“Moxie”
by Nadine “Portraitgirl” Robbins
28×34
Oil on Linen

Born in 1966, Nadine attended grade school in Southern France where she came in contact with that region’s rich artistic heritage. At age 16 she returned to the United States where she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Graphic Design from the State University of New York at New Paltz. An exchange student opportunity brought Nadine back to Europe where she visited the major museums that solidified her love of portraiture. After graduating from college she worked in the corporate communications and identity divisions of Citibank and Chase in New York City. In 1989 Nadine founded Namaro Graphic Designs during which time she received more than 50 design awards all the while refining her figurative painting techniques.

In 2007, Nadine decided to dedicate herself full-time to painting modern portraits that celebrate life. In 2008, she began an ambitious three year project entitled “8 Portrait Peaces” where she painted 8 life size portraits of couples while documenting the process online. The project gained attention in 2010 when one of the paintings “The Rolling Buns” was accepted into the highly regarded Annual Royal Society of Portrait Painters’ Show in London. In 2011, yet another from this series “Acacia and the Bowman” was also accepted into the same show. By the summer of 2011, to celebrate the legalization of marriage for gay couples in New York and the end of the “8 Portrait Peaces” project, The Brill Gallery offered her a one woman show to display her gay portraits from this series. Recently in 2012, the final painting of the series entitles “Molly and Zoe” was a finalist in the juried Acopal Exhibition of Contemporary American Realism.

Nadine plans on continuing to push the art of portraiture into new territories that depict people as they are by using spontaneous poses that capture authenticity, warmth, wit and humor.

dino@nadinerobbinsportraits.com
845-233-0082
Twitter: portraitgirl
www.nadinerobbinsportraits.com
www.facebook.com/NadineRobbinsPortraits

Andrew Demcak is an award-winning poet and novelist whose work has been widely published and anthologized both in print and on-line, and whose books have been featured at Verse Daily, The Lambda Literary Foundation, The Best American Poetry blog, and PA. His fourth book of poetry, Night Chant, was published by Lethe Press, 2011. His other poetry books are: A Single Hurt Color, GOSS 183::Casa Menendez Press, 2010, Zero Summer, BlazeVOX [Books], NY, 2009 and his first poetry book, Catching Tigers in Red Weather, three candles press, 2007, that was selected by Joan Larkin to win the Three Candles Press Open Book Award. He was a 2010 Finalist for The Crazyhorse Poetry Award. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Lambda Award, Thom Gunn Poetry Award, both the California and Northern California Book Awards, Best of the Web, and others. He has an M. F. A. in English/Creative Writing from St. Mary’s College in Moraga, CA , where he studied with Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Michael Palmer, Carol Snow, Frank Bidart, Gary Snyder, Charles Wright, and Sharon Olds. Andrew is also a member of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, where he studied with Galway Kinnell, Richard Howard, and Lucille Clifton. His poems, including Young Man With iPod (Poetry Midwest, #13), are taught at Ohio State University as part of both its English 110.02 class, “The Genius and the Madman,” and in its “American Poetry Since 1945″ class. At the age of 23, Andrew published his first chapbook, The Psalms (Big 23 Press), which was favorably reviewed by Dr. Clifton Snider in the Small Press Review (issue 226, vol. 23, no. 11.) When he is not hard at work as a Children’s Librarian for Oakland Public Library, he can be found eating okonomiyaki at Japantown in San Francisco. Viva Wallace Stevens!

His paintings range from the figure and portraiture, to still lives and landscapes, to investigations of machinery, architecture, and microflaura. His images occupy a spectrum from high rendering to almost total abstraction.

His work is included in numerous private collections, among them those of Chicago collector Howard Tullman, best-selling novelist China Miéville, and author Kathleen Rooney. He is represented by Dacia Gallery in Manhattan, Gitana Rosa Gallery in Brooklyn, Hilliard Gallery in Missouri, and Six Summit Gallery in Connecticut. His art is collected at www.danielmaidman.com, and most of his writing on art is at www.danielmaidman.blogspot.com. He lives and paints in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Do you find living in New York inspirational?

Yes, absolutely. I used to live in Los Angeles, and whether it was the geography, or where I was with my own work, I didn’t really know any artists. It’s a lot easier to meet artists here, and discuss work. I get a lot out of seeing what other people are doing and the thoughts they’re bringing to their work. The city itself, it goes without saying, is an amazing source of inspiration.

How would you describe the immediate art scene there?

I don’t know if I could give you a good answer. There are lots of nuclei of artists in the city. So for instance, the artists I know tend to be classically-trained figurative painters, many of them working out of studios in Bushwick, in Brooklyn. They have a constellation of galleries and social events, some of which I attend. But all of that is only one nucleus in a much larger New York art scene; lately I’ve been making more of an effort to get out of my comfort zone and see what other people are doing.

If you did not live there where would you paint instead and why?

I have a lot of trouble imagining not living here right now. I’m pretty uncomfortable outside of megacities, so I’d have to be in LA or London or something if not here.

What is your favorite restaurant and item on the menu?

Funayama Sushi in the west village. Very reasonably priced sushi, but extraordinarily good fish. Salmon sushi.

Whose artwork are you digging the most lately and why?

I’ve been excited about Stephen Wright for a number of years, and I’m still excited. I’ve given some thought to Eric Fischl recently and I’m a big fan of Walton Ford’s. I’m working on a project involving surfaces and spaces; I’ve turned to Richard Serra and Cy Twombly when considering surfaces, and Vilhelm Hammershøi, Adriana Varejão, and Hugh Ferriss for spaces. A different project involving large color washes has me pondering Helen Frankenthaler.

If one of your paintings makes it to the Louvre 200 years from now, which one will it be and why?

So far, I think either Blue Leah #2, because I think that’s where I’ve come closest to complete personhood in a painting, or Black Wall #1, because it’s the first thing I’ve done that could be considered a formal innovation.

If you had to stop painting for some unforeseen reason what would you do instead?

Probably write, but I’m doing that already. I do worry about losing an eye, or a hand.

What other mediums would you like to explore?

NASA has developed a carbon nanotubule surface which absorbs something like 99% of light, making it the blackest substance on Earth. It was designed to keep stray photons from bouncing into space-based telescopes. I’m not sure how archival it is, but I’d like to get my hands on some of that.

If you could sit with an artist from the 1800′s who would that artist be and what would you ask them?

Van Gogh. He seems to have been one of these poor bastards who’s a genius from afar, and insufferably intense in person. I would ask him to tell me what was on his mind. If we could each have sat with him for half an hour, things might have gone easier for him.

You are also a writer and contributing articles from your blog to the Huffington Post. Have you ever considered poetry?

Not even a wee bit.

If you love something set it free, she said.
I said:
If you buy a dress in a store where someone steals your wallet
you’ll never like the color.
I realize that’s not exactly the same thing and yet
I know how to make up philosophy like that
to keep you from knowing—
I can’t remember what I’ve lost.

***********

Parity

Not by sight but by faith I know he loves her still,
And I have sent myself here to tell you this.

Just when the seasons were failing and the snow had finally begun,
the red finches arrived all at once to give us courage.

She was disinclined to believe a man could love her so
and she didn’t believe this celebrity could last,

so I have sent myself here to tell you, he loves her still,
I know this not by sight but by faith.

Poetry says every woman wishes she were able to wake next to a man
in his last days of life who was singing:

Let’s talk dirty in Hawaiian, and singing the dirt as sweet
as a swan’s breath.

It was that he was capable of the feeling.
She could not believe her good luck. He was capable of the feeling.

And with all the days that I have left
I’ll think of that.

***********

Grace Cavalieri is celebrating spreading poems from here to there via radio for 35 years.”The Poet and the Poem” is recorded at the Library of Congress for public radio and is still going strong. Grace is indebted to GOSS183 for publishing her four recent books of poems (2008-2012.) It is especially heartening to know Grace’s new chapbook Gotta Go Now is available to download free on Magcloud.com. This is a wonderful thing for poetry and the art of generosity.

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Blue Leah #8, oil on canvas, 2012, 24″x24″

The Barrista, oil on canvas, 2012, 48″x48″

Genevieve, oil on canvas, 2012, 24″x24″

Photo courtesy of Ed Felker

Statement:

For some years, I’ve been making figurative paintings. Lately, I’ve gotten to feeling a little cramped in this practice. It’s regrettable, a little, because I’ve finally gotten pretty good at it. But getting good is often a sign that it’s time to move on.

I’ve started working aggressively on breaking the boundaries of my art practice. My eye was cast outward before, seeking the soulfulness in people and things. I don’t intend to stop this search. But I am adding to it an exploration of the vast unmapped inland, the wild center of the continent of the self.

In line with this branching out of my interests, my pictorial paradigm is expanding. I am continuing to work on highly-rendered figures. But additionally, I am now making expressionist paintings, depending for some on the formal concepts of the color-field painters, for others on the linear approach of pure geometry, and for others still on idioms I am developing for the depiction of enormous masses and obscure forms.

Art: www.danielmaidman.com
Writing on art: danielmaidman.blogspot.com

artist statement
“If I Only Hadda Hearst” oil on wood, 20×20 cm

I recently red Daniel Maidman’s encounter with Hirst’s Dots and it got my mind to thinking. Daniel Maidman uses informtion theory to analyze how Brit Pop’s Michael Jackson has created an absolutely empty system, which signifies nothing. So, if I had a Hirst, any mar…k -ANY! I make on it would convey more significant information than that of an entire Hirst canvas, or for that manner the entire body of dot works. Hirst is the redundant 0 and I am the 1. But the good news is, anyone can be the one. It is not an act of vandalism, it is a trumping.

But lets look at it from another view: If Hirst took the Mona Lisa, or Picasso’s Guernica or even Alyssa Monk‘s bathtub women, his painting on them could add no ashtetic nor (at least for the above old masters) monetary worth to it and perhaps all Monks lacks in the second category is a hundred years and some lucky publicity. But should an artist, and particularly if that artist was me, paint anything on top of a Hirst, it can only ADD asthetic and monetary value. There are tousands of dotted canvas, but only one of them in the world would have Beel’s information conveying 1.

Paul Beel made his first painting (self-portrait as Park Ranger) at age 4. Born in Ohio, He’s lived in Idaho, San Francisco, NY, and now resides in Tuscany. He has an MFA, and has exhibited extensively in Italy and abroad. He sells with Bonelli Arte Contemporanea Paul has won many awards both big and small: from the the National Portrait Gallery in London, to the Premio Celeste Prize, to Best of Show at the Black Swamp Arts Fest . He is currently undergoing a creative explosion brought about, curiously, by a series of drawings and paintings executed live via Skype.

falling from the second deck
disheartened by the disaster
of life
under melting Arctic ice
you can hear
one of the many voices
of lauryn hill
shouting
‘if you can’t take the heat,
use fewer jalapenos.’

Joshua Gray lives just outside Washington DC with my wife and two boys and is the DC Poetry Examiner for Examiner.comas well as Co-Chair of his local arts and humanities commission and a Board member for The Word Works. His book Beowulf: A Verse Adaptation With Young Readers In Mind was published by Zouch Six Shilling Press earlier this year and his poem “Poem Noire” was selected for Verse Daily’s Web Weekly feature.

Grace Cavalieri interviews Emma Trelles for the Library of Congress, March 2012.

Open PDF Issue #1 2008: original