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The Herald Scotland
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
'I started out copying Bugs Bunny' - Artists set for double show
'I'm a bit uncomfortable calling myself a hyperrealist or a photo-realist,' Mr Wilson tells me. 'I just aim for as real as possible.' Nor does he study or follow the work of the artists who popularized or championed the form, such as American trio Chuck Close, Richard Estes and Duane Hanson. Instead he prefers graphics-based art and name-checks people such as Sir Peter Blake. Bordeaux and Blue by Colin Wilson (Image: free) So what's the appeal of so precise and naturalistic a form of representation? 'It's something I've always admired,' he says simply. 'It's like a magic trick. It looks like it's real, then you realise it's not, and I've always found that magical and very technically impressive. I think everyone starts out trying to copy – I started out copying Bugs Bunny – then you go to school and copy simple objects, and the aim is always to make it look like what you see. I always found a lot of comfort in that, because you know when it's good because it looks like what it's meant to look like. There's a great satisfaction in it.' The precision he shows in his work extends to the creation of the source images, which can take a day to set up and photograph. 'There's a lot of grape prodding and cheese nudging,' he laughs. 'It can be quite tedious. But at the end of it, it's ready to go and I get so excited about picking up a paintbrush, especially if I'm trying something new. It's like a puzzle, and that's always exhilarating.' And of course the what is as important as the how. Everything to be photographed has to be perfect – fruits ripe, berries fresh, glasses clean and glistening, champagne bubbling and doubtless properly chilled. 'You have to photograph things at their absolute best. Just yesterday I was photographing a Camellia from the garden and already today the head has fallen off!' Read more It will live on, though, in his art. Flowers are also a concern of Samantha McCubbin, though that's where the comparisons end. In her studio in Glasgow's East End she paints loose, semi-abstracted studies of riotous floral blooms, and she uses oil paint rather than acrylic. Her works are bursting with colour as a result and have a quality rare in still-lives: a sense of movement. It's even reflected in their titles. Frenzy Of Flowers, Petals Unhinged and Sway Of The Night are just three examples. For Ms McCubbin, who studied fashion before turning to painting, the appeal of floral subjects begins with the fact that she loves flowers. Who doesn't? But there's more. 'I'm drawn to their folds, their movement, the richness of their colours, and the variety of shapes,' she tells me. 'I also find contemporary flower arranging inspiring. There's a sculptural, expressive quality to how flowers are composed that really speaks to me. But ultimately florals are just the starting point. My work isn't about creating an exact likeness of a flower, it's about what painting them allows me to do with the medium itself. Flowers give me a structure to work from, but then the process becomes about following the movement of the paint, responding to the gestures, the brushstrokes, the surprises – and the happy accidents along the way.' One such happy accident was her discovery of square boards to paint on. She immediately liked the contemporary feel of the format and it made sense compositionally, centring her subjects. Increasingly she is experimenting with different sizes, though the bulk of the 45 works she will show at The Lemond Gallery – her largest suite of paintings to date – are in the square format. Lavender Meadow by Samantha McCubbin (Image: free) Impressionist painters Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet are obvious touchstones – there is a pair of paintings in the upcoming show inspired by a trip to Monet's garden at Giverny – but two more surprising influences are Howard Hodgkin, whose colourful abstracts often overlapped his frames, and the endlessly inventive German painter Gerhard Richter, once described as the Picasso of the 21st century. 'I have always loved their bold and expressive use of paint and the way it speaks for itself,' says Ms McCubbin. 'It really resonates with how I want to work. There's a sense of emotion and immediacy in their process that I connect with.' Two painters, two very different approaches to the creation of art. But unifying them is a quest to capture the sublime – or, at the very least, the good things in life. Colin Wilson and Samantha McCubbin show new works at The Lemond Gallery, Glasgow from May 17 (until May 25)
The Guardian
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘I invited a dozen ex-boyfriends to dinner and taped it': the amazing avant-garde recordings of Linda Rosenkrantz
There is a series by Peter Hujar in which the photographer shot groups of friends, collaborators, lovers and other members of the New York avant garde, from the 1960s to 80s. In one image – including the artists Paul Thek and Eva Hesse – the writer Linda Rosenkrantz stands near the centre. 'That was mostly people that I had gotten together, some who became very well-known,' Rosenkrantz tells me by phone from California. 'Five or six of us would go ice-skating or dancing on Friday nights.' Rosenkrantz grew up in the Bronx in the 1930s. After university she moved to Manhattan to work in the publicity and editorial department of the Parke-Bernet auction house, becoming enmeshed in the city's art scene. 'I met Hujar in 1956. We hit it off immediately,' she says. Hujar and Rosenkrantz remained close until his death from Aids-related complications in 1987. In the 70s, when Rosenkrantz was an established writer, she asked various artists to note everything that happened to them on a specific day, and then read it out for her to record. The first two were Hujar and the painter Chuck Close . The latter's day – 18 December 1974 – featured a job photographing Allen Ginsberg for the New York Times. The project eventually ran out of steam and Rosenkrantz didn't give it much thought until decades later, when Hujar's archive went to the Morgan Library in New York and she donated the material. Eventually the publisher Magic Hour Press discovered it and in 2021 released their discussion as the book, Peter Hujar's Day. Now it's been adapted into a film by Passages director Ira Sachs, with Ben Whishaw as Hujar and Rebecca Hall playing Rosenkrantz. 'When Ira Sachs signed up for the film, he got in touch and I instinctively felt that he was the right person to do it, because I had liked his other films,' says Rosenkrantz. 'It's been a great experience for me, and it was so serendipitous.' The film, which premiered to good reviews at Sundance, is due for release later this year. It plays into a recent surge of interest in Hujar, with an acclaimed show at Raven Row in London, after an exhibition at the Venice Biennale last year. While Hujar has been celebrated in the decades since his death, Rosenkrantz remains lesser known. Aged 90, she is living in Santa Monica in California. Her husband of 50 years, the Guernsey-born writer and artist Christopher Finch, died three years ago. When I contact Rosenkrantz about an interview, she cautions that she's not very articulate, which is ironic given how heavily speech features in her work. She is best known for the cult book Talk from 1968, a dialogue-only 'reality' novel, in which she spent months taping her conversations with friends. She then transcribed hours of tape into 1,500 pages of text, eventually whittling it to a story of three friends in their late 20s, spending a summer by a Long Island beach. It was a raw, funny book presenting people from the Warholian art crowd talking about sex, drugs, psychoanalysis and much else. (Sample chapter title: Emily, Marsha and Vincent Discuss Orgies). The book captured the modern moment in a novel way. 'That kind of thing was in the zeitgeist. Artists were painting from photographs,' she says. 'It just struck me as I was getting ready to go to East Hampton that I should take a tape recorder and I always had it in mind as a book.' It caused a minor stir. New York magazine ran two reviews, alongside a photo of Rosenkrantz on the beach in a bikini, tape recorder by her side. Not all responses were kind. 'It was mocked for all the talk of sex, drugs and therapy. There was a minister or some church person in Britain who thought it should be banned,' she recalls. It had its admirers too; Harold Pinter sent a note of praise, George Romero's production company wanted the film rights and Leonard Cohen was a fan. 'He said that he had read it out loud walking on the beach,' she says, 'and that he had tried to do something similar and decided that it couldn't be done and that I had done it.' Through the 60s and 70s, she was an art world insider, encountering the likes of Susan Sontag and David Hockney, going to Andy Warhol's parties at the Factory. While working at Parke-Bernet, then acquired by Sotheby's, she set up and edited their art magazine. She met her husband while running the magazine. He was a friend of Chuck Close and later she was the subject of one of the painter's large-scale portraits, not that sitting for him was particularly dramatic: 'He took a polaroid. It was very quick and not a lot of talking or direction.' After Talk was published, she tried more tape experiments, including the day-in-a-life recordings, while another idea, Ex, had gallows humour: 'I invited, one by one, about a dozen ex-boyfriends to dinner and taped the whole evening, and they're pretty funny.' Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion Rosenkrantz and Finch were inseparable. They co-wrote a novel called Soho, a multi-generational saga set in the Manhattan neighbourhood, and Gone Hollywood, a social history of cinema's golden age. 'We worked very well together,' she says, though Soho – written under the pseudonym CL Byrd – 'did not make an impact.' In 1990, the couple and their daughter Chloe left New York for LA, shortly after Rosenkrantz started a new track. A friend, Pamela Redmond Satran was an editor at Glamor magazine: 'I pitched the idea of doing an article about baby names. And she said, 'You know, I think this could be a book'.' Before this, there were just books with lists of names; Rosenkrantz and Satran added more analysis with social context and trends. 'The first one, which was called Beyond Jennifer and Jason, sold very, very well,' she says. This was followed by nine more books. They set up a website, to collect everything. 'It influenced the culture in a major way.' Whether anticipating the babynaming industry, or developing new approaches to storytelling, Rosenkrantz always had a knack for the new. 'My father used to say that I was ahead of my time when I was quite young,' she says. She has also 'always been attracted to unusual forms', which led her to publish a memoir in the style of a listicle, before they were BuzzFed to death. My Life As a List: 207 Things About My (Bronx) Childhood was published in 1999. But by the 00s, her most significant work – Talk - was no longer in wide circulation. One reason for its muddled reception was that her publishers presented it as a straightforward novel, rather than a recorded rendering of reality. But in 2015, when New York Review Books revived Talk in their Classics strand, she says, 'It was a complete reversal. It got great reviews and was seen for what it was. I kind of insisted that it had to be what it was meant to be, which was a taped book. I felt very redeemed.' The book was praised as a blast of 60s counterculture and for its prescient view of neurotic city dwellers. Critic Becca Rothfield wrote that it 'reminds us that wry self-awareness and anxious fragility are hardly a millennial invention'. It was seen as presaging the autofiction boom of the 2010s and likened to the TV shows Girls and Broad City. Then in 2018, Lena Dunham's website Lenny Letter revived parts of the Ex project: publishing transcripts of Rosenkrantz's boyfriend dinners, rendered in comic strip form. Today Rosenkrantz wants to do more with Ex, and revisit diaries she kept years ago. When Peter Hujar's Day was published, she was said to be working on a book called Namedrops Keep Falling on My Head, about the people she's met through the years. She says now that it's not enough for a book but perhaps it will appear in another form. It takes in everyone from Janet Malcolm, David Hockney and Fred Astaire, to the beat poet Gregory Corso with whom she had a relationship. Meanwhile, she hopes the new film prompts interest in a screen version of Talk. 'It has real scenes as opposed to the Peter Hujar [book].' How does she feel about Rebecca Hall's representation of her in Peter Hujar's Day? 'I'm very happy with it,' she says. 'Most of it is Peter talking, but she doesn't get to say very much, or I didn't say very much. But she sort of captured the way I would have responded.' This hints at a self-effacing matter-of-factness to Rosencrantz. She doesn't give off a sense of thwarted ambition or great regrets – just a life lived well. In the original Peter Hujar transcript, there's a moment where Rosenkrantz explains her motive for the project: 'To find out how people fill up their days, because I myself feel like I don't do anything much all day.' The fact that at 90 she's still developing work seems to prove otherwise.
New York Times
01-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Kathan Brown, Acclaimed Fine Art Printmaker, Dies at 89
Kathan Brown, the founder of the San Francisco-based company Crown Point Press, who helped revive the centuries-old art of intaglio printmaking in the United States, producing limited-edition prints by artists like Elaine de Kooning, Chuck Close and Francesco Clemente, died on March 10 at her home in the Bay Area. She was 89. Her death was confirmed by her son, Kevin Parker. Ms. Brown spent more than 60 years establishing her reputation as a master of a printing technique that goes back to 15th-century Europe and was used by the likes of Rembrandt and Albrecht Dürer. Crown Point Press is 'the most instrumental American print shop in the revival of etching as a medium of serious art,' the art historian Susan Tallman wrote in her 1996 book, 'The Contemporary Print.' Unlike the more common practice of lithography, which uses chemicals to bind an image to the flat surface of a metal plate or stone, intaglio printing involves etching the image into a copper or zinc plate with a stylus or with acid, creating grooves that are then filled with ink. When the plate is run through the steel rollers of the press and the image is transferred to paper, the ink reservoirs create a deep color saturation and a velvety quality, Valerie Wade, the director of Crown Point Press, said in an interview. Ms. Brown typically invited artists, both emerging and established, to Crown Point for two-week residencies. The point was not to create reproductions of existing works, but to produce originals — or 'unique multiples,' as the company calls them — in editions of 25 to 35. Over the years, Ms. Brown's stable of artists included luminaries like Sol LeWitt, Pat Steir, John Baldessari, Helen Frankenthaler, Chuck Close and Ed Ruscha. The limited-edition prints, currently priced from about $3,000 to about $15,000, made the work of top artists affordable to casual art enthusiasts, as well as to private collectors and galleries. Many have ended up in the archives of museums around the world, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Because most of the artists Ms. Brown worked with had no experience with this form of printmaking, their efforts amounted to forays into a new artistic medium. 'Printmaking's layered quality allows the artist to see his drawings more analytically,' Ms. Brown said in a 1982 interview with The Atlanta Constitution. Experimentation was part of the experience, she told The Oakland Tribune in 1980, 'an opportunity to take some chances and risks with ideas that they might not take within their normal mediums.' Kathan (pronounced KATH-un) Louise Brown was born on April 23, 1935, in New York City, the elder of two children of Elwood Brown, a portrait photographer, and Clarissa (Bradford) Brown, a schoolteacher who graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago. She grew up in Daytona Beach, Fla., and eventually enrolled at Antioch College, in Yellow Springs, Ohio, earning a bachelor's degree in English literature in 1958. Along the way, she studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, where she took an etching class. On a trip to Edinburgh after graduating, she found an old etching press in the yard of an inn, where it had been hidden during World War II by art students hoping to spare it from government scrap-metal drives for the war effort. She bought it for the equivalent of $75 and cashed in her return flight, traveling home on a freighter instead, so that she could bring the bulky cast-iron press back to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she settled with her first husband, Jeryl Parker. Using her salvaged press, she and her husband started Crown Point Press in 1962, but they divorced shortly thereafter, and Ms. Brown set up shop in the basement of her home in Berkeley. Early on, she established working relationships with the acclaimed California painters Wayne Thiebaud and Richard Diebenkorn. Mr. Thiebaud's 'Delights,' a series of Pop Art depictions of ice cream and other sweets from 1964, was bound in book form, and decades later, a copy sold for about $100,000. 'Green,' Mr. Diebenkorn's series of abstract works from 1986, sold at auction last year for about $572,000. In addition to her son, Ms. Brown is survived by her second husband, the artist Tom Marioni, whom she married in 1983; and two granddaughters. Always looking to push boundaries, Ms. Brown did not restrict herself to working with visual artists. In 1986, the minimalist composer John Cage visited Crown Point's studio and tried to capture the essence of fire by burning sheets of delicate Japanese paper on the press and creating prints out of the singed fragments. Vito Acconci, the performance and video artist, once printed an image of airplane wings big enough to fill a gallery wall; he included the print in an early 1980s installation, along with a 20-foot ladder. That particular artwork was a bit cumbersome to appeal to the casual art buyer. But, as Ms. Brown once said, 'we are more concerned about work that will last rather than what will sell.'
