COMING SOON… CHECK BACK LATER THIS WEEK TO READ THE BOOK HERE FREE OF CHARGE.

Flying the Colors: The Unseen Treasures of Nineteenth-Century American Marine Art, which I wrote in 2007-08 (and which is co-authored by Alan Granby and Janice Hyland) is now available at amazon.com (pre-order) or through Mystic Seaport, The Museum of America and the Sea.  After so much hard work and such a long wait it is a tremendous pleasure to see it in print.  I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

For those with a keen interest in marine painting the illustrations in this anthology will be hard to resist.  The text of the book is also rich with pleasure and consists of five chapters: Fine Art (including the work of Robert Salmon, Fitz Henry Lane, William Bradford, Francis Augustus Silva, Alfred Thomas Bricher and William Trost Richards); American Marine Art (including paintings of harbor scenes, the work of the Luminists, refined ship portraiture and American primitive ship portraiture); Chapter Three is devoted to the work of American artist James E. Buttersworth; Chapter Four  is dedicated to painter Antonio Jacobsen; and finally the International chapter (including works depicting American ships in foreign ports.)

Thank you all for your support and interest in my work and in marine painting in general.  We are currently planning various book launch events and parties to take place in New York City, Litchfield, CT and Palm Beach, FL.  Please stay tuned for more details.

Don’t forget to join me at the Winter Antiques Show, New York on January 27, 2010 where I will be available for discussion, questions and to sign your copy of the book.  Please call me if you need tickets to the show.

I look forward to seeing all of you.

There are plenty of amazing exhibitions now on view in NYC that are sure to get us all excited about the change of season.  Here are some must-see shows:

Vermeer’s Masterpiece The Milkmaid is now on view through November 29th at the Met.  The famed Vermeer painting of the young woman is on loan to the Met from Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum and is on view with five other Vermeer paintings and various other Dutch paintings from the Met’s collection.  Also at the Met, in case you missed it this spring or summer there is still time to see Roxy Paine on the Roof, Maelstrom.

The Whitney Museum of American Art brings us one of the most intriguing exhibitions of all in Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction opening tomorrow.  This exhibition takes us beyond the shells, flowers and desert skies we typically associate with O’Keeffe and delves into the more subtle and sensual lines and shades of her abstract drawings and paintings.

From abstraction to non-objective painting… The Guggenheim highlights one of the core artists in its permanent collection with its exhibition Kandinsky, opening later this week.  This is a rare opportunity to see so much of the artist’s work in one location.

As for art fairs, be sure to attend Modernism + Art20 November 13-16 at the Park Avenue Armory.

Metro New York Vanderbilt alumni are welcome to  add some culture to your weekends by joining me for a Chelsea art gallery tour on Saturday, September 26, 2009.  We will explore what is hot in the contemporary art world and view a wide variety of current gallery exhibitions.  Please contact the local alumni association to sign up for the tour.  Reservations are required.  I hope to see you there.

An exhibition of five works of art by Brazilian artists Mauricio Dias and Walter Reidweg fits perfectly within the programming goals of its gallery space at the Americans Society as it references the similarities and the discord between cultures in the Americas.  Here the artists have chosen to examine  the  cross-cultural and social contexts of North and South America in a variety of ways in each of their works.

In Mama, 2000, a 16 minute film depicts a US border patrol agent discussing training  dogs for the tough job of drug enforcement and policing illegal border crossings.  The piece focuses on the personal and emotional connection between the trained dogs and their agents, and to the left and right of the main film are the “honor roll” of dog portraits with name banners on each to identify the successful canine.

In Suitcases for Marcel, 2006/2008, 12  distinctive cases rest atop separate pedestals, the tops propped open to reveal 7″ LCD panels playing films of characters carrying that particular bag around Rio.  The simultaneously running films document the journeys of the 12 cases while the cases reveal their films from within.  Each case seems to take on its own persona as it tells its own story.

In Raimundos, Serverinos and Franciscos, 1998, Brazil’s poor janitors and doormen gather in a small room and go about their daily activities for 4 minutes, piling in one by one and claiming a few inches of space, before hauntingly dropping their activities and turning to look at the camera as the film ends.  The final seconds create an awareness in the viewers that the men, the most popular names of men in such professions in Brazil, knew we were watching all along and have called us out of our voyeuristic privacy.  Their actions are then revealed to us to have been a performance all along.

Moving Truck, 2009, brings the work of the two artists to the present day and to New York itself.  The artists park a U-Haul truck on the street and broadcast their films in the open back of the truck container.  The reactions of viewers and passersby is filmed as part of the project and displayed in the gallery.

Dias & Reidweg:…and it becomes something else is on view now through August 1, 209 at the Americas Society, 680 Park Avenue, New York City.

Now on view at the Park Avenue Armory is a fantastical installation by Ernsto Neto called anthropodino which acts as an otherworldly playground for children and adults.  The giant piece is composed of layers of sheer fabric stretching from the ceiling to floor with hanging sacks of sheer fabric filled with wieghts and even cinammon.  Weaving our way through the “hallways” created by the caterpillar-like forms of the work  (sheer fabric stretched over what look like bones) we reached numerous endzones such as a giant beanbag for lounging and a pit of aqua balls recalling a swimming pool.  Neto, a contemporary Brazialian  artist, chose this biomorphic form (which is itself a space) to recall the physical connection between artwork/architecture and the viewer, as if the installation itself were both body and architecture.  While there were a few adults partaking in the fun the children seemed to have the most fun of all.  This piece is the first art commission at the Park Avenue Armory which is now a not-for-profit institution designed to use the historical armory space for arts programs.

Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue (at 67th Street) New York, New York 10065.   Installation on view through June 15, 2009.