ABSTRACT QUARTET Motherwell Karolac Belag Bellinger

James Kalm tries to keep up with the latest most significant and important trends in local painting. But, between museum shows, special art historical projects, and the day to day complications of life, your correspondent is overwhelmed with “trying to keep up”. To make up for this diminished video time, your reporter decided to scoot around looking at what’s on offer, and combine four reports into on survey. Robert Motherwell “Early Paintings” at Paul Kasmin traces this original member of the Abstract Expressionists development from the early 1940s until the mid 1950s. Unexpectedly the works are texturally rich and varied with surprising compositional elements that become the artist’s trademark features. Jason Karolac “Prospects” at McKenzie is a coloristiclly themed show exposing paintings that have skeletons of hot, near neon colors, over black backgrounds that contain nuanced blocks of off grey tones. “Ghost Writer” is the title of Andrea Belag’s latest show at Steven Harvey Fine Art. Belag gives viewers a walking explanation or her experiments with panels, leaving much open wood revealing its natural warm browns and also its grain. Other works are high keyed, and employ layers of the artist’s broad brushstrokes and wipings. Crossing over the Williamsburg Bridge we stop in at David & Schweitzer to talk with painter Len Bellinger about “Thugs, Miscreants, and Recent Extractions”. Bellinger thinks of paintings as “objects” while he mines art history by altering art book reproductions of great masterpieces as a means of study. These “distillations” are then used as sources for his chunky, sculptured paintings.