Exhibit: Alpha Art

Unfortunately, I am too poor to make my way into new york to take advantage of its seemingly endless expanse of galleries. Which is why I made my way to the Zimmerli, and this small art gallery called Alpha Art in downtown New Brunswick. I had no idea it existed until a friend told me about it, but I am glad I checked it out. The art featured in this gallery in some sense kind of relates to the Blocks of Color exhibit I saw in the Zimmerli, only in the sense that these also seemed a lot like watercolor paintings.

[Neptune's Revenge, 24 x 48" diptych, lacquer on panel, by John Hawaka]

Many of them are totally abstract paintings, with no real discernible pictoral representation of anything. However I really enjoyed the splash of colors across the paintings, some more than others, although I cannot really say exactly why I preferred some over others.

[Smokey Glen, 24 x 32", lacquer on pane, by John Hawaka]

Some of these paintings however did resemble familiar objects such as people or flowers, some more so than others.

[Blue Dahlia, 32 x 48", lacquer on panel, by John Hawaka]

Among all of these paintings were a few which featured a style drastically different from the rest, these in particular caught my eye as I walked around the gallery. They were like colored line drawings on a solid black background, and they almost seemed like neon lights glowing at night. The farther I stood from the painting, the more recognizable the paintings became.

[Girl with Cat, 36 x 48", acrylic, by John Hawaka]

Seven Days in the Artworld: Chapter 3: The Fair

[78] -- "Only a century ago, no one had a car. Now people have two or three. That's the way its going with art."

[79] -- "The fair is significant from a prestige point of view. If a gallery is not admitted, people might think that it is not as important as another gallery that is. If a gallery is refused next year, it could destroy their business."
(comment by a member of the admission committee)

[81] -- In the art world, gossip is never idle. It is a vital Form of Market intelligence.

[82] -- The art is so demanding that the architecture needs to be nearly invisible. The ceilings are high enough to go unnoticed, and dealers praise the quality of the walls, which support even the heaviest works. most importantly, the expensive, artificial lighting is clean and white.

[82] -- "If you go after art and quality, the money will come later...We have to make the same decisions as the artists. Do they create great art or art that sells well? With the galleries it's the same. Are they commercial or do they believe in something?"
(comment by Samuel Keller - The Director of Art Basel since 2002)

[82/3] -- When you first start collecting, you're intensely competitive, but eventually you learn two things. First, if an artist is only going to make one good work, then there is no sense in fighting over it. Second, a collection is a personal vision. No one can steal your vision."
(comment by Don Rubell)

[83] -- "there is an implied incompetence. Out of everyone in the art world, colelctors are the least professional. All they have to do is write a check."
(comment by Don Rubell)

[83] -- "Collector should be an earned category. An artist doesn't become an artist in a day, so a collector shouldn't become a collector in a day. It's a lifetime process."
(comment by Mera Rubell)

[84] -- "When you buy from the first or second show, you're inside the confidence-building, the identity-building of an artist. It's not just about buying a piece. It's about buying into someone's life and where they are going with it. It's a mutual commitment, which is pretty intense."
(comment by Mera Rubell)

[88] -- Unlike other industries, where buyers are anonymous and interchangeable, here artists' reputations are enhanced or contaminated by the people who own their work.

[88] -- "Occasionally meeting an artist destroys the art. You almost don't trust it. you think what you're seeing in the work is an accident."
(comment by Mera Rubell)

[91] -- Logsdail distinguishes between galleries and what he disparages as 'dealerships'. the former discover and develop artists; the latter trade in art objects.

[91] -- " 'Buying in depth', or the practice of acquiring many works by the same artist, is often cited as a very respectable way to collect."
(as opposed to 'fishing with a giant net', where some collectors seek to purchase many various works from various artists so they can claim that 'I have one of those', or 'I was there')

[95] -- When it comes to the relationship of artistic and monetary value, "you can't use money as an index of quality. that is a fallacy. That will drive you crazy!"
(comment by John Baldessari)

The Zimmerli: Blocks of Color

I honestly was not expecting to come across anything that I would really enjoy viewing in the Zimmerli, and I have to say with great pleasure that I was severely mistaken. The Blocks of Color exhibit is right up my alley, featuring many woodcut prints, most of which seemed less like a print and more like a beautiful watercolor painting. Among my favorites were these Asian landscape paintings which i managed to get some photos of..and ironically did not get the title of the paintings or the artist. I absolutely Love the saturated color featured in some of these works, coupled with dramatically beautiful contrast of the line-work makes for a style painting that I can never get enough of.

The best works I saw in this exhibit ironically I know the names of yet do not have any images of, unfortunately. But upon seeing these works of art I made a point to document who made them and what they were titled. These were near the end of the exhibit..at least near the end in the manner which I walked through the gallery, two by Helen Frankenthaler both of which are color woodcut prints. One titled Japanese Maple, and the other titled Geisha. Immediately following Helen's works were the works of Michael Mazer, the two were titled Gail's Island 1, and Gail's Island 2. I absolutely LOVED how these two images featured the pattern of wood grain colorfully covering both works and within the grain, little islands of trees were added floating about the swirls of the wood grain. The coupling of the trees with the wood grain made it seem like the grain was not only wood, but also water, which completed the two paintings as convincing landscapes.

Interview with Luis Nunez

[This is not exactly word for word, neither of us had a recording devise, but I wrote my questions and his answers as we went along]


LN: I’m a Graphic Design major, but mostly none of the works I have developed in class were anything I felt were worth keeping. I don’t feel like I have learned much from Mason Gross, I’ve learned more skills on my own.

TL: So do you produce works outside of class for fun or what?

LN: I have a lot of designs which I created for my job, I work for Student Life Marketing. I learned a great deal of design skills from this job.

TL: What do you do for your job? Like what is your title?

LN: I am a designer and photographer.

TL: Do you take any photography classes at Rutgers?

LN: I took Black and White Film my freshman year, it was a great class and I learned a lot. I later took Digital Photography, and I felt that class was okay, but I didn’t learn as much as I would have liked to because the class was filled with students both familiar and new at photography, so the pace was somewhat slow.

TL: Okay well let’s take a look at your works, are they all online?

LN: Yea I have them all on my website; none of these works are from class, they are my personal work for my company.

TL: What programs did you use for these?

LN: These were made with a couple programs, mostly Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. I’m very good with Photoshop, I love it, and I have gotten better at illustrator over the years.

TL: Where did you first learn to use these programs?

LN: I learned most of the programs I use in high school; Mason Gross did not teach me much of anything new.





TL: I love the textures and patterns you use in this; there is a lot of overlaying of subtle transparent patterns within images and text. Was this all done in Photoshop?

LN: Well, I made the text in Adobe Illustrator, and them moved it into Photoshop to refine it and put it all together, everything else was done in Photoshop. I like to make scenery out of my work.

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LN: This is one of the biggest projects I have ever done; it was a flier for Newark. They wanted a flier to promote the reconstruction of the riverfront. I am pretty satisfied with it, although there are things I would have liked to have done differently, it’s too cheesy for me, but that’s how it had to be.

TL: Why did it have to be cheesy?

LN: They were very vocal about specifically what they wanted to see, so I didn’t have much choice.

TL: What did you want to do with it, what would you want to do away with?

LN: This boat scene here [in the front and center of image] I would have played around more with the way the images are cropped. They are ‘scrapbookish’, I would want them to seem more real, make it look like a believable scene.

TL: Yea I get what you mean, but at the same time I can understand how having ‘cutouts’ compiled in a scrapbookish manner would work better. If the images are cut out and thoughtfully placed, it can still look good even with images that are clearly edited. By making it obvious that the scene isn’t real it is clear that the work was intended to look as such, and it won’t be mistaken by viewers as a failed attempt by the artist to make a realistic and convincing scenery.

LN: Yea [nodding in agreement]

TL: But I like this, I enjoy graphic images and patterns, flat planes of color overlapping, and this cutout look does that for me. But that’s just personal preference.

TL: So what kind of work do you produce? Where is your market?

LN: I mostly work for urban promoters, people who want to promote their parties, I’m sure you have seen little posters around campus and on busses. Urban art is a majority of my work, but I try to stay away from the clichés of urban design.

TL: What do you mean, what are the clichés?

LN: Like, putting a nude girl on the poster, or using dirty fonts-because most of the time they are unreadable. People only use those fonts because they look cool, but I take what I have learned in designing and classes and apply it to my art.

TL: So are you like trying to converge the urban style with more ‘proper’ design you have learned?

LN: Yea, I take the skills that I’ve learned conceptually and apply it. I try to produce really good work because there are really ugly fliers out there. People just pick up Photoshop for the first time and call themselves graphic designers, and they get work because they will do it for cheap.

TL: So would you consider these people competition? Or are you not worried?

LN: I do consider them competition just because people still go to these guys because they are cheap. In terms of quality though, I am not threatened, I produce quality work which is worth paying for.

TL: How did you get into all of this?

LN: When I first started my company, I based it solely on photography. I would go to parties with my camera and take tons of photos of the crows and the party’s atmosphere for promoters. It was good money; I would walk away with $150 every event just for taking pictures. Eventually I was able to open up the design portion of my company because promoters started asking for specific designs.




LN: I did a Drake concert once, and I got a really good shot that was used on Hot97 and something called “Media Fakeout”.

TL: Hot97 sounds like a radio station, but what is Media Fakeout? Is that like a website or a blog or something?

LN: It’s a website about music and stuff, kind of like a gossip website I guess.

TL: How do you plan to incorporate your kind of work into your thesis?

LN: For thesis, I was thinking of going back to drawing, I really miss it. It will all be digital though, I will draw everything on a tablet in Photoshop. Then I will lay out these images to tell a story of a time in my life. For thesis it will be about my time at Rutgers; the struggles, the happy times, the frustrations with class, starting my company, and the parties.

TL: Is this your first time telling a story with graphic design and photos?

LN: This is the first time that everything will be from scratch; I’m only using my memories.

TL: So you are only memories, drawing photos from memory?

LN: Yea. Then at the end, the last few images before the piece ends I want it to fade to white. The story is not finished, so I can go back and fill it in. It will be of a four year span of my life, and years later I can go back and fill in another span of my life, fill in the gaps, and at the end of that segment I will fade it to white again so I can go back again later. It can be my never ending story.


Luis has a website for the company he started, more of his works can be found there: www.dainfamous.com

Visiting Chelsea

Robert Miller Gallery
Barthelemy Toguo

I enjoyed a lot of Toguo's works, I was particularly attracted to the watercolors. Some of them were pretty vulgar and somewhat dirty in content--even one that seemed to be a woman spurting blood from her groin onto the heads of other figures. However, such things did not deter me from enjoying the art. I especially loved the work called Purfixation XXII.

Many of the watercolor paintings featured humanoid figures, though many were distorted or disembodied. This painting has a silhouetted profile of a human head, and some kind of lizard like creature. My favorite thing about this painting is that within the body of the main figure, it almost looks like a landscape painting to me, like a window into another plane. I also love the few simple lines extending from the man's mouth across the page.
The back room of the Robert Miller gallery featured some sexual images posted on the walls, and many beds all piled high with clothes and a veil of some see-through curtain covering each. The floor was also covered with banana boxes. While I am not certain of any meaning behind this room, it all seems to be very phallic and sexually themed. My one shot at a meaning has me guessing that there is some idea of protection--the floor being covered in banana boxes--and all but one pule of clothing on each bed was covered in this thing transparent curtain. This made me wonder why one pile was uncovered, left as a pile on the floor, while the rest of the clothes were on beds safely covered. Was this some kind of condom reference? Maybe clothes representing peoples lifestyles that need to be protected? I don't know..its just a theory.
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Enoc Perez featured a gallery full of architectural paintings. Many are rich in color and seem almost solid from afar. It is upon coming closer that I notice that the paint is not smoothly and solidly placed. Mostly all of the paintings are painted in this scratchy fashion. He seems to have worked in thick layers on these paintings and allowed for the texture of the surface to be visable through the paint. The painting where this effect was most noticeable for me were these huge paintings of twoering, somewhat unstable looking buildings. There were two that looked very identical aside from differenced in the building and background color.


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Aperture Gallery - 4th floor - Nature as Artifice: New Dutch Landscape in Photography and Video Art

I have to say, from reading this gallery on the list, I was very disinterested in what it had to show. I'm not sure why, I just didnt think photography of Dutch landscape would 'do it' for me. Boy was I worng. Of all the galleries I visited, this one was by far my favorite. Every photograph was so rich in color and so clean, I didnt believe they were real photographs of landscape at first. That is it all almost looked fake, like they were pictures of perfect little models. In fact with a few pictures I struggles looking far and close to determine if it was real or not. The landscapes were rich in color and almost surreal looking. Some of the simplest photos were the most dazzeling and sometimes even somewhat erie. The landscape photos taken from above looking down where the hardest for me to believe, the color in this photograph particularly was intense and I did not believe it to be real upon forst looking at it.

Many of the buildings were just as spectacular as the landscapes. I had trouble believing that such colorful and perfect buildings actually existed on teh face of this earth. I most particularly loved this photo of what looks like a parking garage? Taken at night, this building is just glowing..I would love to have this outside my window to gawk at.


Possible one of the largest and of my favorites was the large cityscape. Different from both any landscape or building, this one is a convergence of natural lanscape litteres with perfect buildings and lights. I love how the photo was mounted too, on top of a light box, so the photo seems all the more real, like i was actually looking outside a window.