Sam Leach, until April 2, Peter Walker Fine Art, Adelaide

Sam Leach's latest exhibition Enlightement becomes sacrifice of sacrifice opened last night already sold out at Peter Walker Fine Art, which isn't unusual for either Sam, or the gallery.

Sam presents a new body of work which continues his exploration into the relationship between human and non-human forms, in particular anthropomorphism. Sam’s work retains his familiar style, evoking the old masters, but with a nod to contemporary art and society.

To see more os Sam Leach's work, visit his website by clicking here

Conic Section , Oil & resin on wood , 40 x 40cm

Balson Ape, Oil & resin on wood , 25cm diameter

Apply Multiple Filters , Oil & resin on wood , 40 x 40cm

Fracture Landscape , Oil & resin on wood , 25cm diameter

Margaret Bowland, until April 1, Babcock Galleries, New York

Margaret Bowland's first New York solo exhibition "Excerpts from the Great American Songbook" is currently on at Babcock Galleries. This is definitely an exhibition not to miss as Margaret Bowland is one of the great up & coming painters currently working in the USA.

Margaret Bowland: Excerpts from the Great American Songbook is accompanied by a new book on the artist written by Siri Hustvedt and published jointly by Babcock Galleries and the Greenville County Museum of Art.

After New York, the exhibition goes to the Greenville County Museum of Art from May 18 to July 17, 2011.

Margaret Bowland's Excerpts from the Great American Songbook explores problematic and provocative issues of race, gender, beauty and individuality in contemporary social thought. She evokes great old musical standards like "Isn't It Romantic," with its velvet melody caressing one's ear and lyrics hanging in the air: "Soon I will have found some girl that I adore/Isn't it romantic?/While I sit around my love can scrub the floor..." Suddenly, it isn't so romantic as the song floats one into the dark side of gender and race. Bowland says "beauty makes sense to me...has weight for me, only when it falls from grace. It starts to matter when it carries damage. Sorrow allows [beauty] to cast a shadow". And what is the shadowy dark side of beauty? Bowland's paintings, conceived with a rich tenebrist light seem to punch their way into one's consciousness through the captivating metaphorical image of a young black girl whose inner awareness looks upon an outer world in which "it ain't necessarily so". Everything is so audaciously familiar in Margaret Bowland's paintings, so known and certain, and yet immediately, viscerally and fastidiously uncertain.

AND THE COTTON IS HIGH, 2011, 82 x 70 inches, Oil on linen

LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL, 2010, 65 3/4 x 56 1/4 inches, Oil on canvas

SOMEDAY MY PRINCE WILL COME, 2010, 78 x 64 inches, Oil on linen

SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW, 2011, 82 x 66 inches, Oil on linen

The Daily Mail tests viewing times for classic paintings, and modern art.

We know what we like, and it's not modern art! How gallery visitors only viewed work by Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin for less than 5 seconds

To read the entire article by Philip Hensher, CLICK HERE

The Daily Mail decided to view how long visitors at the Tate Britain looked at certain works in their collection with interesting results.

"The basic fact about art is that you, the viewer, decide how much time you're going to give it. Other art forms give you no choice.
A symphony is going to take up 40 minutes of your time; a film two hours; a play perhaps three or four hours. But you can choose whether to look at a painting for ten seconds or ten minutes. That's a good measure of how interested you are by it.
We wondered whether there was a difference between the amount of time people were prepared to give a classic painting, and to modern art."

&

"We set up that simple test. We spent a day sitting in front of four classic paintings, and the works of four famous contemporary British artists.
We counted how many visitors stopped at each; for how long, on average, they spent looking at each work; what the longest examination was; and what sort of gallery visitor each work seemed to attract.
surprisingly, despite all the controversy, and the public promotion of new British artists, they did less well in this test than the 18th and 19th Century artists.
Tracey Emin's Monument Valley (Grand Scale) is an image of the artist, sitting in an armchair in a famous American landscape. No one looked at it for more than two minutes; if people did look at it, it was for five seconds on average. And most visitors did not look at it at all.
Though Damien Hirst's famous pickled animals do seem to interest visitors, one example - the 'spot' paintings that form such a large part of his work - might as well have been wallpaper. Our sample spent, on average, less than five seconds looking at it."



The implication of the results of this survey of gallery-goer's apathy, the Daily Mail contends is something that professional curators might like to ponder.


Ophelia: by Sir John Everett Millais
TOTAL VIEWERS: 562 AVERAGE DWELL TIME: 1 minute, 57 seconds LONGEST LOOK: 30 minutes

Monument Valley: by Tracey Emin
TOTAL VIEWERS: 177 AVERAGE DWELL TIME: 5 seconds LONGEST LOOK: 2 minutes

Anthraquinone -1 Diazonium Chloride: by Damien Hirst
TOTAL VIEWERS: 379 AVERAGE DWELL TIME: 5 seconds LONGEST LOOK: 30 seconds

Vivian Maier, until April 3, Chicago Cultural Center

I am going to break from posting only about painting and show the work of street photographer Vivian Maier because not only is her work brilliant, but also her story is absolutely amazing.

Vivian Maier was an American amateur street photographer who worked for about forty years as a nanny in Chicago. During those years she took about 100,000 photographs, primarily of people and cityscapes mainly in Chicago. Her photographs remained unknown and mostly undeveloped until they were discovered by a local historian, John Maloof, in 2007, who tried to contact her only to discover she died (April 21, 2009) several days earlier at the age of 83 after slipping on some ice hitting her head.. Her photos, some 100,000 remained hidden her entire life, tens of thousands have yet to be seen as she left boxes of undeveloped film rolls.


It's best that you watch the Youtube Video below to see the full story of Vivian Maier and how her work was recently discovered.

The first American exhibition of her photos Finding Vivian Maier: Chicago Street Photographer is on now at the Chicago Cultural Center

Ron Bolt, until March 26, Albemarle Gallery, London.

Ron Bolt, in his current exhibition at Albemarle Gallery, London, continues his exploration of the coastal and river waterways that fascinate him, a wilderness that he describes as “sacred”. Continuing in the tradition of landscape painting in Canada although with a focus of where land, water & light meet.

Ron Bolt was born in Toronto in 1938. His career spans forty years. As a painter, he has held over seventy one solo exhibitions around the world.

Sundown at Black Rock, oil on canvas, 117 x 99 cm

Tidal Surge - Antrim, oil on canvas, 117 x 104 cm

Flashdance South, oil on canvas, 92 x 132 cm

Dazzlerazzle, oil on canvas, 107 x 117 cm

Harry Holland, 04 Mar - 26 Mar 2011, Albemarle Gallery, London & Mar 9 - Apr 30, 2011, Mineta Fine Art, Brussels, Belgium

Harry Holland has exhibitions opening this week in both Brussels at Mineta Fine Art and at Albemarle Gallery, London.

Harry Holland is widely regarded as one of Britain's best craftsmen, who works with uncompromising commitment and sincerity to produce art that is intense and rewarding.

His style is distinctive and immediately recognisable, something which every artist seeks. The paintings are suggestive in the sense that they imply situations, events, or relationships that are not directly expressed; this imbues them with an engaging sense of mystery.

Holland was born in Glasgow in 1941. He trained at St. Martin’s School of Art from 1965-69. Since the seventies this extraordinary classical artist has had over thirty solo exhibitions and figured in countless group exhibitions worldwide.

Below are paintings from the London exhibition;

Balcony, oil on canvas, 51 x 30 cm

Beach, oil on canvas, 76 x 66 cm

Boat ten, oil on canvas, 89 x 122 cm



Below are paintings from the Brussels exhibition;

Ipod, 2010, 46 x 38 cm

Landing, 2010, oil on canvas, 61 x 37 cm

Photo, 2010, 46 x 52 cm

A Debt to Pleasure, until April 2, Montserrat College of Art Gallery, Beverly, Massachusetts

“A Debt to Pleasure,” curated by Gallery Director Leonie Bradbury is currently on at the Montserrat College of Art Gallery in
Beverly, Massachusetts.

I'm certain this exhibition will be of great interest to many here, as allegory and realism, something not often seen, yet discussed regularly in such places as art forums. In this exhibition allegorical realism is employed to investigate symbolism in painting (past and present), cultural history and the art world’s insistence on originality and obsession with everything new.

Erik Thor Sandberg, Alterations, oil on panel, 2010. Courtesy of Conner Contemporary, Washington D.C.


Inspired by the visual and symbolic richness of the painting practices of the distant past, the artists in A Debt to Pleasure integrate the sensual and the sinister to question ‘meaning making’ in contemporary art. Featuring Julie Heffernan, David Ording, Shelley Reed, Erik Thor Sandberg, and Anne Siems.

Beyond their flawlessly rendered surfaces, the paintings in A Debt to Pleasure integrate the sensual and the sinister, the vulgar and the mysterious. Each artist explicitly references stylistic techniques and aesthetics of the past to create a provocative body of work that explores meaning making in painting.

An exhibition of technical skill, visual indulgence, and timelessness, “A Debt to Pleasure” presents a series of works that question their place in history. Beyond their flawlessly rendered surfaces, each artist explicitly references stylistic techniques and aesthetics of the past to create a provocative body of work.

Shelley Reed, By the Pool (after d’Hondecoeter), Oil on canvas, 2009. Courtesy of the artist

David Ording, After, oil on canvas, 2005-7. Courtesy of Carroll and Sons Gallery, Boston

Julie Heffernan, Self Portrait as Tender Mercenary, 2006, Oil on canvas, 231 x 173 cm / 91 x 68 1/8 in Courtesy of Dodge Gallery, NY

Anne Siems, Snail Girls, mixed media on panel, 2010, Courtesy of Walker Contemporary, Boston

Teresa N Fischer, until March 3, Elliott Fouts Gallery, Sacramento, California

Although Teresa N. Fischer's exhibition "Nostalgia Emerging" at Elliott Fouts Gallery, Sacramento is about to close, do yourself a favour and check out this wonderful artist's paintings.

You can see more of Teresa's paintings by visiting her website Click Here

Also at the start of this year Teresa began blogging about her paintings, the process, the inspirations etc. To visit her blog click here

Chalk Rocket, oil on linen, 18x24 inches
Rocket Chalk has been juried into Salon International 2011.
This is a project of the International Museum of Contemporary Masters and is hosted by Greenhouse Gallery of Fine Art in San Antonio, Texas. The exhibit is April 2 - April 22, 2011.

The Roost, oil on linen, 12 x 24 inches

When your horse comes in, oil on linen, 24x18 inches

Popcorn express, oil on linen, 14x28 inches

The Swan, oil on linen, 20x16 inches

Curiosity got the bird, oil on linen, 12x24 inches

Caravaggio, until May 15 in the Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza in Rome

An anonymous portrait of Caravaggio

Apparently Caravaggio was a very naughty boy, much more than previously known. An exhibition of his art and recently discovered and restored documents, which include his police record, offers further proof of this famous artist's roguish dark side.

Caravaggio appears to be almost compulsive in his lawlessness. For instance, the man was weapon-obsessed, sporting a sword, dagger, and pistol at various times. Twice jailed for carrying arms without a permit and known for beating strangers in late-night fights and pelting police with rocks.

The new evidence clarifies some of the details of the notorious brawl in which Caravaggio killed a man. The 1606 brawl during which the artist killed one Ranuccio Tommassoni, leading the artist to flee Rome and causing Pope Paul V to issue a death warrant, the documents reveal that the fight was over a gambling debt, and not a woman, as some accounts have suggested. The showdown was arranged in advance, with Caravaggio squaring off against four foes alongside a gang of three of his own comrades, including a friend who was a captain in the Papal army. One of Caravaggio's supporters was also wounded in the battle, thrown into prison, and subsequently put on trial.

Detail of a police report on parchment regarding a complaint that Caravaggio was illegally circulating in Rome with the sword and a dagger pictured.


One document on display features a drawing done by a judge of a sword and dagger seized from Caravaggio, who was arrested for carrying weapons without proof of permit. All this had been unknown until skilled archivists were able to examine the original records from Caravaggio’s decade in Rome. These records—police blotters, judiciary decisions, eyewitness accounts in the first person—were bound into ten volumes, each with up to 1,500 parchment pages of hand-written reports in Italian and Latin. The problem was that the parchment pages were self-destructing because the highly acid ink was eating up the pages. To save them, the archives director made a public appeal for sponsors. Thanks to articles in the Italian financial daily Il Sole-24 Ore, a handful of private sponsors were found, and the costly, time-consuming and painstaking restoration work could begin.

Other incidents include the written testimony of a waiter at the Moor's restaurant who had the bad fortune to be working when the irascible master painter came in for lunch with some friends:

"I brought them eight cooked artichokes, four cooked in butter and four fried in oil. The accused asked me which were cooked in butter and which fried in oil, and I told him to smell them, which would easily enable him to tell the difference. He got angry and without saying anything more, grabbed an earthenware dish and hit me on the cheek at the level of my moustache, injuring me slightly... and then he got up and grabbed his friend's sword which was lying on the table, intending perhaps to strike me with it, but I got up and came here to the police station to make a formal complaint"





Caravaggio also apparently cut a hole in the ceiling of his studio to accommodate some of his large paintings. Since he was a renter, this did not sit well with his landlady. After she sued the artist, Caravaggio and a friend decided to revenge themselves by hurling rocks at her window.

Apart from all of this, Caravaggio managed to to find time to paint many a masterpiece.

Ben Schonzeit, until March 5, Elaine Baker Gallery, Boca Raton, Florida

Ben Schonzeit, one of the old school original Photorealists is exhibiting this month at Elaine Baker Gallery, Boca Raton, Florida.

With over 40 years of painting behind him, Ben is now widely recognized for his strong , photorealistic images of opulent flowers set against dramatic backgrounds. While being highly photorealistic, Schonzeit’s paintings also bend our perception by combining real and surreal imagery. His flower paintings are symbolic of the old with the new, and a general theme of passing time. Schonzeit’s works are settings for dreamscapes, full of melancholy, romantic irony, and intense color.

Lake Placid Bouquet, 2011 , Acrylic on polyester, 72 x 96 inches

Aalto Umbria, 2011 , Acrylic on linen, 66 x 78 inches

Peachy Peonies, 2011 , Acrylic on polyester, 66 x 44 inches

Middle Rose, 2010 , Acrylic on canvas, 44 x 48 inches

Kevin Sloan, until February 2, Gardner Colby Galleries, Naples, Florida

Kevin Sloan's exhibition at Gardner Colby Gallery in Naples, Florida has just closed, however it's well worth getting acquainted with his paintings.

Kevin was recently featured in American Art Collector, to read the article Click Here

Tropical Tableau, acrylic, 48 x 44 inches

Modern Wilderness, acrylic, 44 x 36 inches

Audubon's Tea, acrylic, 30 x 36 inches

Google's art project: The Grand Tour from the safety of your computer.

Google's art project goes live as of today, to visit the website Click Here


So far Google has photographed 17 of the great museums of the world which can be visited online virtually moving around the museum’s galleries, viewing more than a thousand artworks. Some works are viewable in high resolution, as well as information being available on the artist and the work.

Eeach institution has nominated a single piece as a “Gigapixel Artwork”, which Google has photographed “using super high resolution or ‘gigapixel’ photo capturing technology”. It produces an electronic image containing 7 billion pixels, allowing viewers to study the work in microscopic detail.





For those who cannot travel, I suppose it does give you some idea of what certain museums are like. However nothing is as good as viewing artworks in the flesh. Even that is not guaranteed in museums nowadays where there is the disturbing trend where people wander up to a masterpiece, view it through their camera/Iphone, take a snap and move on without actually looking at it directly with their eyes, only through a screen.

American Painting Video Magazine, Winter Issue

American Painting Video Magazine, Winter Issue is now available to download for $10



The Winter issue of American Painting Video Magazine contains five different segments adding up to two hours of video. Highlights include an in-depth interview with legendary artist Antonio Lopez Garcia and Edward Minoff, a lecturer at the Grand Central Academy in Manhattan, going through the process of completing a seascape.

American Painting Video Magazine link, Click Here

Featured Artist: Frank Mesaric

I've been wanting to do a post on the Australian artist Frank Mesaric's paintings whilst his exhibition was still hanging at the Latrobe Regional Gallery late last year. Unfortunately, I was unable to do so, hence I have started a new category of post to feature artists outside of their exhibition time framework.

Furthermore I am pleased Eugene Barilo Von Reisberg has allowed his catalogue essay to be also printed here. Eugene also has his own art blog Arts Diary 365



Frank Mesaric: The Weight of Stone

We are used to absorbing the world around us at a single glance. We accept the incongruity of split images rushing past our eyes as we flick through glossy magazines, surf the ever-increasing number of television channels, or wade through the multitude of still and moving images on our computer screens. They compete with each other for our attention, and through the process of ocular attrition, we have learned to ignore this rapidly changing visual cacophony.

Hospital Bed and 'The Anatomy Lesson', 2010 Oil on Canvas - 160 x 200 cm


However, the new body of work by Frank Mesaric demands time and concentration. We need to leave the extraneous noise of the world at the gallery’s door, enter without rushing, take a deep breath, and abandon ourselves to contemplation. For it is only after a careful consideration and inquisitive examination that semantic links between the seemingly disparate sets of images on the artist’s canvases begin to reveal themselves.

Friendly Fire and 'The Raft of the Medusa', 2010 Oil on Canvas - 160 x 200 cm


Mesaric’s immediate environment in Myrtlebank and the surrounding environs of Gippsland provide the artist with a continuous source of inspiration. Townships and power stations, hospitals, outhouses and derelict buildings are all drawn from the artist’s surroundings. Even the fighter jet and the burning oil field were witnessed by the artists not in the Middle East but from the comfort of his living room couch, which also makes its appearance in one of the paintings in this exhibition.

The Old Masters are another important source of Mesaric’s inspiration. Their ghosts were ubiquitous in the artist’s earlier subject paintings and portraits, whether through a gesture, symbol, or connotative presence. However, for the first time this influence is being emphatically brought to the fore. Quotations from Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Velazquez, and others appear almost ephemerally, traced in a delicate shimmer of a white chinagraph.

F-117 Night Hawk and 'Supper at Emmaus', 2009 Oil on Canvas - 160 x 200 cm


Aesthetically and psychologically citizen of the world, yet physically and inextricably connected to Gippsland, Mersaric points out with these paintings that in our global egalitarian contemporaneity everyone is as close to the renowned masterpieces of the world as they to the nearest art book or computer screen. They posit Mesaric’s works somewhere between the celestial visions of saints in Old Master paintings and collaged social commentaries of James Rosenquist. They are metaphors for the higher aspirations of the artist and the universal exemplars of achievement for his art students. More importantly, they are visual ‘thought bubbles’, providing running commentaries on Mesaric’s vignettes of contemporary life.

Deep Water and 'St Mary Magdalene with the Smoking Flame', 2010 Oil on Canvas - 160 x 200 cm


For example, the juxtaposition of the landscape with Loy Yang power station and Velazquez’s The Triumph of Bacchus could be read simultaneously as the celebration of earth’s bounty through his allegories of mining and viticulture; the critique of our culture of consumption through the depiction of the billowing power station and Bacchus’s feast; and the warning against the abuse of the natural resources through his allusions to the prognosed environmental and climatic changes and the later depictions of the God of Wine as a dissipated and obese old man.

Multiple meanings similarly intertwine in Bridge at Tarraville and ‘The Virgin Mourning Christ’. Both images are those of quite contemplation. At the same time, the sunset heralds the end of one day and foreshadows the beginning of another just like the death of Christ foreshadowed his resurrection. The empty road is lined with telegraph poles which are eerily reminiscent of crucifixes; and if we read the road as the site of fatalities, the image of the Virgin becomes a universal symbol of loss and mourning, and the overall message of the painting as that of rebirth, impermanence, and transcendence.

Bridge at Taraville and 'The Virgin Mourning Christ', 2010 Oil on Canvas - 160 x 200 cm


It is tempting to think that the painting Entry Door and ‘The Inspiration of Saint Matthew’ is self-referential. Opening your mind to inspiration is likened by the artist to leaving the door ajar and inviting that next step to the great unknown, the leap of faith, the feeling that Mesaric has experienced no doubt on numerous occasions when physically opening the door to his own studio or making that first brush mark on an empty canvas.

Couch and 'Judith Beheading Holofernes', 2010 Oil on Canvas - 160 x 200 cm


One can continue analysing these paintings ad infinitum. The Anatomy Lesson above a hospital bed is perhaps a simultaneous reference to the faith in the progress of science and the acceptance of the inevitability of death. Velazquez’s older gentleman next to the young boy in The Waterseller acquires menacing overtones placed beside the snapshot of a toilet with the imprints of sickness or blood. The eternal gender battle for domestic dominance is expressed subtly in phallic and vulvic indentations in the couch, and much more graphically in the quotation from Judith and Holofernes above.

At times the correlation between the corresponding images may appear to be tenuous, but the artist always leaves enough visual clues to engage the viewer in unlocking their hidden meanings, create the parables of their own, and enrich their viewing experience in the process.

Burning Boat and 'Saint Sebastian Cared for by Irene', 2010 Oil on Canvas - 160 x 200 cm


Frank Mesaric’s exhibition, The Weight of Stone, shows that his art is impossible to pigeon-hole. It does not slot easily into a convenient art movement, and cannot be branded with a fashionable ‘ism’. Yet it participates actively in the plurality of postmodernist vision which constitutes one of the cornerstones of Australian art, and engages the viewer in a discourse about the authorship, sense of place, and the universal aesthetic identity.

But in order to engage in this visual discourse with the artist, we need to leave the extraneous noise of the world at the gallery’s door, enter without rushing, take a deep breath and abandon ourselves to contemplation. I promise the experience will be a rewarding one, for we stand to learn infinitely more about these paintings, and, by osmosis, about ourselves.

by Eugene Barilo Von Reisberg



To go to Frank Mesaric's website click here