left to right: Folding Chair, 2012, by Tom Judd (Courtesy of the artist); Lawn Chair, 2013, by Amy Ritter (Courtesy of the artist); Siesta, 2010, by Doug Smock (Courtesy of the artist); Chair, 2015, by Jen Brown (Courtesy of the artist)
RICK ORTWEIN: There a lot of pairs of things. SD: Yes, that became apparent. We also included very little abstract painting. Almost none really, because, one, there was a ton of it, and two, it didn’t feel especially compelling to me. It’s not that it wasn’t compelling in general, just in the context of looking at work by 580 artists. BD: I wouldn’t say it wasn’t compelling, but at the same time, when it came time to try to pull things apart, in some kind of Dufala logic, when we were putting it together between the two of us, it wasn’t
media and internet-based stuff that’s using a graphic language that seems to come from a print, typographic, or commercial media tradition— trades, crafts—rather than an academic painting tradition—color, character, figurative composition underpaintings! All of these are useful tools in abstract painting for sure, but I think the ambitions are different, and the histories are different. BD: There were really profound, technically proficient painters, like Phillip Adams (see page 7). His work is really amazing.
fitting.
SD: It’s pretty stunning.
SD: For me, it was a little bit more nuanced, maybe
BD: Thinking about people who were rejected,
just by virtue of me being the 2-D guy. There was a
they were absolutely incredible draftspeople with
lot of really painterly abstraction, but almost zero
impeccable technique, but that wasn’t what we
graphic abstraction—if that’s a thing. Marianne
were responding to.
Dages (see page 6) is an exception, but that was almost the full extent of graphic style in all the works—there was almost none. BD: There were a lot of color fields.
RO: If there’s so much painterly abstraction, that would seem to be the local trend then. SD: I agree, but I didn’t know how to parse it into a selective group, especially when there’s so much
SD: There was a lot of color stuff, a lot of really
weird stuff that seemed to be well outside any
painterly stuff, but that’s not particularly interesting
prevailing discourse about how art is made. Even
to me right now, especially in terms of abstraction,
though some of the artists have PAFA (Pennsylvania
because there’s a little bit of a movement in print
Academy of the Fine Arts) connections, it’s not
The Woodmere Annual: 74th Juried Exhibition 5