Our twenty-sixth post of the series, Artists in the Time of Coronavirus includes Monica Kane, Su Knoll Horty, Sarah Kolker, Weiyi Chen, Ira Wright, John Muse, and Robert Younger! Thank you for all who submitted! And if you want to participate, send your statement (250 words max) and 2 photos to support@theartblog.org. More details here. Stay safe and stay positive, and come back in the days to come for more “Artists in the Time of Coronavirus.” We have a wonderful community and are so proud of being able to share everyone’s art.
[Note: We have gotten over 250 submissions, so if you haven’t seen yours yet, don’t worry- it is coming, and we can’t wait to post it!]
Monica Kane
The current quiet in our world is remarkable. The air is so much cleaner without the many cars traveling each day. And I am grateful and humbled by the abundance of honest-to-goodness warriors that are all around. In my studio this morning, I read some poetry before taking to some work in wire. Keeping quiet by Pablo Neruda, some instructions from Grapefruit by Yoko Ono (thanks to a dear, talented friend) and the following poem thanks to a distant artist friend who introduced me to this poet:
FOR LUCK
These pines have their own way
in the day’s early heat. Still,
not an animal moving.What matters
comes down to names,
our home, this tiny planet
going nowhere we can understand
in plenty of time.A wind picks up,
see what there is to be seen,
push your luck, rest.-Anthony Petrosky from JURGIS PETRASKAS, 1983
Su Knoll Horty
In the time of the Coronavirus, the sensation of color, the lushness of oil paints, the thrill of creating, and the surprise of abstraction are still what drives me to paint–Add drama to the canvas, and I’m hooked!
My hope is that my paintings’ lushness, power and mood-altering color will affect the viewer on a visceral, not practical level. I want the viewer to escape with me into our imaginations so that they pay attention to, remember, and ultimately are transported into the world of color!My latest series is called Color Pops, Beautiful Transients.
Sarah Kolker
Instead of me in my studio working, it is my children. My daughter has learned to draw portraits from one of my lessons I created as an online teaching tool. After spending an afternoon in the studio on her class lessons, while I was on a conference call with my coworkers, my daughter decided to paint a portrait. My son of course wanted to join in on the action after waking up from his nap, which was in his stroller after a hike, not at school like normal on a Monday afternoon.
Weiyi Chen
Hi,
This Weiyi Chen, a graduate student from Pratt Institute. The project called Ultramarine,which I finished recently.Through this work,I want to express: We are always in a dynamic and static interlaced world, every stationary object contains motion, every moment of motion also has the meaning of relative rest. Just like the ultramarine, A kind of pigment. Although it is a static objective substance, its story of crossing the ocean involves movement.URL: https://www.wchen306.com/ultramarine
About the life recently,
Because of the epidemic, most of us spend more time alone with ourselves, think about things and accumulate creative inspirations.I also got some inspiration from the recent social situation and made a small sculpture about social conmments.I’m sure it’s a time that may disrupt a lot of planning, but it’s also a great time to stop and think.
Ira Wright
I got a late start. I’m an unknown 87 year old outsider artist living in Santa Fe. I have COPD and allergies. I’m painting as fast and as hard as I can because I know if the virus catches me, I have maybe a week. No time to waste.
—Ira Wright
eMail: studio@irawrightart.com
Website: https://irawrightart.com
Instagram: @theartofwright
John Muse
I’m drawn to auction catalogs because they are readymade exhibitions of readymade things; they are marketplaces too: artworks “hang” in the space of the page, have hard, clean edges, white backgrounds, captions, prices, provenance; they are solicitous, alluring, costly, important. A cultural infrastructure is thus visible: objects, paintings, photographs, famous names, famous works, collector bait, opening bids, beauties of all sorts.
I operate on this infrastructure, sounding its strengths and weirdness, by riffing on the prepositional logic of paper and paint: one thing on top of another, or under, or inside, or next to: revealing, obscuring, supporting, abutting. Visual and conceptual confusions abound: entanglements of images as obdurate things and images as containers of things; pictures are objects and pictures are windows through which we see objects.
But then paint is to paper as embellishment and defacement are to an ideal. I decorate and mar; I cook and spoil. By smearing paint, by stenciling and cutting biomorphic forms—by which I mean blotches, holes, and various organs, bleeding and seeping and infecting things and spaces. The rounded and bloated against the rectangular and sharp; iconophila (I’m making something delicious) versus iconoclasm (I’m befouling something beautiful).
And though I’ve been working this way for several years and in a more concentrated way since the summer, in the midst of this pandemic, in the grip of the foreseeable now, with even shorter attention spans, with contacts and spaces of all sorts being suspect, terrifying, deadly and yet still life-giving, necessary, these paintings suddenly look like evidence of something curious and ugly. The auction block, the things we trade, the homes and museums and archives we populate with them—these vessels are not just broken, they do the breaking. Too much, everywhere, all the time.
jmuse@sonic.net
http://www.finleymuse.com/
https://www.instagram.com/johnmuseartist/
https://haverford.academia.edu/JohnMuse
Robert Younger
March 11th I took a Concord Bus to celebrate my sisters 76th birthday in Philadelphia on Sunday. A three day layover in New York City would be ample time for friends, art and a walkabout. That Wednesday I was aware of the Coronavirus and that New Rochelle was a hot spot. Along with my toothbrush were two handy pocket sized sanitizers. On arrival I walked from East 42nd Street, inhaling the sights and sounds over to 27th and 10th Avenue. Had a great dinner with friends and discussed the virus. First thing Thursday bused uptown to MOMA next to a woman dressed in plastic, wearing a mask. The Judd show was fantastic. For me it’s all about The Multicolored Works. Friends came over for dinner that night and we discussed both Judd and COVID – 19. My host after walking the dog Friday the 13th morning described the 8AM line at Whole Foods as going around the block. Like a black and white episode of The Twilight Zone everything around me was starting to shut down. Managed to see the Al Taylor drawing show at the Pierpont Morgan Library which was very quiet. Stop. This is when I realize I cannot continue. it would not be appropriate or prudent. No to visiting Invisible City show, Philadelphia friends or family. Caught the 8AM bus and retreated back across the Maine border. For 14 days I have been staying as far far away as possible from my wife.
Robert Younger
3/30/20
IG: robert_younger_studio
