Rebecca Murtaugh in the NYT

Check out Rebecca's work and words in an article by Penelope Green today's New York Times on the front of the House and Home section.

"...Rebecca Murtaugh, an artist, was thinking about space, value and the “thingness” of objects, as she put it, when she created her 2001 Post-its installation in her bedroom in Arcata, Calif., where she was living at the time.

“I was really mesmerized by Post-its,” she said last week. “They come in all these colors. They are beautiful. They have a purpose, but it’s different for everyone: sometimes it’s a note, ‘I’ll be back,’ or maybe it’s a phone number. But for all these important things, the note itself is always ephemeral and temporary. Yet it’s carrying all this valuable information. So there is this duality: it’s disposable, but it’s very valuable. I wanted to mark an important space, not a book with a note, but an entire room.”

It took Ms. Murtaugh six days to cover her bedroom and all the objects in it with Post-it notes. She used the original yellow for areas that she said had less value, like the walls, and neon colors for areas of more value, like the bed coverings and the rugs. She spent over $1,000 at her local stationers, and titled the piece, “To Mark a Significant Space in the Bedroom #1.” Only five people saw the original, including her now-husband, who had gone away on vacation and returned to find the work in place. (Ms. Murtaugh dismantled it after 24 hours, but the piece lives on in digital form on design blogs like insurgentmuse.com and the artist’s Web site, rebeccamurtaugh.com.).

“He was kind of alarmed,” she said. “It sort of felt like you were on the inside of a piñata.”

Her relationship to the more mundane applications of Post-its has been irrevocably altered. “What’s interesting is that I don’t use them for organizing anymore,” said Ms. Murtaugh, who teaches art at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. “I don’t want to waste them.”"

Congratulations Becky!!!!

Artificium of Humanitas VI

Seoul Hae-Tae Gallery, Seoul, South Korea, June 25 - July 2, 2007
Shang-Shang Main Gallery, Beijing, China, July 5-11, 2007


On June 25, 2007 22 artists from the United States will join artists from Korea, France, Germany, Russia, Mongolia and China in an exhibition of paintings, sculptures, drawings, and mixed media pieces at the Seoul Hae-Tae Gallery in Seoul, South Korea. Known as Artificium of Humanitas VI, the show will move to the Shang-Shang Main Gallery in Beijing, China and run from July 5 – 11, 2007.

Now in its fifth year, the show is a continuation of a dialogue about the sharing of cultures, manners, and artistic expression from distinctive and different cultures. The concept was developed by Hee Ja Sung, a Richmond, Virginia artist who is originally from Korea. The show has been growing strong since 2002.

Artists participating in the exhibition include:
Bill Fisher, James Miller, Mark Bryant, Anne Savedge,
Fiona Ross, Sara Clark, Brad Birchett, Chuck Scalin,
Mim Golub, Kipp Green, Solomon Isekeige, Melissa Burgess,
Cynthia Fraula-Hahn, Amie Oliver, Kirsten A. Kindler,
John M. Pollard, Cynthia Erdahl,
Barry Roebuck, Robert L. Tarbell,
Jorge M. Benitez, Don Crow and Hee Ja Sung.

Works of Art on Paper, a national juried competition, will open on June 30th, 2007 at the Long Beach Island Foundation for the Arts and Sciences. A drawing of mine, Unicursal Labyrinth (full image above, detail below), will be in the show. This particular drawing is made of a single and continuous line that forms a faulty "the way in is the only way out" (a.k.a., unicursal) labyrinth. For those of you interested in this madness, if you click on the image you will see the line begins at the upper right hand corner and continues around the paper until the line ends mid-way up the right hand side of the drawing.

Works of Art on Paper is curated by Starr Figura, Assistant Curator of Prints and Illustrated Books at the MoMA.Unicursal Labyrinth, Sumi ink on Arches paper, 2006
25" x 20"
Price on request...

Sarah Peters at Winkleman Gallery

If you are in NYC go see the always wonderful Sarah Peters' show at Winkleman Gallery! She has a host of new drawings and a self-portrait bust. I just love Sarah AND her work - go see!







UPDATE, 7/13/07:

SARAH PETERS
‘Being American’
Winkleman Gallery
637 West 27th Street, Chelsea
Through July 21 - EXTENDED 'TIL JULY 27! GO SEE!

In her first solo show, Sarah Peters breathes life into an obsession with the art and history of colonial America. The breath comes from a fidgety crosshatch technique rendered in pencil and black ballpoint pen that gives her images both a gauzy drift and an almost fingernails-on-blackboard screechiness.

The gallery explains that Ms. Peters revisits the naïve, often awkward motifs of colonial art to make them more complete or realistic. Thus “Dreamer,” a portrait of a man in the angular style of an itinerant painter, has a trio of voluptuous bikini-clad women in the background, perhaps to show what was really on the man’s mind. “Séance” adds intimations of ghosts, or at least moving curtains, to an image of a flower urn, a traditional mourning motif.

But what Ms. Peters really does is make this world seem crazier, suggesting the thinness of the line between the cooked and the raw amid a general atmosphere of chaos and decay. “Still Life With Battle” shows a compote dish of fruit and a background swarming with tiny figures: naked men armed with clubs. And the show’s tour de force, a 20-foot-long drawing titled “Being American,” shows an Arcadian landscape strewn with columns, portrait busts and neo-Classical statues as well as a woman sculptor, contemplating a nude torso.

Ms. Peters’s precedents include Edward Gorey and the early work of both Jim Nutt and Sue Williams. Her alternately wafting and grating drawing style makes her images feel at once romantic and hard-bitten. They may seem to float through the mists of time, but they have a few scores to settle. ROBERTA SMITH

Untitled, 2007
Silk print on Japanese paper

Home Again...


I just got home from a month in Ireland, a trip that was absolutely wonderful in every conceivable way. The Tyrone Guthrie Center is a stellar place to live, work and eat (and eat and eat) and the artists and staff there are remarkable. Big thanks to everyone there, to director Dr. Pat Donlon, Lavina, Tedd and Doreen, Mary, Theresa and Ingrid, Marcella and Denise, and Eamon.Above, Mary Donnelly and Stephanie Sabatier.

Also hello's to Mary Donnelly, Mary Dorcey, Annie McCartney, Terry Loane, David Gleason,
Alice Coughlin, Stephanie Sabatier, Enda, Phil Coulter, David and Miles, Siofra O'Donovan, Shannon, Neil Martin, Ruth Hickey, Debbie and Fred Ziegler.
Above: Mary Donnelly, David Ferguson, Miles, me and Fred Ziegler at breakfast. Notice, please, the empty bowl of whupped cream that Lavina left where I could find it. Diabolical.

The Big House, viewed from the greenhouse.
Stephanie took this picture of my hand (above) to prove that I did get work done in between funs, and (below), the view from my drawing table, up towards the greenhouse and water tower. The little pond below is alive with frogs, newts and other squiggly things.Neil Martin, cellist, composer and chef-for-the-night at Annaghmakerrig, above, and his sous chef Phillip Coulter below, very blurry shot, as he was working very hard, Neil being a perfectionist and all.
Above, Teddy shows Pat how it's done...

Miss Warby, are you there?


I can't wait to go again next year...