Jeff Wall at Art Institute of Chicago

Last weekend we were in Chicago. We visited with my friend Stepahanie Dean who is an incredible and accomplished photographer. Naturally we all headed over to the Art Institute of Chicago to see the Impressionist and Modern Art collection (omg Toulouse-Lautrec and Manet!) and the current Jeff Wall show.


I really liked "Double Self Portrait".


"Picture for Women" is exceptional too.






These two were on a smaller scale, like 30 x 40, and had a much gentler and subtle beauty to them. They struck me as compositional and formal studies.

I'm glad I got the chance to go with a photo person because, as a painter, I am practically ignorant of relevant contemporary photography, and I was able to open up to the one medium with which I am often confounded with. Rather, I was prompted to simply enter the exhibit, and once I got the gist, I really understood what makes this work good. It's not that photography has a completely separate set of formal guidelines for judging its quality as a work of art. And that Wall's focus is so intent on using modern painting as a launching point, and I may add it is very reverential, his work is a good epitomy for crossing the boundaries between painting (an additive medium) and photo (a subtractive medium).

Tobias the Cat

Tobias, 1996 - 2007
Rest in Peace kitty, we'll miss you

On the Topic of Modernism

I often define my painting as Modernist. Not in the furniture, architecture, or literature sense, but it's Modernist in the sense that I aim to express on canvas what my relationship to it and to the world is, and incorporate formal aspects of painting in with.

Modernism is not a word used frequently in contemporary art, but I feel that with the outrageous and overwhelming volume of post-modern art that's out in galleries now, I must intentionally steer the viewer away from inferring any of his or her preconceptions or ideas about what the average contemporary artist should be.

I proudly take the stance that painting is, in its own right, still pure and modernist, in this very Postmodern world. Even artists like Cecily Brown and Dana Schutz deal with paint on canvas, whatever the subject matter they express, it comes down to the pigmented textures, expressions, form, shape and color.

Postmodernism states that everything has been exhausted, explored and acheived in modern art, therefore it's open season on anything: copying, appropriating, even stealing is a-okay. Postmodern visual art became popular about forty years ago.

I think this painting by Degas is as poignant today as it was when it was painted. And so, that's how it goes when one focuses on the human form and the human condition. There's nothing Postmodern about Birth, Life and Death.


Edgar Degas, "L'absinthe", 1876 Oil on canvas, 92 x 68 cm; Musee d'Orsay, Paris