While the paintings frustrate, complicate and undermine pictorial expectation, they also bring deep satisfaction in reflections, openings and bursts of revelation.

Bradford's handling of her chosen subject matter, ocean liners, deflates the heroic and grand tragic associations this subject typically conjures, suggesting instead the human frailties, struggles and joys of our everyday human existence.

There is a tension in John Lees' paintings, currently on view at Betty Cunningham Gallery, between what the artist reveals and what he hides.

Judith Simonian's show of recent paintings at Ed Thorp Gallery give the impression of an artist who wants to have it all; abstraction and representation, painterly heat and cool remove, spiritual transcendence and messy materiality.

The beauty is in the lusciousness of the paint, the graceful drawing and the myriad ways that Harris uses paint-space to undermine the old-masterly illusionism of the pictures. The ugliness is in the ghoulish red-rimmed eyes, eyelids and faces; the distortions of weirdly lit flesh.

Matt Bollinger is a painter-collagist, and his current show at Zürcher Studio,, presents three distinct facets and directions in his work. All three bodies of work exude the sadness of a world soaked in loneliness and destitution.

The beauty of these paintings is that they never fall into finger pointing or polemical politics, which tend to either preach to the converted, fall on deaf ears or let the complacent, liberal, art-world viewer off the hook.

Back in Chicago for the summer I attended the opening of a new show at Linda Warren Projects, which included a dozen works by the New York City-based painter Glenn Goldberg.

I was happy to catch a very wild exhibit of new paintings by Rodney Dickson at Gasser Grunert Gallery, up through July 13, before I head to Chicago for the summer. All the paintings are either 8 x 5’ or double paneled 8 x 10’. They are heavily worked, and I mean literally, heavy as in un-liftable, abstractions formed in usually vertical marks and paint piled sometimes inches thick.

In my painting I’ve always responded a lot to the energy of the places I go, and being in New York has stimulated my work in an even more dramatic shift than usual.

I often decry that there is not much good painting being done, however what I think is actually true is that it is easy to underestimate the quantity of good painting in the plethora of, often sensationalist, media being exhibited in galleries these days.

This past weekend I took in multiple art fairs; The Armory Modern and Contemporary, The Independent, Scope and The Art Show at Park Avenue Armory. Overall, I discerned a fairly clear division between the flavors of the art fairs, what Ken Johnson in the New York Times aptly described as ‘The Old New and The New New’; the former providing the comfort of familiarity like visiting old friends, the latter more of an adventure filled with peaks and valleys.