John murray classes week of Dec. 3, 2012

We have a model next week all classes.
Female nude.

See you next week john.

John Murray classes week of Nov. 26, 2012

(nothing whichful about

thick big this

friendly

himself of

a boulder)nothing

mean in tenderly

whoms

of sizeless a

silence by noises

called people called

sunlight

(elsewhere flat the mechanical

itmaking

sickness of mind sprawls)

here

a living free mysterious

dreamsoul floatstands

oak by birch by maple

pine

by hemlock spruce by

tamarack(

nothing pampered puny

impatient

and nothing

ignoble

)everywhere wonder

if (touched by love’s own secret)we, like homing

through welcoming sweet miracles of air

(and joyfully all truths of wing resuming)

selves,into infinite tomorrow steer

-souls under whom flow(mountain valley forest)

a million wheres which never may become

one(wholly strange;familiar wholly)dearest

more than reality of more than dream-

how should contented fools of fact envision

the mystery of freedom?yet,among

their loud exactitudes of imprecision,

you’ll(silently alighting)and I’ll sing

while at us very deafly a most stares

colossal hoax of clocks and calendars

  

I love this poem by ee cummings and wondered if you could use it as grist for your visual mill.
See you next week, john.

John Murray classes week of Nov. 19, 2012

Sometimes I wonder whether I am painting pictures of words or whether I’m painting pictures with words.
—Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha’s oeuvre has never been confined to established categories of style or media; for instance, books, drawings, prints, photography, and painting are used in parallel, together with materials as unconventional as gunpowder, fruit juice, bleach, coffee, and syrup. But throughout Ruscha's restrained yet daring experimentation, writing as act and subject, in print form or painted on canvas, has remained a constant inspiration for his iconic images of the American vernacular. His singular, sometimes oblique use of words allows for the exploration of the role of signifiers in language and thought, while his range of artistic means allows the act of reading to be literally manipulated as a process by which to generate meaning.

This exhibition follows “Reading Ed Ruscha” at Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, which fully explored Ruscha's obsession with books and language from the outset of his career. In New York the focus is exclusively on his consideration of the book over the last twenty-five years as a subject, as a support for pictures, or as an actual object. It includes acrylic and oil paintings, drawings on paper, watercolors on vellum, photographs, and book works.

In the small painting History (2005), Ruscha deflates a huge topic with an austere yet highly illusionistic side view of a rather-too-slim book spine on which the word appears. Whereas in the large-format painting Gilded, Marbled and Foibled (2011–12), he lets loose in a richly patterned description of traditional decorative bookmaking techniques, while the title provides a riposte to early Conceptual Art instruction. The Open Book series (2002–05), finely executed on untreated linen as a direct allusion to traditional bookbinding materials, appears as life-size images inviting closer perusal, while the giant works of the Old Book series present age-worn pages as monumental artifacts.

Various bookworks provide corollaries to the paintings. A strategy for a series of insidious small abstract paintings from 1994–95, where words forming threats are rendered as blank widths of contrasting color like Morse communication, resurfaces a decade later in book covers, where the oppositional actions of enunciation and erasure meet. In another book series, Ruscha has again used bleach to leach a single large initial on the colored linen covers of found books, such as a gothic M on the cover of Imaginary Gardens, or L L on two matching Shakespeare tomes entitled Twins (diptych), by which he deftly transforms one medium and format into another. In another, monochrome books mimic Minimalist objects and sport appropriately generic titles such as Atlas or Bible.

Ed Ruscha was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1937 and studied painting, photography, and graphic design at the Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts). His work is collected by major museums worldwide. Major museum exhibitions include the drawing retrospective “Cotton Puffs, Q-Tips®, Smoke and Mirrors,” which toured U.S. museums in 2004–05; “Ed Ruscha: Photographer,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Musée National Jeu de Paume, Paris (2006); and, “Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting,” Hayward Gallery, London (2009, traveling to Haus der Kunst, Munich and Moderna Museet, Stockholm in 2010). “Ed Ruscha: Road Tested,” Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2011); “On the Road,” The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2011). “Reading Ed Ruscha” concluded at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria in mid-October, just as “The Ancients Stole All Our Great Ideas” opened at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, an exhibition that Ruscha was invited to curate, working from the national art and natural history collections. It remains on view until December 2, 2012.

Nice work, by a great artist.Do some research online see if you agree.

See you next week (mon.). john.

No class on wed. day before thanksgiving!

John Murray classes week of Nov.12, 2012

No class mon. the 12th (Veterans Day).

To commemorate the holiday here is a poem by e.e. cummings;

why must itself up every of a park

anus stick some quote statue unquote to

prove that a hero equals any jerk

who was afraid to answer "no"?

quote citizen unquote might otherwise

forget(to err is human;to forgive

divine)that if the quote state unquote says

"kill" killing is an act of christian love.

"Nothing" in 1944 A D

"can stand against the argument of mil

itary necessity" (generalissimo e)

and echo answers "there is no appeal

from reason" (freud)-you pays your money and

you doesn't take your choice. Ain't freedom grand

-e.e. cummings circa 1950 from Xaipe

Above is a painting I did 5 years ago "Silverline" that to me is a reference to my own military service.

Does this poem bring to mind a work of visual art for you?

See you wed. john.

John Murray classes week of Nov. 5, 2012

Monday classes have a model next week. A female nude series of poses.
I have thus far been unable to get a model for Wed. (Supercharged a.m. and p.m.), so if anyone is desparate to work from the model swap class from wed. to mon. (preferably the afternoon class which is small on mon.). I will keep trying to get a model for wed.; however.
Please bring charcoal and fixatif and a new prepared canvas on mon.

John Murray classes week of Oct. 29, 2012

Work with a common household object and do an interpretive painting or deconstruct it and put it back in painterly terms. I've shown a piece I did in this manner this Summer. Matisse and Picasso did much of this in their work.
See you next week, john. (happy Halloween on Wed.!)

John Murray classes week of Oct. 22, 2012

Art Review

Planter of the Seeds Of Mind-Expanding Conceptualism

By KEN JOHNSON

• Anyone who wants art to be more radical, anti-market and otherwise against the establishment should hasten to the Brooklyn Museum to see “Materializing ‘Six Years’: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art.” Traditionalists who bemoan the triumph of mind over matter brought to us by Bruce Nauman, Sol LeWitt, Adrian Piper and scores of others in the mid-to-late 1960s will also profit, for they will here become better acquainted with their enemy. Today’s booming market for attractive objects notwithstanding, most of the ideas, values and fantasies that animated the conceptual turn half a century ago are still in play in the more intellectually fashionable circles of the art world.

Enlarge This Image

A notebook page by Lee Lozano for “No Title (Grass Piece)” (1969), a performance work for which she tried to stay stoned on marijuana for 30 days.

An image of Vito Acconci in his “Following Piece” (1969).

The show is not a conventional museum period survey. Rather, it approximates how the rise of Conceptualism was seen, while it was happening, by one person: the curator, critic and writer Lucy R. Lippard. Ms. Lippard (born in 1937) is known today mainly as a feminist and leftist activist, but in the years addressed by the exhibition — 1966 to 1973 — she was an extraordinarily energetic participant in, and promoter of, what was then seemingly a relatively apolitical trend.

Organized by Catherine Morris, curator of the museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, and Vincent Bonin, an independent curator and writer, the exhibition is designed to reflect the chronological structure of the seminal book Ms. Lippard published in 1973 to document her involvement with the Conceptualist movement. Its lengthy, unlovely title is worth citing in full, as it reflects the dauntingly cerebral tenor of much of the art it describes: “Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972: a cross-reference book of information on some esthetic boundaries; consisting of a bibliography into which are inserted a fragmented text, art works, documents, interviews, and symposia, arranged chronologically and focused on so-called conceptual or information or idea art with mentions of such vaguely designated areas as minimal, anti-form, systems, earth, or process art, occurring now in the Americas, Europe, England, Australia, and Asia (with occasional political overtones), edited and annotated by Lucy R. Lippard.”

Yes, that is like a mouthful of sawdust, and a lot of what is in the show is similarly dry and technocratic. There are charts, maps, magazines, exhibition catalogs and pages of dense verbiage. Among dozens of aesthetically indifferent photographs are examples from Douglas Huebler’s impossible mission to take a picture of every person in the world, and images of Vito Acconci performing his “Following Piece,” in which he tailed strangers on the street until they went indoors. Notebooks by Lee Lozano are filled with carefully hand-printed texts describing, for example, a performance work called “No Title (Grass Piece),” for which she tried to stay continuously stoned on marijuana for 30 days.

Some things are weirdly disconcerting, like Mr. Nauman’s video of his hands kneading his own hairy thigh into different shapes. Some are comical. William Wegman’s video “Spit Sandwiches” offers a close-up view into the artist’s mouth as he sings a nonverbal, percussive tune. Bas Jan Ader’s “Fall I, Los Angeles” is a 34-second film showing him tumbling off the roof of a one-story house. Generally, though, there is not a lot of hilarity to be found. And excepting a Minimalist diptych by Jo Baer, conventional painting is entirely absent. It is not a visually ingratiating show.

Oddly, there is little acknowledgment of world events. An exception is the famous poster picturing victims of the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, overlaid by the text reading “Q. And babies? A. And babies,” which was distributed by the Art Workers Coalition in 1970. But the overall impression is of a nearly autistic, self-reflexive insularity.

Conceptualism’s political import is better understood when considered against the background of the mainstream art world at the time. Abstract painting, championed by the powerfully influential critic Clement Greenberg, was ascendant, and the market for contemporary art was booming, thanks to Pop Art. Young radicals viewed the commercial gallery system as a cog in the capitalist machine that they believed responsible for the war in Vietnam. Refusing to produce goods for sale to comfortable collectors and instead making “dematerialized” works that sharpened and elasticized thought were construed as forms of political resistance.

This helps to explain what seems in retrospect to be the messianic nature of Ms. Lippard’s involvement. Between 1969 and 1973 she organized a series of four exhibitions in four cities. This she did by traveling to each place with many of the works in a suitcase in the form of artists’ instructions for realizing the pieces on site. Each show had for its title a number signifying the population of the host city. One in Seattle in 1969, for example, was called “557,087”; “2,972,453” took place in Buenos Aires in 1970. She was, you could say, the Johnny Appleseed of Conceptual Art, planting germs of mind-expanding thought that would grow and flourish around the world.

In the early ’70s Ms. Lippard’s commitments changed in response to a pertinent question asked by some: Why were there so few female artists among the cohort she was promoting? In 1973 in Valencia, Calif., she organized her last numbered show, “c. 7,500,” which included Conceptual works by 26 women, including Agnes Denes, Martha Rosler and Yoko Ono. In the decade after that she devoted herself to promoting female artists of all kinds. In some ways this was a reversal of field, from a mandarin preoccupation with pure thought to a populist concern for the economic and political conditions of living people in the real world.

But as Ms. Lippard notes in an essay in the Brooklyn exhibition’s excellent catalog, it was not a rejection of where she was coming from: “Conceptual Art in the broadest sense was a kind of laboratory for innovations in the rest of the century. An unconscious international energy emerged from the raw materials of friendship, art history, interdisciplinary readings and a fervor to change the world and the ways artists related to it.” That energy can still be felt in this richly illuminating show.

“Materializing ‘Six Years’: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art” is on view through Feb. 3 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park; (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org.

Roy Lichenstein at the National Gallery of Art Washington DC

WASHINGTON — Like a champion gymnast perfecting a winning routine, Roy Lichtenstein developed a deft, tight, virtually foolproof art style, one that was based on agility rather than brawn and, though narrow in range, was capable of surprising variations and extensions. 

‘Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective’

• 

Among the pieces in the exhibition is “M-Maybe,” from 1965.

The look of this art isn’t big, but it’s smart; cool and dry, but accessible. Connoisseurs and know-nothings alike can enjoy it, and for some of the same reasons. And there’s the recognition factor: very high. Once you’ve encountered his work, you’d know it anywhere. Catch a glimpse of a Lichtenstein out of the corner of your eye from a moving cab, and it will register, half-seen.

“Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective,” a traveling exhibition now at the National Gallery of Art here, is the first major survey of his work since his death, at 73, in 1997. It’s a big show and has a few slow spots, but on the whole it moves right along. Its 14 thematic sections have been edited with less-is-more dispatch. There aren’t many labels to detain you. Most important, Lichtenstein’s large-featured images, with their Ben-Day dot patterns; thick, black contours; and flat, bright colors are almost ergonomically comfortable to the eye.

Lichtenstein, born and raised in Manhattan, was focused on art from the start. Barely out of high school, he enrolled at the Art Students League and studied painting with Reginald Marsh. After a three-year Army stint during World War II, he earned an M.F.A. from Ohio State University, and worked here and there before moving to New Jersey in 1960, then back to New York City the following year.

Like almost everyone else, he had been turning out brushy paintings — there are a few in the show — in an Abstract Expressionist vein. But by 1960, that model felt style-cramping and uncool. There had to be other options, and he found one: he started painting cartoons.

The earliest example, “Look Mickey,” from 1961, is the first thing you see in the exhibition: a picture of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, adapted from a Disney children’s book.

Lichtenstein would later say that he painted it for his kids. In reality, he painted it for himself, to get as far away as possible from where he’d been.

He kept going in this new direction. He clipped ordinary images — a hot dog, a pair of Keds, a manicured female hand doing housework — from tabloid newspapers, comic strips and advertisements; made drawings of the images; transferred those drawings, enlarged, to canvases; and painted them. He set everything in the paintings against fields of Ben-Day dot patterns to suggest the look of cheap commercial printing, initially creating the patterns with a dog’s grooming brush dipped in paint.

What he was making, of course, was Pop Art. He didn’t invent it, but he was quickly pegged as one of its defining exponents, and his career took off. In 1961, through a fellow artist, he met the dealer Leo Castelli, who agreed to represent him, and immediately added him to a group show of other stars on the rise, including Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella. Andy Warhol would soon join the team.

Lichtenstein’s first Castelli solo, in 1962, sold out before it opened. He was clearly at the beginning of a heady ride, though he experienced it largely from the perspective of his studio, where he spent most of his time, refining and toning the formal aspects of his art and judiciously expanding its repertory of themes. He became comfortable working in thematic series, keeping several in progress at once.

In the early 1960s he continued to paint everyday objects, but switched from color to black and white. He also moved from Disney comics to a romantic genre produced by DC Comics, from which he adapted a line of close-up images of the faces of lovelorn, emoting young women. The 1963 “Drowning Girl” become one of his best-known pictures.

By this time, too, he was attracting disapproval. His work was criticized for being lightweight, nostalgic, uncritical, conservative: pseudo-populist art for the carriage trade. With the Vietnam War moving into high gear, and resistance at home on the boil, the perceived ideological defects of his art seemed particularly glaring. 

Or like Roy Lichtenstein you can be a commercial painter designer!

A better way to go is next week try a conceptual piece about the NewArt Center office staff, your fellow artists, the walk to Walnut Street? Photograph with your phone camera and we'll print in the office and collage or transfer to canvas for painting? or presentation? Think about it, please.

See you next week, john.