Peonies only exist in red, pink and white.
Their season is absurdly short.
They require seriously cold winters to incubate their amazing profusion.
Their true glory is unknown to those in overly temperate climes.
To crown their abundance of petals, they are redolent with divine fragrance.
Smell is too common a word.
Whenever I gaze into a full blown peony, I (and many others) become instantly, irreversibly intoxicated.
Wood Block Print, Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA /
Summer greetings to all. This June, I was invited by the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA to create a wood block print to benefit the center. I worked with master printer Andrew Mockler from Jungle Press Editions. Provincetown, for a long time, has been an amazing nexus of creative personalities. I was staying in the barn where Helen Frankenthalerand Robert Motherwell painted in the 1940s. Eugene O’Neil‘s early plays were produced by the Provincetown Players. And Hans Hofmann taught at his famous summer art school there for many summers. Amid all this rich history, a group of artists, mostly women, created a unique form of color wood cut prints in Provincetown. My favorite of these artists was Blanche Lazzell (1878-1956). She was a great artist not widely known outside the world of printmaking and she was also a true bohemian spirit.
Andrew and I researched white line woodcuts, and he devised a contemporary technique to replicate them using one wood block, inked with various colors, run only once through the press. Consistent with my current studio explorations, I selected for the image a single aloe plant, vigorous and upstanding, succulent but armored. Over our work time there, we created the block and proofed many color variants utilizing the same single woodblock, of which these are two of our favorites. Once editioned, the prints will be available from junglepress.com.
“Emerging From the Shadows”: Dorothy Browdy Kushner /
I am so proud to see Dorothy Browdy Kushner’s works in print, listed with over 300 of her women colleagues. Below are some of the images recently published in Emerging from the Shadows: A Survey of Women Artists Working in California 1860-1960. This four volume reference set has been a decades-long labor of love for the two authors, Maurine St. Gaudens and Joseph Morsman.
To learn more about my mother and California Modernist Dorothy Browdy Kushner, visit:
DorothyBrowdyKushner.com
Oxbow School Students Create Mural with Robert Kushner /
It was wonderful to visit Napa, CA in the riotous height of spring and particularly inspiring to work with a wildly talented, spirited, goofy, wonderful group of high school students. Gathered together from all across the country for this one semester art immersion and academic program, I hope they learned some things, but I know that I felt renewed and restored by their optimism and buoyant energy. Drawing, drawing, painting the myriad of wild flowers and garden flowers at hand, then collectively composing and collaging this collection of blossoms done by the entire group was an education for them and a thrill for me.
Oxbow School Spring Visiting Artist Lecture Series: Robert Kushner /
Robert Kushner
Tuesday, March 22, 7pm
Visiting Artist Lecture
Oxbow School, Napa, CA
Since participating in the early years of the Pattern and Decoration Movement in the 1970’s, Robert Kushner has continued to address controversial issues involving decoration. Kushner draws from a unique range of influences, and his work combines organic representational elements with abstracted geometric forms in a way that is both decorative and modernist. He has said, “Decoration, an abjectly pejorative dismissal for many, is a very big, somewhat defiant declaration for me . . . . The eye can wander, the mind think unencumbered through visual realms that are expansively and emotionally rich. Decoration has always had its own agenda, the sincere and unabashed offering of pleasure and solace.” On his collages specifically, Kushner writes: “I want to make [my pieces] as diffused and confusing as possible. I want the viewer to time travel as broadly as possible. And so I include papers from as many languages, cultures, times, and places as I can which become a part of the content of the work. In all likelihood no one individual could read all the languages in each collage. Instead of concrete cognition we arrive at a mist of unknowing.”
Kushner’s work has been exhibited extensively in the United States, Europe, and Japan and has been included three times in the Whitney Biennial and twice at the Biennale in Venice. He was the subject of solo exhibitions at both the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum. A mid-career retrospective of his work was organized by the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art. Kushner’s works are included in many prominent public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; National Gallery of Art, DC; Corcoran Gallery of Art, DC; Tate Gallery, London; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu; Denver Art Museum; Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence; J. Paul Getty Trust, Los Angeles; Museum Ludwig, St. Petersburg; and Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Image: Robert Kushner, Large Succulent Garden, 2014, oil and acrylic on joined paper, 54 3/4 x 33 1/2 inches
Robert Kushner at Jerald Melberg Gallery, March 12 – April 23, 2016 /
Please join Jerald Melberg Gallery for an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Robert Kushner. In this recent body of work, Kushner continues expanding the style he has worked in for decades: boldly colored, opulent paintings patterned with flowers and plant forms. The exhibition also includes a series of mixed media collages composed of elements from varied times and worldly locales, overlaid with minimalist flora forms.
Coffee & Conversation
with
Robert Kushner
Saturday, March 12 at 11:00am
Jerald Melberg Gallery
625 South Sharon Amity Road
Charlotte, NC 28211
704.365.3000
Listen to Robert Kushner’s Gallery Talk at Jerald Melberg Gallery:
Robert Kushner, “Tenderness” /
Motifs can remain the same, but intentions often change over time. The mood of 2014 becomes different in 2015. “Tenderness and Thorns” mellows to “Tenderness.” “Cacti and Camellias” turns into only pure white camellias. Here is a brand new (nearly finished) painting: “Tenderness,” 102″x 256″, oil and acrylic on seven panels.
Robert Kushner Tapestry Designs: Manufacture des Gobelins /
In 2011, I was contacted by Manufacture des Gobelins, perhaps the most prestigious tapestry weaving house today, to inquire whether I might create a design to be woven into one of their tapestries. Gobelins was created in the 1600s at the initiative of Henry IV and was expanded under Louis XIV in 1662 to create tapestries for the many newly built royal palaces, such as Versailles. With only brief interruptions the weavers have been weaving ever since.
In recent times, Gobelins has commissioned many important contemporary artists to create tapestry designs. Picasso, Matisse, Odilon Redon, Raul Dufy, Alexander Calder, Sonia Delaunay and Shirley Jaffe have all supplied drawings or paintings which were brilliantly translated into tapestries.
In the summer of 2012 I toured the factory, observing how the maquettes were translated for the weavers, how the colors were meticulously matched, and how the weavers were working for one or two years to create each design. I spent some time in their museum of historical tapestries, learning and thinking about just what I wanted to see them make with my designs.
My designs for a tapestry were created at home in my New York studio. The images are of my house plants such as euphorbia and begonia. Impressed with the weavers’ ability to depict gold, I made prominent use of gold leaf in the maquette. When my design was approved, work began, matching the colors and then weaving samples. Here are the first swatches. Now, with my approval, work will begin. For now, these samples serve as a tempting appetizer.