The color field abstractions of Tegene Kunbi.

Tegene Kunbi (1980) was born and raised in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. From 1998 to 2004 he, too, received his art training at the university. In 2007 he received the prestigious DAAD scholarship. A year later he moved to Berlin to further develop his painting there at the Universitat der Kunste.

His work is a reflection of an inner dialogue that culminates in a battle for structure. His rhythmic compositions betray both his African roots (landscapes, farmland and bustling markets) and, secondly, his stay in Germany (the 'Gründlichkeit "the orderly). Those two worlds he combines layer by layer to colorful and geometric grids. Under this apparent harmony of colors is a source of inner discord.

Recently he exhibited for Margaret Thatcher Projects and the Goethe Institut (Göttingen, Germany). (courtesy Tasting Art) 

From Africanah.org
 Oftentimes in the artist’s compositions, color is stacked. This dynamic arrangement of color may be viewed in works such as End Day (2013), where bold strokes of red and purple sweep across the composition. A myriad of activity is hinted at underneath, and can still be sensed in the strata of green, violet and blue.

Paintings such as Mold (2013) highlight the variation in his application of the paint. From light and translucent to thick and voluminous brushstrokes, the resulting surface is rich with texture and a history of saturated layers built one on another.
Tegene Kunbi was born in Ethiopia in 1980. He received his BFA from the University of Addis Ababa in 2004. Through 2009 he continued his education at the Universität der Künste Berlin. Recent exhibitions include Galerie Gerken (Berlin, DE) and the Goethe Institute (Göttingen, DE.). The artist is the recipient of the prestigious DAAD scholarship.

He evokes worlds – he is an alchemist like Klee, Rothko, Mitchell, Diebenkorn and Frankenthaler. Kunbi had me thinking of Kandinsky on the spirituality of art.
Kunbi lives and works in Berlin, having left Addis Ababa to further his painting studies with an esteemed group of professors at the Universität der Künste Berlin.
The artist’s deliberate compositions of geometric form and color express the artist’s constant mind’s eye view on his native landscape, its clothing and the mural paintings of his homeland. His rhythmic compositions translate his African roots – the lay of the land, the narrow streets, and the color-saturated bustling, crowded marketplaces filled with textiles and daily necessities.

 The artist’s deliberate compositions of geometric form and color express the artist’s constant mind’s eye view on his native landscape, its clothing and the mural paintings of his homeland. His rhythmic compositions translate his African roots – the lay of the land, the narrow streets, and the color-saturated bustling, crowded marketplaces filled with textiles and daily necessities.

All images are courtesy of The Margaret Thatcher Project
The artists website is here

Tribal Life in Old Lyme: Canada’s Colorblind Chronicler and his Connecticut Exile from The Public Domain Review

Abigail Walthausen explores the life and work of Arthur Heming, the Canadian painter who — having been diagnosed with colourblindness as a child — worked for most of his life in a distinctive pallete of black, yellow, and white.

Postmen of the Wilderness by Arthur Heming, 

first published in his Drama of the Forests

For most of his life, Arthur Heming, “painter of the great white north”, painted in a monochrome scheme of black, white, and yellow tones, choosing this style at least nominally because of an early diagnosis of color blindness. These possibly self-imposed restrictions lasted inexplicably until the age of sixty, when a full, nearly technicolor palette suddenly splashed across his canvases. Thematically, he worked with scenes whose colors were appropriately blanched: winter hunting and trapping expeditions that he took for the Hudson Bay Company and alongside people of the First Nations. His narrow focus in painting mirrored his work as a traveler, novelist, and illustrator, and the commercial nature of his output certainly influenced the mixed reception he received in the art market. In Canada he existed as an outsider of both the trapping communities he traveled with in the north and of his peers in the fine art world. His best work is transcendent, calling to mind the rich velvety grayscale of Gerhard Richter’s realistic paintings, while his weakest work is the sort of mystic wolf lore that later became the vernacular of furry bedspreads and black crewneck sweatshirts. Heming was conflicted about both his place in his homeland and his status as an artist. This is perhaps why he was so eager to find an adopted home for many consecutive summers in a distinctively non-arctic landscape, a farming community on the Long Island Sound, Old Lyme Connecticut.
While the Florence Griswold artist colony in Old Lyme Connecticut is generally touted as the “birthplace of American Impressionism”, Heming left a few distinctively Canadian marks on the communal dining room. First, there is his contribution to the collection of panels painted by artists who resided there; his, which depicts a lone canoe flying over rapids as seen from above, stands out from the rest because of its stark black and white color scheme and the narrow focus of its detail. Rather than a miniature painting of the pastoral Connecticut landscape, his seems like a snapshot of a larger, wilder, uncontainable narrative.

Shooting Death’s Rapids (1906), Heming’s contribution to the dining room 

panels at the Old Lyme artists’ colony

Barn find Bentley from The Steeple Times September 1, 2015

It’s in the Mail

“Barn find” 1934 Bentley owned by press magnate Esmond Harmsworth (later 2^nd Viscount Rothermere) to be sold at Silverstone Auctions sale at Salon Privé 2015

Esmond Harmsworth – later 2^nd Viscount Rothermere – led a remarkable life. Eton educated, an MP at the tender age of 21 and subsequently chairman of Associated Newspapers from 1932 to 1971 and of Daily Mail & General Trust Ltd from 1938 to 1978, Harmsworth purchased a ‘Derby’ Bentley 3½ litre three-position drophead coupé by Thrupp & Maberly new in 1934. That car, now in “barn find” condition is to be sold this week at the Salon Privé sale at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire.

It’s in the Mail –1934 ‘Derby’ Bentley 3½ litre three-posiition drophead coupé by

Thrupp and Maberly. 

 

Esmond Harmsworth, later 2nd Viscount Rothermere (1898 – 1978)

The interior of the car has certainly seen better days

Harmsworth’s car – which cost him £1,100 as a bare chassis and a further £500 for its coachwork (the equivalent of a total of £102,000 today) – remained in his ownership through the war but then was not heard of again until 1952 when it was sold for £800 to the works director of the Standard Telephone Company, Alfred Mason, for £800 (the equivalent of £22,000 today). His widow sold it to the athletics administrator and anti-drugs campaigner Sir Arthur Gold CBE (1917 – 2002) in 1965 for £180 (the equivalent of £3,200 today).

Now described as an “unmolested relic”, the car has been untouched since the 1950s and is offered with a guide price of £60,000 to £80,000. It will be sold this Friday, 4^th September 2015.

To book tickets to Salon Privé, click here. Prices for full entry range from £95 to £270 plus VAT and booking fees.

The Steeple Times

Important Marvel Bronze Age comic book. X-Men Giant Size. Volume 1 Number 1. 1975

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Are you ready for some football? We have lots of cool old stuff in stock right now for you.

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From The Comics Journal: The Art of "Dwig" Dwiggins.

Framed!

Dead Cats at Moonlight – The Art of Clare Victor “Dwig” Dwiggins

BY Paul Tumey Aug 31, 2015

There was a time when childhood in America meant using dead cats at moonlight to get rid of a wart. It meant throwing things at the teacher when her back was turned. It meant firecrackers in ant piles.
The early American newspaper comics celebrated this wild aspect of childhood.
One of the prime — and perhaps widest — tributaries into screwball comics is the “wild child” concept. Without works like Wilhelm Busch’s Max Und Moritz (1865) and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884), there might not be Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad as we know it.  Creators like Richard Outcault (The Yellow Kid, Kelly’s Kindergarten) and Rudolph Dirks (The Katzenjammer Kids) are well known and documented. A few years after Dirk’s irks and Outcault’s jolts, we encounter the madcap School Days (1909 and 1912)  the graceful, nostalgic, and slightly erotic re-imagining of the wild child comic by the free-spirited master who called himself “Dwig.”

SCHOOL DAYS by Clare Victor Dwiggins – August 5, 1909 (collection Paul Tumey)

Like Outcault’s “Kelly” comics, Dwig’s half-pages foreshadow Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder’s best work with Mad and Goodman Beaver. There are so many details and gags. It’s all combined organically into a tour de force of manic energy and chaos. Note the leering men in the window – they represent the school board and have decided they must do anything to keep the beautiful school teacher from resigning. There’s the alpha boy Pip Gint who has set up a Breughel-like contraption in which a fat boy chases a bucket of sweets and powers a ride. Animals, kids, adults swim in a rich soup of words (which in themselves are literary caricatures with mis-written letters, comical misspellings, slang, and invented words).

Who was the masterful artist behind this comic?
For about the first third of his busy and active career, Clare Victor “Dwig” Dwiggins (1877-1958) employed an effervescent, dense and decorative visual style. He also drew numerous depictions of appealing and slightly screwy Gibson Girls, which tied in to his Bohemian take on life.

But, around 1913, something happened – and Dwig shifted. The sexy women and screwball exuberance of his work changed to a simpler, less dense, more abstract style. He became obsessed with dwelling in the idyllic past of his small town childhood growing up in the mid-west in the late 1800’s — putting the names of his boyhood chums into his work, and disappearing into his studio for hours every day to live in simpler times.

SCHOOL DAYS by CLare Victor Dwiggins – October 26, 1926

Today, these indulgent and loving depictions of boyhood by Dwig can seem cloying and overly sentimental, but Dwig was sincere and authentic in this work. Perhaps one reason his later work fails to connect with many readers today is simply that we did not have the sorts of adventures he did — digging up dead cats at moonlight to remove one’s face with punk water, or tramping around the country with a pack of friends. If he were working today, perhaps Dwig would be turning out a comic strip version of “Freaks and Geeks.”

Pages from BILL’S DIARY, which collected a late Dwig series

Forgotten today, Dwig was one of the most productive cartoonists and illustrators of his generation. In addition to dozens of comic strip series published in American newspapers, Dwig created interesting and graceful art for hundreds of postcards, books and magazines articles and covers. He was an astonishingly fast and prolific creator. Once, he was working at his drawing table when something suddenly made him leap away from it, and a second later, his cabin studio by an upstate New York lake was struck by lightning, shattering his drawing board! It seems that Dwig was so quick not even lightning could catch him!

SEATLESS SAM, THE SUBWAY GINK by Clare Victor Dwiggins – October 28, 1911

Here is a 30-minute documentary about Dwig’s art I’ve made for this column. It represents a version of one-third of “Forgotten Funnies: Images of American in the Comics of Percy Winterbottom, Dwig, and Ving Fuller,” a presentation I will be delivering November 10, 2015 at Ben Katchor’s New York Comics and Picture-Story Symposium. Many thanks to Jane Davidson for her help and support.

From the New York Times: John Perreault, Art Critic (and Artist) Who Championed the New, Dies at 78

John Perreault, Art Critic (and Artist) Who Championed the New, Dies at 78

By WILLIAM GRIMES SEPT. 8, 2015

John Perreault reviewing a de Kooning show for The Village Voice. Credit Fred W. McDarrah/The Village Voice

John Perreault, an art critic at The Village Voice and The SoHo Weekly News who was an early champion of feminist art and the craft-oriented pattern and decoration movement in the 1970s, and who later held senior curatorial positions at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center on Staten Island and the American Craft Museum, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 78.

The cause was complications of gastrointestinal surgery, his husband, Jeff Weinstein, said.

Mr. Perreault started out as a poet and painter, but after being recommended by the poet and art critic John Ashbery, he began writing criticism for Art News. In 1966, The Village Voice made him its chief art critic, and he used the position to make the case for new art and work outside the mainstream, especially the creations of feminists like Judy Chicago; photorealism; art with gay content; and the pattern and decoration art associated with the Holly Solomon Gallery.

On Artopia, a blog on the website Arts Journal that he started in 2004, he described his interests as ranging “from Minimalism and Earth Art to realist painting; from pattern painting to performance art; from street works to ceramics and design.”

Mr. Perreault’s reviews were required reading for anyone trying to make sense of the swirling, often confusing, art scene of the 1970s, when movements and trends vied for attention.

As an artist himself, he became friends with many of the subjects he wrote about.

Alice Neel painted him, nude, in a portrait shown at her 1974 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In “The Turkish Bath,” Sylvia Sleigh painted him — nude again — with his fellow critics Lawrence Alloway and Carter Ratcliff. Depicted from the chest up, this time wearing a shirt, he was the subject of a 1975 portrait by Philip Pearlstein.

John Lucas Perreault (pronounced per-ALT) was born on Aug. 26, 1937, in Manhattan and grew up in Belmar, N.J., and other towns along the Jersey Shore. His French Canadian father, Jean, parlayed his experience cooking on merchant marine ships during the war into a series of restaurant jobs.

In high school, John scooped ice cream at a Howard Johnson’s along the Garden State Parkway where his father worked. There he mastered the profit-pumping technique of creating a curled scoop that looked like solid ice cream from the outside but actually contained a large air pocket.

After studying briefly at Montclair State Teachers College (now Montclair State University), he enrolled in Kenneth Koch’s poetry workshop at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan. His first poetry collection, “Camouflage,” was published by Lines Books in 1966, with an introduction by Mr. Ashbery. He was also the author of the collections “Luck” (1969) and “Harry” (1974).

In the mid-1960s Mr. Perreault began exhibiting his paintings at One Eleven Gallery in Greenwich Village. He soon turned to conceptual and performance art. For the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church-in-the Bowery, he recited a long poem, “Hunger,” as color slides were projected on his back. He also did a series of street projects with Vito Acconci and, with Hannah Weiner and Eduardo Costa, organized the Fashion Show Poetry Event, which featured clothing made by Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Alex Katz and other artists.

After The SoHo News, as it had been renamed, went out of business in 1982, Mr. Perreault became the chief curator of the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse. He was the director and curator of the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art at Snug Harbor from 1985 to 1989, a period when, the critic Vivien Raynor wrote in The New York Times in 1995, “the Staten Island art scene experienced a kind of golden age.”

He was a pivotal figure in organizing the first “Day Without Art” in 1989 to draw attention to the impact of AIDS on the arts. More than 600 cultural institutions took part in what became an annual event.

After serving as senior curator at the American Craft Museum (now the Museum of Arts and Design) from 1990 to 1993, he became the artistic director, and later executive director, of Urban Glass, a workshop and gallery in Brooklyn, and the editor of its magazine, Glass Quarterly.

Mr. Perreault taught at several schools, including the New School, the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, the University of Arizona in Tucson and the State University of New York at Binghamton. It was while teaching at the University of California, San Diego, that he met Mr. Weinstein. They married in 2008 in Massachusetts. He is also survived by a brother, Ron, and a sister, Barbara Kaska.

Mr. Perreault was the author of numerous catalogs and books, including “Philip Pearlstein: Drawings and Watercolors” (1988). His fiction was collected in “Hotel Death and Other Tales,” published in 1989.

In recent years Mr. Perreault began painting again, exhibiting at Gallery 125 in Bellport, N.Y., on Long Island, where he had a second home. He turned to unusual media, including toothpaste, sand and instant coffee, a nod to Bellport’s status as the summer home of the man who first mass-produced instant coffee.

“Although my guess is that the art ‘object’ is done with, I myself still go on making ‘paintings,’ but this doesn’t have much to do with making salable physical objects,” he told the magazine Art Experience NYC in 2011. “Making them is more like philosophical investigations, art criticism or yoga.”