Bellingham's Thomas Wood paints as if he were knitting thick threads into a coarse version of a landscape. His best work has a battered gleam, as if it had been through a lot. The awkward quality of his oils brings to mind Albert York, whom Calvin Tompkins once called the best unknown painter in America. Tompkins was referring to unknown in New York terms. Wood is largely unknown in Seattle even, though he lives a hour north of it and has shown in the city for years.At Lisa Harris through May 2. … [Read more...]

When you open a sentence, you instantly see the birds fly out of it. Robert DuncanOlivia Parker … [Read more...]

From Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, Winter Arm, 2007, and Summer Arm, 2008.Body farming on the moon, here. … [Read more...]

Miner's Camp, Jewell Ridge, VA (2006) Click to enlarge. … [Read more...]

About this post on Gala Bent, Louis Torres quoted from and queried:"No matter how she crowds her space, nobody's home.... Her drawings appear to be waiting for you to leave, in order to disappear."Please translate. I responded: There's a mute, recessive quality to her drawings that comes close to threatening her form.Because I realized I wasn't connecting with him at all, I added:I think of it as a good thing.I was going for an improvisation rather than a review, a moment instead of a full-dress regalia.  Torres, co-editor of Aristos, … [Read more...]

On vacation, Arnold Schwarzenegger ran into a bear and bought it. The New York Times had the story first, with the SF Chronicle trailing. It's never good to trail a national paper on your local story. Those who think getting stomped on such a trivial matter doesn't matter haven't worked at a newspaper. A four-footed bronze animal blocking the entrance to the governor's office qualifies as an event. The Chronicle should have had its paws all over it.Jon Carroll's piece is nice, but I wish the paper had sent its art critic, Kenneth Baker. Mr. … [Read more...]

If the polarities of art were considered in political terms, Obama would be classical (restrained, cerebral, detached) instead of expressionist (emotional, intuitive, physically engaged). Bush rose to neither occasion. With his irrationally sunny and superficial certainties, he would be as out of place in the latter tradition as the former.(Francis Bacon, click images to enlarge.)Nor would Bush have been at home in the Dark Ages. His privileged and tidy-minded version of the evangelical was unknown in the 14th century. Saying that century's … [Read more...]

Green Guy Flag … [Read more...]

Gala Bent draws dense, dainty tableaus that make light work of heavy symbolism. Her heart's in hallucinated oddities with silky, spatial connectives and small, bright bursts of color. No matter how she crowds her space, nobody's home. She's myth-minded but modest. Her drawings appear to be waiting for you to leave, in order to disappear.At Gallery4Culture till Friday. … [Read more...]

Susan Skilling was raised on the lovely muck of the Northwest School's color palette, those muted grounds seeded with light. Hers isn't a name that leaps to mind when talking about the region's prominent artists. For decades she has labored in semi-obscurity, praised when she exhibits but prone to drop out of sight for years on end before surfacing again to startle those who see her work. It's classically Northwest in tonality and aspiration, using dim tones to seek celestial things in gouache or opaque watercolor on paper. Forward momentum … [Read more...]

From James Harris, where her work is on view till May 2: Stephanie Syjuco uses the tactics of bootlegging, reappropriation, and fictional fabrications to address issues of cultural biography, labor, and economic globalization...She constructed small cut-out dioramas taken from tourist photographs of the Philippines and placed them conspicuously throughout her apartment. She then photographed her living space as a personal travelogue....By examining and constructing objects with fictional identities and histories, the artist reveals a larger … [Read more...]

Amelie Chabannes:Joseph Mills: … [Read more...]

Looking up from below, N. P. Thompson: And down from above, Robert Gober.Harrison Higgs' drains are clogged..But Buster Simpson's serve a useful purpose: … [Read more...]

Randy Kennedy wrote about them here. Slate offered its version here. Art Mobs ventured into the field here. PDL in Seattle topped all these others with For the tan you've been craving, stop by Flavin!Talking in museums is almost always an attempt to tour guide. I try not to bother others as they contemplate art in museums, but sometimes, when confronted with a genuine art critic emergency (Is there an art critic in the house?) I intervene, with varying results. Latest entry, Momus (Nick Currie). Says Art Fag City:Momus gives a highly … [Read more...]

Bob Thompson: Thompson showed up half-a-century later in the work of Christopher Lux, images here, who's doing it on purpose. Lux:This is work from a consumerist eye, an exercise of interpretation, the work of others used in a search for my own voice. Identity is no longer based on creation of something from nothing, but an attachment to a collection of images and ideas, juxtaposed just so, to create 'the individual.' Like listing bands, television shows, books and movies as a means to attain a whole. As we surround ourselves with the ghostly … [Read more...]

Raising moral objections to art has a long and dishonorable history. Who today sympathizes with Savonarola, the 15th-century Italian monk who convinced Botticelli at the end of his life that his paintings were sinful, or with Ernest Pinard, the 19th-century prosecutor who tried to ban Madame Bovary? Savonarola and Pinard are disgraced names, yet some of their censorious ideas are still with us, nagging at the edges of art. "To impose upon art the single rule of public decency is not to enslave it but to honor it," Pinard claimed. Ah, the … [Read more...]

We're doomed. The solution they posit has already been tried. Abundance makes it futile, but as a one-day foray it worked for C-Monster. A post she originally titled A great pair of tits proved popular. Talk about bait and switch. When sex-starved boys clicked, they got this: … [Read more...]

Considering the free flow of cultural influences, why is it that American artists engage the carnival theme with gamey vulgarities, while Europeans produce high-toned spectacle? Extras from splatter and noir movies populate American work, and the gilded glide through their European equivalents. Case in point: Enrico David, finalist for this year's Turner Prize and recently at the Seattle Art Museum thanks to SAM curator Michael Darling.Born in Italy and living in London, David is a slippery devotee of magical thinking. Even when working alone, … [Read more...]

From the online-only version of the newspaper at which I once so happily toiled, this sentence: The King County Sheriff's Office has released more information on the man who stubbled of the woods early Tuesday near North Bend.Anybody could write stubbled instead of stumbled, but in the old world, such goofs were far less likely to appear, thanks to copy editors. Readers now serve that role, but at the PI, the writers don't seem to notice. The story posted at 12:54 p.m. Tuesday. The first correction came in at 2:08. It's now Wednesday morning, … [Read more...]

The lace that peers out of pockets and lines a neck like blind worms in search of soft earth was free, but Goya charged extra for hands. Allowed into a painting, they have the tendency to take over. Oskar Kokoschka let them.Bruce Nauman assigns them lowly roles (false friend or pugilist). Hannah Wilke, right hand drawn by the left, tracked cancer.Debra Baxter provided one of hers with a fallback position. She may not be able to take you down, but the brass emblem of intimacy sheltering her middle finger will.Eduardo Calderon - Caliban in … [Read more...]

Shot taken in Seattle at 17th Ave. and Harrison St., an affluent, gracious old homes portion of Capitol Hill:  … [Read more...]

From George Chacona via Devon Cannon:From Charles Krafft, occasional poet:GOD TOLD ME TO GIVE YOU THE FINGER God told the Jews to leave Egypt. He told the Mormons to go to Salt Lake City, Set up a giant choir, and a 7up bottling plant. Then God told me to give you the finger The next time I saw you. It is not that God is angry with you, You cannot anger God. It's just that He wants to be sure You still believe in miracles. … [Read more...]

(Image left, Deborah Alma Wheeler. Click to enlarge.)Opens May 1. Web site here.Artist/curator Sharon Arnold put together a good local list, here.I can't imagine a better image for the festival than Wheeler's partially unzipped carrying case carried into erotica by metaphoric implication. Every year this festival gets better. Even in the beginning, when the art wasn't worth noting, the audiences certainly were. (Stories here and here.)Joey Veltkamp is in this year's lineup with a lovely painting from a series celebrating the 1970s:Robert … [Read more...]

Bob Zoell (Click to enlarge) … [Read more...]

Paul Stout:Stout's sculptural models are filters through which he distances himself from the world. As a kid, he worked in a hobby store. Systems tinkering was mandatory. The geeky youth he must have been is now blinding us with science and passing it off as art. From his cracked accounts, the tragedy of our cracked relationship with the earth takes slippery and uncertain shape.Susan Robb: She works in the gap between flesh and fantasy, nature and technology, attraction and repulsion. Her meanings slide across each other like tectonic plates. … [Read more...]

Double Standard, 1961, via MAN … [Read more...]

Audubon killed his models to paint them alive. Since his day, more artists have tended to let the dead be dead. Lately, there are a lot of dead out there. Roni HornMorris GravesMasahisa Fukase … [Read more...]

Charles Ray, Plank Piece, 1973Jennifer Zwick, Hanging Front, Hanging Back, 2007 … [Read more...]

Letters sideways and shuffled in the middle (via):Do the letters spell out Lancelot, LA's Chance Lots or Jack Pierson's title, Last Chance Lost? Just as dyslexics don't limit themselves to one meaning, the work itself invites multiple readings. Pierson's battered cluster of light-struck letters is the equivalent of Thelonious Monk's embrace of wrong/right notes... Because everybody knows that in art, wrong can be right.(Baldessari)Stephanie Syjuco at James Harris Gallery through May 2. … [Read more...]

When the visual engages the verbal, the former is frequently an illustration of the latter. Michael Spafford's homages to Wallace Stevens' poem are a rare choice, not the usual echo. They are a duet with Stevens, a point/counterpoint.Stevens' Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird first published, 1917.Spafford's woodcuts of the same title, 17.5 by 23 inches, from 1975, with a second entirely different set a decade later. Images via Francine Seders Gallery.That's why for each stanza there are two images, the first from 1975, the second from … [Read more...]