New American Paintings
Juried Exhibition-in-Print Number 43

New American Paintings
Book XLIII
January 2003
Volume 7, Number 6
Editor and Publisher: Steven T. Zevitas

This issue features 40 artists who are "winners of the Seventh Pacific Coast Competition." The juror was Jessica Morgan, curator of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. I find it hard to understand why there would be only one juror. No scientific competition or prize committee I know of would have only one member. Can you imagine an Olympic skating or gymnastic competition with only one judge? We are not told how many entrants there were to this competition. Could have been 45, 400, or 1000. Each artist has a statement, but the juror does not give reasons for her selections.

Each artist has three pieces shown. There is a price listing in the back. I will make a few comments on some of the artists. Feel free to send me your thoughts and I'll try to post them.

Lisa Liedgren, pages 110-113: Three views of a single work, Yellow Town, mixed media on paper, 29"X41", $1400, are shown. It consists of a grid of yellow drops, maybe 13,000-14,000 of them. The dots vary in size. Many dried as small hemispheres. Occasionally, one is malformed. Dots came into painting as a responce to photography and printing technologies. Liedgren's work seems to be a cross between Roy Liechtenstein, abstract expressionism and minimalism. Her work (see the link below) is mildly interesting and has some aesthetic appeal, but sometimes a dot is just a dot. "Is there a common generic language or a hidden visual structure in our minds that speaks to us beyond taste and preferences?" askes Liedgren. If so, I do not think she has found it. Mental images are not reducible to dots.
See: Liedgren at the James Harris Gallery in Seattle.
Madison Smith, pages 134-137: I like Smith's work a lot. The three works shown are Elizabeth, Tommy, and In Abeyance; all are 21"x19", oil on panel, and are priced $1000-1200. Tommy is featured on the cover.
Tommy and Elizabeth each depict a single isolated figure, a teen or pre-teen, boy and girl, respectively. The backgrounds are a muted white with the figure floating in the middle, alone. The character in Tommy is a bit chubby, and is wearing a white short sleeved shirt with a black tie and gray pants. He looks as though he has had a long and thankless day at the office, though he appears to be about 13. Is this Tommy's future? Is this why Tommy has to go to school? Is this why Tommy is alone? In Elizabeth we she a young girl who is thin and awkward looking. She does not know what to do with her hands. She is placed a bit off center. Is she trying to find her place?
In Abeyance shows a chaotic cluster of empty school desks. Again the background is bland. One desk faces us. Whose?
Smith does a great job of capturing and exploring teenage uncertainly and alienation. He does what a good artist, like a good scientist, should do: pick a specific, well defined problem and hammer away at it. You do not make much progress by trying to answer the "big questions" right away. This is the problem with much of abstarct expressionism. While it is not impossible to tackle the "mystery of existence," most who attempt it end up spouting platitudes. Even in physics, the answers to the big questions (say the origin and fate of the universe) rest on countless minor works: how old is that star?, how far away is that gas cloud?, how much does a neutrino weigh?
Smith is a young painter, born in 1974. It will be very interesting to see what other problems Smith chooses to explore and what answers he comes up with.

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