Genius grants

I have done many films on artists, short films of great artists installing their work (Mark Disuvero) films of great artists painting (Philip Pearlstein, Enrique Chagoya + many others) and a number of top photographers who talked about photos. One of my favorite interviews and films was with Rackstraw Downes, who just today, won a MacCarthur Genius Grant. Here is the announcement:

Rackstraw Downes, the veteran painter of landscapes and urban places, is a realist esteemed by people, including me, who normally have scant use for realism in art. His current show, of work from 1999 to 2004, at the new Betty Cuningham Gallery, is powerful in quiet, stubborn ways. The subjects include a viaduct in Harlem, a flood-monitoring station on the Rio Grande, a Texas desert, electrical substations in that desert, and metal ductwork in a large, dark attic. The look of the pictures, most of them panoramas, is luminous but taciturn: just the facts. Their surfaces are fine crusts of dry, oil-starved pigment, applied in sober little strokes and patches. The tonality is so uniform that the color, though extremely varied, turns almost monochrome in memory. “I want to paint exactly the way something is,” Downes said to me recently. “If that means dulling down the green, then dull it down. Find the beauty in that.” The pressure of scrutiny in his pictures yields a revelation not only of how the world looks but of how the eye—unaided by photography, which Downes pointedly never uses—toils to behold it.

I will try and either post the film or some clips. He is remarkable on a variety of levels. Oh I should add, my interview and his images are available in a book at the Betty Cuningham Gallery in New York.