Tag: Sharon Butler

Remembrance Studio Visit

Walter Robinson’s big question: What do they want?

Contributed by Sharon Butler / Walter Robinson played an important role in the New York art scene for over five decades, and on Sunday, February 9, he passed away at his New York home. A piece in Artnet reported that the cause was liver cancer. Walter loved artists and the art world, and he believed that anyone could have a piece of it. You want to be a writer? Go ahead and write. You want to have a gallery? Open one. You want to be a painter? Paint. He was a hub of that world and never seemed to lose interest in the wild schemes…

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Solo Shows

Deirdre Frost: Windows on the world

Contributed by Sharon Butler / Deirdre Frost’s multifaceted paintings, on display in her solo show “Tumbling Earth” at Kevin Kavanagh Gallery in Dublin, exude an edgy, futuristic energy you’d glean from a David Lynch movie, in which teal curtains and magenta skies feel oddly familiar yet distinctly foreign. Frost, who is based in Cork, challenges us to reconsider what home might look like when the distinction between indoor and outdoor no longer held. Her world could be the one that emerged after some kind of apocalypse, in the wake of civilization, viewed furtively, perhaps from caves. 

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Solo Shows

Chris Martin: Staring into the sun

Contributed by Sharon Butler / Chris Martin is deep into a nearly five-decade-long artistic odyssey fueled by an unrelenting passion for process, spontaneity, and embracing the unexpected. His prolific energy, both physical and creative, melds into his broad knowledge of painting history and an insatiable desire to share his thoughts, feelings, and vast collection of everyday ephemera and small objects by embedding them in paint on canvas. Martin’s paintings are bursts of assemblage showcasing the power of proximity – vibrant cacophonies of glitter, pages ripped from textbooks books, magazine remnants, letters, and newspaper clippings. “Speed of Light,” his second solo exhibition with Timothy Taylor, draws inspiration from the dark night sky in the Catskills, inflecting profound questions about the universe with a comedian’s flair for the seriously absurd. The results are thought-provoking, funny, and, at times, ecstatic. 

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Public Art

Diana Cooper: The energy of New York

Contributed by Sharon Butler / Diana Cooper’s new public art project “Double Take” is rich with art historical references and playful wit, breathing life into an otherwise unsightly ventilator shaft installed opposite the egress from the Roosevelt Island subway tunnel, where it blocks a magnificent view of the city across the East River. The mosaic, crafted in collaboration with glass artists in Italy, incorporates fractured and twisted linear perspective to create the illusion of roiling depth, blurring the boundary between static skyscrapers and the roaring East River.

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Solo Shows

Kate Shepherd: Feel me

Contributed by Sharon Butler / Kate Shepherd’s 2025 exhibition “ABC and sometimes Y,” at Galerie Lelong & Co. in New York, hums in the space between precision and poetry. The paintings are specific and unshowy, rendered in colors that Shepherd selects for their emotional undercurrents. She teases out big questions: How do we interact with the world? How can we untangle what we see? And how do color and form quietly alter our perceptions? The result is a kind of geometric sorcery whereby shapes don’t sit still – they shimmer, shift, and keep you guessing. Every line, every wobble feels heartbreakingly human, which is extraordinary for geometric abstraction.

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Opinion

Kamala Harris: The Arts, Women’s Rights, and Democracy advocate for President

Contributed by Sharon Butler / Two Coats of Paint joins the voices that say clearly: Kamala Harris is the overwhelming choice for president. Whereas Donald Trump vowed to defund the arts, Harris has supported them throughout her career, recognizing the arts as essential to American identity, education, and economic growth. The stakes, of course, are much higher, especially this year…

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Studio Visit

Walter Robinson’s big question: What do they want?

Contributed by Sharon Butler / What happened to all the conceptual painters? I’m thinking of artists, like On Kawara, who were more interested in ideas and process than in developing traditional painterly chops, for whom painting was about more than basic human emotion and formalist exploration of color, line, and shape. By the 1990s, many of the painting-thinkers had stopped painting and moved into other disciplines – relational aesthetics, video, digital, and installation projects. For the relatively few who continued to paint, the starting point remained a proposition rather than a vague if compelling exploration of the subconscious. Walter Robinson, though disguised as a figurative painter, is one.

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Group Shows

The enduring elasticity of painting

Contributed by Sharon Butler / After a lengthy stretch during which emerging painters have leaned into commercial preferences for the traditional, many seem to be breaking free from the market’s emphasis on imagery and narrative. Painters with a penchant for experimental, near three-dimensional approaches have bounced back into the conversation they commanded in the early 2010s. Three current exhibitions, all curated by artists, reflect various aspects of this phenomenon.

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Artist's Notebook

Sweet Art Alabama 

Contributed by Sharon Butler and Jonathan Stevenson / Hitting the road to Alabama for Sharon’s solo show “March” at the Sarah Moody Gallery at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa in late March, we knew from ongoing contact with gallery director and art professor William Dooley and his assistant Vicki Rial that a deftly curated presentation in a beautiful space and a warm reception from the Art Department were in store. The students and gallery patrons who attended Sharon’s artist’s talk were inquisitive, smart, and welcoming. What we did not expect was the prevalence of so many talented people in the wider art community spanning Tuscaloosa and Birmingham, which we discovered is rich with deeply engaged artists, curators, and gallerists.

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Open Studios

Invitation: “BIG TOP” at Dumbo Open Studios, April 13 & 14, 2024, 1 – 6 pm

Please join us: The 2024 iteration of Dumbo Open Studios, takes place this weekend! Painter and Two Coats publisher Sharon Butler will have some new paintings on view at the Two Coats of Paint Project Space (20 Jay Street #308), and she has also organized “BIG TOP,” an exhibition of 13 talented young artists she met while teaching in the University of Connecticut’s MFA Program.

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Studio Visit

Twofer: Patrick Neal and Zach Seeger

Contributed by Sharon Butler and Jonathan Stevenson / Last month we stopped by the LIC building where Patrick Neal and Zach Seeger, two formidable painters, have studios. Both write on occasion for Two Coats of Paint, and we hadn’t seen what they’d been up to since we saw their solo shows – Zach’s “Sports” at Gold Montclair and Patrick’s “Winter was Hard” at Platform Project Space in DUMBO.

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Group Shows

A gathering at Tappeto Volante

Contributed by Sharon Butler / Last week, “La Banda 2024” opened at Tapetto Volante, a gallery tucked into a group of Gowanus studio spaces, currently inhabited by artists Inna Babaeva and Lenora Loeb. The show features work by many of the stalwart artist-organizers in Brooklyn’s art community, who keep the outer-borough art conversation percolating despite the relative inattention of mainstream media that focus more on Chelsea, the Lower East Side, and Tribeca.

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Solo Shows

Cordy Ryman, maestro of the quotidian

Contributed by Sharon Butler / While nostalgia and the yearning it precipitates may be gripping the art world, Cordy Ryman’s gently dazzling painting installations, on view at Freight + Volume, are unapologetically about the here and now – that is, what’s happening in one place today. Titled “Monkey Mind Symphony,” the show captures the distractions we encounter day by day, minute by minute. What could be more apt for our time than a visual language comprising small objects? Logically, they are the physical manifestations of tweets or threads, crafted easily, sometimes beguilingly unfinished in the traditional sense of the word, and arranged so as to radiate Ryman’s idiosyncratic energy.

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Solo Shows

Patricia Satterlee and Fran Shalom: Heirs to Nozkowski

Contributed by Sharon Butler / Abstract painter Thomas Nozkowski was widely and deservedly recognized for making intimately scaled abstract paintings using an idiosyncratic visual language that was derived from the visual and emotional stimuli of everyday life. Since his death in 2019, I’ve often wondered who might be the next Nozkowski. Given the trend towards figuration, mixed-media surfaces, and massive scale, precious few painters seemed to be walking in his humble footsteps. Now we have Patricia Satterlee and Fran Shalom.

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Interviews

Text and image: Laurie Fendrich and Peter Plagens

Contributed by Sharon Butler / I had some questions for Laurie Fendrich and Peter Plagens — artists, writers, spouses who have a two-person exhibition of abstract paintings on view at Texas Gallery in Houston through December 16. After they were evicted from their Tribeca loft a couple years ago, they decamped to Litchfield County, where they both have studios in their home — a beautifully converted auto body shop. In her seventies, Fendrich is a Professor Emerita of Fine Arts and Art History at Hofstra University and is represented by Louis Stern Fine Arts in West Hollywood. After writing regularly for The Chronicle of Higher Education for many years, she now writes fiction and contributes art reviews to Two Coats of Paint. Plagens, in his eighties, is the art critic at The Wall Street Journal and is represented by Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York. My interrogation about the evolution of their painting lives over the course of some fifty years started during an early morning text exchange that became so rich and resonant I asked if Two Coats of Paint could publish an expanded version.

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