Art Column

In Parts 1 and 2 of this three-part piece, I addressed Matthew Collings’ human-centric approach to art history and the ectoplasmic vibe. In Part 3, I am thinking about how the drawings function as works of art. Or are they works of illustration? Does this distinction matter?

When I was young, each summer my family spent two weeks in a cabin at a rustic resort in the Adirondack Mountains. There was a sidewalk that led from our cabin by the lake to the dining hall that served three meals a day. This sidewalk was the only pavement in the camp. The texture was coarser and the color darker than the sidewalks at home. On two different rectangles there was a coin embedded in the concrete, pennies, heads up. The pennies had been embedded to mark the year the sidewalk was laid. One penny was older, more tarnished, and dated earlier than the other. In a place at end of a dirt road, where most of the camp was connected by wooded paths, this short stretch of smooth flat surface was an urban touch, a bit of outlying labor someone had taken pride in.

...Every artist who has spent a long night in the studio knows that eventually, the ghosts will come.

The traditional version of Art History taught at university posits a timeline, delineating eras that contain advancements in technology, named movements, and the introduction of new “isms.” Artists are born, work, and die on this timeline, the sum of their life in art summarized in an image or two. Matthew Collings’ version of art history is different, focusing on the artists more than the art, the specific rather than the vast, and the personal rather than the academic. The setting in many of his drawings is the studio, the place where art is made, rather than the church, palace, gallery, or museum.

Joan Mitchell’s studio in the 1950s. “Heroes-era” David Bowie is there with her. So is Louise Bourgeois, and Claude Monet, partially translucent, standing behind Joan Mitchell’s dog. A new painting hangs on the wall under spotlights.

Since 2020, Matthew Collings has made over 2000 art history drawings in colored pencil on A4 paper. Collings is a British artist, art-writer, TV personality and, as I learned in our video conversation last month, a one-time kidnap victim. He posts the drawings on Instagram shortly after making them. The drawings are usually accompanied by a title or descriptive caption, some of them long enough to tell a story. They are sold through Artist Support Pledge an art community-marketplace. Eventually, images of the drawings will be edited into a book, though Collings’ plans around that are still forming.

The thesis of the new exhibition at NOMA, Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club, is ambitious. It draws a wide circle around the American artist in Nigeria, a literary journal called Black Orpheus, and the Mbari Club, a collective of artists, musicians, and writers that formed in 1961. The scope of the exhibition continues beyond Nigeria, beyond Africa, and concludes with a selection of African-American artists working in Africa in the mid 20th century. Last week, I attended a tour given by Ndubuisi Ezeluomba, exhibition co-curator and curator of African Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. It will take me more than one visit to absorb all the ideas that informed the exhibition.

Tara Gorman wakes at 6 a.m. to be at work by 7. She’s a retail manager at a wholesale produce company in Western Massachusetts. She calls it “the fruit mines,” and tells me she likes her job. Most days Tara works until 6:30 p.m. and is home by 7. After dinner she does whatever chores need to be done to clean up from that day and prepare for the next. Then, with whatever time and energy is left, Tara goes to the basement to play with toys. She makes dioramas or stages scenes that sometimes include produce or other food. On her day off Tara might walk in the woods, bringing along an elephant, a nun, or a man in a lawn chair or other little toys as well as her camera. This got me thinking: do adults make art for the same reasons children play? Neither activity is immediately necessary for survival and yet––

Sergey Melnitchenko’s series Young and Free was made before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Context, in this case war, shifts the impact and meaning of an image or artwork. Melnitchenko typically shoots his subjects nude. This strategy can free a body of its cultural specificity and the distraction of clothing styles. The nude body can evoke eroticism or innocence. The tone of this work is innocence and levity. The young men in these photographs play with an attitude of freedom, apparently without shame. In the context of war, the unclothed bodies of young men seem vulnerable, beautiful and tragic. Ukraine has been engaged in a defensive war for almost a year now. I look at these photographs and I worry about these men. As a mother of sons and as a human on Earth, they hurt to look at. Context bleeds into art, and art bleeds back.

I visited New Orleans Museum of Art one last time in 2022. “Whaaat?!” I said, under my breath when I saw an unfamiliar painting in the Impressionist gallery. “You sly devil,” I said to the painting or maybe to Monet himself. This canvas did not look like a typical Monet, but also it did with its cerulean sky, puffy clouds, wide variety of greens, a variety of brushstrokes. The way the water was articulated, deep blue and a surface–both the surface of the water and the surface of the painting–of horizontal skittering white marks was all Monet. The main reason the painting didn’t look to me like a Monet, other than the fact that I had never seen it before, was the main subject and how it was painted. The big, sagging beige-ish brownish structure was quite un-Monet-ish. The wall label read “Houses on the Old Bridge at Vernon, c. 1883.”

Last month, the final exhibition at SHED on Poland Avenue closed. The founder-directors (and spouses) Gabrielle Banzaf and Jon Gott are leaving New Orleans. But SHED isn’t closing; it’s shapeshifting. Though SHED was created in the backyard of their rented New Orleans home, they told me, the project was never limited to a certain geography.

Bert Drieghe works four days a week as an electrician near Ghent. In our email exchange in English (Bert’s native language is Flemish) he specified, “I don't do house installation, but make electrical cabinets for industry, such as conveyor belts, mixers, rollers, automation... Just like everything in my life, this certainly has an influence on my paintings.”