It's been a while since I've been on the BAP blog. (BAP!: it's like one of those legends that fills the screen when Batman kicks someone in the kisser.) To be honest, Craig Arnold dying kind of took it out of me a bit, and blogging about poetry just seemed strange for a while. At any rate, I hope to write a blog about one of Craig's poems soon, and I also have a copy of Jill Essbaum's Necropolis that I'm keen to report on.
But first: here's a dynamite show of young painters if you are in, or passing through, New York. It's at the Painting Center, 52 Greene Street, 2nd Floor, and it runs through July 19. A friend and a first-rate painter, Gabbe Grodin, who works with me at The New Criterion, has these paintings in the show:
As John Yau writes in the catalog: “Painting is a slow art, no matter how quickly viewers might believe they see and absorb a painting’s visual data. It takes time to make a painting, and it takes time to see it, in some cases far longer than it took for the artist to make it. And along the way, any number of things can happen. At a time when there isn’t any discourse telling painters what they should be doing, the situation is wide open and even scary. There is no dominant style, subject matter, or relationship to paint’s materiality or immateriality. You can work from direct observation, make everything up, or be conceptual in your decisions. There is no safety net; nothing that says this is the right or wrong way to go. Abstraction and figuration are two options among many. Some may regard such confusion (or anarchy) as unhealthy, but I am not one of them. The pot is simmering, and out of it many unexpected delights have been emerging, even if they have flown under the radar.”
Here's an installation shot of a few more pieces. Check out the show, if you can!
