Harold's Sketchbook

Archive for September, 2009

Lauren Edmond’s Digital Landscapes

Monday, September 28th, 2009

Digitally manipulated imagery has been a part of the scene for a number of years now, but there is still an almost mystical regard for the physical medium of paint as something sacrosanct. Artists who have taken on the challenge of rendering their images digitally are still viewed by many people as interlopers; I like to think of them as pioneers, venturing “into the badlands of other media” as Robert Hughes once said of Stuart Davis. David Hockney is perhaps one of the first major artists to establish a precedent in this regard (he was doing drawings on computers almost as soon as the technology became available).

Lauren Edmond is a digital painter whose work has been turning up in small group shows in New York City this last year or so; there was a show last autumn at the Tompkins Park Library, and then another at a small cafe on 7th street called Planet One, and most recently at the HOWL: Homage to Allen Ginsberg exhibit that is currently on view at the Theater for the New City on First Avenue.

Ms. Edmond has a distinctive color palette that is strangely reminiscent of the mysterious nocturnal, aerial landscapes of Yvonne Jacquette, and a handling of form that at times seems allusive to the landscapes of Fairfield Porter. But what is peculiar about these images is that they are all rendered on a computer, using a digital painting program called Painter and drawn with a Wacom stylus and graphic tablet.

Moses Hoskins at OK Harris

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

I recently made a visit to OK Harris Galleries, in SoHo, to check out the latest exhibit of one of my favorite New York painters, Moses Hoskins. The new paintings expand on abstract visual motifs that the artist has been working with for the last couple of decades.

As an abstract painter, Hoskins is a bit of an enigma: his work is not easily placed into categories that the critical lexicon has established since the second world war with the sudden, spectacular rise of non-objective painting in America. His work is too opaque and perhaps a bit too blunt to fit in with the Color Field artists such as Helen Frankenthaler or even Sam Francis. The pastoral lyricism of his palette keeps him at arm’s length from the rowdier exponents of Abstract Expressionism. Not finding an easy frame of reference for understanding the work, some critics have resorted to making a comparison with the late work of Richard Diebenkorn: those fragile arcs and incised lines floating in between misty skeins of washed-out color do bear some superficial resemblance to the Ocean Park Series. But the light and atmosphere that is being evoked in Hoskins’ paintings seems all wrong for that comparison to stick for very long, once you see the actual pieces themselves. Such comparisons are a bit like trying to write about music: Beethoven is to Brahms as Mahler is to what? Miles Davis is to Funk as BeBop is to (fill in the blank). As it happens, I often find myself thinking of jazz when I look at a good Hoskins painting or collage.

Moses has a generous selection of his works on view at his website, along with some engaging photographs from his extensive travels in Europe, the Middle East and India.

The paintings are on view at OK Harris in Soho through October 17.