Harold's Sketchbook

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Visit Harold’s Sketchbook at www.haroldgraves.com

Happy Holidays everyone!  Here are some photos I made of the snow in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn; click on each photo to see a larger image:

Montreal artist Peter Krausz has 15 landscape paintings on view at the Forum Gallery through January 16th.  These remarkable paintings are all executed in secco, a technique that utilizes an egg-tempera medium applied directly to dried plaster.  The resultant surfaces have a jewel-like luminosity and depth of color reminiscent of early renaissance painting.

Borders have been a recurring motif in the artist’s work (Krausz escaped with his family from Eastern Block Romania in 1969 during a surreptitious border crossing)–political and agricultural borders imposed upon the natural landscape, often resulting in harshly contrasting planes of land thrust against each other.  The paintings in No Man’s Land takes as its visual source the island of Cyprus, where a Dead Zone (as the Greeks call it) cuts across cultivated fields, villages and even individual houses like a gaping wound.  In Krausz’ paintings, sections of uncultivable terrain spread before the fertile greenery of ancient lands–evoking at once the rugged beauty of the earth as well as our struggle to live harmoniously upon it.

28°F Friday December 18, 2009
S’posed to snow maybe tomorrow–need to water my plants–Wes Montgomery on the radio

As the first big cold front of the season began making its way into the City, I stopped by the Tria Gallery for some warm Holiday Cheer and to visit with friends at the Winter White exhibit.  Here are some snapshots that I made at the crowded opening:

Visit more of Harold’s Sketchbooks at www.haroldgraves.com

James Ensor at MoMa

Drawings from the Compass in Hand exhibit at MoMa

YellowFever Live at the Whitney

Walking out of the Francis Bacon show at the Metropolitan Museum and looking at the beautiful Joachim Patinir triptych in the European Paintings Galleries.

The Alice Neel show at David Zwirner's Gallery in Chelsea

Another Alice Neel

The Caillebotte show at the Brooklyn Art Museum

To be continued . . .

Visit more of Harold’s Sketchbooks at www.haroldgraves.com

When Philip Guston began showing this work at Marlborough in 1970, the negative reaction of the established New York art world was so overwhelming that the gallery would not renew his contract to exhibit there.  Hilton Kramer ridiculed the new paintings, and much of the art world dismissed the work as being “impure”—it was simply too transgressive for the sensibility of the art establishment, which revolved around a received notion that painting had to be “pure” to be seen as authentic.

Guston eventually moved to Woodstock, withdrawing from the city to focus on his new artistic direction.  The David McKee gallery began showing Guston’s new work and continued to do so until the artist’s death in 1980.  His painting output during this time period became a lightning rod for subsequent generations of figurative painters, who drew inspiration from his courageous break with the dominant trend of abstract expressionism.  Guston once said, “I’m puzzled all the time by representation or not, the literal image and the nonobjective. There’s no such thing as nonobjective art. Everything has an object, has a figure. The question is what kind?”

The current exhibit at McKee is a great opportunity to visit some of the very earliest of these protean works, which still pack quite a punch after 40 years.

James Kalm Visits the McKee Gallery: Philip Guston Small Oils 1969-1973

Visit Harold’s Sketchbook at www.haroldgraves.com

My Brompton folding bicycle is a mainstay of my experience as a sketchbook artist & photographer in New York.  I commute all over the city with my sketchbooks, pens, and camera in the shoulder bag that mounts onto the front of the frame.  My “other bicycle” is a Motobecane Nomade from the late 1970’s, which I purchased from a Goodwill store for $40 over 10 years ago.

Sketchblog artist Harold Graves with his Brompton T-6 folding bike on the Brooklyn Bridge.

Visit Harold’s Sketchbooks at www.haroldgraves.com

Here are some drawings I made while visiting Cambridge a couple of years ago:

And here’s a few pen & ink drawings I made this week:

Visit Harold’s Sketchbook at www.haroldgraves.com