American Eyes

Burning for You

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‘Kitchen Fire’, 2023, oil on linen, 24 x 18 inches.

I’ve had an ongoing series of paintings about lovemaking that pop up every now and then. Depicting intimacy in a way that is a tad voyeuristic yet never prurient is challenging, but I find that it works when the moment is somehow eclipsed by the periphery of life lived.

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In My End is My Beginning:  Seeing Double at “Philip Guston Now”  

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Philip Guston, the influential North American painter who died in 1980, has been on my mind lately.  This essay is about why.  It is also a belated thank you note to him.  I say this because, half a lifetime ago, my awareness of this hero/bad boy of Twentieth Century art saved my hide.  Or, more realistically, to take my grandiose appreciation of his efforts down a few notches, a job talk I gave at Purdue about Guston in 1994 clinched my unlikely shot at a permanent academic career in the humanities.   (I am ashamed to admit that when I was thirty, landing safely on the tenure track felt like a life-or-death matter.) Can I recover what Guston’s art meant to me back then on a gut level? I can certainly remember the outlines of my precarious situation back then, and why Guston’s late trauma-filled work would have appealed to me on a deep personal level.

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L.A. Flashbacks

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Persuaded by James to go downtown (from where we lived so close in Echo Park many years) first time in five years (shocked at new residential skyscrapers we were told are including formerly homeless), to The Broad’s superb “Keith Haring” exhibition which I had otherwise intended to avoid (given what I knew would be a kind of “euphoric fear flashback” to the even-pre-AIDS rough-around-town NYC 70-80 years before we moved to LA when we then really did swing into ACT UP action). Glad I went but no nostalgia.

Photos by James Rosen

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“New York: 1962-1964”

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“New York: 1962-1964 explores a pivotal three-year period in the history of art and culture in New York City, examining how artists living and working in New York responded to their rapidly changing world, through more than 180 works of art—all made or seen in New York between 1962-1964.”

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Tactile Values

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LAST DAY TO SEE LARRY MADRIGAL’S EXHIBIT IN NYC!!!

Nicodim Gallery is tucked behind a temporary girder due to road work on Greene Street. It’s a little odd to open the door and walk right in on intimate scenes from Larry Madrigal’s marriage. Per the exhibition’s press release:

Over the course of creating Work / Life, the artist and his wife conceived their second child. He watched his wife’s body change while his pretty-much stayed the same. She is a mother, he is still Larry…

He’s out to make himself useful. Madrigal confessed somewhere — maybe on his instagram — that he wasn’t sure his massage below was doing any good, until his wife put her book down…

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What is the Truth, or…How the Roto Rooter Man Tried to Kill Me

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We live in a self-made adobe house and every year the line from the sink to the septic tank backs up and we need to have the Roto Rooter man come out to unclog the pipe. He kneels beneath the kitchen sink with his long electric snake, and unclogs the drain. And that is what happened a few days ago. It took him twenty minutes. Afterward he came  outside to figure up the bill, and  as the Roto Rooter man stood by his White Roto Rooter Van, I asked him if he had been vaccinated.

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