Stephanie Pierce: Radiant Welter (We scored a short Q&A with the busy artist about the new work!)

“Howlinglight”, 2015, oil on canvas, 71″ x 84″

Stephanie Pierce showed a body of work, Wake, at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects just last summer.  Now Pierce is readying to show a new body of work at Alpha Gallery in Boston with the title Radiant Welter.  The exhibit opens April 4th.  Here is a choice bit from the press release: ” With meticulously plotted out applications of paint pushing and pulling between figuration and abstraction, Pierce’s work conveys the sensation that materiality becomes elusive the minute we try to pin it down.”  

We asked Pierce a few questions about her work, and how she works lately.  She was kind enough to reply.  

After you read the Q&A below, you know you  might want to see more  of Stephanie Pierce’s work at her website.  You might want to read more about her at the website for the Joan Mitchell Foundation (Pierce received a J.M. Foundation grant last year). or read the longer interview with Pierce that Sam King posted in 2009. 

What is the hard part of painting for you?

All of it: getting started, figuring out what to start with, figuring out what is interesting there to be uncovered, figuring out what it’s going to be about, pushing past the obvious things, breaking routines, finding something new, embracing the chaos. Finding something transcendent in observing something so mundane over a long period of time, having patience and faith that something good will eventually happen through the process. Making it matter.

untitled, 2015, oil on canvas,  56″x50″

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Eric Sall murals

 

Those wild and wacky folks at the U.S. General Services Office made this cool video of Eric Sall murals being installed in the Richard Bolling Federal Building in Kansas City, MO.  Check it out.  More on the mural project.  More Eric Sall.

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Pure Paint for Now People at Weber State University

Currently on view at Weber State University’s Mary Elizabeth Dee Shaw Gallery is Pure Paint for Now People, and ambitious exhibition of contemporary painting curated by Matthew Choberka and Lydia Gravis. The show features works by many artists with whom MWC’s readers will be already familiar from previous postings, and plenty we haven’t covered before, too.

Above: Gianna Commito, Stow, 2011, courtesy of Rachel Uffner Gallery, NYC
Below: Installation photos, courtesy of Mary Elizabeth Dee Shaw Gallery

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Gorky’s Granddaughter with Judy Glantzman

One of my most favorite painters, Judy Glantzman, talks to Gorky’s Grandaughter.  I can’t decide which the best part, maybe where Glantzman is crawling around on the floor on top of one of her drawings, and I’m in awe of the obvious physical investment, thinking, “Yes!  This is what being a painter is all about!”…or maybe the discussion about color and “the space in between” a few minutes later where Keeting and Glantzman really address some of painting’s more elusive aspects.  Just brilliant.

I have this great memory of being at a Glantzman show in NY with my then-two-year-old son.  We were standing in front of one of Glantzman’s paintings imitating her painting it…gesturing with our wrists and arms, saying things like, “Here she went WOOOSH and here she went SHLOOOP!”  and having a great time in front of it.  I kind of feel that same way during the moments when the camera pans over some of her work in progress.  Hope you do too.

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Michael Krueger: See Be

Healer, acrylic, gesso & colored pencil on linen 30″ x 20″ (d.v.)

From the press release for Michael Krueger’s exhibit, See Be:

 The subject of the exhibition is rooted in landscape, and notions of wilderness and observation. The title, in part, refers to the act of seeing as becoming; meditative observation as a means to learn, understand and become. There is also a nod in there to the notion of live and let live, to allow nature and wildness to be, as the grateful observer.

The truth is, See Be is far less a departure for Krueger than the press release leads us to believe.  Krueger dips his toes into a new medium and new motivations.  Longtime fans will be pleased, maybe only wishing for the appearance of a cowboy, hippy or poofy-haired heavy metal singer.  It’s a funny  moment for an artist, this sort of transition, so  I’ll stop here, and let Krueger speak for himself.   See Be is on view at Haw Contemporary in Kansas City until March 13, 2015.  Read the rest of the press release here.  More Michael Krueger.  

You were a part of our Tenses of Landscape exhibit a couple years ago, how has your take on landscape as a subject changed over the last few years?  

Yeah, I have been working with the landscape for about a decade now, at first sort of unknowingly, and with the last few bodies of work with deeper intention. For my exhibition See Be, I started with a full-blown study into early American painters of the West: Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt, others too. However, it might be difficult to see the association in the paintings I made, for which they are probably much better off.

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Van Gogh to Rothko at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

So, it’s been more than a minute since I’ve posted to MWC. On several occasions, I’ve prepared pieces regarding Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art – the still shiny-new museum 30 minutes to the north of me that opened its doors in the fall of 2011 – and then decided against publishing them. Most of these posts would have attempted to parse some rather mixed blessings that CBMAA’s temporary exhibitions bestowed upon this region in the last few years. Not so for Van Gogh to Rothko, which presents a healthy dose of major works by significant 19th and 20th century artists of both European and American extraction, culled from the Albright-Knox Gallery’s collection. In college, I pored over library books reproducing many of these paintings. Soutine’s Slaughtered Ox, a Diebenkorn Berkely painting, De Kooning’s Gotham News. Robert Irwin, Francis Bacon, Philip Guston, Max Beckmann, Grace Hartigan…more than I’ll name here. Lee Krasner’s 1955 painting/collage, Milkweed, shown here, is a deft orchestration of shape and surface that must be seen firsthand to be appreciated. The exhibition’s timeline begins with post-impressionism (hence Van Gogh being named in the title), stepping broadly and boldly through a host of 20th century movements – surrealism, futurism, cubism, abex, minimalism. When I first heard an art museum was coming to Bentonville, this was the kind of experience I imagined – it’s finally here. I hope that there are more in store.

Info here.

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