Aspiring to express subtler layers of reality in his art, he gradually liberated himself from the limitations of an overt political agenda. Arnold Mesches, “Shock and Awe 23,” 2012. A/c, 80 x 104 in. © Arnold Mesches. Courtesy of the artist. The shock of his first encounter with Franz Kline’s paintings back in the fifties […]

I began thinking that something else was happening, and that something else had to be brought into my thinking as a social realist painter — how the hell can I bring that into my thinking as an image maker? Arnold Mesches, “Eternal Return,” 2013, acrylic on canvas and paper on canvas. 50 x 60 in. […]

Like we said in Part II of our Annual Recap, what stayed with us most from 2013 was mostly small and mostly quiet, meditative works that brought us back to the pleasures of long looking. Here’s a shortlist of the galleries and museums we felt did right by riding the counter-current, giving us intimately scaled […]

We started Tilted Arc back in October because we wanted to create a conversation around ideas of practice and intention. We are so deeply grateful to the artists who have contributed fresh and often challenging insight into how art and literature get made, and the essential place that materials, memory, perception and process claim in […]

Absurdity, as a concept…can transcend immediate frustration by asking the viewer to question, not only what they are seeing and feeling, but, more importantly, why they are questioning their awakened uneasiness. Hopefully, the dichotomy only increases when one is seduced by the richness of the painting’s surface and the enticing vividness of color… Arnold Mesches, […]

What this painting confirms for me is that the painting process is an exchange between internal and externalized aspects of the artist’s subjective, emotional life. Intense looking and reacting to one’s own marks and moves on the canvas over time constitute the substance of that exchange. Ultimately, even when I start with a model, I […]

…I felt I’d gotten the light I wanted. It looked and felt like water at night. The layering and pale pink over dark purple created the effect of light bouncing off a surface and I recognized a kind of transparent glow that had happened in the course of painting the barges… Katherine Bradford, “Night Divers.” […]

The degree to which the painter is transformed by their process is the degree by which the viewer can be transformed by, or enabled to “enter,” the painting. It’s not a finite record or exchange, but in the face of that genuine and meaningful articulation of transformation, the viewer does feel it, does “know it.” […]

The more art I see—and I think in 41 years in the art environment in New York I have seen quite a bit of art—enigma is that aspect of an artist’s work that holds me the longest and the thing that separates one artist from the rest. But enigma does not necessarily make you very […]