Collecting

Washington’s Hillwood Museum: ‘Fabergé Rediscovered’

Why do people collect? What drives someone’s passion? Collectors are a fascinating species, perpetually both hunting-and-gathering and then showcasing their accumulated treasures.

Left: Catherine the Great, 1914, Fabergé Easter Egg.

Businesswoman and philanthropist Marjorie Merriwether Post is a prime example of a highly-dedicated collector. When her father C.W. Post, founder of the Postum Cereal Company, died in 1914, Marjorie became one of the wealthiest women in the world. She lived in New York City and began collecting to furnish her vast Fifth Avenue apartment, focusing on fine and decorative arts. She was an early patron of Cartier when he opened his business in Manhattan, and she became interested in Russian Imperial art when she began meeting emigres fleeing Russia after the 1917 revolution. According to Malcolm Forbes, Mrs. Post “pioneered Faberge collecting” (Malcolm Forbes, 7/30/1973, quoted in Fabergé Rediscovered catalogue, p. 163).More

Parallel Fields: Three Artists at Manhattan’s Lichtundfire Gallery

Processing information, data and imagery that accumulates or is set aside from our dominant thinking forms our beliefs, opinions and behaviors. You stub your toe and for the next few hours or so you tread more carefully. You get a speeding ticket and the next time you’re on that particular road you drive more carefully. You stargaze one evening and experience one of the century’s greatest meteor showers, so you continue to look skyward every chance you get. Those very specific lessons both short term and long become bigger, more life changing if you fixate over them. That tendency to obsess, that hyper focus on the mundane to the miraculous is what leads to exceptional thought, creative foretelling and compelling art of modern and contemporary times.More

The Art of St Petersburg, Florida

My trip to St Petersburg, Florida, was as much a success as I could have hoped for. The show I co-curated with Amanda Cooper, Water Over The Bridge: Contemporary Seascapes, is a timely and topical exhibition. Its subject matter, which in large part includes thoughts of climate change and the rising water levels strikes a loud cord here following the wrath of the area’s fall storms. But before I get into the specifics of that exhibition and the exhibition at Leslie Curran Gallery nearby, I want to give you my thoughts on the newest exhibition at St. Pete’s MFA (Museum of Fine Art).

Above, left: Selena Roman, Untitled (Tube) (2013), Archival inkjet print, Photo: Courtesy of the artist
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Yangyang Pan: ‘The Unveiling,’ at Madelyn Jordon Fine Art

Yangyang Pan, ‘In Between the Blossom,’ 2018, Oil on linen, 42 x 72 in.

Yangyang Pan, who was born in 1976, spent the first 30 years of her life in Central China where the meanderings of the Yangtze River, traditional Chinese art and art education shaped her thinking. She even taught art where she studied, at the Sichuan Fine Art Institute, but never realized her full potential as a painter until she moved west to Canada in 2006. At that time, Pan quickly found new inspiration in the work of Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell and Philip Guston, opening up her eyes, mind and emotions through the freedom of Abstract Expressionism.More

Art Gallery Ontario, with Artists Mitchell/Riopelle: ‘Nothing in Moderation’

On my way to this exhibition I was thinking of Joan Mitchell (1925-1992) and Jean-Paul Riopelle (1923-2002), as a golden couple in a post-war, Golden Age. Paris retained its charm and New York was newly ascendant after World War II. Riopelle seemed a ‘golden boy,’ irresistible and charming with his expensive race cars — including Bugattis — boats, properties and artistic success. Mitchell brimmed with athletic confidence, and was not at all shy about her body. Looking at photographs with her lovers, we can’t miss seeing the sexual magnetism she radiated. Theirs was a good match in many ways—but on careful examination, they were anything but a golden couple.More

From Nature: An Interview with Val Kilmer, by D. Dominick Lombardi

Val Kilmer, Photo by Hank O’Neal (all images courtesy of Woodward Gallery, NYC)

Val Kilmer, well-known actor, director and producer is also an accomplished poet and visual artist. In all instances, the diversely and abundantly talented Kilmer must manage his creative energies in many different ways, but for him it is in the visual arts, like poetry, where there is more of a need or want for experimentation, chance and enlightenment, as poetry and the visual arts are the ultimate internal process.

Kilmer brings everything to the table, even the very core of our being, as thoughts of God and the origins of the universe vie for his and our attention in his art. I recently had the pleasure of asking Kilmer a few questions to help clarify his process and intent in the following Q & A.More

Contemporary Artist, Michael Zansky and ‘The Saturn Paintings’

What’s attractive to artists about quantum science is that on the subatomic level, matter is in flux. Art is the imitation or the distortion of a thing in another substance. It imagines that all its elements can, if they want, change, swap and mutate characteristics constantly.

Michael Zansky began making art in the late 70s. He showed in Boston while he was at college at For 40 Years his paintings, drawings and models have addressed the protean character of the human condition. From then to his recent show at the Herron Gallery, University of Indiana, Michael Zansky has been mutating.More

Connecticut’s Housatonic Museum of Art with Eclectic Landscape Exhibition: New Perspectives

Martin Weinstein, Sun Dogs, 3x, (2011), acrylic paint on acrylic sheets.

In the United States, landscape painting has long served as a metaphor for other themes: symbols of our terrestrial treasures (in the case of the Hudson River School); a post-Civil War “return to order” (in the example of American Luminist painters); our complex national heritage portrayed by Regionalist artists in the Roosevelt era; or the broad, flat expanses of the natural and built environment manipulated by installation artists in the contemporary period. Whether it’s the view out our bedroom window, or from a high summit vantage point, landscapes speak to issues of identity, emotion, inclusion and alienation.More

New York’s Cavalier Gallery shows Contemporary Artist, Francine Tint: ‘Explorations’

Francine Tint, ‘Paris Red’ (2017), acrylic on unprimed canvas 51 x 65″ (all images courtesy of the artist). Now at Cavalier Gallery, New York City

The illustrious forty-plus year career of Francine Tint, established with works in over two dozen museum collections and a number of prestigious grants, continues to amaze. Her latest paintings currently on view at Cavalier Gallery, in New York City, are a whirlwind of subconscious thoughts and responses that quickly take shape in distinctive colors and tantalizing textures. They represent an intuitive and animated journey that emerges from the delicately watermarked and stained unprimed canvas to a weightier, more expressive vocabulary of distinct effortless lines, thick swathes of imposing color and darting detail, to create a wholly visceral sense of atmosphere and depth.More

Toronto Contemporary Artist, Nicole Collins, Interviewed by Critic, Emese Krunák-Hajagos

Nicole Collins, ‘Furthest Boundless,’ Koffler Gallery opening reception, 2018, Photo: Dahlia Katz

Nicole Collins has been exhibiting simultaneously around town, with ‘One Shot,’ at General Hardware and ‘Furthest Boundless’ at Koffler Gallery. I interviewed her about her work.

EKH: For One Shot at General Hardware you wrote, “The final marks are black (for bile, melancholy), the very first time I used black on a painting, an indicator of an obsession that has played out over the ensuing 24 years and found its’ zenith in Furthest Boundless.” What came first: the theme of death or the color of black?More