Dennis Hollingsworth

See I See #9: The New, New Museum

In Advance (of the broken arm)

Last night, I attended a talk between Thierry de Duve and Jeremy Johnston at the Emily Harvey Foundation about the work and influence of Marcel Duchamp and Marcel Broodthaers. This is in the wake of MoMA's exhibition currently up now until this fall 2026: Marcel Duchamp. This was my first exposure to Jeremy Johnston, he seemed well regarded by the crowd. As for Thierry de Duve, among his books, I have read his Duchamp's Telegram: From Beaux-Arts to Art in General and I found it to be so fascinating, I annotated it more than any other book I've owned.

I took notes.

*

See I See #8: Layering, featuring Colin Thomson and Adam Simon

See I See #8: Layering, featuring Colin Thomson and Adam Simon

The issue of laying in art and painting seems as natural as the air we breathe, but I think that the topic has become perhaps such a key feature of contemporary life as we pass the first quarter of the 21st century that it is incumbent upon us to focus on it and open the topic up a bit. To do this, I have invited artists Colin Thomson and Adam Simon to join me in conversation in each of their studios to unpack this subject in the light of their oeuvre.

See I See is a channel devoted to conversations about art, the art we see, the art we've seen and the art we'd like to see.

History is only history when it's documented. Our exhibitions are documented as installation shots, as lines in a CV and hopefully when a review is published. Back in the day, publications were in the hands of power. I hope, with some confidence, that See I See adds another, perhaps more stubborn document into art history, complimentary but not contingent to a gallery show. We artists can document history too.

Time stamps:
0:58 Introduction of the topic of layering in painting.
6:28 Colin Thompson introduces his painting. Bringing drawing into painting.
7:29 Color influencing how you see different layers.
7:46 Fusing line and color.
8:19 The use of preparatory drawings while not knowing the outcome.
10:39 The objectives of Thomson's process.
11:34 Viewing inside the lines.
15:10 Premeditation versus spontaneity.
18:14 Adam and Colin's shared educational history in the New York Studio School.
23:34 Layering as an index to today's zeitgeist.
27:18 Abstraction vs representation.
28:44 Zombie Formalism vs things repeating.
31: 26 Pedigrees of influence.
31:44 "I'm hoping that I'll float up in this world of color."
34:52 Clarity comes about Colin's use of layering.
36:22 Colin's working theme, Manhattan's urbanism.
37:49 Landscape within a figure inversion.
40:30 Painting's magical potential.
41:00 The impact of the digital world.
*
41:48 Adam Simon's studio.
43:10 Adam Simon introduces his painting.
44:12 Metaphorical functions of the imagery.
44:54 The question or function of time (recognition).
46:47 Variability of depth.
49:57 "Ecology"
55:08 The reservoir of source imagery, its fixed nature and agency.
57:43 "You have to do it to find out."
53:13 The embrace of randomness.
01:00:08 How layering reveals history.
01:00:44 How corporate logos are infused into society.
01:01:44 Adam's two conceits.
01:02:32 The function of delayed recognition (the "nasty drawing" anecdote.)
01:04:34 Circular and circulation.
01:05:25 Pareidolia, the integrity of the imagery and abstraction.
01:07:46 Courting a "fucking mess".
01:08:47 Automatism.
01:09:28 Merging abstraction and commentary.
01:09:48 Who's using who? (Corporations, society and the artist.)
01:12:28 Entropy, forward and reverse.
01:13:21 Cultural identity and memory.
01:15:26 The all-over, abstraction, inverting Pop through AbEx.
01:07:11 Water. The flux of layering, how it's alive.
01:18:31 The "expanded field" of layering.
01:19:05 Wrapping up.

Sometimes you feel like a nut.

See I See #7: "Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds"

See I See #7: "Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds" at the Jewish Museum, NYC.

I review the new Paul Klee exhibition at the Jewish Museum, NYC. It's a tale of persecution and physical suffering, but I look for the smile in his works. What is remarkable are a series of satirical drawings he made commenting on the insanity of what he called the "National Socialist Revolution" in 1933. An exhibition spanning the artist's lifetime with 94 art works, the final gallery is devoted to his last years as he suffered and eventually died from the autoimmune disease scleroderma. Despite all this gloom, the happiness that he found in his art works is undeniable.

Paul Klee
Jewish Museum NYC
Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds
Mar. 20 - Jul. 26, 2026

Ahora

See I See #6: Gwenael Kerlidou's James Bishop Trilogy

See I See #6: Gwenael Kerlidou's James Bishop Trilogy

NYC artist and writer Gwenael Kerlidou speaks with See I See about his recent article, "James Bishop, an American Hermit in Blevy", Tussle Magazine, February 5, 2026. Within that article, he links us to two articles that he wrote in February 14, 2015 for Hyperallergic, "Failure as Success in Painting: Bram van Velde, the Invisible" (Parts 1 & 2), and a translation of Maurice Pleynet's "Color Squared, Ripples, Intent", published in 1972.

Besides an in depth presentation of James Bishop's oeuvre, a theme emerges about the differing histories and perspectives between America (USA / NYC) and Europe (France). As Kerlidou unpacks this history and its impact on contemporary art and painting, we are treated with a vivid awareness of our panorama and blinders on both sides of the Atlantic.

James Bishop, an American Hermit in Blevy

Failure as Success in Painting, Bram van Velde the Invisible, Part 1

Failure as Success in Painting, Bram van Velde the Invisible, Part 2

"COLOR SQUARED, RIPPLES, INTENT" BY MARCELIN PLEYNET

Works

See I See #5: Gregoris Semitecolo

See I See #5: Gregoris Semitecolo

We visit the opening of Gregoris Semitecolo at Ramiken Gallery in NYC's LES. The art world loves a rediscovery, and there's a bit of a buzz in town about Ramiken's recent offering*. Semitecolo is one of Greece's celebrated national artists, whose works are in the collections of the National Gallery of Greece and the Athens Municipal Gallery. A pioneering conceptual artist in the 60's, he focused his attention solely on painting in 1984 until the end of his life in 2014.

I went to the opening, snapped a few pics and jotted a few notes, observations about a peculiar artist who marched to his own drummer. (Isn't that what we all should do anyway?)

*I didn't notice until deep into this production that Ramiken has a gallery in Athens. At lest it is an address important enough to list at the bottom of their website. Could be an important detail.

Works

See I See #4: Artists Panel at Ptolemy

Works

See I See #3: Everything is a Bet

I'm talking about an article written by Kate Brown in ArtNet News, February 26, 2026, titled "In the Age of Prediction Markets, Everything Is a Bet. Will Art Be Next?"
Brown is anticipating the advent of the "financial gamification" via Polymarket in the arenas of art, art sales, art speculation and perhaps even art conversation itself.

I felt compelled to remind the art audience of the importance of remembering where the real value of art stems: that the extrinsic value of art, what art is worth in money, stems from an investment of intrinsic or inherent value, literally art for art's sake. It is a strange and even wondrous aspect of art in the marketplace, that the value of an art object stems from an essential unwillingness to part with it. The greater the unwillingness, the greater the value, more the many needed to persuade, to conquer the attachment to that thing.

This is the difference between what art is and what it can do for you.

It's tough to estimate when the shift occurred, when art became viewed as yet another fungible form of currency, another asset to be listed in a financial portfolio. Everyone active in the art world is aware of this debasement but few seem to grasp firmly the paradoxical relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic value in an artwork. As such, the art marketplace has lost a very important spark and cynicism reigns supreme where art became a mere instrument of wealth creation.

I ended the video with this:

So, I am compelled to reiterate this: the extrinsic value in art stems from an intrinsic investment of attention, of possession, of what really should be called love.
Love doesn't scale easily if at all... and scale is where the money is.
You can bet your money.
You can bet other people's money.
Or, you can bet your life.
Artists and the people who take custody of art for its own sake, bet their lives.

***

Links:

See I See #8

Prediction Markets Are Eating Culture. My Bet Is that Art Is Next

Prediction: the successor to postmodernism

Rage -- Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles...

Stephan Fry, delivering the backstory to Homer's Iliad. I was listening to him this morning, thinking that a throwback to summer 2023's series of paintings on paper could be greatly complimented with a connection to Fry's storytelling. Click on the top image, rage-tinted, to go to the month of October 2023 for documentation of the entire series.

(Below: Where the series currently sits, in my house in Spain.)

***

PS: The video is already in the linked image at the top, but for direct access, click here: Painting the Iliad.

See I See #2

See I See #1

Last Week I Did A Thing

From my Notes: Art Definition

***
"Abstraction is the hallmark of ideology."
- Philip Pilkington

***

"music [the visual arts included] is a fugazi."
-Mike Benz T=55:00

(Context: regime overthrow spy games in Venezuela and beyond)

***
"People don't have ideas, ideas have people."
-Rupert Sheldrake

Problems with cynicism and self delusion. Reality check: how much of this thought process is real or subjective?

What is it about art that is real and false?

Is Art the Tao (Dao)?

Is art a Platonic form?

"It is better to not try to be virtuous or pretty or knowledgeable because it is those people who get used or ultimately confused. It is not through virtuousness or trying to be virtuous that true virtuousness is achieved. It is through uselessness that one truly becomes useful." -Zhuangzi

"He uses language to go beyond language, in the end."

***
something in here, pertains to art
"...very specific engineering limitations..."
The mistake: Designing to what we think is possible at the ultimate limit (idealized limits), at the ultimate time.

***
There's an essential conflict about whether the world is corporate or disincorporated (past tense, intentional).

A resentful attitude about technology and innovation says no.

Mankind in modernity is homeless. However, a foundational story in the West is The Odyssey (similar to the Messiah?), a story that aches for home. This means that the Industrial Revolution isn't the cause of our unease and disquiet is built in. The reassuringly integrative story of Classicism is really a story about class.

However much the pre-modern integration and societal harmony was either mythical or concrete or merely functional, this societal framework did exist and it did permeate the world at one time.

History is, at the end of the day, a story. The story of art, of fifty years ago or earlier had been questioned and criticized as being patriarchal or too rigid otherwise. What alternative stories of art had been advanced in this long meantime?

***
Inspiration, inkling, the muse,

***
Snip of one of my comments to Saul Ostrow's "Note to Self: Abstract Art's Form and Function"

The definition of art derives from the root meaning: arə- Proto-Indo-European and Greek ar- "to fit together." Fabrication lies at the heart of the meaning, but within lies a crucial aspect that exceeds mere assembly. Popular usage indicates a scope that is transcendental, indicative of the superlative. The art of war, the art of cooking, the art of reasoning, the art of...

What I take from this is something about the moment when one is operating at and beyond the frontier of all extant known methods of "fabrication" (bracketed to indicate an expansive definition of the term).

This is the territory where one resorts to inspiration, imagination, what was known to be the muse, the world shared with faith, the land (noumena?) into which our rational mind pushes into, balls cupped into the hands*.

The mushiness of the definition of art , lying as it does between a categorical and qualitative indicator.

Art may even belong solely to the West, it is singular, an issue of individuals, autonomous, superlative. In the non-West, it might be inextricably bound within communitarian relationships.

***
People can't define art, so how can anyone define success in art?

***
Art with a capital A, outsider art, established artists, neophyte, white cube galleries, historic spaces, art of the Now...

Gil Sanchez anecdote: "I too am in history"

What hovers in this conversation is the distinction between what is in or out of art. We've been erasing distinctions for decades now. What remains however, is the tacit acceptance that "art with a capital "A" is that which is enmeshed in the gears of capital. Art that is an asset class is unconsciously the legacy description of "successful " art.

Art has become good enough

Intimidation & perceived elitism

Blindness

Even among those educated in the arts

Even those in the ranks of the "elite"

When the elite themselves have given up

***
T=11:30
Corporeality allows us to have imagination, to grow and expand. Heaven (non-corporeality) is perfect and by definition, static.

Later in the video, other models (Hinduism & Dante) reflect Leibniz's Monadology.
(T=16:00) Pearls and mirrors are analogs of monads.

***
Corporatist state of mind...

"Corporations versus the constitution "

***
CARTER RATCLIFF
AUG 13
[Diego Velazquez, Las Meninas, 1656. The Prado, Madrid]

Of course it is, but why? Last month Artsy addressed that question in an essay entitled "4 Reasons Why Looking at Art Is Good for You." Here they are, in the order they were presented:

Art can help your mental health
Art can improve social skills and resilience
Engaging with art can help your heart
Being around art can lift your mood

The first, second, and fourth reasons overlap, but never mind. Rushing past its minor muddle, the essay goes straight for scientific testimony, which corroborates much that art-lovers have long suspected:

"A growing body of research ... shows that even a single session of viewing visual art can significantly enhance wellbeing, reduce stress, and activate pleasure and reward pathways in the brain," said Dr. Nisha Sajnani, director of arts and health at New York University and co-director of Jameel Arts & Health Lab. "These effects are amplified by moments of reflection, social connection, and personal meaning--reminding us that art doesn't just reflect life--it helps us feel more alive."

How does art have these desirable effects? Well, the emotions prompted by art have been linked with lower levels of cytokines, proteins that control inflammation. Art supports our immune systems. But note this: researchers have shown that "nature and spirituality" can affect us in similar ways. Art prompts the release of dopamine. "the 'feel-good' neurotransmitter," and that's nice, though art has no monopoly over this physiological process. We also get dopamine hits from scrolling through our phones, which inspires an unhappy thought: spending half an hour with meaningless Facebook posts is equal, neurologically speaking, to half an hour face to face with Las Meninas. This equivalence would not, I suppose, be highlighted by even the most obsessively data-driven scientist--certainly not by Professor Semir Zeki, a neurobiologist at University College London, who discovered that "the way our brain reacts to beautiful artworks is very similar to how it responds when we are in love." Professor Zeki has not, as far as I know, investigated the conflict that arises when the one you love does not love the art that you do.

Being in love, loving art, feeling a rush of spirituality, wandering through nature, wasting time on a cell phone--these are a few of the activities and states of being that can turn the tide of neurotransmitters in a positive direction. Not all are good and some are very bad. Have neurobiologists investigated the possibility that psychopaths get a dopamine high from attacking people? Book Sixteen of The Iliad features Achilles enraged and extoling the anger that "rises up in the soul of a man like smoke, and the taste thereof is sweeter than drops of honey." (Samuel Butler's translation.) I am not saying that Achilles was a psychopath. Still, in providing a classic example of pleasure felt for dubious reasons, his wrath points to an obvious truth: brain chemistry is amoral. And it lacks taste. The silliest cartoon can stimulate as much dopamine as the greatest painting.

Why bring taste into it? Am I a snob? Maybe, but what I take for my good taste is not militant. I like certain cartoons and dumb jokes and idiotic pop songs and all manner of things that thrive on a plateau far below the one where I find the art I admire. What, then, is the problem? There isn't one unless we impose on culture the ideal of equality that should guide our political life. Everyone should be equal before the law. Everyone should be free to vote and to say whatever. Thus, anyone has the right to recommend that I take professional wrestling as seriously as I take art. Yet I am under no obligation to agree, even if a scientific study finds that art and professional wrestling produce comparably positive neurological effects in their respective devotees. My right to my own opinion is obvious. Just as obviously, brain chemistry is a physical not a cultural phenomenon.

It is good to feel good, and it is reassuring to hear that art can help us improve our moods. Yet science provides no way to scope out the larger picture. Art contributes not only to individual well-being but also to the play of meaning and value that sustains our communal lives--and without which there is no individuality. It is said that we are social animals. We are, as well, animals who become who we are in a give and take with our culture as well as our society, and I believe that the more complex and demanding the artworks with which we engage the better we will be. I have no lab results to back up this belief. Nor do I feel the need for them. Call me a snob, but it seems to me indubitable that it is better for you and the culture if you get involved with the grand subtleties of Las Meninas and avoid the brutish melodrama of professional wrestling, the crude mythology of movies spun off from Marvel comics, and the addictive emptiness of video games. In Las Meninas you find inexhaustible possibilities for making sense of yourself, others, and the world we inhabit. In the cheesy stuff you find lines of least resistance that lead directly to an abraded and diminished sensibility.

An afterword. What about attractive but merely decorative paintings, competent but overly genteel poems, highly wrought but unambitious novels--all the stuff that is respectably professional and not, after all, so bad? In The Scarlet Pimpernel, a 1934 movie with Leslie Howard, the foppish hero says, "There is nothing quite so bad as something that is not so bad." Clement Greenberg, not a writer I usually invoke with approval, said in an essay on kitsch that upper middlebrow culture is more damaging than low culture. Yet Ludwig Wittgenstein, feeling frustrated by the impossibility of making himself entirely clear to his students, would wallow in Hollywood movies. Jacques Derrida is rumored to have indulged in the worst that French television had to offer. So there may be a place for mediocrity, the best and even the worst of it. More on this later.

***
Art vs Art World

Termed "vs" versus because each are distinct, because the latter is t a singularity but instead a multiplicity, because there is commercial aspect that is all too willing to eclipse all others, especially the one whose heart is centered within vision and the imagination.

Many artists these days unfortunately tend to think that the art world is a kind of lock for a key must be fashioned... and people like this (which abound in government, industry and institutions) think of themselves as a key to be shaped, mind, imagination and works.

This is unfortunate because as this kind of artist begins to file away at the teeth of their character

***
Without intellectual and creative integrity, art world is just a pyramid scheme.

Late in the history of art, intellectual integrity was strained by the misuse of caprice

***
Cognitive Light Cone:
[Michael Levin]

"Every agent can be demarcated, be define defined by the size of the goal they pursue."

Goals are a signal of intelligence.
Agent: Boundary between self and world.
Nested agency.
Agents operate in their own self interest.

Single cells: metabolic goals

Cells comprising muscle and bone (salamanders, for example): goals in anatomical space

Life is the embodiment of intelligence. William James: Intelligence is the ability to reach the same goal by different means.

What is called Platonic Space is the space of minds. "Selflets" populate Platonic space.

You don't have access to your past. You have access to your memory engrams, which the future you will have to interpret, treating your own memories as messages from your past self. Therefore those memories will have to be interpreted. You are not committed to the fidelity of that information, you are committed to the salience of that information. A process view of the self. Continuous storytelling. Our current actions are messages to our future self.

The persistent self is breaking down.

Q: Larger light cone = better? A: depends on the organism. Enlarging the light cone enlarges meaning.

CSAS: Center for the Study of Apparent Selves.

Fundamental unit in the world: perspective.

Laplacian Demons are unsustainable. You can't afford to track everything. As your past self compresses many diverse experiences into a compact representation, a memory trace of what happened... [pithiness] the thing about compression is that data that's compressed most efficiently starts to look random. Lots of metadata loss. Unless you know the algorithm required [an unconscious process*] to decompress [the engram], the data itself looks like noise, because you've pulled out the correlations. You have to be creative to interpret your own engrams [memories]. There are no non-destructive recall of memories.

* These unconscious processes [referred to "hardware"] doesn't define you, it enables or constrains what you want to do. We are a collective intelligence or groups of cells. The unconscious dimension is unconscious for a good reason. (Reference to film Ex Machina, an unfortunate interpretation, the materialism of humans being the mere resultant of the cogs and gears aka proteins, lipids and ions.). Humans are resultant beings. No discovery of the fundamental reality of your being should pull you away from the emergence of who you are. Materialism underestimates matter.. We are majestic agentic beings. Really minimal things have surprising cognitive qualities. [Leibniz]

Bio-electricity as cognitive glue, allowing scalability.

(T = 50:00) Intelligence: a specific type of problem solving. "Beginner's mind". A new definition of intelligence. Basis for experimentation: what is the problem space, what are the goals and what are the capabilities it has to reach those goals? A measurement of competency.

Paper: "Reframing Cognition". Basel cognition: stories of scaling, a question of where did our cognitive abilities come from? Not panpsychism. Potential energy and least action principles are the tiniest hopes and dreams that there are, the most basel version of cognition. Experimentation involves a selection of tools to address the problem.

(T=+1:00:00) What does a good theory of consciousness give you? Consciousness is the kind of thing that cannot be studied in the third person, you can only study it by being part of the experiment. A weak version of this is art. Stronger form: a rich brain interface, you have to fuse with the subject of the experiment. Other subsystems of the body have a non zero amount of consciousness. We are a collection of interacting consciousnesses.

Bioelectricity, xenobots, anthrobots...

***

Input vs output side of consciousnesses

The action side, the ability to do things

Agent: "What do I do next?"

Driven by the need to choose the next action.

New definition of consciousnesses: Kevin _____ "I move, therefore I am."

Panpsychism with an empirical component (intentional?)

***
Art in terms of Human Action:

"Economics is the study of human action with regard for improving life when scarcity is involved."
-Dave Smith

T=7:30
(Libertarian comic Dave Smith, while discussing the impact of 2025 tariffs in Austrian Economic terms.)

Human Action

Praxeology
Not to be confused with Practice theory, which is also called praxeology.
In philosophy, praxeology or praxiology(/ˌpræksiˈɒlədʒi/; from Ancient Greek πρᾶξις(praxis) 'deed, action' and -λογία (-logia) 'study of') is the theory of human action, based on the notion that humans engage in purposeful behavior, contrary to reflexive behavior and other unintentional behavior.

In Smith's definition, with regards of the artworld, the aspects of improving life, aka flourishing, and scarcity stand out. An artists central objective is to improve life, even when, or perhaps especially when employing ironic means to do so. Scarcity is central when quality inevitably ranks and sorts the various abundance of accumulated art produced or conjured in the world at any given time.

***
Lee Krasner 1978 Interview
(Earlier), she describes the transition from the academic to the cubism as taught by Hoffman was as difficult as the transition from that to the abstraction (all over) of Pollock. It took her three years painting, as she described it, "frozen grey masses" to get to the other side of cubism, which was always object or subject based.

Later, she relates the first encounter of Hoffman and Pollock, where Hoffman chides Pollock for not dealing with nature (as subject), when Pollock famously retorted "I am nature."

T=15:00
"...if we think of the Renaissance concept of space where you are the artist up here and whatever it is ...your using perspective as your means and you are making your whatever you're doing with it. Now if we go from that concept into cubism, the thing is still there in the same sense [that] nature is there. I am here the artist, I observe and the only thing is frontal now and that much has taken place. Now, in Pollock once more, there is another transition. I can't define it for you. Sorry, it's not my job."

Cubism & academicism: artist > nature (as subject)

AbEx abstraction: artist > artist (the self, subjective experience, therefore the psychological preoccupation with Freud & Jung)

Pop: artist > consumer culture

Minimalism: artist > (specific) object (analytic, reductive)

Conceptualism: artist > algorithm (mental will)

Post 20th century art: artist > the physical reality of a work of art / the world at large (cumulative experience)

***
algorithm
/ăl′gə-rĭᴛʜ″əm/

noun
A finite set of unambiguous instructions that, given some set of initial conditions, can be performed in a prescribed sequence to achieve a certain goal and that has a recognizable set of end conditions.

A precise rule (or set of rules) specifying how to solve some problem; a set of procedures guaranteed to find the solution to a problem. 

A precise step-by-step plan for a computational procedure that possibly begins with an input value and yields an output value in a finite number of steps.

***
Ockham's Razor
Elegance
Beauty?
Piercing through the muddle.

***
I awoke to the thought of how art is different altogether from an art market or an art industry ... or maybe even from an art world. These words coalesced and lingered in my mind, kept me awake as I turned them over and over.

"...hypothesize the hypostatic..."

***
Sun Tzu Art of War
There are three great avenues of opportunities in life: Events, Trends, and conditions.

Hypostasis

***
Skin in the game > retouch the material touchstone.

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Avant-Garde
If once the most advanced was the margin, now the margin is considered the most advanced. (This dates to the 1950's. What of this 70 years later?)

***
Constraints built into reality.
vs
Imagination unconstrained.

Once we began to model reality, eventually some of us tried to make reality fit our models. To refine this assertion: people now tend to use models, virtual constructs propositioning reality, in order to shape the behavior of a target population towards a desired end. Theoretical constructs used as bait.

Is art simply, self expression (per Spengler)?

Is this still bound to individualism?

Isn't the definition of art in the West inevitably bound to individualism?

Spengler's Prime Symbols

Concern for the tangible and immediately present: the human body

No horizon

Red & yellow : flesh

Classical gods had limits

Finitude

Ahistorical

Desire for limitations & boundaries

Limitless will to power

Reach to the infinite

Ethereal

Blues & greens, the color of death

Brown is a mileu

Calculus: Functions instead of concrete numbers

Cities vs the nation-state

Arabian: enclosed dome

Egyptian: narrow path

Chinese: the wandering path

***
Making it strange
Liminal boundary between disruptive innovation and adaptation/acculturation.

Why linger?

***
Frontiers of fabrication

Necessity is the mother of invention

Here's my definition in two aspects:

Art is imagination, concretized.

The definition of art derives from the root meaning: arə- Proto-Indo-European and Greek ar- "to fit together." Fabrication lies at the heart of the meaning, but within lies a crucial aspect that exceeds mere assembly.

Popular usage indicates a scope that is transcendental, indicative of the superlative. The art of war, the art of cooking, the art of reasoning, the art of... What I take from this is something about the moment when one is operating at and beyond the frontier of all extant known methods of "fabrication" (bracketed to indicate an expansive definition of the term).

This is the territory where one resorts to inspiration, imagination, what was known to be the muse, the world shared with faith, the land (noumena?) into which our rational mind pushes.

Silos Everywhere You Turn

This week, I launched a project that I have entitled "See I See". I will elaborate further about this endeavor in a future blogpost, right now I want to talk about how proliferating projects like this across other online platforms such as Substack, has me fine tuning the mission of this particular weblog, a project that has been in the running now for 23 years and counting.

Early on, it was a genuine diary, a log online memorializing the great and small in my everyday life. Most times it was about the work progressing in the studio, other times -especially when my wife Stephanie first lived in Spain for an initial extended time, making our house and studio there a home- I was sharing with this audience what life was like in Northern Spain, Catalan Spain. Afterwards, when we returned to Los Angeles, I uploaded snippets of life in the then nascent art community in Chinatown, LA. When we moved to New York City in 2012, the day to day reportage started to dwindle and I started to take notes at the events where thinkers would debate the state of play in the art world at the time.

This blog will certainly maintain its' diaristic function, but the recent adventure in self publishing via the Substack platform will have its effect on the ongoing function of this weblog. See I See will be about the art I see and the thoughts not only I have about it, but ultimately the objective is to capture the dynamic, fleeting, rich dialogue that I have enjoyed with my friends along the way. Until I get to that place where I can attract my fellow artists, curators, writers and friends to clamp a microphone on their lapels and tolerate the camera's gaze... I'll have to go solo. That's no problem, I will enjoy the learning curve even though there's lots of bumps and bruises along the way (to my ego!).

And here I am getting to the thought that started me typing this post in the first place: porting out thematic sectors to other avenues such as art reviews in Substack, and grumbling about the folly of the West in creating the war in Ukraine exclusively in X (formerly know as Twitter), using Instagram as a community bulletin / billboard... and well, that's about it, my little online panorama... I'm going to use this weblog to port portions of my Notes application more often than not. My Notes is the place where I can capture fleeting thoughts when I first arise from bed, those shower thoughts, musings that tend to float while I'm commuting to my studio. This means that sometimes these blogposts might appear more fragmented, maybe aphoristic if I'm lucky, but overall, I'm going to siphon the thoughts that I have been filling into bladders in my Notes, into this weblog. For an example of what I'm talking about, check out the next post.

Ahora

James Bishop / Timothy Taylor Gallery

Last night, convened a talk about the life and work of James Bishop at Timothy Taylor Gallery in TriBeCa. The room was packed with an audience full of what most would call the best painters and writers in NYC. Bishop, a painter straddling France and the USA, painting during what was considered the demise of painting, absorbing the dialog of Minimalism and Primary Structures and painting anyway. It was very interesting to hear the commentary from luminaries such as Molly Warnock, Amy Sillman and David Reed.

I took notes.

Hal Foster and Blake Rayne at Miguel Abreu

Last Saturday, I attended a conversation between Hal Foster and Blake Rayne at Miguel Abreu Gallery in the Lower East Side. The exhibition titled Reserves" comprised of paintings, sculptures and installation of course was fodder for the conversation, but much of it focused on Rayne's paintings. You can find images in the link. Rayne's practice involves a highly articulated breakdown of his painting process, much of which is couched in art theory that ripened, or over-ripened in the early aughts. Again, follow the link to the press release which is descriptive.

It seemed to me that the artist was such a student of thinkers like the very famous Hal Foster, that there wasn't much room for Foster to weigh into the dialogue. At one perhaps pivotal moment, Foster remarked "For a minute there, you sound like a really smart Modernist... and that's MY job!" My notes in red and green denoting Foster and Rayne respectively, show the ratio clearly.

I took notes, although they don't probably capture the drama of the evening. The talk was recorded, and perhaps the gallery might make it available to the public someday, someway.

Ahora

Building Models: The Shape of Painting

Last night, I attended a panel discussion centered on the exhibition at The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation in the Lower East Side, entitled "Building Models: The Shape of Painting", Curated by Saul Ostrow.

Saul is an old friend of mine, as are more than a few artists exhibited in the exhibition. A brilliant feat of curation, I believe Saul had cast an intelligent net over what could be an unwieldy topic, how the physical nature of the support had been incorporated into painting, proper. I consider his essay to be magisterial and I will paste it under the fold.

I took notes:

Ahora

Ahora (and Previously)

...and previously:

(November 10, 2025)

...and previously:

(April 17, 2025)

...and previously:

(April 3, 2025)

What we are looking at are the brace of panel paintings built through the months of cancer treatment, primed and painted in successive color coats initiated during the radiation procedure until completion... this week.(Two white panels coming late to the finish line, yes.) Now begins the paintings, proper. Lots of prep to fulfill the vision proved out (previously, yes) in the three exploratory panels here, here and here.

Tom McGlynn

Yesterday, Tom McGlynn was interviewed by Adam Simon on the occasion of his exhibition titled "This Here", at Rick Wester Fine Art in Chelsea, NYC. The space was crowded with some of the best active painters in the city. Great conversation. I came away with an enhanced appreciation for MyGlynn and Rick Wester as well.

I took notes.

Out of the Woods

Heather Bause Rubenstein recently gave a talk at Ruttowski 68 Gallery in TriBeCa. Her interlocutor was her husband, critic Raphael Rubenstein.

I took notes:

trepidation and commitment

trepidation and commitment
2024
PTG 654
22-1/2" x 28-1/2" x 1-1/2"
Oil on canvas over Wood Panel and Frame

world shared with faith

world shared with faith
PTG 653
22-1/2" x 28-1/2" x 1-1/2"
Oil on canvas over Wood Panel and Frame

the heart of the meaning

the heart of the meaning
2025
PTG 652
22-1/2" x 28-1/2" x 1-1/2"
Oil on canvas over Wood Panel and Frame

Doors of possibilities

Doors of possibilities
2024
PTG 651
Oil on Canvas over Wire, Wood

Abiding

Abiding
2024
PTG 650
Approximately 46" diameter, 9" depth
Oil on Canvas over Wire, Wood

Iliad

Iliad
2023
PTG 649
24 works on paper, 36 x 28.5 cm each
Oil on Paper

I'm assigning all 24 works on paper as one work as a whole.
See here and all 24 blogposts during October 25, 2023.

Fin de Año

Fin de Año
PTG 648
60" x 48"
Oil on Canvas over Wood Panel

envisioning what had come to pass

envisioning what had come to pass
2023
200 x 40 cm (variable)
Oil on cardboard, string

The Remove

The Remove
2024
PTG 646
28.5" x 30" x 8.25"
Oil on Canvas over Wire and Wood

Bloom

Bloom
2024
PTG 645
28" diameter x 8-1/2" depth

flashes of an optic

flashes of an optic
2024
PTG 644
12" x 14" x 7.75"
Oil on Canvas over Wire and Wood

as noumenal as

as noumenal as
2024
PTG 643
13" x 14" x 4"
Oil on Canvas over Wire and Wood