustrator. He is best known for drawing bicycles and bike parts. His drawings were published in cycling magazines and catalogs, to my knowledge he never showed in a gallery

However his drawings are extraordinary. His line and detail are unmatched by anything I’ve ever seen – they are also iconic. Rebour’s drawings are the flashpoint of the image of the cycling boom of the early seventies and to this day, they evoke a memory of an earlier and to my eyes, a more human version of bicycle culture.

When I view Rebour’s work I equate the new technological present with a loss of humanity that the early days of cycling held and showed so well. The artist in me views Rebour’s work with envy of his amazing technical and natural skill as well as sadness knowing that artwork like this just isn’t made nor considered relevant anymore.

When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. – H.G. Wells

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25 year long Lewitt drawing retrospective

Published January 29, 2008

Jock Reynolds (A former WPA Director) was a real visionary when he was in the DC area so an idea like this is surprising – but not completely. I think its a very interesting idea.

(From the New York Times)
The Yale University Art Gallery, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and the Williams College Museum of Art have teamed up to present “Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective,” a 25-year-long show to be installed in a newly renovated building at Mass MoCA in North Adams. In 2004, three years before LeWitt died, he and Jock Reynolds, director of the Yale gallery, began talking about the care and disposition of LeWitt’s wall drawings. This led him to give Yale about 40 of these drawings, along with the wall-drawings archives.

Mr. Reynolds, realizing that Yale would never be able to show a large number of them at one time, initiated a discussion with Joseph C. Thompson, director of the 13-acre Mass MoCA campus. Mr. Thompson took LeWitt on a tour of Mass MoCA, and the artist set his sights on Building 7, an abandoned 30,000-square-foot three-floor industrial building.

“He placed every drawing and drew every wall,” Mr. Thompson said.

When the project opens in November, nearly 100 wall drawings will be on view, dating from 1968 until LeWitt’s death at 78 in April. About half are from Yale; the rest from public and private collections. The three institutions have raised more than $9 million, Mr. Thompson said. About $3.5 million will renovate Building 7 and $2.5 million will provide an endowment related to the exhibition. A catalogue raisonne will also be produced. Williams College is providing the educational programs tied to the show. Students from Williams, Yale and other institutions will work for six months as intern apprentices, installing the works with professionals from LeWitt’s studio.

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Sol LeWitt in memoriam

Published April 12, 2007

I paused before I wrote anything about Sol Lewitt recently because to me he was truly an influential artist in helping develop my approach to image-making, in particular image-thinking.

My first intentional encounter with his work came when I was working for Nancy Drysdale in the early eighties. She was selling some of his wall drawings and asked Chris Bailey and myself (we both worked for Nancy at the time) to produce the work in accordance to the directions of the drawing. At first I thought it was quite a cop out – how could an artist not do his own drawings (I was young and more than a bit naive). The one thing it made me do, was to start thinking and looking at how these works could vary just by the installer. Later as the wall drawings became more colorful, I thought they were becoming more about the implementation of the work than the concept of the work.

What I came to realize was that the implementation is/was the concept. I still think that is pretty interesting.

His approach became infinitely scalable. Here is an example of the directions of a drawing. This one is from the NGA’s Vogel collection:

Wall Drawing #65 / Lines not short, not straight, crossing and touching, drawn at random using four colors, uniformly dispersed with maximum density, covering the entire surface of the wall.

The interpretation is wide open, yet at the same time it is defined within structural limits. It is open and closed at the same time.

Every once in a while I’ll talk to someone about my work and I will talk about how I’m interested in a “non-specific exactness”, this approach comes directly from thinking about these early wall drawings.

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Art Basel and orbiting events – day three

Published December 10, 2006

Let’s start with my catching up with yesterday information about Flow.
Arthur Roger Gallery (New Orleans) is showing Nicole Charbonet (top) whose built and developed paintings are a new interest if mine – I became interested after seeing them in ArtPapers magazine and in person they are as strong as they seemed.

Kenise Barnes (Larchmont NT) is showing Robert Flynn (above) who does these amazing charcoal and graphite images of sod. I know this sounds weak – but it’s just the opposite. These are amazing images and deserve your attention. A recent work is based on trophies and “boy toys” (my phrase) – well worth searching out. I understand he also does some amazing sculpture of items found in Home Depot – it sounds good so I’m waiting for that.
Miller Block (Boston) is showing Lori Nix who was gotten enough words from me in the last few days. So you know that you should be looking at her work a good bit.

After Flow yesterday, I had even lower hopes for the Bridge show. So I walk in and am handed the second largest and physically intimidating catalog of the last week – its almost the size of “Parabola” that I mentioned on wednesday ok, it’s half that size – but its still big -like an old issue of “Interview”. Again Flow is probably the best of the fairs after ABMB and I was also surprised by the high quality at Bridge as well. I really did think these two shows were just me too art fairs – I was so wrong. Both of these shows have set the bar very high, in fact it might be that these “late bloomers” are the real future of what is going on in Miami for the next few years as far as growing the orbiting events. Neither one is using the whole location, nor are they tied to any single location giving these events the ability to grow and shrink with almost no downside. Don’t get me wrong, AQUA is a great event, however the AQUA Hotel is already full so what’s next? Other than a deeper editing in the gallery selection process, I’m not sure.

So lets get to what I saw… Johnnie Winona Ross (above) is showing a painting and a great set of prints at Elin Eagles-Smith (San Francisco) – since we last spoke about JWR – he has developed a waiting list for his paintings – but a few prints are still available. I’m as thrilled with his work as I was last year.
Trillium Press has some great things going forward, including a book of David Mamet Cartoons.
Front Room Gallery (Brooklyn) is showing works by Emily Roz Who creates large grids of images taken from movies and television. Using Polaroid film she is able to mimic the look and feel of images flickering on screen. She also is able to hold up a mirror depicting formula and genre of the american landscape.
PierreFrancois Ouellette (Quebec) is showing John Latour as a re-staging of his show, “Lost Words”. Latour is one of four who make up this show – his work occupies a space between Joseph Kosouth and edited FBI documents.
Andrew Edlin (NYC) is showing swiss photographer Mario del Curto (below) photographic the work of architect Richard Greaves. These feel like the work of someone photographing the folk art of the American south however most of these were shot in Canada – and it hardly matters. The images are eccentric and familiar, yet have are fascinating in a way thats hard to ignore them.

Back to AQUA
I meant to spend a few moments with Isaac Layman, however when I as there he was pretty busy with some folks so I put off the conversation with him for a later date. That said, lets touch on his work a little so you can see where my excitement is coming from. IL’s work sits in a relationship between the detail and the whole – it shows that the parts are more complicated than the larger whole. These images recall a sort of updated cubism that is all the more fascinating in that he is building images based of many smaller images toward a collective whole. A macro/micro type approach. Isaac Layman is showing at Soil

Platform had a number of nice Jaq Chartier’s paintings. These are always a strong and continue to impress me with the vernacular of the image that is built and referenced throughout all of the works.

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Tara Donovan at Barbara Krokow (Boston)

Published November 6, 2006

Rubber band drawings and sculptures are currently being shown at Barbara Krakow this month. I missed the much talked about installation at Pace earlier in the year and as a result, was happy to see this small, yet engaging exhibit. 4 or 5 rubber band drawings are exhibited along with a couple of sculptural pieces and the result is quite successful. I tend to feel with Donovans work, bigger is very often better and in that vein my favorite piece was a sculpture approx. 40 x 40 x 40 – a cube covered in stick pins. It’s shiny and captivating as well as untouchable – it seems like a perfect piece – of course perfection can hurt you as well.

The rubber band “drawings” feel more like prints to me (and it hardly matters one way or the other). The technique is easy to understand as well as the resulting image – yet its the presence (in all of Donovans work) of basic office supplies that have been repurposed to something more interesting as well as beyond the traditional use of the materials. You might say she has found something organic in the use of these everyday office materials.

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