…its failure reveals the exact element I want to express. In this sense I want to focus on drawing’s inherent nature of being intimate and immediate, unstable, alive. This quality of drawing, exposed through revealing the process, opens space for the viewer to experience an organic moment of tension, just like every moment in nature. […]

How can one, with any seriousness or sense of commitment, create a painting and take it through its life, and it doesn’t involve a loss as you develop it. Ruth Miller Forge, “Enamel Jug Still Life,” 2001 (reworked 2013), oil on linen © Ruth Miller Forge. Courtesy the artist and New York Studio School. Photo: […]

This painting happened at the end of a work session on a summer day, when sweatiness, general mess and frustration let mind barriers fall. I was on a pink jag, thinking about Wendy Davis’ filibuster Mizunos and the image of Malala Yousafzai making her speech at the UN, clothed in Benazir Bhutto’s sari.” Marianne Gagnier, […]

Abstract painting requires a huge amount of faith in oneself. The process is mysterious and almost impossible to teach, as each artist needs to find his/her own way. If one can approach each painting having the love and trust that things will be all right, that an image will come eventually, we will make the […]

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 […]

Process is very important, but process alone can often end up being too much of a “period piece novelty.” And I wanted to avoid that which was easy for me to do because I‘m not a process artist. I had started building up layers of paint using just a mixture of latex, gesso and what […]

After a while it became very obvious that not only was there a great deal of potential there for drawing, there was a great deal of potential there for painting. And that’s really the simple way in which the work I have been doing in drawing and painting for the last 8 years was generated. […]

No one would have, even to this day, conceived of the question: “Is drawing dead?” That would never ever occur to someone. So the question then became: What is it that happens when we go from drawing to painting that so many people seem anxious to kill? And the best that I could come up […]

My own personal, most dominate, influence as an American painter from the beginning has always been de Kooning and to this day I don’t think I have ever gotten over “Pink Angels” simply for the way in which de Kooning uses line as an articulating, overlapping depth element and for the way he plunges that […]

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 […]