The best of these have the capacity to transmit the magical healing property of painting -- the feeling that in making them the artist was transformed and that in looking the viewer can be transformed.

Grounded in an ethos of work, sweat and hard fought emotional truth, they convey, at the same time, spiritual and aesthetic transcendence.

Benjamin King's paintings, now on view at Longhouse Projects resist easy categorization, slipping fluidly back and forth between material-based abstraction and Mother Earth inspired landscape.

As well as the numerous group show that I wrote about several days ago, several one-person shows from the Lower East Side caught my attention; Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects featured the work of a young painter, Eleanor Ray, who makes exquisite small paintings of small moments, mostly interiors and cityscapes. Their is a sensitivity of touch and delicate light that brings to mind Corot’s small plein-air paintings.

I’m continuing my project of reposting pieces from my Huff Post archive. This article was originally posted on March 1, 2013.

Cora Cohen’s paintings, now on view at Guided By Invoices, invite the viewer to pause, to slow down and to step out of the demands of our time-bound reality. She does this with work that is the visual equivalent of a large-scale whisper or in musical terms, they are analogous to ambient music in its starker and darker forms.

People often ask me, ‘what have you seen around?’ and I dig around in my memory for a semi-comprehensive list of from my rounds. So, here is a potential walk of primarily group shows (and one two-person show) mostly on the Lower East Side. Part II will be some one-person shows, and something from Chelsea.

The following is the catalog essay that I wrote for Petey Brown’s upcoming show at A.I.R. Gallery.

As a creative act, painting shares characteristics with many other art forms; music, theater, poetry, dance, which can serve as rich analogies for what it is like to paint. Petey Brown has a long history of utilizing dance as an apt metaphor for the physical graces and challenges of making paintings. She has found in The Tango, the subject of her most recent body of work, a perfect vehicle to address the dynamics of forming images in paint. The Tango is a dance form thematically driven by the nature of aggression, submission and domination, but also centered in the heart and the passion of connection.

This was originally posted 02/01/2013 on the Huff Post

Jackie Gendel’s installation at Jeff Bailey Gallery, “Revenge of the Same,” is a continuation of sorts from her exhibit at the gallery, which was closed due to damage from Sandy flooding.

This was originally posted 10/25/2012 on the Huff Post

Jasper Johns described art as taking an object, changing it, then changing it again. Robert Rauschenberg spoke of all his best materials being found on a walk around the block.

Originally posted 11/29/2012 on the Huff Post

Just before Sandy landed in New York, two painters, Sangram Majumdar and Karla Wozniak, organized a weekend group show, “Mark, Wipe, Scrape, Shape,” at Majumdar’s studio, temporarily dubbed Spaceshifter. And, based on what I saw, just in case you weren’t sure, I’m here to tell you that painting is alive and well!

Of all the art that I saw at last weekend’s NYC art fairs, the most exciting display was the display of HC Westermann paintings, sculptures and works on paper at Lennon, Weinberg Gallery from the ADAA Art Fair.

Though orthodoxies exist, and while pluralism in art is not anything like a new idea, it seems that this is one of those periods of art when, outside some passing fashions, it would be difficult to identify any dominant movement.