New Drawings

Sioban Devlin & Paul O'Behnke...Irish cousins!

Gorman and Nozkowski

The first few are from the Nozkowski catalog for the show at the Rubicon Gallery. I couldn't find and pictures on the web of these specific pieces (you get the idea).

The other two are by Richard Gorman...

Hallward, Kerlin and Douglas Hyde

Today I met up with Sioban in Dublin at Merrion Square. First stop was the Hallward Gallery. The guys who own it moved shop from Cork. It was a nice space but a little unfocused due to their mid-winter group show being hung salon style. They had a few small John Kingerlee works on paper but actually some of the best work in the gallery was by one of the owners, a guy named John Brennan. He did abstractions based on the sea near Cork in a very sophisticated palette.

Next we stopped by the Kerlin Gallery. Upstairs they were hosting an installation by Liam Gillick. I can relate to some of Gillick's pieces better than others. This one was very spare, mostly nude wood with very little color---color is usually how I connect to his work.
Downstairs I asked the gallery director about Richard Gorman's work and he was nice enough to bring out several pieces so we could see them in person. I was telling him how much I like Gorman and how much trouble it was to get a catalog from a Japanese show last year. I asked if they had any catalogs for sale from past shows and he surprised me by giving me a very nice little book/catalog from a recent show!

After lunch we went to the Douglas Hyde Gallery and saw a really uninspiring show of paintings by Wilhelm Sasnal. Everything looked really half-assed and not in a good way. The work looked like a cross between '80's Neo Expressionism and Gary Hume.

I was in a good mood all day today because THE SUN WAS OUT! I couldn't believe it...blue skies, shadows cast by objects...the whole nine yards!

New Drawing

aprox 18x24 inches

Galleries, Lilliput Press X-mas party, and Dun Laoghaire Harbor

This is about the seventh straight day of rain and cold temps here. I can't complain though I left sunny Florida of my own volition. And I have to say I'm liking the cold it's just the rain I could do without.

On tues I went in to Dublin to chek out the Thomas Nozkowski show at the Rubicon Gallery on St. Stephan's Green. It was a nice show. I've wanted to see his work in person for some time (I missed the show in Memphis a while ago)and this one was a great example of his typical oil on paper,easel size work. Nozkowski is out of the mainstream and no academic at all and I think that's why younger painters admire him. His abstract work is derived from life experiences and surroundings, his images are varried and quirky and there seems to be no consistent approach to a piece.

Tomorrow I'm going in to Dublin to see shows at the Hillsboro Gallery (showing a couple of Gillian Ayres and a John Hoyland in a holiday show)and I also want to visit the Kerlin Gallery, they show a couple of people I really like such as Richard Gorman. Sioban wants to visit Hillsboro too and then we'll get some dinner.

Last night I was invited to the semi annual Christmas party give by the owner of Lilliput Press (where Sioban works as an editor).
I almost didn't go because the weather was so bad and when I did venture out I ignored Sioban's directions and went my own way. This probably added about a mile of rain soaked walking to the trip but the city did look beautiful in the rain. Dublin is lit up for Christmas and the river Liffey looks incredible. I'm glad I made it to the party though. I met a lot of interesting people---one American living here with his Irish wife and French/Irish couple living in France. The Frenchman and I talked most of the night---solving all of the worlds political problems. I also met a very nice older lady who is a publisher in London. We talked about the recent Turner prize winner and she was also very keen on Hockney so we talked about him for a while. It's really great to be able to talk art again!
I also met the press owner's son -a guy about 30 who looked like Colin Farrell-who was pulling pints and called me a pussy for leaving early and not drinking enough. I told him...(insert bad fake Irish accent here)"I see yur aftur gettin yur arse kicked talkin like dat." We parted on good terms though and I had one more Budvar for the road.

I would have stayed much later but I am a pussy and had a long rainy walk back to Tara street to catch the last train back to Dun Laoghaire.

Ireland trip

Here are a couple of photos from my trip...the sunset is walking home from the train station in Greystones and a couple of pics of my room at the house in Dun Laoghaire...

Happy Thanksgiving

We had a great time in Port Charlotte, FL visiting Robin's dad and his wife Deb. Bri also flew down (or over) from TX and it was great to see her. I wish Aubrey could've made it too, though!
Robin's dad keeps you busy in the early part of the day---biking, kaiaking, or boating---The the beer drinking starts at lunch and continues until dinner when the beer is replaced by wine. After dinner it's vodka tonic time! This schedule is fun but takes it out of you after a few days!!! In short we both have fond memories of bits and pieces of Thanksgiving 2006.
+ Robin looked beautiful alll weekend!

Robin Soaking Up the Sun

We had fantastic weather today---just cool enough for a sweater but still warm enough for the girls to be playing volley ball in their bikinis! Ah Florida...

Drawings

Untitled Drawings

No More Rummy...

...the other guy can stay.

Oh, and Thank You America for making my election night dreams come true!

All We Saw and Heard, 2006

All We Saw and Heard, 2006, acrylic on panel, 42x42 inches.

Eire

Here are some photos from our trip to Ireland about two years ago.

Travel Bulletin

I just received great travel news.

A friend's parents in Ireland are going out of the country so I'm going to spend three months house sitting in Dun Laoghaire (Dun Leary), a suburb of Dublin.
This should give me plenty of time to get familiar with the art scene there check out the NCAD, get some painting done and drink some Bulmer's cider!
I'll be spending some time with our friends Sioban and John who live in a village called Greystones in the county Wicklow. Hopefully Robin will be able to come and spend a couple of weeks with me and Dale and Kristin and Jason may be able to come over for a visit.

This will be the longest time Robin and I have ever spent apart so I'm not looking forward to that aspect of things. Still, this will be an incredible opportunity to see what living in Dublin would be like on a day to day basis. I've thought of little else but getting back over there since we visited almost two years ago.

Studio View w/Joe

paintings

Art Show in Nashville

If your're in Nashville check out this group exhibit I'm in @ Vanderbilt University Law School.

PRIVATE DIALOGUE

Vanderbilt University Law School and Zeitgeist gallery present PRIVATE DIALOGUE, a group exhibition featuring...

PAUL BEHNKE

JOSEPH BURWELL

BRADY HASTON

ALICIA HENRY

KELLY POPOFF- PUNCHES

TERRY THACKER

AUG 16 - DEC 15, 2006

Opening: Thursday, October, 26, 5-7 PM.

Vanderbilt University Law School, 131 21ST Avenue South, Nashville, TN

For further information contact Lain York @ Zeitgeist 615.256.4805
Or click on title of this post to go to the gallery link.

KAREL APPEL 1921-2006

Obituary :

Karel Appel Dutch artist and Cobra group member known for his frenetic style and vibrant colours.

Christopher Masters Wednesday May 10, 2006The Guardian


The Dutch artist Karel Appel, who has died at the age of 85, famously declared that "If I paint like a barbarian, it's because we live in a barbarous age" - the sentiment of a man who had reached adulthood at the beginning of the second world war. Yet, like other members of that shortlived but celebrated movement of radical artists and intellectuals, the Cobra group, he absorbed a variety of intellectual and artistic influences, out of which developed a frenetic style of sweeping brushstrokes and vibrant, even lurid, colours.

Born in Amsterdam, Appel was the son of a barber. He studied at the city's Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten during the darkest period of the war. On graduating in 1943, he had to wait three years for his first exhibitions, in Groningen and Amsterdam. Like the surrealists, he created aggressive, disturbing forms apparently dredged from the depths of the unconscious, as in the ironically titled Hip Hip Hooray of 1949 (now in the Tate Modern). In fact, he was closer to the French painter Jean Dubuffet, who famously championed the "outsider art" of children and mentally-ill people.
Appel's most important contacts were with other young artists from the low countries, such as the Belgian who went by the name of Corneille and the Dutchman known as Constant, with whom he founded the Experimental Group in Amsterdam in 1948. At this time, of course, any self-respecting avant garde had to be associated with at least one Parisian cafe - in this case, the Cafe Notre-Dame, where, that November, Appel's movement was publicly re-branded as Cobra.
Despite this moment of Parisian glamour, Cobra was an acronym of "Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam", reflecting the origins of its members, who now included the Dane, Asger Jorn. Its first exhibition was held a few months later in Amsterdam, where Appel also completed a mural in the city hall cafeteria. Neither event was a great success; Appel's painting of smiling yet sinister children spoiled so many municipal appetites that it was almost immediately covered up, and it remained hidden for the next 10 years.
Undaunted, in 1950 Appel returned to Paris, where the writer Michel Tapié gave him the support that had somehow eluded him in the Netherlands. Although he participated in another Cobra show (in Liège in 1951), as well as in the group's eight reviews, he soon developed a successful solo career. In 1954, for example, he received the Unesco prize at the Venice Biennale, an achievement followed three years later by a triumphant visit to New York. He had finally graduated from the cultural capitals of the old world to the new megalopolis - and he promptly began a series of jazz portraits, including one of his hero Dizzy Gillespie, whose music was to enliven the film The Reality of Karel Appel, directed by Jan Vrijman in 1961.
Inevitably, Appel's work has suggested comparisons with the fluid, energetic styles of French art informel and American abstract expressionism. But his images always remained at least vaguely representational, with monstrous shapes and mask-like faces looming like Jungian archetypes in People, Birds and Sun (in the Tate) and The Crying Crocodile Tries to Catch the Sun (at the Guggenheim, New York), both from the mid-1950s.
Above all, it was the quality of the oil on canvas - vivid, viscous and roughly textured - that made Appel so distinctive. Often he squirted the pigment at his figures without touching a brush - "my tube is like a rocket, which describes its own space" - or laid it on thickly with a palette knife: Reclining Nude of 1966 (in a private collection) is less concerned with the female body than with the "tangible sensuous experience" of painting.
Appel also explored other media, ranging from textiles, ceramic and stained glass - in both religious and secular buildings - to aluminium and polyester, which he used in his sculpture. He was an accomplished printmaker, juxtaposing coloured etchings and wooden carvings in his cycle Appel Circus (1976-78).
Still more extraordinary were his associations with people from totally different artistic genres. In the 1980s and 90s he produced intriguing combinations of painting and visual poetry with Allen Ginsberg, while in 1987 he worked with the Japanese choreographer Min Tanaka on Can we Dance a Landscape? at the Opéra Comique in Paris - a performance set against a background of bright landscapes, feline faces and spotted cows on wheels. The reviews were mixed.
Unsurprisingly, it is Appel's role in Cobra that continued to receive most attention; indeed, by the end of his life, the group had become part of the canon of 20th-century art. In 1995 a museum dedicated to Cobra was opened in the Dutch town of Amstelveen, and in 2001 Appel's 80th birthday was celebrated by retrospectives across Holland.

· Karel Christian Appel, painter and sculptor, born April 25 1921; died May 3 2006