We want to question Tyler Green‘s gulaging of Sarah McEneaney as a regional painter in Modern Art Notes, the other day. We don’t know David Bates’ work (Green compares Bates to McEneaney), but judging from the image MAN ran, we have to question placing the two of them in the same sentence, let alone in the same post. (top image McEneaney’s “My myomectomy”)
McEneaney is not really about Philadelphia. Her work is about her life as a paradigm of the artist in the world. The specificity of her images to Philadelphia and her own private life and daily life transcend themselves. We’d compare her to Florinne Stettheimer and Persian miniatures.
As for regionalism, we don’t get what’s wrong with it or why it’s being damned. We have particular fondness for a number of “regional” painters whose work talks to us from afar–like Grant Wood, some Thomas Hart Benton, Charles Burchfield, oh that’s enough for starters. (bottom image is random Persian miniature from Google images)
