"Painting is not dead, it's just hard."

The Things They Carried 2011 Sarah Awad (via Sarahawad.com)

Painting is the latest release in the Documents of Contemporary Art series by MIT. The Brooklyn Rail has a loving review of it here.

The book defends and celebrates the medium - as anything on painting today does. I think it's clear painting didn't disappear and it won't. It's almost as if the original declaration of Painting is Dead was simply to generate good conversation around the complex merits of painting for it's own sake in today's world.

Painting (via The Brooklyn Rail)

An artist in a studio near my own once told me that "installation is where it is" and followed by something to the affect of, "painting is over."

I don't buy it. I stick to painting simply because of it's tangibility - the tactility and almost humming quality of the act itself. And painting seems to involve depths I'll never exhaust.

But I do use other mediums - like photography - to paint. One included article in Painting is Jerry Saltz's The Richter Resolution. Saltz's article laments current painting's handicap on photographic reference. He misses what he calls paintings "weapons of mass destruction" or "drawing, color, surface, touch...."

One of paintings greatest wonders is it's ability to distill information. The medium is inherently about choices. And a good painting directs you and makes you believe in those choices. Meaning also that what is absent is believable too.

Photography does the same, but with different refinement. Painting as an act in itself, as in a repeated process of re-articulating something or re-imagining things, has taught me how to choose and to think. And it's sometimes painfully slow or nostalgically fast. But it carries layers and each painting ultimately has multiple moments of understanding of one thing.

Adding to that notion, The Rail's review ends with the anonymous quip, "Painting is not dead, it's just hard."

Sarah Awad MFA Thesis Exhibit

Habitation 3 2010 Sarah Awad (via Sarah Awad)

Catch this MFA Thesis exhibit if you live in the LA area:

April 14 - 22, 2011

Opening Reception: Thursday, April 14 from 5p - 8p

New Wight Gallery, UCLA

Artists Include, Sarah Awad, Alexis Hudgins and Greta Waller.

I have been interested in Sarah Awad's paintings since finding them on Visual Inventory last year. I've lived them subsequently through bad reproductions tacked up, frozen on my studio wall. My interest in them has changed and since her work has grown.

Figures and architecture pieces appear in Sarah's work, but the paintings become mostly about the shape relationships within those things. Her paintings are full of the qualities I hold back on: heavy strokes, electric color, decisive abstract color fields and messes. As the few versions of Habitation show, these are playful and investigative. She's being a student and that's something I often forget to be. Sarah's work shows me that there is still a lot of risk I can take with my own.

(This post was originally published on 2/7/11 and since been revised.)

When a Ditch is just a Shape

Nele Tas About Christmas 2005 (via BAM)

Grier Edmundson The Work Ahead of Us
2009 (via 1430)

I switched majors in college because Illustration wasn't teaching me enough about painting. I thought the act of painting alone was enough. But that put me in the position to approach subject matter very literally. Illustrative. Today I am still trying to teach myself how to paint - or - how to paint, paint, not things. How to break things apart. How to paint abstractly.

I always seem to think from figurative means to abstraction. I actually remind myself constantly to step back, squint or find a means of obstructing my observation - ways of breaking my vision. Another words, I am always turning towards representational means to articulate something, but find more and more that my subject matter means less and less. There is something else I am looking for at an abstract level.

Maureen Gallace Cape Cod, Early September 2008

Seeing the work of Nele Tas reminded me of that today. Alot of his paintings of crowds are very abstract, but snag us using recognizable body-like shapes. It's as if the artist is using objective shapes as non-objective shapes. Figurative, or literal shapes (in this case bodies) as marks in themselves. It got me thinking: maybe lots of representational painters aren't even lingering on figurative means. Maybe, even, they're approaching representational subject matter with abstraction.

In my process, it wasn't until seeing Grier Edmundson's work at Fourteen Thirty Contemporary last year that I truly began to understand a painting with figurative subject matter could convince me not of the narrative but of the painted relationships. Or even that those abstract relationships could create a stronger representational narrative. Grier Edmundson is also alot like Luc Tuymans.

Sarah Awad and Making Decisions

 

I found Sarah Awad's paintings today through Visual Inventory blog. These are simple paintings dealing strongly with what is sometimes so hard for me to make: decisions.