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Scott Davis: Seeing an IFO

by Ken Greenleaf | January 01, 2009

IFO (Arrival), the big (six by nine feet) 2004 Scott Davis painting often on view at the Portland Museum of Art, is a difficult one and takes some getting used to.

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The Painted Hype: Clifford Still and Andrew Wyeth

by Ken Greenleaf | December 28, 2008

The news of the release of the bulk of Clifford Still's work to a museum in Denver dedicated to his work reminds me of the hype machine of another wildly overrated painter, Andrew Wyeth a number of years ago.

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Process, process

by Ken Greenleaf | November 14, 2008

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Inventing the Underground.

by Ken Greenleaf | October 26, 2008

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The PMA 2009 Biennial and Bill Thon

by Ken Greenleaf | October 22, 2008

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Portland Loses Bob Solotaire

by Ken Greenleaf | October 07, 2008
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How Big Public Art is Done When It’s Done by Grownups

by Ken Greenleaf | September 09, 2008
The fact that the South Portland tank project was done using mass calls for artists and jury selection from hundreds of entries mark it as a provincial undertaking. In the real world, great projects aren’t done that way. Juries and mass calls are done...

On Good Art and Bad

by Ken Greenleaf | August 17, 2008
A responder to a previous post questioned my criteria for making distinctions between good art and bad. Many gallons of ink have been consumed on this topic, much of it by people a whole lot smarter than me, but it’s worth considering anyway. This is...

Needing Public Art II

by Ken Greenleaf | August 03, 2008
My recent post about public art drew two pointed responses. Paul wrote that my argument that made a direct comparison from art to newspapers, and by extension if we couldn’t have good newspapers we shouldn’t bother to have any. The function of newspapers...

Why We Don’t Need Public Art

by Ken Greenleaf | July 29, 2008
It’s an article of faith among art organizations that public art is unquestionably a good thing. The fact is, most public art is far from a good thing; most of it is plain awful. Making art good enough to hold its own in a pubic space is special skill...

Charles DuBack - An Unreconstructed Modernist at Jameson

by Ken Greenleaf | July 24, 2008
It’s in the nature of newspaper scheduling that you don’t always get to write about those interesting events, so I haven’t had the time or column inches to devote to a veteran painter of considerable interest, Charles DuBack at Jameson Gallery in Portland...

On Going Too Far for Art

by Ken Greenleaf | July 18, 2008
For the past couple of decades or so quite a number of artists have been trying to push the limits of decency in art. It’s good business. Remember the piss Christ, the elephant-dung virgin, Mapplethorp’s special nasties? Feces and bodily functions have...

Why is Painting Still So Healthy?

by Ken Greenleaf | July 07, 2008
Robert Boorstin, a senior executive at Google, notes that there are now 1.4 billion Internet users, and the number is growing by 250 million a year. Over 10 hours of video are uploaded to You Tube every minute of every day. There are 3 billion mobile...

Hartley Sets a Record

by Ken Greenleaf | June 01, 2008
Word comes that a Marsden Hartley painting, Lighthouse, has been sold at auction at Christie’s for $6.31 million, a record for an American Modernist, as the pioneers of modernist art in this country are known. The previous record was set for a Georgia...

How To Do It, If You Want

by Ken Greenleaf | May 23, 2008
Two shows I recently reviewed have, on reflection, something in common. It’s hard to think of two more dissimilar artists than George Bellows and Lois Dodd . Bellows was the wide-ranging social critic chronicling life in the early American century, and...