A Traveler's Digest

Whenever I travel, I like to create a visual journal that acts as a repository for all my memories;  a book that I can flip through at any time and be brought right back into the thick of the adventure. I try to journal at some point on each day of all my trips, while the experience is fresh in my mind.

A few of my travel journals, filled with memories...

Greece

Italy

New Mexico

And my newest journal, which itself went on a journey from here...

to here...

London and Prague

A glimpse of what is inside...

I have created a slideshow of each and every page from this journal which can be seen at

Create Mixed Media.

You can read more about my journal-making process on Bridgette Guerzon Mills' wonderful site amanobooks in this interview from 2009.

A Day at Dia: Beacon

Next stop on my road trip...Dia: Beacon. This museum is the home of Dia Art Foundation's collection of art from the 1960's to the present. Located on the banks of the Hudson River in Beacon, NY, the museum is housed in a former Nabisco box printing factory that was redesigned by the artist Robert Irwin. It is impressive place to view an equally impressive collection of art.









I planned my trip to Dia: Beacon to see a temporary exhibit of one of my most favorite artists ever...Antoni Tapies. Tapies is a Spanish Catalan painter whose work tends toward abstract expressionism but truly transcends this approach. His artwork, though usually canvas-based, is highly sculptural and textural. He often incorporates marble dust and sand, and sometimes uses material and objects to create assemblages on his canvases. And he often adds numbers, letters, and sweeping gestural marks to his paintings. I first read about the exhibit here in the New York Times.



The exhibit, entitled "The Resources of Rhetoric", was well worth the trip. Unfortunately, Dia: Beacon allows absolutely no photography. (This is one of my pet peeves, as for me, viewing art in a museum or gallery seems incomplete if I cannot photograph it). However, several of the paintings in this exhibit were borrowed from the Fundacio Antoni Tapies in Barcelona and I had photographed them on a visit there several years ago.









And just because I am so inspired by Tapies' work, here are a few more images not from this show, including an accordion book that was exhibited at MoMA:











I discovered the work of so many more amazing artists at Dia: Beacon. Again, as there was no photography allowed, I will post examples of the work of each artist from my own photographs that I have taken at other galleries, museums, and at Sotheby's, the auction house.



John Chamberlain: Creates freestanding and wall hanging sculptures from old automobile parts.







Louise Bourgeois: Sculptor of abstract and organic shapes. Also famous for her spiders, one of which was at Dia: Beacon. This photograph was taken at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.







Joseph Beuys: German artist who created performance art pieces as well as installations, paintings, sculpture, and assemblages. His work was often political and humanistic.







Gerard Richter: Diverse artist creating blurred figurative paintings, abstract paintings, and overpainted photographs.







Bruce Nauman: Artist working in a wide variety of media, including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance.







Richard Serra: The museum has several of his monolithic, 13-feet high, curved steel plates, which you can enter and/or walk through. I was most amazed by the "skin" of the steel, composed of a natural patina of peeling and velvety rusts, ochres, blues, browns, and greys. I have included some close-ups below taken from a previous posting from his show at MoMA.

This Ain't Trash...It's Art

Continuing on my Road Trip, but still close to home, I saw an exhibit at Sikkema, Jenkins & Co. in NYC showcasing the art of Mark Bradford, an American artist who just won a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. He uses mostly material that he finds on the streets of LA to create highly textured, abstract works. His process is about adding layers and tearing away to create what look like to me to be urban landscapes. Here are some examples, with close-up, detail shots included.








Take 1 minute and 34 seconds out of your day to view this video about Mark. I guarantee that many of his statements here will resonate deeply. After all, "This Ain't Trash...It's Art."

On the Road Again

I am hitting the road and want to take you along for the ride. Over the course of the next week or so, I will be sharing some of my stops along the way. And what better place to begin than NYC, my home base.

I just visited an amazing exhibit at Pace Wildenstein highlighting the work of Maya Lin and entitled "Three Ways of Looking at the Earth." Maya, well known for her design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, is an American artist that works in the space between art and architecture. The exhibit presents three large scale installations that allow the viewer to almost become part of each, as you walk through, around, and under the work.

"2 x 4 Landscape" consists of more than 50,000 two-by-four pieces of sustainable wood, set vertically to portray the swell of a hill. At its peak it is 10 feet high and covers a space of 1,900 total square feet. It changes from every angle and I found it to be mesmerizing, sensual, serene, and powerful...all at the same time. Click each image to enlarge to get a better view.






"Blue Lake Pass" consists of 20 separate blocks of particle board and represents the narrow passageways through the mountain passes of the Rocky Mountains. I found this piece to be the perfect combination of ordered grid and undulating curves.





Here is a short video of all three installations that was filmed earlier in the year when the exhibit was at the Cocoran.