Studio Visits

Exploring the work of an artist who rarely shows in New York.

In 1980 or ’81, I met Philip Allen through his childhood friend, the painter Jon Imber, who died of ALS on April 17, 2014, at the age of 63.

Despite the hue and cry about zombie formalism, there is a lot of very good painting going on these days.

The first work by the Irish artist, Denis Farrell, which I saw was a box titled Ukiyo (2011), containing seventy equally-sized, abstract watercolors. Ideally, the watercolors are supposed to be framed and mounted across all the walls of a gallery, becoming a sequence inviting the viewer to look at each work.

John Willenbecher tells me that his recent paintings are about “connecting the dots.” One of his lifelong interests has been the night sky – abstraction in nature – which he traces to his childhood interest in astronomy while growing up in eastern Pennsylvania.

CHICAGO –– I first saw Leslie Baum’s work in a sprawling group show, My Crippled Friend, at the Canzani Center Gallery (October 11, 2013–January 10, 2014), the main exhibition space of Columbus College of Art and Design (Columbus, Ohio).

Albert Contreras, who was born during Franklin Roosevelt’s first term as President, is a lean and cheerful man around eighty years old. He lives and works in a small apartment two blocks from the Pacific Ocean.