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Despite the realities of social and geographic mobility, society seeks to maintain definitive categories of racial, national and ethnic groups. This categorization is the defining function by which we attempt to make a simplified order of the world.
My work explores this complex relationship of race, culture, and history, where form and content merge. Addressing both the autobiographical and global, while drawing on the past, present, and future, I manipulate form, transforming the familiar, subverting its original meaning and connotation through reinterpreting and reconfiguring.
I look for ways to codify the structure of information by using abstraction in both the imagery and the ideas. Maps are used as a point of departure, working with the logic of the poet rather than that of the demographer in setting up categories, collecting data, and creating pseudo graphs and charts. I play with place as a geographical, metaphorical, and metaphysical concept, where intersecting worlds collide and give birth to intimations of mapped space, geopolitical realities of national borders; indications of population density and critical mass, and parts resembling errant engineering models or animated characters. I hope that these oblique narratives, shifting spaces and wandering images may open a way forward in allowing pictorial construction to become variables of thought and feeling. The medium of paint has the last word.
Lisa Corinne Davis received her BFA from Pratt Institute and her MFA from Hunter College. Her paintings have been exhibited across the United States and in Europe, including one person shows at June Kelly Gallery (New York), Gerald Peters Gallery (New York), Zolla/Lieberman Gallery (Chicago), Pamela Salisbury Gallery, (Hudson, NY), and The Mayor Gallery (London), and have been reviewed in The Telegraph, Art News, Art in America, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The New York Times. Davis is currently represented by Miles McEnery Gallery (New York) and The Mayor Gallery (London).
Davis’ work is included in many private and public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and The Philadelphia Museum of Art (documented in Represent: 200 Years of African American Art in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, by Gwendolyn DuBois, Yale University Press, 2014).
She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship, four Artist Fellowships from The New York Foundation for the Arts, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. In 2017, she was inducted as a National Academician at the National Academy Museum & School.
Davis has taught at the Yale University School of Art and is currently a Professor of Art at Hunter College. She has lectured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Carnegie Mellon, Dartmouth College, and the National Arts Education Association. Her essays on art and culture have been published in Brooklyn Rail, Art Critical, and Art Forum.
Susan Bee
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My newest paintings focus on apocalypses, fables, fantastic landscapes, and reveries. My paintings echo their sources while also addressing contemporary issues such as climate change, displacement, floods, and fire. These paintings translate mythological imagery from a diverse array of sources, examining how visual culture unfolds across centuries and contexts including deities from India. These mythical figures are placed in composite imaginary landscapes and mixed with playful abstracted imagery. A comparative mythology emerges as visual motifs repeat across canvases, prompting unexpected connections. In other paintings, I have created fantastical landscapes with transformative symbolic trees and wonderlands. In these paintings, the visionary and dreamlike imagery is explored with intense and vivid color and with a riot of linear and eccentrically shaped gestures: there are many textured layers of oil paint. My canvases are always meant to be materially present with vivid strokes, colors,and graphics. I keep my painting surfaces alive with active brush marks, color, collage, textures, and patterns; the surfaces are not polished to the point of illusion. Blending familiar gestures with the unexpected, my paintings pay homage to our individual and collective pasts while also confronting our present.
Sharon Horvath
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I like it when my paintings make me feel like I am not alone in the room, when a painting shows me a new code to play with. I begin with a pair of colors which might derive from a painting of a Tantric deity or a cereal box from the 1960’s. I paint lines as if I am following tributaries I’ve never seen before but seem familiar. Within the lines are sometimes stars. Or, I place tiny obstacles in the path to shift the scale and throw the lines off the trail on purpose. At those junctures, the lines become inflamed and secrete larger shapes. I try to see a syntax forming within the composition and make the whole thing rhyme with itself. Rhyming is the key.
In the composition of the painting, circulation is everything. Like water bubbling with air, blood effervesces into thoughts in the brain, flesh eventually transfigures; ashes and dust disperse and magnetize the mists exhaled by trees. Clouds fill and fall as rain into rivers flowing on and on, their journey destined for your teacup. I’d like my painting to be like offering you that cup of tea.
David Hornung
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My paintings are never based on a preparatory sketch or plan. I usually begin with quickly painted shapes, lines, or a configuration. It’s a casual, energetic start and a proposition to contend with. Once I’m locked in, I try to sharpen my focus without extinguishing the life of the nascent image. If I suspend judgement and maintain an open, playful attitude, unexpected pathways emerge, and I can find my way forward.
When I too quickly feel a sense of satisfaction and control, I get suspicious that I’m trading on what I already know; not discovering. When this happens, I need to kill the lovely thing so the unexpected can come into view. It takes a surprising number of adjustments in color and composition along with layering, blotting, scraping, and sanding to arrive at a resolution. It’s the interplay between physicality and thought that makes a painting real.
Elizabeth Hazan
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My recent paintings explore a range of imagery from my imagination that is partly drawn from memory yet grounded in the experience of nature as it is pushed to extremes. The result sits resolutely in the fertile border between landscape and abstraction.
I spent a lot of time as a child in the East End of Long Island surrounded by open farmland. The empty farm field sits in my mind as a place like the space in the painting; the painting becomes a field where I can grow strange natural forms that suggest trees or weather. The term dream logic feels apt where there are elements, forms or light that feel familiar to the viewer, but things verge on the surreal. I aim for a degree of ambiguity that resists easy naming. My paintings often embody a kind of euphoria, yet I am at once celebrating the beauty of the natural world while we still have it and expressing melancholy at its destruction in our hands.
I want people to see the paint in front of them as opposed to an illusion that feels set and closed. Openness and mutability are also how imagery appears in memory, where things aren’t fixed and bordered, and I have honed a language that reflects this fluidity and playfulness. My fears about the perilous climate seep in to inform the work but are not broadcast in obvious ways. The paintings combine investigative lines and floods of color to create imaginary landscapes that suggest nature off kilter.
I start from ink and watercolor drawings that I approach like a stream of consciousness writing exercise. When I make the drawings, I am thinking as much about how the lines narrate the picture as I am about evoking the light and atmosphere of a specific environment. I create images in the space of the picture rather than attempting realism. Because I work with continuous line making in the drawings, the resulting language verges on cartoon-like, with a plasticity that has been called “as if Milton Avery painted the background of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon.”
I work from a hovering, aerial vantage point, picturing the paper as an empty field where I can draw in the dirt with lines that move around the field and then start upwards towards an area that is like a sky, scooping volumes of air with a looping line. I then make small scale oil paintings that attempt to capture the freshness and immediacy of the watercolors, and the way unexpected, unnamable colors flow into each other. I remain open to the ways oil paint is different and change things as I go. From these smaller works, I select some to create larger paintings. I do this all freehand, so each size has different challenges to overcome, and showing some of that struggle is important to me. I want to arrive at a place that is hard won and alive.
Hazan was born and raised in New York City and attended Bryn Mawr College and the New York Studio School. She was awarded a fellowship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, has twice been a resident of Yaddo and received a grant from the Peter S. Reed Foundation. Recent solo shows include Under the Sun, HESSE FLATOW, NY; Sundown, Madoo Conservancy, Sagaponack, NY; High Noon, Duck Creek Art Center, Springs, NY; Body to Land, (two person) Turn Gallery, NY; and Heat Wave, Johannes Vogt Gallery, NY. Recent group shows include Even in Arcadia There I Am at HESSE FLATOW, NY; Blue Hour at Phillips, NY; Mercury Rising, at Bookstein Projects, NY: Trodden Path; HESSE FLATOW East, Amagansett NY; Psychedelic Landscape, Eric Firestone Gallery, NY; and Heat Wave, Johannes Vogt Gallery, NY. Her work has been written about in Hyperallergic, Forbes, Two Coats of Paint, Art Critical, The Brooklyn Rail and The Art Newspaper. She serves as the founder and director of Platform Project Space in Brooklyn, NY.
Steve Greene
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I began making paintings again in 2022 after several years of working exclusively on paper. A lot of the same motifs I use in drawings show up in the paintings – strange sculptural architectural shapes, maps, diagrams, constellations, the body, molecular structure. I try my best not to dwell on why I am drawn to the imagery in these works, especially in the early stages of a painting. Too much clarity of purpose, for me, means I am closing off possible avenues of discovery. The titles (which always come after, when I have one foot in the real world) offer clues to the viewer and to myself, but they are only suggested guideposts. I would rather allow the imagery to keep regenerating itself. My goal has always been to make a thing that buzzes and vibrates with a sort of mysterious energy.
I once had a teacher who asked me what I thought about when I was painting. Back then I had no idea how to answer. Right now I’m thinking about making a line straight, but not too straight. I’m thinking the paint is not gliding on the way I want it to, it’s too thin or too thick. I’m wondering if this line is like an illustration, but I’m not even sure what that really means. I’m trying to keep things loose, but then I tighten up. I want spontaneity without sloppiness. I want effort to show, but not too much effort. I want it to look like I care a lot (I do) and I’m working really hard (I am), but like it is flowing out of me with the greatest of ease (it’s not.) I hope to be working on that for a long time – the clock is ticking.
Gregory Rick
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I see my work as history painting, promoting the obscure, the forgotten, and the common knowledge. My life has been full of tribulations which I look at as initiations. For every hardship I have endured, my art has grown with me. My father went to prison for murder when I was eight years old. Although losing my dad was rough, he left me a book on military history and one on art that started my infatuation with both and served as a means of connection with my pops and provided material for a deeper connection with my mom. Similarly, art was a bastion of light after I returned from Iraq, helping me deal with my guilt about the war.
This work comes from my personal experience, but is not entirely personal. I tell stories that reflect my story but are in dialogue with the wider world, where myth gives voice to the underbelly, the lumpen in tandem displaying the familiar and grandiose. My work tethers together seemingly opposing ideas as I connect the personal, the historical and the political. I am painting on a shaky historical line cemented in humility and conviction. I occupy my pictures with characters who serve as archetypes in conjunction with memory and self-exploration in order to reflect on the absurdity, malleability, and monumentality of history.
Catherine Howe
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The many-hued paintings in “Wallflower” represent a catharsis, punctuating the end of a period of extreme isolation. After the shared solitude of the Covid outbreak, I was further sidelined by a diagnosis of blood cancer.
Excluded from socializing while undergoing treatment, I spent my days in the studio and the shaggy garden that surrounds it. My perennial companions were the local flora and fauna. While sitting things out, I focused on working and waiting and invited imagined partners to spin into my space.
The results are a group of paintings that are very different in their process and color-relationships, yet still linked to my past output. I could now really take my time and see what came up. These blooms spring wholly from this extended musing and an urge to anthropomorphize. They are purely invented and non-existent in nature, embodied in variegated brushstrokes on color fields of mutable, iridescent pigments.
It is a wet-into-wet process wherein nothing may stand still including myself, each piece being executed with full body engagement. Movement is an aspect of composition and function – both color and sheen shift as the viewer takes a step and realigns their view.
I imagined a garden of blooms in airy, watery spaces, or barely held captive by a vase. In my hopes, these flower figures possess a self-confidence and spirit that transcend earthbound woes.
It is now a world where nothing is alive without peril. This hard-won period of studio output reminded me it is also a paradise, where each day may see nature rising again to flourish still.
March, 2024
John Walker
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John Walker’s oeuvre, spanning across over sixty years, has included a variety of abstract approaches bound together by a careful balance between raw and spontaneous movement, and mindfully structured space. Walker has been inspired at different times by the art of Oceania, European masters Goya, Manet, and Matisse, and the work of American Abstract Expressionists. Throughout his career he has utilized different shape and pattern motifs: in the 1980s, a time when his work was heavily influenced by the art of Oceania, his “Alba” shape (a loose reference to Goya) was a focus of most paintings; in the ’90s, polka-dots and egg-like orbs prevailed; and his 21st century work has included a variety of repeating amorphous shapes and zig-zag lines.
Much of Walker’s work of the last 20 years is based on the coast of Maine, where the artist lives. These abstract landscapes oscillate between spontaneity and a decidedly conscientious approach to shaping the architecture of the canvas. In a palette which ranges from crisp whites and primary and secondary colors to muddied, rusty browns, greys, and black, alongside gritty surfaces and carefully manipulated linear movement, Walker evokes the character of the New England coastal landscape.
John Walker (b. England 1939) is originally from Birmingham, England, attended the Mosely School of Art, the Birmingham School of Art, and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. His work can be found in museum collections including The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; The Guggenheim Museum, New York; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Gallery, Edinburgh; Tate Gallery, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut.
The artist’s many teaching appointments throughout his lengthy career have included Cooper Union, Yale University, the Victoria College of the Arts in Melbourne, and the Royal College in London. He retired in 2015 from his position as the head of the graduate department in painting at Boston University.
Robert Feintuch
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I want my work to be rooted in lived psychological life, so I try to recognize and work with a full and often contradictory range of desires around vulnerability, admiration, humiliation, beauty, self-aggrandizement; and increasingly, around power, moralizing and mortality.
I have a long history of using myself as a model and at times, I’m acutely aware that I have these desires myself, and I work to embody them. Other times I tell myself I’m trying things on, thinking – for better or worse – this stuff is broadly human. Either way, I really don’t see myself as doing any of this looking down on it from a position above.
Looking back, I can see that I’ve often been drawn to the thin line between grandeur and grandiosity, and while I’ve tried to make paintings that are felt, I am also instinctually drawn to parody. I think laughter operates a lot of different ways in the world. For me, it doesn’t prevent real feeling – it just helps as a way to get through.
Years ago, at one of my openings, a writer who had followed my work for years pointed at one of my paintings and said, ‘That is so painful, I can’t look at it.’ A couple of minutes later, an artist friend, pulling me in front of the same painting, said, ‘That’s one of the funniest paintings you’ve ever made.’ I loved both of those responses.