Category Archives: Art World

Oneness Revisited

blossomsmallOneness Revisited 2010

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.  ~Tennessee Williams

violetszip

These works speak to the multifaceted sublimity of nature. This series owes much to Barnett Newman as I  borrow his use of the famously termed “zip,” the strip of color that runs vertically through his often monochromatic paintings, which he believed offered a passage into the realms of the sublime or the limits of rationality.  In my work  the “zip” reveals the complexities that proliferate from the apparently simplest flowers to reveal the boundlessness of color, structural complexity, and the hidden. The flowers are photographed in my urban garden.

 Prints  48″ by 36 “.

 

Candelabra  Marguerite Van Cook

 

StarlilysRose Zip

Genetic Portraits: Products of Immortality.

This show opened the night before the World Trade attack of 911. Consequently, in wake of the tragedy it was received in unexpected ways. People came into the gallery which was just above Houston Street, just slightly outside the worst hit zone, to commiserate and to cry.  Ironic since the show was about preserving memory and the problems of storing ones genetic data for sale.

 Each image was part of a grouping that offered not only the portrait but the subjects molecular structure. It also included a DNA analysis for future recreation. This was placed into clay pots.

 I chose people from amongst my friends and peers for my subjects .

 I  wanted to show elements of their vocations, visual clues to assist in their recreation down the road. Hence my ballerina is depicted in a romantic pose.


The Herald was fun to paint because it simply represents a young man in his prime and I enjoyed the historicity of his pose which contrasts the post modern ubiquity of blue jeans with the classic quality of his pose.

 The Herald may be viewed at a larger scale

The Outsiders Compass Series and Film.

The Outsiders Compass is the first in a series that appeared in a show at The Proposition Gallery along with my film, “Funky Shui in New York.” Please Art in America Review at the bottom of the page.

Morpheus Loves Persephone,  print 48×36.

Golden boyNectar for the Golden Boy 36X48

Rosetta, 24X36

Keats 36X48

The Glasswhistlers EmbarkationThe Glass Whistlers Embarkation 36×48

outsiders compass at Harvard

Lateral Dommages at Harvard Business School Collection

 At Max Fish

VanCookmaxfish2004

 April 2004 Art In America

Marguerite Van Cook at The Proposition

Marguerite Van Cook is a New York artist who worked with DC Comics and formerly ran the Lower East Side gallery Ground Zero with her husband, James Romberger. Van Cook began work on the video Funky Shui in New York (2003) with the notion that she would travel through New York and improve the city’s energy potential through the Chinese practice of environmental correction known as feng shui. According to its practitioners, feng shui involves an understanding of geographic orientation and electromagnetic energy in the balancing of opposites and the releasing of blocked energy. Van Cook writes that she came to realize that improving the universe was an improbable task, and so begins this 8-minute video projection by acknowledging in on-screen text, “Some things are best left alone,” punctuated with the track of a percussive base line. Van Cook constructs a filmic ritual, viewed in jump cuts and montage, that incorporates images associated with feng shui, beginning with a vat of living frogs—in China, traditionally linked to wealth—moving in undulations of acidic purple- green water. In close-up, a woman (the artist) appears, costumed in headscarf, lipstick and sunglasses. Next comes imagery of a small courtyard of brick and stone and a narrow passageway, the sort of corridor associated in feng shui with the escalation of energy. The frogs appear again, and daffodils fill the screen. A figure veiled in white goes by. In the courtyard, the woman rocks in a folding chair, head thrown back, mouth stretched wide. A boy faces into a corner, then out, as though spinning. There is a jump cut to the bared back of a kneeling figure, the back gracefully inscribed with an ancient text concerning harmony and rulers. There are cuts to the veiled figure and flowers and to a nude man in carnival mask. The woman walks down Orchard Street, or somewhere similar, inspecting merchandise on the sidewalk. Through the legerdemain of digital editing, a postcard like still of the masked man recedes into the distance, falling away from a close-up of tulips, and then the man sits on a couch. And so it goes. In a text accompanying this exhibition, Van Cook describes her fascination with still images derived from film. For her, these moments exhibit a quality that surpasses the power of ordinary photographs. With that in mind, she intended Funky Shui as a source for the creation of such images. In an adjacent room, the artist installed four chromogenic color prints that are composites constructed of such frame grabs. These iconic images formally recall not only their immediate source but the work of generations of avant-garde filmmakers, from Bunuel and Dali to Jack Smith, shifting away from the confines of narrative to build structures made of dreams. —Edward Leffingwell

Nature and Metamorphosis Images.

This series came about as I was thinking about my relationship to nature, I saw a frog at night and when we were cycling in the Camargue in France, then we saw hundreds of them. I love te delicate quality of their skin tone. They invited me to play with ideas of anthropomorphism.

I was filming the whole time and some of the images are less pristine because they are caught in motion, or because the media conflict with the subject. Only so much is possible, but then pushing the low tech is something that I’ve often explored.

The relationship between the body and nature and how we understand energy led me to make this image. The distortion is inspired by the ideas of metamorphosis brought by the frog.

Body in change, dreams at night. More to be said about how this image was produced. Women’s issues that deserve a textual explanation.

I have left this page text light for the time being, because I want the images to be what speaks, at least for the moment.