John Kacere
Laura '94 - 1994
oil on canvas
36 x 52 inches (91.4 x 132 cm)
John Kacere What separates Kacere from his fellow Photo Realists is that he has no interest in recording the complex banality of diners, pickup trucks, suburban streets, small town movie theaters, western horse shows and all of the slices of Americana that they depict. Nor is he interested in how the eye makes meaning out of the optical signals of a photograph. His themes are those of obsession. For Kacere, the cascade of drapery of a raised skirt, the buttocks or mons veneris seen through bikini briefs, the garter belts and the sheer stockings are not only the trappings of seduction. They are a kit of parts, as were Morandi's humble jars and bottles, that give him the formal elements with which to construct his erotic icons. For almost twenty years, he has delicately rearranged the parts, varying the models and their garb, but they have all been visions of the same Goddess. Any one of his best works would have been sufficient homage to the Goddess, but can a painter ever say "Well I did it" and put away his brushes. Kacere keeps pursuing his obsession. "Perfection" is a demanding task/mistress. Paul Brach East Hampton, N.Y. John Kacere
Jay Kelly
Eighteenth St./Jersey City N.J. - 1997
watercolor on paper
10 x 26 inches (25.4 x 66.04 cm)
Jay Kelly Jay Kelly is a hyper-realist painter of exceptional talent. The intensity of his craft and the belief in his subject matter infuses his works with a detached warmth more real and compelling than photographs, which a casual observer would swear to be seeing. Along with Davis Cohen, John Salt, and Richard McClean, Kelly joins the ranks of a school of painters who've gained a firm foothold in the history of art. His ability to stop the movie of life and show us one frame in total detail, gives us cogent insight into the nature of people, places, and things. Kelly is a truly American artist be-cause he dispensed with the academic paradigm of how a person becomes an artist. He never went to art school, and has very little to do with the art world. Kelly was actually fired from advertising and took advantage of his extended vacation to fuse meticulous nature with sensitivity to arrive at his present mode of consummate expression. Having grown up in the relative safety of the suburbs, places like Newark and the Bronx always represented for Kelly the idea of the dangerous. Kelly shows us that there is beauty, even humor, in decay. One of Kelly's underlying themes is that the America that once produced the most quality products in the world is gone. His paintings in a sense are elegies for the proud objects of America's past. His metaphoric still lifes are like dinosaur bones of an industrial age that is becoming no longer viable as we move into the next century where the computer chip will supercede the spark plug. It is possibly the poignant subject matter, the ironic sadness of these fallen giants that makes Jay Kelly so compelling. In his flawless style, the bleached light falls over a symbolic graveyard. His personal commitment to perfection resounds on a grand scale against the rusting history of our fading era. Excerpt from Ravi Singh Cover Magazine, Jan. 1990 Artist Statement: The focus of my work is depicting the area in and around the port of Newark, New Jersey. Known to most people as an area they drive through, few pause to notice what is around them as they travel on one of the many major roads that intersect there. My work freezes a moment in time to allow us a chance to stop and see this environment and possibly get a glimpse of ourselves at the same time. A glimpse of who we are by what we have created and have left behind as we unceasingly race into the future. I have purposely chosen not to add or eliminate any details from these scenes so that they accurately portray what is there: an environment I see as full of the contradictions of life. For instance, they depict an eerie stillness found in an area frenetic with human activity or the pure white snow covering the black stain of a recent oil spill. In these industrial scenes we also see our strength to create and at the same time nature's ability to reclaim what was once her own. Abandoned trucks, once useful, are now slowly rusting and being absorbed back into the earth. Fields of new grass rise where once stood oil storage tanks. It is the decay of industry along with the rebirth of nature. It is splendor and chaos coexisting out of man's need to create. Jay Kelly, May 1996
William Nichols
Northern Afternoon (Delphiniums) - 1999
oil on linen
50 x 64 inches (127 x 162.5 cm)
William Nichols William A. Nichols' paintings can be described, paradoxically, as gestural Photo-Realist works. Photo Realism's flawless imitation in paint of a photographic sur-face leaves little room for the gesture, but this contradiction is resolved quite successfully in Nichols' paintings. The artist takes his own photographs, mainly of subjects in parks and botanical gardens in the Milwaukee area, and works from a slide projected on his canvas. The rapid, gestural application of transparent mixtures of acrylic paint suggests the spontaneity of Impressionist technique but the photo reference here is unmistakable. The color in his landscapes often has a slight overall tint which suggests the distortion common in color slides, and "overexposed" light areas and 'underexposed" dark portions serve as compositional elements in the paintings. Acrylic watercolor is not the usual medium of Photo-Realist canvases, and Nichols' surfaces differ accordingly. The clarity of his paint is especially appropriate to the depiction of the foliage, flowers, and white-aired spaces that are his subjects; the light translucence of the paint itself suggests the freshness of the natural subject matter. The overwhelmingly lush and extravagant visuals sometimes delay perception of the formal elements of the compositions, but Nichols best paintings are vigorous and sophisticated compositions of both structure strength and subtlety. Excerpt from Catherine Lamagna Arts Magazine, September 1979 Artist Statement: Verbalizing about the visual arts is always a difficult task that usually falls short of the mark. It is a domain of ambiguities and a job that's made even tougher when talking about your own work. So with this in mind let me do my best and say that I use the landscape for what it is capable of generating; great beauty, sensuality and a sense of time. I have pursued these qualities through looking at landscape--close up as opposed to a traditional vista or distanced viewpoint. The peculiar sense of intimacy that this achieves, I have tried to heighten through the large scale of work and by handling the paint in a way that imparts a sensual and tactile awareness of surface at close range. The photograph is an important component in constructing the painting. Its ability to lock in quantities of information at a precise moment in time and report candidly about it offers a unique vantage point from which to explore and reflect on things with a new kind of thoroughness. The photograph helps me create a view from a distance that has great pictorial clarity with an attempt to place the spectator in the landscape, that is, trying to create a sense of being surrounded by it rather than approaching it frontally. Because of the inate beauty of the subject matter itself, the underlying toughness or edge of the work is not as obviously accessible as it is in other works which focus more directly on this aspect. Finding a form or path of constructing the painting that both includes this beauty yet transcends the sentimental and pretty which the subject matter could easily become, is a major challenge and one which I hope I have been successful in overcoming. Frankly, it is difficult to speak directly about the content or poetry of the work. Suffice it to say that it is of great importance to me and available for the viewer to experience and define for him or herself. William A. Nichols, 1991
Richard McLean
The Sheik - 1983
oil on canvas
50 x 68 inches (127 x 173 cm)
Richard McLean There are many names for the type of art practiced by Richard McLean: Photo Realism, Post-Pop, Super Realism are some of them. The paintings look like photographs. Even when viewed from close range, their surfaces are so smooth that it is difficult to believe they were done by hand. McLean's large paintings take him from two to five months of painstakingly skillful labor to complete. Like most of the other photo real-ists, he works from photographs, either his own or ones he has found elsewhere. Taking innumerable slides, he com-poses his pictures by cropping undesired elements and introducing bits and pieces from other sources, finally choosing the one composition that can be best transferred to the large scale and the intense focus of the painted canvas. The result is made into a transparency and projected onto the canvas, where McLean makes a tracing of the image in graphite. During the painting he is guided by a color print of the photograph. As McLean says, it sounds simple but it is not. Despite an almost chilling objectivity, Super Realism has retained it's popularity amongst the many and varied contem-porary schools of art. McLean is unique among its practitioners in that instead of depicting such inanimate objects as store fronts, trucks, food and gleaming surfaces he turns to nonurban subjects, like the horse and horse-show life. Born in Hoquiam, Wash., and raised in rural Idaho, he did "a fair amount of farm work" in his youth, he says, rode, went to country rodeos and owned a few horses. Searching for an identity in his paintings he turned back to that experience. He was spurred on by a discovery he made in San Francisco magazine distributing office. "They handled various horse magazines, and in poring through back issues it dawned on me that there was a gold mine of material available in print. I was already interested in a centralized, frontal, focused image. If I doubted the concept in any way, those pictures convinced me," McLean says. At times there is a cutting edge to the people in his paint-ings. He admits to viewing the eastern tradition in horses as elitist and finds a quality of charming hokum in "western finery, country music and eatin' beans around the campfire" a reach-ing out for an ersatz culture that perhaps never really existed in the West. But he denies that he is making "some acid or ironic comment on an aspect of American life," a charge that has been made with some justice against other photo realists. "My interests are aesthetic and intellectual; they are centered around the problems of painting." Many of those problems have to do with the traditional view of the horse. "We tend to see the horse as action, passion, rippling muscles," McLean says, "the storm and stress we associate with dynamic energy and purity." He has challenged this traditional view by picturing the horse in a static pose, taking a subject that was "admittedly sentimental and putting it through the crucible of my painting powers to temper and harden it, to give it some kind of intellectual toughness, to make it read as a painting, as hard art. And yet the subject is romantic." Excerpt from: Phyllis Linn, Classic: Magazine About Horses and Sports, 1976 Artist Statement: My work is, among other things, about order, equilibrium, tranquillity and innocence. It is also about the largely undervalued pleasure and spiritual instruction one takes from the sheer look of things. Richard McLean. 1997
Joseph
Richards
Essex IV - 2000
oil on linen
48 x 56 inches (121.92 x 142.24 cm)
Joseph Richards It has been twenty years since I first started concentrating on mechanical subjects for my paintings. During that time, I had painted some railroad subjects yet had paid scant attention to locomotives. That is until 1991, when I encountered a steam locomotive that was running on a scenic line. The sight and sound were very exciting and the complexity of the machinery was like a wild abstraction. The intricacy of the locomotives movements was a marvel to see. I was reminded of my childhood when I used to watch these giants working in the local switchyards. Back then, I was a bit frightened by them. They seemed almost to be living entities. Even standing idle with their steam up, they were never silent -- they panted, grunted and hissed. I knew I wanted to paint these truly remarkable machines. Over the past few years, I have painted a number of locomotives and found that there is a segment of the collecting public that is just as fascinated with them as I am. My research has informed me of the fact that there are nearly two hundred of these grand old machines still working. They may not be hauling freight over the mountains but they are hauling passengers on excursions; they are still doing their thing. Joseph Richards, 1998
Lance Richbourg
Black Mike Makes the Tag (small version) - 1999
oil on paper
18.25 x 22 inches (46.35 x 55.88 cm)
Lance Richbourg BASEBALL PICTURES BY RICHBOURG Not that our civilization lacks its charms. One is the lyric romance of the game of baseball. It is a sophisticated sport where guys built like Roman gladiators execute feats of terpsichorean grace in hitting, throwing and tagging each other with a rather small ball. It is such an art in itself that serious painters have rarely undertaken it as a subject. Now we find a dozen large pictures that seem to echo "Mrs. Robinson's" lament, "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?" These are by Lance Richbourg, a California artist who has stayed ahead of his times by ducking behind them. He painted portraits long before recent revival of the practice, then disappeared from public exhibition for several years. His comeback at Arco Center for the Visual Arts finds Richbourg altered into the best artist he has ever been in works that may have significance beyond intrinsic merit. They are derived from baseball photographs from the '20s and '30s and painted in homage to the artists baseball-player father. Athletic scenes of batting and sliding are slowed to a dreamy, pastel pace where catchers seem to tenderly caress skidding runners. Richbourg has developed a technique of carefully recording scenes on heavily textured surfaces that break up outlines so paintings combine the high realism of an Eakins or Anshutz with the metaphysical stillness of a Giorgio Morandi. The artist capitalizes on the dramatic natural compositions offered by the sport, making strong formal grids where baselines lend hard-edge structuring and red dust captures the excitement of Abstract Expressionism. The paintings capture the mythical qualities associated with nostalgia and avoid pitfalls of regret and cuteness. If we ever figure out what Post-Modernism is Richbourg may be a part of it. L. A. Times Calendar, March 1981 Lance Richbourg
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