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  Jack Richard Smith “Spiros Antonopoulos” Oil on Copper 2004

  JACK RICHARD SMITH (1950-) Taos, NM

  “Spiros Antonopoulos” 2004

  Blackoil, wax, lead salts on copper, burl wood and ebonized wood Dutch old master style frame

  Exhibited: “Taos Portraits” by Jack Smith, Harwood Museum of Art, University of New Mexico, Taos, New Mexico, May 14th – August 15th, 2004

  Illustrated: “Taos Portraits” by Jack Smith, May 14th – August 15th, 2004, exhibition catalogue (Taos, NM: Harwood Museum of Art, University of New Mexico) illustr. 16

  Painting: 6” x 6”
  Framed: 13 3/4” x 13 11/16”

  Price: $14,500

  Incorporating blackoil, wax, lead salts, and copper Smith’s small format portraits and paintings are detailed and intimate depictions of creative individuals and charged tableaux. Smith’s singular style of portraits glow with a warm inner light and present honest, straightforward images that speak of personal narratives. Smith’s interest in miniatures developed first as a matter of convenience. In 1982, while preparing for a winter of travel in Mexico, he experienced logistical problems traveling with the larger size painting materials he was using at the time. The solution seemed to be a block of watercolor paper and casein, a milk base paint of versatile possibilities and vehement drying power. Suddenly, his paintings went from three by five feet to three by five inches. The history of oil painting, principally centered around the Dutch schools and their development of a method called black oil painting, often executed in miniature, also captured his interest. Black oil, an oleoresin comprised of white beeswax, raw linseed oil and litharge of lead, suspends the pigment above the painting ground, which was traditionally wood panel, linen or copper plate. This medium seems to suspend the pigment, allowing light to penetrate and reflect from the surface and illuminate the imaged from behind, a sort of light from within. The small format is an act of compression that requires the viewer to draw in close to a more intimate proximity and will, if the painting works, hopefully approach Joseph Campbell’s description of art as an “object of fascination” to engage the viewer and stop for a moment one’s busy mind. Jack Smith was born in 1950. At age 16, he began his training at the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan before moving to Ohio to attend Columbus College of Art and Design. He also studied for a brief time at the Instituto de Allende, at San Miguel de Allende, GTO, Mexico. He now resides in New Mexico. Reflecting a profound knowledge of art history and and an alchemist’s sense of the painting craft, contemporary painter Jack Smith has forged his own place amongst the most powerful of contemporary portraitists working in America. Jack Smith recently received a prestigious Past Achievement Award from the Peter and Madeleine Martin Foundation for the Creative Arts, following an important solo exhibition titled, Jack Smith: The Taos Portraits at the Harwood Museum of Art at the University of New Mexico in 2004. The exhibition featured fifty portraits of Taos, New Mexico residents, executed between 2000 and 2003. The series was intended as a visual biography of this unique artistic community at the turn of the century. Smith’s subjects range from the famous to the infamous — including artists, writers, art patrons, Native peoples, and street peoples. Spiros Antonopoulos’s (he always dropped the s in Spiros when saying his name) past is a little sketchy. I understand that he was trained as a musician and through that came to the world of computers, which he mastered immediately given his hot tub size brain pan. He also told me once that he had “done lots of drugs and some porn movies” while in college. Before we met he used to drive by my house in Arroyo Hondo, NM when he lived above us on the ridge road called Atalaya, about fifteen miles north of Taos and would make funny faces at me through the smudged window of his ghostly, lowrider station wagon. He was wildly eccentric dresser and had a selection of sunglasses that Elton would envy, mostly a thrift store wardrobe kind of guy. As I mentioned before, he tended to remind me of a mad computer geek samurai, which I tried to capture in this portrait. I’ve heard he now lives in the East Village and has forsaken his aforementioned life for obsessive Bikram yoga…… and that’s where the trail gets cold. The Taos portrait series was executed from 1999 to 2003 and was intended as a visual biography of this peculiar valley and town of Taos, NM. The subjects range from famous artists, writers and political activists to street people and what we affectionately call “sage bunnies”, or, folks that live out in the hinterlands in a grow hole with a goat or two and come to town once a month for provisions and bathe in patchuli oil, I presume, to save water. I would have liked to have had more of these folks but lining them up proved problematic as they tend to live in a parallel universe called locally, “the land of poco tiempo”, or “little time” , a condition caused, in their case, by smoking too much cheeba. This same time thing is true of my attempts at several more Native American friends from the pueblo…… it is something I greatly admire about them, unless of course you are scheduling a portrait sitting for the fourth time and they just had to go to Walmart without warning. But then “this is Taos” as John Nichols mentions in the forward to theexhibition catalogue and it is often referred to as an “open air asylum” for a myriad of good reasons. I thought it would be interesting to look back at some future time and see the weft and warp of the tapestry of Taos at the turn of themillennium. I could easily have done three hundred, but one must stop somewhere. The show was hanging in conjunction with Wayne Theibauld’s “City/ Country” exhibition at the Harwood Museum in Taos, New Mexico, June to September, 2004. – as told by Jack Smith, May 2006

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  Alyssa Monks “Push” Oil on Canvas 2006

  ALYSSA MONKS (b.1977) USA

  Push 2006

  Oil on canvas

  Signed: Alyssa Monks 2006 (on lower back of canvas)

  Exhibited: DFN Gallery, New York 2006

  Illustrated: American Art Collector, May 2006, p. 155

  H: 30” x W: 56”

  “Push” is somewhat of a response to the long tradition of bathtub paintings where a nude woman is displayed. However, the figure is me, the painter, so that the subject is also the artist, juxtaposing the objectification of women in that tradition. Also, the figure wears a black negligee and red lipstick, white makeup gently drips down the cheek, closing the door on naturalism.

  At the New York Academy of Art, Alyssa Monks studied with Vincent Desiderio, Wade Schuman, Brenda Zlamany, John Jacobsmeyer, Harvey Citron, Deane Keller, Edward Schmidt, Steven Assael, Lisa Bartolozzi, Patrick Connors, Peter Cox, Jon DeMartin, Leonid Lerman, and Hong Nian Zhang. Alyssa’s sensibility of paint and color allows one to be seduced into the illusion of each image. Striving for anatomical and realistic accuracy, it is her intention to elicit a serious confrontation. The work requires attention to detail and a slow and rich execution. It is this artist’s concern to visually relate the contemporary human experience with sensitivity, empathy, and integrity.

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  Knox Martin, “Eight”, Magna and oil on canvas 1958

  KNOX MARTIN (1923-) USA

  Eight 1958

  Magna and oil on canvas

  Signed: Knox Martin on lower left on front of canvas, Knox M on back of canvas

  Marks: From: CORE, 38 Park Row, New York 38, NY, To: Martin, Knox, Eight, 1958, Magna/Oil, 30×40, 700. (paper label), Fischbach Gallery, 799 Madison Avenue, New York 21, Knox Martin, Eight, C.O.R.E., Price $700 (paper label), Mr. Ned L. Pines, 605 Park Ave., New York 21, NY (address label).

  Exhibited: Fischbach Gallery, New York 1963; I. Jankowski Gallery, New York, 1975

  Provenance: Personal Collection of the artist; Private Collection New York

  Canvas: H: 40 1/4” x W: 26 1/4””

  Framed: H: 52 3/8” x W: 38 3/8”

  From 1957 to about 1964, the spirit of art in New York City was moving in directions for which Abstract Expressionism had not prepared us. By 1965, the strokes, swipes, drips, and splatters of New York painting had given way to cool, laconic representations of the most ordinary of ordinary objects. It was a transformation in artistic culture in which intellectual rewards replaced, or at least supplemented, visual ones, and the whole philosophical face of art was beginning to disclose itself in a particularly vivid way. I saw Knox Martin’s paintings as embodying this transformative moment. In them, I thought, the tension between the two rival philosophies of art could be felt. the way I saw them: they appeared at first glance to be collages, made of large, irregular, overlapping swatches of patterned cloth. Some of the swatches were striped, some appeared to be decorated with circles. It must be conceded that stripes and circles belong to the vocabulary of one kind of abstract art, while the irregular shapes, which felt as though they had been torn from bolts of material, belonged to another.

  So one might properly claim that Martin was synthesizing an expressionist abstraction with a geometrical one. For me, however, Knox’s stripes and circles evoked the life of the circus: the striped tents, the loudly patterned costume of clowns. And Martin’s colors—pistachio, raspberry, banana—were festive and impudent. That is why I felt that the paintings referred to vernacular reality, as much so as Campbell Soup cans or Coca Cola bottles. The circus was a recurring theme in modernist art, and I thought it appropriate for late modernist painting to reduce the circus to patterned rags expressive of its raucous gaiety.

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  Duggie Fields, “Girl with Shoulder Bag”, Oil on linen 1970

  DUGGIE FIELDS (1945-) London, UK

  “Girl with Shoulder Bag” 1970

  Oil on linen, custom wood and green lacquer Shadow box frame

  Marks: “Girl with Shoulder Bag”, Winter 1970 (Dougie Field)

  Canvas: H: 72” x W: 36”
  Framed: H: 74 1/2″ x W: 38 1/2″

  Duggie Fields was born in 1945 and brought up in the village of Tidworth. He spent his youth in the countryside, moving to the outer suburbs of London in his adolescence. He studied architecture, briefly, at Regent Street Polytechnic before going to Chelsea School of Art in 1964 where he stayed for four years, before leaving with a scholarship that took him on his first visit to the United States. As a student his work moved from Minimal, Conceptual and Constructivist phases to a more hard-edge post-Pop figuration. By the middle of the 1970s his work included many elements that were later defined as Post-Modernism. In 1983 in Tokyo, sponsored by the Shiseido Corporation, a gallery was created specially for his show, and the artist and his work were simultaneously featured in a television, magazine, billlboard and subway advertising campaign throughout the country. He started working with digital media in the late 1990’s describing his work in progress as Maximalist. Selected One-Man Exhibitions 1971 Hamet Gallery, London 1972 Bear Lane Gallery, Oxford; 1975 Kinsman-Morrison Gallery, London 1979 Kyle Gallery, London; 1980 lkon Gallery, Birmingham; Midland Group, Nottingham; New 57 Gallery, Edinburgh; Roundhouse Gallery, London 1982 Spacex Gallery, Exeter; B2 Gallery London 1983 Shiseido Exhibition, Tokyo 1987 Albermarle Gallery, London 1991 Rempire Gallery, New York 2000 Random Retrospective, Virtual Gallery, DuggieFields Selected Group Exhibitions 1976 New London in New York, Hal Bromm Gallery, New York 1979 The Figurative Show, Nicola Jacobs Gallery, London; Masks, The Ebury Gallery, London; Culture Shock, The Midland Group, Nottingham; Art and Artifice, B2 Gallery, London 1983 Taste, Victoria and Albert Museum, London 1984 The Male Nude, Homeworks Gallery, London 1985 Image-Codes, Art about Fashion, The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; VisualAid, Royal Academy, London l986 The Embellishment of the Statue of Liberty, Cooper Hewitt Museum/Barney’s New York 1987 Twenty Artists Twenty Techniques, Albemarle Gallery, London 1989 Fashion and Surrealism, Victoria and Albert Museum, London 1988 Het Mannelisknaakt, Gallery Bruns, Amsterdsm, St. Judes Gallery, London 1990 Universal Language, Rempire Gallery, New York 1993 Tranche d’Art Contemporain Anglais, Tutesaal, Luxemburg 1998 Exquisite Corpse, Jibby Beane, London 1999 Art 1999, Jibby Beane, London; Flesh, Blains Fine Art, London Nerve, I.C.A. London 2000 Art 2000, Jibby Beane, London Up &Co., New York