Gesture

“I didn’t want to paint figuratively. I didn’t want something that was overtly referencing the social issues around me, but I wanted to find a way to describe them. How do you internalize this? How do you make a form that forces a painting to be an experience that is not necessarily easy to see, handle, or look at?”

“A precisely aimed reach into the immeasurable flow of things.”

During the 1990s, Catherine Howe and I were painters in the same downtown studio building at the edge of the West Side Highway and frequent visitors to each other’s work space. 

Joyce Pensato starts with the most iconic cartoon figures—Mickey, Minnie, Daffy, Krazy, Stan, and Homer—but her representations of them couldn’t be further from their usual plastic media.

All that I look for is right here in Beatrice Caracciolo’s work: weight, touch, light, atmosphere, scale. 

At one time the paintings were all atmosphere. There was no ground, no topography upon which the eye could settle—time was fluid—and what lurked beneath the surface referred more to collective memory than the painter’s marks.

One night Lex Braes came to a party in my loft, a bit of boisterous dance music, a dram or two of whisky, and a chance encounter with a fellow Scotsman were enough to send Braes into a rollicking frenzy of delight. 

James Nares played in a band or two, but today his improvisations are usually solos, and they take place on canvas or paper.

Untitled, abstract ink drawing by Richard Nabhan.

Gestural charcoal on paper drawing, Ruby Range by Don Steinmetz.

Two oil pastel on canvas works, Bois Chenu (Jeanne La Pucelle) and Itzam Na T’UI by Dan Asher.