The Next Best Thing

Francis Cunningham's Masters Exhibit at the Century Association - Video

If you are not able to get to New York City by November 20, to see the Exhibition in person fear not, we have for you the next best thing. 

Please enjoy this video presentation of the Exhibit. 

Click to Virtually Visit the Exhibition

Arthur Cohen & Francis Cunningham Exhibition, May 2010 in Red Bank NJ

Those who could not make it to Francis Cunningham and Arthur Cohen "The Landscape Cape Code and the Berkshires" show's opening reception at Laurel Tracey Gallery last weekend, we managed to glean some images from the gallery and a guest and bring your a slideshow.  Click here for the slideshow. You can also see the exhibition at the gallery until May 20, 2010.

Laurel Tracey, Francis Cunnigham, Arthur Cohen, Kitty Cunningham before the show in the gallery.

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Arthur Cohen, who is showing Provincetown Harbor paintings in the exhibition, just like Francis Cunningham studied with Edwin Dickinson, although at an earlier time.  Laurel Tracey Gallery page says the following about Arthur Cohen, his style and technique:

Cohen's sweeping panoramas of Provincetown Harbor are developed from storied layering and scraping - thin levels of paint build up over a day. week, or even over several years, referred to by Cohen as the "ghost" in his painting. It is this "buried" sense of time and continuity that evokes a sense of timelessness and spatial infinity. Working with a focused palette of blues and grays, occasionally some pink and green, Cohen repeatedly brings the viewer a synthesis of light from different moments;

Keeping in mind the common denominator, it is interesting to see the difference and similarities between the two painters' work in this exhibition.

Designs within Design

Yesterday was supposed be our video editing day- finish another portrait- but we started late and decided to make a short pretty unedited video about the concept of "designs within the design."  The idea of the designs with design define quite well, although not completely, Dick's painting process.
So, for the video, using one of his older, small, premiere coup landscapes, which he had used to create a background for a large nude of Tom Johnson- whose video portrait is coming soon- Dick illustrates how a viewer's eyes enter the painting through the edges of the painting. He flips the painting to its sides and upside down to analyze the framing, a great, simple tool in painting, photography and critical tradition, to get a better sense of space and the painting's compositional organization.
He then moves to another painting, the work in progress, the three figure piece, and reveals a stages in his color-spot process and the way he arrives at designs within the design of the picture as a whole.

The End Game Never Ends, and Self-Portrait

While I'm editing portraits, Dick is among other projects working on the three figure painting, which yesterday got its first spots of color. He's also touching up some nudes that we'll video very soon.

And then the most novel and fun for me at the moment, Dick has been pulling out various paintings from years ago which exhibit such variety of style. One of such paintings is a self-portrait as a "married buck right out of art school" with some early painting in the background done from the head, not nature.

Weekend of August 22nd: Perke and Dick in the Berkshires

Despite the "micro burst" storm that tore through the Berkshires area and despite merciless mosquitoes, we managed to do quite a lot of work with Dick. I took scores of photos of the barn, of the outside and inside, but especially the studio. Here is the set and here the slideshow, to see almost all of the work and fun in photos an videos. Not yet ready is a longer video, which I'm beginning to edit now.
Talking with Dick about the still life he's currently working on demystified a lot of painting process for me and I hope to show Dick elaborating on it in our video.
This is part of the still life set up, of which only a fragment is visible on the canvas and on the "map."

The rest of the set-up. The dried fruit is a beauty.

Finally, an attempt by me to capture the whole of the setup with my still camera, as it is on Dick's canvas.

Something, I'd not known about Dick's painting process is "the map." He starts his longer projects with a map like this, transfers it to a canvas and then begins his "color spot" painting process. (The many maps that got saved would look great strangely as a B&W graphic novel, in my opinion.) The "color spot" process that Dick uses justly attracted attention of my companion to the Berkshires, partner at NY Art Beat and husband, Kosuke who brought attention to it on his Japanese blog. He touched upon the subject of the technique and wrote in general about our trip and some of the anecdotes that Dick is so good at telling.

Here is the yet unfinished still life on canvas.

When not working on our video and photos, or enjoying a few meals prepared by Kitty, Dick showed us around the area where he's been coming to paint every summer since the 60s. So, here is Perke and Dick by one of the pear trees.

I'm taking the the pear to the barn and then to NY. It was good after a few days of sitting on my fridge.

Walking through the swampy area in the back, from which we had to eventually withdraw, because my shoes were not ready for such an adventure and mosquitoes were biting strong.

At the falls, which Dick claims he used to run to daily after a day of work to cool off. We drove, due to the unstable weather and the mosquitoes.

Saturday afternoon in the barn- resting with tea before Kosuke and my leaving for NY- after a lunch of Sheffield corn, sandwiches and some wine which we'd bought for early Friday dinner in the barn. The dinner was supposed to be followed by Dick and Kitty's trip to a ballet by Ulysses_Dove. All of it was literally cut short by the storm. With the power and telephone out, we made the most of the evening by driving to the nearest restaurant for a good meal and plenty of anecdotes.

New Text: A Vision of the Nude (Abridged for Linea)

We've decided to delete one of our earlier entries containing the essay A Vision of the Nude by Francis Cunningham, because it's too difficult to read as one block of text. At the same time Dick has recently ironed out a more readable version of A Vision of the Nude (Abridged for Linea), which I put up on his website in place of the older version. Enjoy the read. Let us know if you have questions or comments. Dick will try to respond in some form.

"The lack of rigorous training directed toward a specific visual goal – the nude – combined with a view of humanity that saw the model as more than a studio prop for learning to draw, paint and sculpt, led my sculptor colleague, Barney Hodes, and myself to develop new approaches. By focusing on the model, we were working on a nude that was neither idealized and classical nor modernist and anti-classical. It wasn’t a nude people expected or could readily categorize – a Venus or Apollo, say, or a Picasso or a Modigliani. It would be a different nude, and when we founded the New Brooklyn School of Life Drawing, Painting & Sculpture, Inc. (1979-82), we were on our way to articulating what that nude could be." -Francis Cunningham
excerpt from A Vision of the Nude (Abridged for Linea)

Another reason (a less important detail) to remove that previews version of A Vision of the Nude from this blog was the confusion about the authorship of the essay, due to an image of the bust of Francis Cunningham by Barney Hodes, which I'd originally used to break up the text.
Dick still thinks that the bust is a good illustration to his text.


"Francis Cunningham" by Barney Hodes

Here is another bust by the same hand of Barney Hodes:


"Mason Harding" by Barney Hodes. Photograph: by Christopher Wood