B. David Zarley

February 04, 2016, 1:54pm

Erin Washington: Dust to Dust

These colors survive— not, notice, thrive, or flourish, or bloom, although some do carry a floral note about them and all are temptingly considered as analogous to the anemone, beauty from blood, pain—most explicitly beyond the pale, on the periphery, the edge, the places carrying head on out beyond the solid and material plane and hanging, like gravid pauses, over nothing, like Odin from Yggdrasil or street lamps, incandescent color suspended over and illuminating voids, gaps, prismatic trimmings buried like the K/Pg boundary, a band of violence and romance and the proliferation of things difficult to recognize, study, taxonomize, comprehend, so that one looks at, say, a marvelous representation of a Hellenic-style sculpture of a woman's face and neck, Ruin and cosmic dust, in chalk!, becomes absorbed in the kinetic nature of it, of the legion of little cuts and scores which birthed her, the beak and talon marks of Prometheus' eagle in the long-coagulated, tar-like chalkboard blood of the perpetually riven, of the elegant curve of a neck, the carotid groove, being summoned from the most didactic of mediums, the upper lip and eyes piled up as if from snow, the bridge of the nose resting like Golgotha, the dogwood beams born across her forehead—no room for Pallas to get out of there!—and the small nebulae and clouds of uncrossed tally marks and all this hermetic, glorious, intricate beautiful stuff and suddenly screaming out there on the edge is this band, the colorful K/Pg layer, running like snakeskin or a Fruit by the Foot along the upper corner, process yellow and grapefruit flesh and paint-cap-groove green, and the one notices it, too, throughout the painting now, flashes of color, of inspiration!, crocuses in a black snow. - B. David Zarley, Chicago Contributor

Erin Washington | Ruin and cosmic dust, 2015, chalk, acrylic, and gouache on panel, 20 x 16 inches. Photo courtesy of Zolla/Lieberman

October 26, 2015, 9:00am

Nina Rizzo: Environmental Impact

It takes a moment for the eyes to adjust—atavistic mimesis! faux-fear, sympathetic nervous system goosing, the ultimate success of the palette of the night!—and for the wild bereavement of the eyes being divorced from the mind to subside, basic outlines, the context, the color, the safety, to materialize like haints in the gloaming, signposts and sirens demarcating and drawing through the darkness, through midnight and navy blues, still-warm oxblood, unfathomable purples, shadows thick enough to smother, to obfuscate, to kill, great ragged heaping breaths—ribcage expanding gulps—in the brief flashes —royal! the sky? a flower?—which open like false editorial spread irises to provide for the killing of Kurtz and the comforting recognition of shapes, shapes engorged, swollen sweet and suspended, striated like carapaces or the long, primed, puckered muscles of the thigh, like ladders from Pluto, the fat wet tongues of leaves lapping against and pulling the eyes, as if by slow jungle steamer, into and through Nina Rizzo's Conradian jungle. –  B. David Zarley, Chicago Contributor

Nina Rizzo | Long Night in the Garden, 2015, oil on canvas, 60 x 120 inches. Photo courtesy of Linda Warren Projects

June 19, 2015, 8:55am

Art Paul: Kill The Rabbit

Good God!, did it ever fucking multiply; springing forth from the singular mind of the cartilage-crushingly on-the-nose-named Art Paul, who needed a mascot-cum-logo for this eccentric's girly mag, a product, like Paul himself, of the Hog Butcher of the World—when that Lake Michigan wind blows, it blows, baby!—and ended up with an icon, an honest-to-goodness American deity, a long-eared, bow tied rabbit, a lapin a la mode who kept cocked ear bent towards what is comme il faut for the jet age gentleman, who is to sex and a certain cigar-smoke cured, bourbon-splashed, wood-paneled, velvet-touched kind of groomed wolf masculinity what the spider or coyote or raven is to chicanery, arguably the most famous bunny in the world—and here his hare straitens its bow tie, takes a pull off the tumbler, and exhales, in a cloud of fine, fine tobacco smoke, “Not much, doc; what's up with you?”—and an image that would have to be included in any kind of even semi-holistic and honest pastiche of American popular culture, the Playboy bunny!

It has been manifested in a million different inks and mediums, from gloss magazine stock to newsprint to flesh, rendered in rhinestones and sequins and neon tubes, in white and black and pink and a veritable zoo of animal print, looking dapper both soft-core and hard-core, on hats, shirts, sweaters, swizzle sticks, and thongs, across an entire sea foaming with licensing and corporate fornication, hopping—if one can excuse the turn—from one bedfellow to the next like, like … like a goddamn rabbit, one supposes, achieving that absolutely most rare and august of atmospheres wherein a piece of visual art can be both of the commercial sphere—bathing, in filthy lucre and public adoration, for immortality like Báthory—and above it; that bowtied cottontail created a cuniculus to very empyrean itself, and the bunny's enormous brood is both Paul's lasting impact—unfair or not—and lasting curse. – B. David Zarley, Chicago Contributor

Art Paul | Cheers, 1987, colored pencil on paper, 8 x 11.5 inches. Photo courtesy of UIMA

March 17, 2015, 12:13pm

Death Rattle: Philip von Zweck

It's the end of the world, Ragnarok, the apocalypse, and it's coming … well, erratically, in fits and bursts, dives, dips, Archimedean spiraling and humming all the while, fitfully humming, aggravated and unabated, zzzzzzzz the score to the very end, death born upon a cello string … death!, thousand eyed, six-legged, sword-endowed, floccose sickly-sweet smelling death in the personage of a honey bee, listing to one side like the Costa Concordia, vascular window pane wings over its corpse like a widow's umbrella, the victim of colony collapse disorder, laid low by a syndrome we do not understand, a fatal flaw in its system—maybe some sort of inherent vice?—or something wrought by our own machinations, with the little fellow ending up dead regardless; the flowers and crops and agrarian economies wilt, and the apocalypse comes banded black and yellow, apian entropy. – B. David Zarley, Chicago Contributor

Philip von Zweck | Dead Bee, 2015, acrylic and oil on canvas, 9x 11 inches. Photo courtesy of Michelle Harris