I ushered in the first weekend of Spring by going into the city my art pal, Kathy, to an exhibition at The Jewish Museum of one of my favorite artists, Maira Kalman, the wry and whimsical chronicler of the daily, the historic, and the sublime.
Kalman may be most well known for her collaboration on "New Yorkistan" for this cover of a post-911 issue of The New Yorker:
Photography was not allowed, but go here to see a selection of her gouache paintings. By the time Kathy and I left, we both were considering ditching our plans for the rest of the day and speeding home to grab our gouache pans and start painting. I love gouache more than any other medium and Kalman's work is saturated with the rich, velvety hues of the matte paint, yet many of her images are as light and ethereal as a feather floating in a summer breeze.
I didn't know that she was also a collector and that she paints many of the objects that she finds or picks up at vintage stores. Her series of lists of objects typed on rolodex cards started my head spinning with ideas for my own journals. In addition to a series of children's books, pieces from her collection of tables, chairs, textile, and buckets, there are also a few articles of clothing from her textile designs for Isacc Mizrahi, including a black and white raincoat that I would have taken right off the mannequin and worn out the door.
Our intention was to then go see Hypergraphia, a pop up store window gallery in Hell's Kitchen, where the artist Gwyneth Leech is sitting for 6 weeks, doodling beautiful designs in India Ink on recycled paper cups.
This is from her website,
My drawing surface of choice since 2007 is the cardboard coffee cup. The slightly off-white, matte surface of a sturdy unadorned cardboard cup is a wonder and delight. It takes beautifully the jet-black India ink of my Rotring art pen and the earthy permanent colors of the Faber and Castelli brush pens that I favor.
I save the cups from the hot drinks I buy and occasionally collect them from other artists with whom I meet for tea or coffee around town. I wash and dry them and record on the bottom the date, place and occasion, as well as the drink that was consumed, thus capturing the social moment just passed.
Unfortunately, we were driving and I managed to be turned around by one way streets several times and we never quite made it there in the crazy traffic that is endemic to NY on a Spring Saturday afternoon. Go here to see her series of oil portraits designed to illustrate the definition of family in contemporary urban America.
As a mixed media artist and writer with a strong interest in narrative art, I find the relationship between Kalman's work and Leech's work to be very interesting. Both are intent on chronicling the daily moments of life, but both arrive at in fundamentally different ways that have in common a strong philosophy of the sacred ordinary, a philosophy that has motivated all my own art and writing. And serious, recycled coffee cups? I could keep myself in those for years and years!
Tomorrow I'll take you on a tour of the second half of the day.
