Art, Art and More Art

I combed through the Chelsea galleries on Saturday afternoon, from 25 street, zigzagging to the 20th. That is lot of walk, climbing up and down, pacing back and forth, like I was thinking, although I was also looking.

Problem with me is that I don't follow specific art news to know what to focus, so I had to cover it massively and leave it to luck. That spontaniety and anticipation for the unknown excites me, always. It just require extensive labor.

It turns outs that I have been lucky, actually, so lucky to have seen something really extraordinary.

Not everything I saw were impressive, but what I like the best are the following three, their works put me in awe and in feeling of love.

1. An illustrator who loves red--Hope Gangloff.

Her lines are very clean and simple, yet the mood, the shape and shade are perfect. Her charaters, highlighted with just red shoes or a lips or a cigarette stub in their mouth, a shirt, are urban, lying around, moody, purposeless, but living. It reminds me of characters in novels of Murakami. And red is the highlight color in most of her drawings, if there is color at all, besides the black strokes of her ball point pen.

Red rules. Ask Bono.

I like the above drawing very much and so many others which were part of the solo show at the Susan Inglett Gallery at 534 West 22nd Street until yesterday. So yes, it ended, and I was lucky to decided to be there on the last day. That means that we were destined to meet--very chinese way to look at it.

I am sure we will see more of her work. Here is the website with more splendid drawings.

2. Canadian Invasion -- Death from below: The Upper Layers of the hades Geofront

I always like the monster painting in the tradition of Goya. That may answer for my dark side. But these monsters, like in the animation movie of Hayao Miyazaki, mostly have a soft heart or a painful past, thus warm and intimate, thus leaving room for empathy, or transformation of the viewer into them.

These are the amazing graphic paintings by Nicolas Di Genova, the imagination, the detail and accuracy, the humor in the replacementment parts, trees growing out of the back of monster sheep, butterfly with head of horse. This is the art that take me away and come back feeling more and happy.

He draws with belief and zeal. You can feel it. And imagination is what disguishes art and craft. There is so much of it in his drawing, the imagination that starts in reality but ends in infinity with somtime subtle change of compositions of what we know and see before.

And this drawing blog has the interesting collection of his work.

3. Rise from Junk

Project runway judges often ask the nervous designers: You got to have your own perspective.

Vik Muniz shows just that, all new, original, irony in perfection and large scale yet decpetive through photographic remake. Greek gods rise from industrial rubbles. And not to say I saw my beloved Carravagio's Narssisis again--Nice surprise.

The Brazailian artist is truly the designer, he directed art students to put rubbles along the outline based on classic master paintings from a scaffold, he show us videos when this vision is being realized.

It is the use of such cold and empty modern materials or the aftermath of it to tell stories of deity and unearthiness that delivers true irony.

I took photos but I can not seem to add more images to this post. Check out his work here.

And I encoutner lot of red in all the shows, even in street, yesterday and today. I will post them soon.

Today I walked around the buildings in Dumbo with friends to see the open studios of Annual Under the Bridge Art Festival. It was a sunny but chilly day.

I remember when I was in DC and was looking for a winning painting in the national portait competition. I was amazed by the number of artists from Brooklyn that have been nominated in the competition. It is an area indexed espeically high for artists, extra high concentation for excellent ones. Like when you throw a small rock to a the crowd, you have a much higher possiblity of hiting the head of an great artist here.

But for any day, even a bad artist always beat a good soldier, to me--a person who seek to express himself via form of creation rather than destruction is forever more lovely and honorable.

The buildings in Dumbo was filled with artists and art lovers or appreciators, like the market. I love it. Its openess and calm moves me.

But after 2 or 3 buildings, we felt no more art, no more walking, it felt like holiday shopping trip toward the end. I just needed a cup of hot coffee and looked at people. A worn out weekend of over dosage of art appreciation, with a more worn out heel of boots.

I was thinking of you, of couse, and was not thinking of you, in the space and time we could have enjoyed together. For we share the love of many of these works.

I felt closer to you walking to the same galleries that you took me. And there is more happiness than sadness that fills my heart. I smiled, I smiled for I love you still and that love will never be lost, and it warms my heart when I look into the paintings that you will also like--I know.

Even I could not turn around and say, "look at this", or feel your arms arond my waist, but I know you are some where, looking at something beautiful. For you are an artist, you create things funny and beautiful.

To some extent, we all are.