Mark Nelson Hates Jackson Pollock

New Website!

2010-05-09T15:12:00.002-06:00

Please visit my new website at www.marknelsonartist.com

Artist of the Week: Quang Ho

2009-10-27T07:55:00.009-07:00

This week's Artist of the Week is Quang Ho. You can see his work here and here. Quang is an up-and-coming painter from Denver, Colorado who seems to have a bright future in the art business. What's that, you say? He's already one of the most famous artists in the country? I think I need to get out of the house more often.

Go see Quang's show at Gallery 1261 this Friday. Good luck getting in the front door.

Photographer of the Week: Craig Varjabedian

2009-10-23T17:25:00.003-06:00

This week's Photographer of the Week is Craig Varjabedian. You can see his work here. I have a number of artist friends who go to Ghost Ranch, NM to paint and I figured you'd all be interested in a show devoted entirely to the area.

Let me know what you think. (We've been having trouble getting comments to post. If you can't get your comment on the board, try hitting "post" a second time. If that doesn't work, just open the window and scream your comment into the wind. I'm pretty sure everyone will hear you.)

Artist of the Week: Z.Z. Wei

2009-10-07T19:46:00.002-06:00

This week's Artist of the Week is Z.Z. Wei. You can see his work here and here. You can also see a cool article featuring his studio here. Let me know what you think.

Artist of the Week: Bernie Fuchs (1932-2009)

2009-09-22T15:51:00.002-06:00

Bernie Fuchs died last week. If you've never heard of him, he was an artist/illustrator with very few equals in either business. He had a reputation as a consummate professional. When I was in art school, my room mates and I taped many of his illustrations to the walls of our apartment.

Rest in peace, Bernie. Thanks for the years of inspiration.

Artist of the Week: Peggi Kroll Roberts

2009-09-16T12:15:00.005-06:00

This week's Artist of the Week is Peggi Kroll Roberts. We were in a gallery together a while back and the artists loved her work so much that there was a waiting list to do shows with her. If you like bold brushwork, strong abstract compositions, and good-old-fashioned drawing skill, you'll love Peggi . Click here to see her work and let me know what you think.

Artist of the Week: Mitchell Johnson

2009-09-08T13:37:00.004-06:00

This week's Artist of the Week is Mitchell Johnson. You can see his work by clicking here and here. Check him out and let me know what you think.

Artist of the Week: Malcolm Rains

2009-04-21T19:01:00.002-06:00

This week's Artist of the Week is Malcolm Rains. You can see his work here. I'm not sure the jpegs do the work justice, but in person the paintings are really elegant and compelling. If you have an opinion, leave a comment below.

Artist of the Week: David Kelso

2009-04-08T09:20:00.003-06:00

This week's Artist of the Week is David Kelso, you can see his work here and here. Love it or hate it, let me know what you think.

Artist of the Week: Jackson Pollock

2009-04-01T12:05:00.006-07:00

This week's Artist of the Week is my #1 favorite painter of all time, the Abstract Expressionist master Jackson Pollock. I could go on and on about how much I love his dynamic, fluid handling of paint and how his technique of dripping paint on the floor (as opposed to the old- fashioned "canvas on the easel" approach) has liberated the very nature of art-making. Some people fail to see his genius, but I must insist that there has never been and can never be another artist like him. I mean, you could get lost for hours just tracing the elegant paths of his drips, never losing interest in the intricacies of his paint handling. He is truly one of the greatest artists of the last 500 years, eclipsing lesser artists like Leonardo, Michelangelo, Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velasquez, David, Ingres, Goya, Delacriox, Turner, Manet, Degas, Monet, Cezanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Bonnard, Picasso, and Matisse. He makes them look like grumpy old men who put WAY too much time and energy into silly things like narrative, composition, color, symbolism, observation, and quality.

I wish Jackson Pollock were still alive today. I would love to sit down with him and have a beer or something.

Artist of the Week: Catherine Maize

2009-03-24T12:17:00.004-07:00

This week's Artist of the Week is Catherine Maize. You can see her work here and here. She seems to be influenced by Giorgio Morandi, who is one of my favorite artists (click here to see his work). Check out Catherine's work and let me know what you think.

Sacrilege of the Week: I'm Just Not That Into You, Vincent van Gogh

2009-03-17T08:05:00.018-07:00

Dear Vincent,

Boy, this is going to be really tough...um, OK, here goes:

You know how I've been spending a lot of time with Gauguin lately? I swear it was totally innocent at first, but we've been together so much these past few months that some things just sort of...you know...happened. We were hanging out at the museum a couple of weeks ago when all of a sudden I started having all these crazy feelings for him, stuff I'd never felt for another artist before. Gauguin is just so interesting on so many levels. He has the coolest compositions, things you wouldn't usually expect to see. He totally compresses pictorial space but still manages to pack his paintings with indications of depth. His use of arbitrary color is so stimulating to me and his symbolism, OH MY GOD, his SYMBOLISM is SO TOTALLY AWESOME!

Sorry...that's probably not what you want to hear.

I hope this isn't too hard on you, but Gauguin and I just seem to...you know...fit together better than you and me. Please don't take all of this personally. I mean, I really like you and I hope we can still hang out. I'd hate it if I could never see your sunflowers again. I'm just getting so tired of your constant obsession with "paint, paint, paint", as if all someone needs to do to create a masterpiece is go through 10 tubes of yellow ochre. I've learned a lot about myself recently, and it turns out that I need to have my mind stimulated and frankly, your paintings of wheat fields aren't exactly ringing my bell, if you catch my drift.

You're such a great artist and I'm sure you'll make someone else very happy someday. I know you'll get over this eventually. I mean look at Picasso. We split up like 10 years ago and now he's doing just fine.

Your Friend Forever,

Mark

Artist of the Week: Jon Redmond

2009-03-10T06:44:00.003-07:00

This week's Artist of the Week is Jon Redmond, one of my absolute favorites. You can see his work here, here and here. Jon has not updated his personal website since 2004...until this week!!! He's another graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, which is where you go to learn to be awesome. Check him out and let me know what you think.

Artist of the Week: Stanley Bielen

2009-03-04T14:22:00.003-07:00

Here's Stanley Bielen, another still life painter for this week's Artist of the Week. You can see his work here, here, and here. He's a master of simplicity and really handles paint and color well. Bielen is a graduate of Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, which is where a number of my favorite artists trained. Let me know what you think!

Artist of the Week: Susan Jane Walp

2009-02-25T08:18:00.007-07:00

This week's Artist of the Week is Susan Jane Walp. You can see her work here and here. I was going to feature a more controversial artist to get some dialogue in the "comments" stream but I figured the first sentence in Ken Johnson's NY Times review posted below would be controversial enough. Please leave a comment or email it to me and I'll make sure it gets posted. Coming soon: "The Genius of Thomas Kinkade"...

(Also, here's a link to some various Damien Hirst interviews, because I know how much you all love him.)

There is a ladylike gentility about Susan Jane Walp's small, beautifully wrought still-life paintings. Her pictures of potted plants, old knives and spoons, tea strainers, wine bottle corks, pieces of fruit, ribbons and thread evoke a world of gracious domesticity. There is a certain casual disarray, but that is always for the good of a Cézannesque formal order; the angle of a knife, the circle of a saucer or a half grapefruit, the corners of postcards add up to compositions that look back to the late-19th-century stirrings of Cubism.

Ms. Walp is a Modernist, after all. She knows how to make paint do double duty in the service of both a cannily abbreviated illusionism and a delicate abstraction of paper-thin planes; how to make spots of color sing out against muted beige and gray background harmonies; how to let painterly gesture embody a sensual urgency that the imagery demurely guards. All this makes for objects that are as admirable as they are seductive. KEN JOHNSON

Artist of the Week: Tim Tozer

2009-02-17T14:29:00.005-07:00

This week's Artist of the Week is Tim Tozer. You can check out his work by clicking here. He does some great figures with interesting textures and abstraction. Love it or hate it, please leave a comment below.

Damien Hirst: The Anti-Pollock

2009-02-17T14:15:00.016-07:00

Damien Hirst’s art is a joke.

Like Courbet, Manet, Duchamp, Warhol and Koons (and like every kid enrolled in an MFA program these days), Damien Hirst’s work is designed to piss you off. Draped in the authoritative, puritanical veneer of Minimalism and obsessed with that oh-so-serious theme “Death”, it carries too much existential weight for us to ignore. But it’s also too clinical for us to give our hearts to…at least in the way we might give our hearts to something by, say, Jackson Pollock (or Rothko, DeKooning, or Frankenthaller, for that matter). But while you can appreciate, or perhaps even relate to, or perhaps even discover profound spiritual meaning in, a painting by Jackson Pollock, all you can do in front of a Damien Hirst is shake your head, which is precisely the point. The world already has a surplus of “rugged individualists” and other “serious artist”-types. Hirst and his ilk give us some much-needed comic relief. Think of him as a kind of highbrow Eddie Haskell.

So where does that leave us? What are we supposed to do with Damien Hirst? Should we play along and show our disgust at the sight of rotten meat, maggots, flies, and a bug zapper (cycle of life and death, get it?) contained in a glass room? Should we get all hot and bothered over a pickled sheep? Should we rise up in righteous indignation at the sight of a five million dollar painting featuring a bunch of colored polka dots? Or should we demonstrate our insider status by smiling smugly, assured that since we’re in on the joke, it’s ok for us to dismiss the outraged masses as philistines. Maybe we should deliver “free your mind” sermons to evangelize the uninitiated, celebrating our ability to appreciate the nuances of artworks titled “Beautiful, Kiss My Fu@king Ass Painting”.

I don’t like any of these choices, and rather than dismiss Damien Hirst as a charlatan, I suggest we appreciate him and other artists like him in the same way we "appreciate" MTV’s Jackass. Let’s accept that these are artists performing obnoxious, amusing, provocative stunts for our entertainment, not for our edification. Let’s accept that in 20 years they’ll be too old and too rich to carry on like this and will have long since been replaced by the new brigade of 20 and 30somethings who are certain they’ll be remembered as the radical revolutionaries who changed the course of Art History (again…yawn).

So here’s my suggestion: rather than wring our hands about the loose standards of the congregation, maybe we ought to allow ourselves to laugh at the occasional dirty joke told in the back of the sanctuary, or in Hirst’s case, told from the pulpit itself.

Artist of the Week: Aron Wiesenfeld

2009-02-10T09:39:00.007-07:00

This week's Artist of the Week is Aron Wiesenfeld, you can see his work by clicking here, here, and here. Lately I've been interested in paintings with complex or confusing narratives and I think Aron's work is very compelling. He has great skill without being self-consciously academic. There's a wonderfully creepy tone to his paintings, something unsettling. Check him out and let me know if you love him or hate him by posting a comment below (click on "comments" and follow the instructions to post) .

Happy Birthday, Jackass

2009-02-10T08:57:00.004-07:00

January 28th would have been Jackson Pollock's 97th birthday, and to celebrate the occasion, I spilled some paint on the floor of my studio and got drunk.

As an homage to one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, here's a nice photo of a chimp making some paintings: