www.31grand.com
HELEN GRABER
"Self-Portrait in Red" 2003
BARNABY WHITFIELD
www.barnabywhitfield.com
"Tipperary"
"Oh Shatter The Mask! My Mother is Anh Duong!"
"Don't Call Me Log Cabin"
ARTIST'S INFO:
Barnaby Whitfield is a pastel artist in New York City and member of the prestigious White Columns Curated Artist Registry. Barnaby's recent solo exhibition "Whore With Red Cheeks" was at the 31GRAND gallery in Brooklyn's Williamsburg. An unabashed and unapologetic pastel artist with an obsessive nature toned in kitsch and pith; Whitfield creates a personal mythology within an art historical context.
Growing up the child of a politician and an educator in south Florida, Whitfield found himself at the age of 6 living in the master suite of a haunted Antebellum Mansion on an abandoned horse farm. The former owner, and now ghost, Norma, had succumbed to madness for the last ten years of her life. It was said she often walked to the end of the circular drive waving with undergarments fastened to the outside of her clothes. But it was inside the house that her madness truly reined, where she had stuffed her rooms with worthless discards. Whitfield’s family found the former master suite’s, pink and maroon tiled, bathroom, stuffed with lipsticks even filling the toilet bowl; permanently streaking it in the waxy reds his Mother and Father kept in memoriam.
MIKE COCKRILL
www.mikecockrill.com
"Vision in the Garden"
Mike Cockrill presents a world where children slumber in a dreamscape of tangled trees, falling rivers, crows, foxes, and prowling tigers. His large, complex paintings are rich with color and latent imagery - boys hunting with long poles, a princess girl taking flight on a carousel horse, a sleeping girl on a bed dissolving into a pond teaming with fish and frogs.
The fears and yearnings of childhood form iconic moments in Cockrill's work that point to the unspoken truths embedded in storybook fables. Sexual undercurrents find subtle presentation, as in the tender painting “Cross My Heart,” in which a mother places a reprimanding finger on her little boy's nose. Or, sexuality may rage like bolts of electricity as in “Electra. ” Here, with subtle washes of paint and pencil marks, Cockrill depicts a standing female nude fragmenting against a deadpan suburban background and clutching herself in a moment of almost religious ecstasy - hair forming ribbons of lightning, arching into the sky.
Mike Cockrill lives and works in Brooklyn and has shown extensively in New York. His 2005 painting “Ascension”, called a “camp masterwork” by Steven Vincent in Art in America, is currently on view at the Forbes Galleries in the show “Post MalcomModern.