OMG NYC FTW!

Along with everyone else, their brother, their Mom, their dog and their 50 closest friends, John and I went to the Armory show in NYC on Saturday. Boy, was it packed. Yikes! Before we headed to the Armory we actually went to Pulse first, mostly to check out my former studiomate Michelle Muldrow's work at the booth for Jen Bekman projects:

Delirium, 10" x 20", casein on clay panel, by Michelle Muldrow



Great stuff! Pulse was definitely more manageable size-wise than the Armory... and out of the eight thousand million gazillion booths at the Armory, I can easily narrow down my magical favorite moments to just a couple of pieces:

I got to see a painting by British artist Justin Mortimer, at the booth for Mihai Nicodim Gallery - amazing in person.

I can't believe I had never heard of this artist before, a Belgian artist named Michaël Borremans

This is only the second time I've seen a Kehinde Wiley in person...

And here are some other works in the show:

This one really spoke to me.

Fabricate, emulate, the truth dilate, special date

Hey Internets, I'll be showing some of my series of paintings on printed fabric (entitled "fabrication") right in my own backyard, so to speak - more specifically, at a neighborhood cafe: Rocket Cat! Yes, it's the same Rocket Cat Cafe mentioned in this previous blog post of mine - the one with the Shepard Fairey mural on it. So, Rocket Cat will have Fairey on the outside, and Feissel on the inside! It's a big faireyfeissel sandwich! Sort of. Anyway, if you're remotely in the vicinity of Philadelphia and especially if you reside in Fishtown, you simply must come out to celebrate tomorrow night, First Friday, March 4, 2011, from 6-9pm. You must.

As you will see from this post on the Frankford Avenue Arts Corridor website, there's a ton of other great stuff happening in the neighborhood tomorrow night as well - come on out to play, people! It's almost spring! Whoo!!

duck duck duck duck duck duck duck GOOSE, oil on printed fabric, 24"x30" by me, Diane Feissel



Building an arc.

Oh MAN, I can't believe I forgot the painting below when I wrote this post, trying to compile a list of my longtime favorite paintings... I absolutely adore this painting, and could linger in front of it for hours. Lucky for me, it's only 100 miles away from my adoring eyes, at the Met up in NYC:

Joan of Arc, oil on canvas, 1879, 100" x 110", by Jules Bastien-Lepage 

Mmmmm. I love those naturalist painters, yessir I do.

Fairey ironic?

Ok, this one is a case which has me very, very torn, not unlike the issue of the moving of the Barnes Foundation from Merion, PA into Philadelphia... anyway, here's the deal: last year street artist Shepard Fairey created a mural on the side of Rocket Cat Cafe, a couple of blocks away from our home in Fishtown. Recently, however, I noticed that another street artist tagged the mural... and now someone is working painstakingly to remove the tag (see the article at this link). Now, to me, it seems kind of ironic and only natural, in a way, that one work of street art (or, as it is sometimes known, "graffiti") would be covered up by another... the fact that someone is taking the trouble to remove the newer tag, in my mind, raises all sorts of interesting questions about the value we place on particular instances of "street art," or any art, really, over any other piece of art - why is Shepard Fairey's art deemed conservation-worthy and the other "artist's" work not? Is it because he's famous? Because someone paid money to have the mural painted? Because it's "better" art than the tag which followed? Why is the tag not simply allowed to be a part of the work, a "street work" in progress? If we were to apply the same judgment to Fairey's work as to the subsequent tagger, would Fairey's work ever be as valued as it is? Because long before he did the Obama "Hope" poster and all that, Fairey was just another tagger himself, in a sense, putting his art up on property which didn't belong to him? Anyway, I don't have all the answers, but I'd be curious as to what others think of this whole issue. It frankly has me stumped, and somewhat amused...

Me, in front of the Shepard Fairey mural outside Rocket Cat, months before the tagging

(photo taken by the lovely and amazing Alison Overton) 

PSC encore.

Went to a presentation last night at the Philadelphia Sketch Club by painter Paul DuSold. He gave a preview of his new DVD on portrait painting, produced with the help of fellow painter David Shevlino, whose own DVD I discussed in this post. In his portrait-painting approach, he prefers a limited palette, works on the painting from light to dark after laying in the initial tonal range (which I found interesting, I always work in the opposite direction), and emphasizes the two main painting issues as that of tone and temperature - which seems a simple breakdown until you try painting! You can see a demo/talk he gave on Sargent's method of portrait painting at this link.

Arthur DeCosta, oil on canvas, 46"x36", by Paul DuSold



NYC art lessons!

Hey - for anyone who is looking for a really good, private art instructor in NYC, you should try Reiner Hansen, a fellow artist who has just relocated from the San Francisco Bay Area: http://reinerhansen.com

Here's an example of instructor Reiner Hansen's work:

The Seed, oil on panel, 2003, 8" x 10", by Reiner Hansen

Love and death, and painting.

For some reason, I was thinking recently about the paintings that I’ve looooved for years, the paintings that grabbed my attention as a youth and really stuck with me – sometimes to the point of making a special pilgrimage to see them in person. The leading ones are the three below… and I only just realized, upon collecting these images, what a seriously gruesome group of paintings this makes. Am I really that morbid? Yikes.

David Holding the Head of Goliath, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, oil on canvas, 1610, 49”x40” (at the Galleria Borghese)

La Mort de Marat (The Death of Marat), Jacques-Louis David, oil on canvas, 1793, 64”x50” (at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels)

Ophelia, John Everett Millais, oil on canvas, 1851-1852, oil on canvas, 30”x44” (at the Tate Britain in London)

For those who are keeping track, that's a body count of three (although I guess there's no actual Goliath body in the Caravaggio one, is there? So maybe that one doesn't count...?).

Boy, I was a weird kid.