1999
I visited Dickinson's room yesterday. A snowstorm was just beginning and I drove slowly home all in white. There are four windows in her room, I had remembered two. I was not allowed to photograph inside the room, this is a view of her window. You can dimly see the lamp burning on her table. In her time the brick was painted yellow.
Since we are in a moment when we know that everything is changing and yet we have no idea yet how that change might be. Since we are in a moment when every part of the art world is changing and will be changed. Since we have this moment to consider where our heartfelt longings might be realized or dashed, it is a useful moment to consider recent models of possibility. Launch F18, at its tenth anniversary, is an alternative model that has been offered up as a different way, a developmental model different from the established gallery path. So that, as we crawl out from under Covid, and galleries and the artworld comes back to life, we all might consider the example of Launch F18 as a way forward for those artists seeking a different way of doing business.
Read MoreAt the time of the election I did 10 small (8x10) paintings. Through Instagram I gave them away.
Anthony Palocci, Jr., “Open Container #2” (2014), oil on canvas, 14 x 11 inches (image courtesy Craig Stockwell)
Craig Stockwell (Keene, New Hampshire): This painting by Anthony Palocci sits in a central room in our house. A small painting, it occupies a lot of visual space on the wall. It is always shifting. I observe it at all times of day, in every different light, and it continually feeds me. During shutdown I have thought a lot about limitations, formal structures, doorways for imaginative action. This painting offers, repeatedly, those possibilities. And it is such an absurdly humble, simple, handmade painting — very physical in both its presence and its making.
As our art world shrinks and collapses, I have worked this winter/spring to just keep going. Surprisingly, I found that small, structured yet provisional paintings, like this one, are what I turn to both for looking and making. It is a small painting that activates domestic space; a painting shaky in its making yet firm in its presence, resistant to aesthetics yet rooted in art historical reference. Anthony is a Boston-based painter and I purchased this painting from a show at the former et al Projects in Bushwick during the year I spent in New York at the Sharpe-Walentas Space Program, 2013-14.
My work during these recent months has consisted of small, handmade, precarious formalist paintings, which I mailed to people (selected from Instagram) around the country. I reached 100 and am now done with that particular melancholy project. The luminous, shape-shifting quality of Anthony’s painting was an ongoing inspiration for what a painting might be at this time.
I’ve been at home with Sarah now for 43 days, but I have the saving grace of owning a free standing studio building that I can walk to 20 minutes away. Everyday I go. At this time I am not capable of originality or strategic thinking, instead I began work on a pile of small canvases that had been left behind by BFA students and I gathered them from the painting studio at NHIA. Thinking about the monks who, in the Dark Ages, retreated to islands off of the coasts of Ireland and Scotland to preserve western culture in illuminated manuscripts I am doing my own. Repetitive glowing works. As a further thought I am so bothered and restricted now by the accumulation of works I have, I work a lot and things pile up. It occurred to me to begin sending them out as gifts, I’ve sent out about 150 so far.
Gravity Gallery 44 Eagle Street
love songs 8/11/18-9/8/18
Berkshire Art Museum 159 East Main Street
Faculty-Artists from New England Colleges through October
love song #4 12x12 oil and acrylic on canvas, 2018
