Who's gonna win the Trawick?

Here are the Trawick Prize Short Listed artists...

Lauren Adams - Baltimore, MD

Selin Balci - Annapolis, MD

Travis Childers - Fairfax, VA

Adam Hager - Washington, D.C.

Mariah Anne Johnson - Washington, D.C.

Gary Kachadourian - Baltimore, MD

Kate Kretz - Colesville, MD

This year is a tough call, made tougher by the fact that the Trawick has progressively become more competitive each year; congrats to all the artists!

My favorite artist in this lot, and by far the one with the most exposure, experience and artistic DNA is Kate Kretz (remember when one of her paintings achieved worldwide attention a few years ago?).

Kretz should win this prize, and if she was picked by whoever was the "big mouth" (BM) from among the three jurors, then she will win. If I was one of this jurors, because I am a big mouth myself, then Kretz would definitely win.

But the fact that there are a couple (or three actually) of artists with very similar artistic interests in this lot, it seems to indicate to me that the BM was the "chooser" of those two and her own artistic agenda pushes more that way - if I'm correct, then Kretz was backed by the only artist in the panel.... who possibly also backed Mariah Anne Johnson.

UMD graduate Selin Balci's fascinating work gives me the impression of making her a  "juror's artist" (check out her CV here and see how many high profile juried shows have selected her amazing work recently) and I'm gonna predict that she wins this prize.

The show is at Gallery B (the former Fraser Gallery space in Bethesda) and I am told that the prize announcement will be September 16 - the show runs through Sept. 28.

Trawick Prize Finalists

The Trawick Prize: Bethesda Contemporary Art Awards is a visual art prize produced by the Bethesda Arts and Entertainment District that honors artists from Maryland, Washington, D.C. and Virginia. The annual juried competition awards $14,000 in prize monies to selected artists and features the work of the finalists in a group exhibition.

The 2013 exhibition will be held September 4-28 at Gallery B, located at 7700 Wisconsin Avenue, Suite E, Bethesda, MD 20814. 

Congratulations to the 2013 finalists!

Lauren Adams - Baltimore, MD

Selin Balci - Annapolis, MD

Travis Childers - Fairfax, VA

Adam Hager - Washington, D.C.

Mariah Anne Johnson - Washington, D.C.

Gary Kachadourian - Baltimore, MD

Kate Kretz - Colesville, MD

The 2013 competition was juried by Cynthia Connelly, Alexander Heilner and Vesela Sretenović - interesting to note that possibly for the first time or second that I can recall, there are no Richmond-based jurors, and thus the lack of Richmond-based artists. The MICA juror brings in two Baltimore artists (and possibly the Annapolis artist), but the rest are DMV area artists, reflecting the other two DMV-based jurors.

Cynthia Connolly, Photographer and Visual Arts Curator at Artisphere, Arlington, VA, was born in Los Angeles, and grew up in Washington, D.C. where she attended the Corcoran School of Art (bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design 1985). In 2003 she received a certificate from Auburn University’s design/build architecture program The Rural Studio. Internationally shown and a prolific artist, she is known for works in the Beautiful Losers exhibit, the book Banned in DC, her post cards, and curatorial work at DC Space, the Ellipse Arts Center and Artisphere. Her photography is in many private collections as well as the Smithsonian Museum of American History and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Her art connects disparate places, people and things.

Alexander Heilner is a multi-disciplinary artist who works in photography, video, digital imaging, installation, lighting design and sculpture. His work has been exhibited, screened, and performed nationally and internationally, from MoMA to Burning Man. Earlier this year, he won Baltimore’s Baker Artist Prize and his commissioned digital collages were featured in the new Johns Hopkins Hospital complex. Alex earned his bachelor’s degree at Princeton University and his master’s degree from the School of Visual Arts in New York. He has been teaching photography at Maryland Institute College of Art since 2003, and currently serves as the college’s Associate Dean of Design and Media Studies.

Dr. Vesela Sretenović is senior curator of modern and contemporary art at The Phillps Collection in Washington, D.C. She joined The Phillips Collection in January of 2009, bringing significant experience as a museum professional and scholar. Prior to joining the Phillips, Sretenović spent 10 years as curator at the David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University. She has also taught courses in contemporary art and art theory at the Rhode Island School of Design. Earlier in her career, Sretenović worked for the University at Buffalo (SUNY) Art Gallery and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, as well as several galleries in New York. She received her doctorate in humanities from Syracuse University; a master’s degree in modern art history, theory, and criticism from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and a bachelor’s degree in the history of art from the University of Belgrade, former Yugoslavia.
Who's gonna win? I'm like batting 70% picking these, so let me do a little research and by next week the Lenster will have the inside scoop on the potential winner... I like the fact that for the first time the Trawick had an artist in its jury panel...

Jerry Cullum on Kretz's Jollie Painting

Curator and Senior Editor of Art Papers Jerry Cullum adds some insight into the issue of the Kate Kretz painting of Jollie as the Virgin Mary. Read it here.

Cudlin on Gopnikosities

My good friend Jeffry Cudlin, the award winning art critic for the Washington City Paper, offers an intelligent and readable counterpoint to my dissection of Blake Gopnik's comments on the Kate Kretz "Jollie as Madonna" painting.

Read Jeffry's good points here.

I think that the line between illustration and fine art is sometimes real and a lot of times blurred, and many times erased by history, and sometimes entire cultures could be wrong, otherwise we'd still be considering Ukiyo-e as illustrations and manuals, and packing materials for tea vases to be shipped to Europe.

We're both making exagerated claims in a sense... Duchampian followers have a great time spending time deciphering the many stories and angles and intricate issues in Velazquez's "Las Meninas," but the opposite and immediate reaction is delivered equally well and without much deciphering in Goya's "3rd of May."

So the answer is that both can fit into our appreciation of art. And if it wasn't for Rockwell's "The Problem We All Live With," we'd have a very little footprint in contemporary 60's paintings of the Civil Rights struggle.



In some Rockwellian works like this one there's an example of an illustrator whose work crossed over and now - at least that piece and all the works from his civil rights imagery - crosses into fine art. It happened in the 1800s as well - Honore Daumier being the best-known example.



Were Gericault's "Medusa" to be painted today - say with the subject being Abu Ghraib, would that be art or an illustration? Oh wait - it has been done - Botero has done it and it's considered important political art!

In my opinion, and of course I'm opinionated and not necessarily right, Cudlin and many other writers are sometimes too wrapped up in theory and often resistant to just open up and enjoy the possibility of the simplicity of art for the sense of "just because..."

When I first started exploring, creating and writing about art 30 years ago, I too was all wrapped up in theory, and straining to find the meaning, the struggle, the clues, the angst, and the message in all the art that I was seeing. Without a message, the art was useless, I had been taught; if it stands on the shoulders of another artist, it cannot be good.

Among many other events that slowly changed my appreciation of art, somewhere along the lines I stumbled across a book titled: Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture.

And all of a sudden, the vapid, sickly sweet, saccharine Romantic art of the Victorians became a whole new world of clues, deciphering images that had secret meanings to the Victorians, etc.

It was a triumph for what Duchampians believe should be good in art. Yet it was a Duchampian triumph wrapped up in a visual eye candy that looked more like parlor room art than fine art; And it made me realize that both camps could be accepted.

And now I refuse to believe that art has to do this or do that, or delay our reactions, of give us clues, etc. in order to be accepted as high art. Don't get me wrong, there are still plenty of hacks out there producing paintings that sometimes astonish in their vapidity and waste of canvas, but to take the galvanized, one-track train of thought that it's either a Duchampian success or it can't be real art, is a sure way to eliminate a lot of good art which simply may offer nothing but viewing pleasure.

Henri Matisse once said that "there is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted." I think most painters almost subconsciously do this. In painting anything, unless one is outright copying an existing work (as it is taught in many art schools to teach painting techniques), a good artist is always creating something new. Something that until that moment, when the loaded brush is applied to the canvas and allowed to deliver its content, has never been done in that exact stroke, or manner, or hue, or shape, in the entire history of mankind.

Take a look at the book... it's by Bram Dijkstra, who was a professor of English literature at the University of California.

Gopnikosities

I really, really try to stay away from constantly poking fun at the Washington Post's erudite Chief Art Critic, Blake Gopnik's curiously academic and outdated views on contemporary art, which are still somehow stuck somewhere in the 1960s - I think - but the man is a never-ending source of astounding agendart verbosity.

So here's the latest:

According to this AP story a "North Carolina artist intrigued by the public obsession with celebrity has found herself feeding that obsession with a painting of actress Angelina Jolie as the Virgin Mary hovering over a Wal-Mart check-out line.

Kate Kretz has painted for 20 years but none of her previous work has garnered the attention given 'Blessed Art Thou,' showing this weekend at Art Miami, an annual exposition of modern and contemporary art."

And so, this WaPo blogger asked Blake Gopnik for his opinion on the painting, and the Gopnikmeister delivered this brilliant Gopnikism:

"Kate Kretz's painting comes closer to magazine illustration than to the subtle fine art you'd expect to see in a major museum of contemporary art. It gets its messages across, alright. It presents Angelina Jolie as our nation's Madonna of Consumption. In a glory of siliconed breasts, collagened lips and foreign-adopted cherubs, Angelina reigns over Wal-Mart's banality -- its all-American brands, its all-American flag, it's all-American obesity. The problem with the picture, art-wise, is that its messages are way TOO clear. It's more like a puzzle-picture than a probing work of art: Once you've deciphered it, there's not much chance of giving it a second look. Its van-art technique, especially, is so generic that it hardly has a thing to say that hasn't been said a thousand times before -- often, much better. The crucial question, in our busy age: Why spend time with this work, when a 500-word Op Ed would do a better job expressing its opinions, and any number of Old Master paintings would mean more to an art-loving eye."

Let me decipher this a-la-Bailey; Gopnik is affirming that:

1. "Real" art must be subtle in order to be of museum quality.

2. "Real" art should never be TOO clear in its message (otherwise who'd need critics to interpret it for us?).

3. "Real" art should "say" something, but not too clearly, and that something shouldn't have been said too many times before.

4. Old Master paintings, because they're done by dead Old Masters, can say something in a heavy-handed way, and really clearly, but that's OK, because they're Old Masters and not some new painter who's clearly never gotten the memo that painting is dead.