Ravels in Review and GOODBYE

Click “Se Flimklippet” to see another video I made, that you can make too! The ModernaMuseet, or Modern Museum, in Stockholm has a fun program that lets you create videos on your keyboard, and then they are posted at the museum during an upcoming exhibition.

I said another video earlier because, as you might have seen, this week was the premiere of another Ravels In Motion production, of a recent visit to Chelsea to see painter Anne Neely’s latest works. I think they’re well-worth seeing if you have the chance. (Both my videos and her works.

For more great art, check out Melissa Meyer’s dancing paintings and some intersting examples of what can be done in clay. If you feel a little tired of life during these dreary March days, see Doug Aitken’s Sleepwalkers film and read about how it was installed at MoMA.

In addition to the good times, we’ve also had some disappointing times here during our ravels, and this week proved to be full of them. Not only was favorite author Milan Kundera shown to be a communist sell out and Shakespeare unattractive, but Alessandro Twombly showed some works recently that are distrubingly similar to his father’s, painter Cy Twombly.

All these disaapointments in one week were too much for me! So goodbye, dear reader, and farewell!

I’m going to go drown my sorrows in the Costa Rican surf and chilly cervecas. (Because if you have to drown your sorrows, Costa Rica is the place to do it, no?) But fear not for I shall return to you in good time, specifically, April 6. Adios!

Melissa Meyer’s Dancing Paintings

Lang, 2008

Word on the street was that the Melissa Meyer show at Lennon, Wienberg Inc. was worth seeing, so I was lucky I made it down there this weekend before it closed. Canvases, like Lang above, are larger than you would expect and the oils in some places have the thinness of watercolors.

Meyer was in the gallery, and she described how she works with the canvases flat on the floor and paint them in layers. She thinks of the linear marks she makes as “dancing.”

Galvin, 2008

Her work is rooted in Abstract Expressionism, and in these large paintings she achieves an effect rather like watercolors with the play of light and space. I found I really enjoyed just looking at them and tracing the different layers and marks. The marks don’t come together to mean anything, but watching how they interact is beautiful.