The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! —William Wordsworth, The world is too much with us   No time to turn at Beauty’s glance, And watch her…

Juliet Helmke: I visited your works a few times at Surviving Sandy, but it always took me a while to get close enough, I had to wait for a moment that was completely my own. I heard a lot of people discussing where they had been painted, and a fair number of visitors, not seeing…

We wouldn’t expect a straight take on the presumed comfort of “home and hearth” from Marlene McCarty. Her monumental diptych, Hearth 2 (China Camp 2009, China Camp 1976) (2010) is no exception. The two drawings (80” x 117” and 80” x 115”) describe the scene of a crime, in stereo. Both show the same low-angle…

Alex Katz’s three works in Surviving Sandy are painted images of bodies of water. During the show they occupied the large back wall of the first floor, the installation itself therefore an invitation to compare the paintings to each other and consider their roles in a group. Beyond the immediate, obvious similarity that there’s water…

Lisa Yuskavage’s two Surviving Sandy monoprints with pastel additions treat young, nubile figures in relatively isolated landscapes. A No Man’s Land 2 is the more narratively obscure of the two. In it, a squatting young woman appears to be making a bonfire like the one already lit to the right of the piece. She wears…

The paintings Dark Side of the Moon, Side 1 (Speak to Me) and Dark Side of the Moon, Side 2 (Eclipse), (both made in 2013) are part of a series by Tomas Vu titled Flatlands. Large and highly detailed, they feature a mixture of abstract and representational forms variously rendered through the use of acrylic…

Ellen Phelan’s Field Through Trees, is built up and wiped away—built up again, and blurred. Purple, yellow, blue, the darkness of the tree trunks closest to us shows the strokes of paint as paint, and gives itself away even as it describes that which we are to look through. Past the trees there is a…

Ronnie Landfield asked, “Who are they to tell me I can’t be expressionistic? Who are they to tell me I can’t use imagery or paint landscapes? I don’t care if it’s ‘old fashioned.’” 1 His recalcitrance exemplifies the defiance of a youth spent in New York in the ’60s. 2 I mean, Landfield has spent…

There’s something rather poetic in the way James Hyde paints bands of color over a digital print (Down for Up, 2011), almost as if he were exposing the landscape as an illusion while at the same time validating the corporeality of rainbows. Similar bands can be found zigzagging through a terrain of wood and paper…