Eileen Goodman, Lauren Garvey and Aubrey Levinthal at Gross McCleaf Gallery

 

Aubrey Levinthal, Foggy Table, oil on panel, 16 x 16

 

We went to see Lauren Garvey, Aubrey Levinthal, and Eileen Goodman’s openings at Gross McCleaf. Levinthal is like the Bonnard of Philadelphia; her transparent paints and reliance on bright, visionary underpainting that gleams uncovered  gives these still lifes a euphoria and splendor.

 

Lauren Garvey’s abstract paintings make a more introspective impression – mysterious, lower chroma meditations that leave charm behind for something interrogative. They are deeper than Jasper Johns’ abstract painting, but share his confrontational nature, as if to say “what’s this” of something the viewer can come to know, but not understand.

 

Eileen Goodman’s realist watercolors display the abstract organization of objects prepared for painting. The added element is done for color and because it can be included. They then have a relationship akin to the crowd and a showy outsider. The tone, however, is somber, making these outsiders conscious and tragic as an Ayn Rand heroine (if there is such a thing; if not, there should be).

 

Gross McCleaf Gallery

127 S Sixteenth Street

Philadelphia, PA 19102

Oct. 2 – 26, 2013





Bill Scott at Hollis Taggart Galleries

 

 

                                              The Fourth Cherry Tree, oil on canvas, 65 x 34 in.

 

The 21st Century has arrived, and this is what it consists of -- the imagination and empathy of color. What Cezanne did for the apple, Scott does for the viewer. This is partly due to something Rothko took us through on his own behalf, for his own suffering. But the result of painting after another half century of modernist development has landed in America from a unique and apt shore: the city of Philadelphia.

The difference might be said to be a shift in the last two years from opaque to transluscent paint application. It might be said to be a shift from lower chroma to high chroma paint mixture; but none of this is as important as the unique experience that continues from the former paintings, but blooms into undeniable transport.

This empathy of tender, brave and luminous paint, a shimmer of radiance lighting the mind, is as new as the iphone is to the telephone, yet just as human. What you have before you is a symphony without elegy. Nothing is impossible to imagine in a state of joy like this. There is no ballast, just lift. The eyes are upward, they see for you around corners, they see the sound of the surf in the sky, in a bath, in the reconfigured impressionism of Renoir.

You can't really say impressionism, or realism, leads to this; they lead to each other; or better yet, they stem from the same inner source of the artist's inspiration. That one artist can give us such light is like saying a man can be the helmsman of dawn.

Joy and the ode to joy is all!

In Arcadia
Bill Scott at Hollis Taggart Galleries
3 October to 2 November 2013
958 Madison Ave.
New York, New York 10021