Hi.
I left town for the weekend and went to Austin. This list is usually New Orleans-specific but it’s just a ten hour drive (actually, I flew). And then the Fourth July so things here are closed. I did make it to NOMA and met Linda who proved something I believe and think about often: art connects us.
xx, e
ps If you trust me at all, PLEASE sound-on the last video.
Studio Visit with Holly Cerna, Bee Cave, Texas
Holly was gallery-sitting at ContraCommon. We spoke a little our conversation led to her studio behind the gallery. When I was in first grade, Renée Alten brought a little box of florescent Crayola Crayons to school and they were MAGIC. Man, I wanted crayons like that. I pulled up the paintings of Jennifer Coates, very different paint handling, similar palette and parallel-worldliness.
I was really taken with paintings in which the ordinary was magicked with the illusion florescent light that pushed through from another dimension. This little painting of Basílica de la Sagrada Família…
Sydney Parks at ContraCommon, Bee Cave, Texas
Thinking about where art happens, I come up with three geographies: between the artist and the material, between the art and the viewers, and then in the mind of the viewers after they’ve moved on. Sydney Parks’s generative works–as I understand the process–are made in the space between the code she writes, and chance. The viewer encounters the works on a personal screen or, in the context of her show in Bee Cave, projected in a dark space, sitting on cushions, where they can control the color, sound and other elements on cooperation with other viewers. And I couldn’t help but imaging that when I left our conversation, my sensorium (just found that word, first time used) had just gotten some bodywork.
Blanton Museum of Art, Austin
Anni Albers and I have no idea how someone can make triangles so captivating. And I thought of Will Sears’s work and how abstraction, geometry lands different in person.
This sculpture reminded me of the line from James Wright’s poem Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio, “…And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.”
Label text: “Shell captures Farrah Fawcett’s footprints in the sand taken from Padre Island in the actress’s native Texas…”
I’m not sure why I found this piece (referencing Botticelli’s Birth of Venus) so moving. I think it has something to do with the fact that people come and go from this planet. The famous ones drive home the timeline and if you have ever felt real grief when a celebrity, someone you’ve never known, dies, you may understand what I mean.
I can’t think about Philip Seymoure Hoffman or Anthony Bourdain. It is grief. Those footprints.
Marie Watt, SKY DANCES LIGHT
New Orleans Museum of Art
Look at this goofball! M. and I were laughing at the small knees, delicate hands, the empty looking pants-crotch, and Classical architecture stuffed in the background. Displays of wealth and position can be a lot of things, among them is just plain goofy. My inner commentary turns Beevis and Buttheadesque “Yeah yeah! I have a scroll!!!”
There were passages in the painting where I guessed the artist had moments of pleasure in the paint, like in the ruffles of the clothes. Did he have urges like Sargent, Velazquez or even Fragonard? As I was identifying a glint of light on the buckle, Linda came over to us.
Linda, an attendant at the museum, pointed out how this painting of Marie-Antoinette looks situated in perspective on the opposite balcony. Linda is seventy-six. She said like Marie-Antoinette, her family elders wanted to choose a husband for her at sixteen. So, she self-emancipated and finished school. She said, “I’d rather live with my mistakes than theirs.”
I asked Linda to point out her favorite artwork and she took us to this 1894 painting by George David Coulon titled The Spirt of Louisiana.
How strange, I thought. Of all the artworks. “Why?” I asked.
Linda said, “The women here, the way they can take things…” she pointed to the flowers, grass and pearls in the hair, “…and make themselves look good.”
Linda, thank you.
Finally, This guy. Who really looks like he should be singing yacht rock.
I keep your picture upon the wall
It hides a nasty stain that's lying there
So don't you ask me to give it back
I know you know it doesn't mean that much to me…
we’re all so lucky to get to experience your enthusiasm for art of all kinds ! thanks for this and keep it up