The paintings of Rebecca Norton. [divider] I was looking over some paintings by Rebecca Norton yesterday in the print shop. It struck me that the geometric forms of each composition are quite loosely painted and celebrate the painterly imperfections that ensue. By 'imperfections' I don't mean that the paintings are flawed, rather that they delight in their 'hand madeness', their loose brush strokes and unsteady edges. Norton works with geometry, a math based discipline rooted in accuracy and perfection. If I think back to the major players within art history who have worked with geometric form like Malevich, Mondrian, Kelly, Martin, Stella, there is an inherent accuracy and perfection of the geometry that is also incorporated into the way the artists painted. Lines were perfectly straight or angled, painting was hard edge and controlled to create ordered, seamlessly harmonious compositions. Norton's work however removes that controlled painterly element within the geometric composition. Instead her style of painting seems more improvised, expressive and loose. Imperfect by certain standards. To be honest, it is a combination that at first took me to a place of discomfort. It is a strange juxtaposition to see the angled forms and precise geometric compositions mixed with expressionistic brush strokes. But why is that so? First off, it is not what I am used to seeing when I look at geometric artwork, I'm used to that controlled brush stroke and hard edge. In a broader sense, as a consumer I think that I have become intolerant to apparent imperfection. There is little room for it when buying something, I don't want an item with an imperfect paint job or a book with a creased cover. When I look around at most contemporary art, I see the 'flawlessness' conditioning of our commodity driven culture where artists don't leave anything to chance or potential imperfection. A lot of painting seems contrived, or risk free. Norton's looseness is a breath of fresh air and quite unexpected. While having this internal monologue looking at the paintings, I remembered Matisse's Carmelina painted in 1903. For the time, I'm sure people had a similar reactions to the one I initially had when looking at Norton's paintings. The deliberate looseness and resulting imperfection within the portrait is off putting, engaging and ultimately inspiring. The same can be said for Rebecca Norton's work. It's a mysterious contradiction of risky painting within an apparently ordered geometric composition. It functions beautifully as a metaphor for the sub atomic, mathematical chaos that ensues behind the facade of our seemingly ordered visual reality.

Written by

EXCERPT FROM ART LTD MAGAZINE [divider] Julika Lackner: "Major New Works" at Alex Mertens Fine Art  by charles donelan Jan 2014 Spectral Phase #4 2013 Acrylic, Oil + Alum-Silver on Canvas 96" x 72" Photo: courtesy Alex Mertens Fine Art Occasionally a young painter makes a quantum leap forward to a new level, and this seems to be the case with Julika Lackner, as evidenced by a fine and comprehensive exhibition this fall at Alex Mertens Fine Art, in Montecito, just outside of Santa Barbara. Lackner was raised and educated partly in Santa Barbara, partly in Berlin, and the balance she's achieved between the representational rigor and psychological tension of the Northern European tradition and the sun-soaked pleasure principle of Southern California makes her work both viscerally and intellectually engaging. Her new tack, which, to be fair, has been underway for at least three years, involves a shift from representation to abstraction--from standing apart from the scenes she paints to a kind of merging with the atmosphere. The self-assured elegance and power of this change was made possible by long hours of research and practice painting representational light situations, from lively night skies to lurid urban lightshows to aerial views semi-obscured by gauzy clouds. The new series of works, which are titled Spectral Phase numbered 1-8, were painted in 2013; they follow other, large immersive canvases from the years 2011 and 2012 with names like Daybreak and True North. They combine great washes of saturated acrylic color with reflective aluminum surfaces and fields of geometrically arranged brushstrokes in the ovoid shape of small lozenges, or, as critic Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe has termed them, "boats." Their overall impact lands somewhere between Mark Rothko and the avant-garde cinema of Stan Brakhage. The term "boats" derives from the look of Lackner's 2008 series of representational aerial views of Los Angeles, and in particular from an image of Marina del Rey, called From Above, that depicts actual boats. However, in her new paintings, these floating signifiers have shipped anchor and begun to move through a new element that's part air, part water, and all visual sensation. Their presence in the midst of Lackner's masterful control of adjacent color values and reflective surface effects makes these paintings a persuasive contribution to the ever-shifting tradition of contemporary art in California, and beyond.

Written by

Thanks for the great write up GCM. Check out the Culture Feature in the May/June edition. [divider]

Written by

YELLOW as a paint color has a long history. It was first seen in the cave paintings of Lascaux over 16,000 years ago. Originally derived from the yellow ochre pigment in clay, all kinds of yellows can now be synthetically produced through modern chemistry. The first three words that spring to mind when I hear the word ‘YELLOW’ are light, accent and bold. Light because yellow seems to mimic the color and warmth of the sun. Accent because yellow has the ability to highlight any other color that it’s backed up against, and bold because of it's power to do so. For all those reasons yellow can be tough to use in a painting, but spectacular when used successfully. We’ve put together a selection of our favorite paintings from history that master and celebrate all that is YELLOW. [divider] [caption id="attachment_8204" align="alignleft" width="489"] Yellow Painting, Barnett Newman 1949[/caption] [caption id="attachment_8209" align="alignleft" width="501"] Small Boudoir, Willem DeKooning 1949[/caption]               [caption id="attachment_8205" align="alignleft" width="445"] Veluti in Speculum, Hans Hofmann[/caption] [caption id="attachment_8206" align="alignleft" width="514"] Untitled, Conrad Marca-Relli[/caption] [caption id="attachment_8226" align="alignleft" width="435"] Le Grande Julie, Fernand Léger (1945)[/caption]     [caption id="attachment_8210" align="alignleft" width="510"] Number 22 , Mark Rothko 1949[/caption]   [caption id="attachment_8207" align="alignleft" width="507"] Keith Haring, 'Untitled,' 1982[/caption]   [caption id="attachment_8212" align="alignleft" width="478"] Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, 1960[/caption] [caption id="attachment_8227" align="alignleft" width="433"] Said, Gerhard Richter 1983[/caption]     [caption id="attachment_8214" align="alignleft" width="389"] Ring Image, Robert Mangold 2010.[/caption]   [caption id="attachment_8211" align="alignleft" width="699"] Untitled 11, MIKE KELLEY 2008-2009[/caption]   [caption id="attachment_8208" align="alignleft" width="372"] Cy Twombly's “Untitled (Camino Real)" 2011[/caption]              

Written by

EXERPT FROM ART LTD MAGAZINE MAY 2014 Carlson Hatton by Carol Cheh May 2014 Flaws In A Victorian Veil 2014 Acrylic and graphite on paper on panel, edged with aluminum 30 1⁄4" x 44" Photo: courtesy of the artist     [divider] It’s easy to get lost in Carlson Hatton’s work. Utilizing a strong backbone of drawing along with elements of painting and printmaking, these complex works on paper blend a multitude of abstract patterns with figurative elements, creating intriguing juxtapositions that seem at once vaguely familiar and utterly fantastic. In one work, a grid-patterned cat sits observing a set of shapes that resemble a mother and child; in front of them, a moaning woman lies prostrate, while behind them, a tree-like pattern disappears into a grassy background. This hypnotic imagery tightly references commonly seen motifs while eluding clear narratives, creating instead a pliable space for the imagination. A native of San Diego with fine arts degrees from Cooper Union in New York and De Ateliers in Amsterdam, Hatton has been living and working in Los Angeles for about a decade. His home, a Silver Lake fixer-upper that he and his wife, an artist and psychotherapist, renovated themselves, reflects the artist’s philosophy that living and working spaces should be seamlessly integrated. A sunny living room and kitchen are at the center of the house, with sliding doors on the side that open onto two studio spaces. Movement among all these spaces is constant and easy. “I find that I take a lot of things directly out of my mailbox that work their way into my studio,” Hatton reflects. “I’ll see something on television, or I’ll notice the way that the mail is stacked up—I find all these accidents that happen in daily life that I want to record right away.” This sense of inspiration taken from everyday life and constant experimentation with materials are palpable throughout the artist’s work, which seem to incorporate a freefall of manifold visual elements. Hatton credits this way of working to a basic collage aesthetic that has informed his work since he was in college. “For a while, I abandoned painting and drawing altogether and focused on collage,” Hatton recounts. “In grad school in the Netherlands, I was given a very large studio and I started making big installations, videos and animations. I’d collect a lot of materials, and they would all filter their way into these projects.” Hatton returned to painting and drawing with more of an editorial mindset, where he mines large amounts of material to create focused individual works. “At this point, I want it to be a collage sensibility, but it has to be resolved on a single plane. If it gets too collage-like, where there are multiple physical layers, I feel like that misses the point, where the work gets filtered through me into a single flat layer. All that information from magazines, photos, wherever—I am filtering it thru my hand, and that enables it to create its own world.” Hatton counts among his influences David Reed and Marlene Dumas, with whom he studied at Cooper Union and De Ateliers, respectively. “Reed makes paintings that are site-specific, somewhat installational. The idea that the paintings belong in a bedroom, I always find kind of fascinating. I liked Dumas’ use of watercolor—the directness of the media and the way that it offers the richness of painting while referencing things that don’t at all have that richness within them.” The dense works of Lari Pittman and Albrecht Dürer are constant sources of inspiration, with books of their work usually present in Hatton’s studio. He is also fascinated by Henry Darger. “I’m intrigued by the flatness and depth that simultaneously occur within his work, and the way he’s creating these bizarre coloring books, essentially, that kind of draw you in because you might recognize something from popular culture, but there’s not a strong enough link to stop it from becoming its own bizarre world.” Hatton’s unique methodology includes washes of watercolor mixed in with layers of masking, stenciling and silkscreening. His technique can be rigorous, and his surprising choice of the fragile medium of paper turns out to be strategic. “It’s true that paper can only take so much, and I like that it has that threshold, that certain point where things won’t work and it’ll get too rippled or too destroyed. Those limitations force me to make decisions and stick with them, rather than layering and layering until things work themselves out, which could be forever, and I find there’s something less brave about that. I like to have some vision as to where it’s headed.” ”Carlson Hatton: Ataxia” was on view at Ruth Bachofner Gallery, in Santa Monica, from March 8 — April 19, 2014. www.ruthbachofnergallery.com “Stupor,” a solo show of works by Carlson Hatton, could be seen at the Santa Monica College Art Gallery, from February 18 — March 29, 2014.

Written by