Review: Chuck Close tapestries at Barbara Davis Gallery

Douglas Britt offers a glowing review of Chuck Close's tapestry portraits at Barbara Davis Gallery in the Houston Chronicle:

The combination of scale and texture, along with the image's mix of crisply detailed and blurry areas, gives Kate a palpability that stops you in your tracks. Once you've caught your breath and moved closer, you get lost in the subtleties of woven light and shadow.

[...]

The tapestry floats like a classic Mark Rothko painting, but it's grown out of Close's decades of transposing photographic portraits to paintings, using grids to take images apart and then reconstruct them.

The fact that this time the reconstruction happened by digital methods rather than by hand doesn't leave the viewer cold — just the opposite.

Read the whole review here: Artist's portrait of Kate Moss dazzles.

Chuck Close test weaves

One of my favorite phenomena at Magnolia is the test weave, where swatches from various pieces and/or color palettes are combined into one tapestry so that multiple versions or ideas can be proofed side by side. Here is one such test -- portraits by Chuck Close.

Hung Liu panel project: the home stretch

An ambitious print project by Hung Liu neared completion today. Tallulah Terryll worked late into the night yesterday and today to finish seven panels, each of which will comprise half of a diptych with printed/painted works on linen. As they say in Japan: Otsukaresamadeshita!

Combat paper project

Today, volunteer coordinator Pam DeLuco and veterans Angela Knowles and Ehren Tool brought in their uniforms and made paper pulp from them as part of the Combat Paper Project. 

Cooking up pieces of Knowles's dress uniform.

Ehren Tool chats with David Kimball. Tool is a ceramicist and Master's candidate at UC Berkeley. He was kind enough to spontaneously clean a bunch of stubborn paint off of the beater at Magnolia's papermaking facilities!

Knowles, a UC Berkeley undergrad, with pulp.

Pieces of uniform awaiting transformation.

Knowles.

Volunteer coordinator Pam DeLuco tells me about the Combat Paper Project as Tool cleans the beater. Thanks, Ehren!!

Farnsworth portfolio

Brian Caraway and Andy Rottner working on an editioned portfolio of Origin:Specimens prints by Donald Farnsworth.

Hung Liu panel project, Chagoya for Obama

Today at Magnolia, panels were gessoed and painted for a project by Hung Liu. Enrique Chagoya also stopped by to make some Obama stickers for a benefit at Catharine Clark Gallery.

John Demerritt, Hung Liu, Gary Blum

A few moments from 2007:


Bookbinder extraordinaire John Demerritt tries out the Gunnar 3001 automated cutting machine at Magnolia.


Era Farnsworth, Brian Caraway, Sam Bennett, Tallulah Terryll and Hung Liu with a completed Daughters of China portfolio.


Sam pulls prints with artist Gary Blum.