David Schnell, Tom McGrath & Dan McCarthy

We apologize for the missing photos... we're working on finding them.

My name is Narangkar Glover and I am a painter in Oakland. I'm the one who's responsible for most of the painting books that we carry in our Art Books Store. In this entry I review three different catalogues by contemporary painters, and give you my response to each. It's hard for me as an artist to separate the "book" from the art within the book. What's more important? Or is the wholeness of it that should speak to the owner - the combined efforts of the images (the work), the writing, and the design? Personally, when I open an exhibition catalogue, I usually skip past all the art speak and get to the good stuff: the plates, so a big concern is whether the work has been well reproduced.

The catalogue for "Hover" by David Schnell is one of my favorites from the vast inventory of D.A.P. catalogues, and was published by Hatje Cantz.

It's a soft bound, glossy cover book that measures about 9.5" x 13". The first few pages of text consist of several rather concise essays in a variety of languages, or the same essay translated a few times (I can't really tell, but think is cool). Every essay is demarcated with a different fluorescent colored paper ... very design-y ... which I like. Then you get plate after plate of high quality reproductions of his paintings, which are sort of like colorfully abstracted exercises in linear perspective - and very well executed ones at that. Schnell is one of the Liepzig School, contemporary painting's forerunners in art today - and I think I recall seeing a bunch of the Leipzig painting at the Saatchi Gallery in '05. Painting students are going hog-wild for this style of work, and suffice to say, are deriving the shit out of it. Nonetheless, I can't even help but be influenced by Schnell's balance between finely measured and rendered linear perspective (but not in a literal or pictoral sense), and his loose, colorful, and dynamic paint handling, history and decision making. If you are a painter alive today, even if you want to reject his "system", I recommend this book.

Next up is "Tom McGrath: Paintings 2002-2007" published by the Zach Feuer Gallery.

It's a hard cover, cloth bound book measuring about 8" x 10" (landscape). The opening essay by Robert Hobbs, and Art Historian, is like eleven pages long and totally skip-worthy, unless you are a total whore for absorbing every iota of art writing (why?). Each page has one plate, very well reproduced, and no text. The accompanying list is at the back of the book with another, far more concise essay by artist Kevin Zucker, and it's more anecdotal, and therefore more fun to read. And that's about it, book-wise. McGrath's work is compelling in this catalogue. His paintings are painterly renderings of American landscapes taken from the POV of a car windsheild drenched in rain: abstracted surface, yet depicting or alluding to some pictoral scene. But then I'm thrown off by the last three night-time landscape paintings of city lights from atop a hill, which have nothing to do with the car series, and are not as good of reproductions either. But rather than try to make sense of it, I'll move on... Again, a good catalogue if you are a fan of contemporary painting.



... On to a book titled "Dan McCarthy", presented by Anton Kern Gallery and published by The Journal Books.

This is a thick and comprehensive monograph of McCarthy's work to date. Again, the plates are gorgeous reproductions. His paintings are loose and thinly layered washes depicting "statuesque" and often grotesque figures upon rather blank fields, and look to be at first glance, water media on vellum, but are indeed oil on canvas. I think he's expressing a pretty ubiquitus contemporary painting style, where the figure is illustrative and has an ironic hint, rather than expressive, gestural or personal. I think a lot of young painters today derive not only their working style from this formula, but their subject matter as well. There are some images I prefer, and these are in the category of "statuesque", like San Blas Commune (cover), Race, and North/East. All in all, not being a huge fan of "tongue-in-cheek", "nostalgia", or "symbolism", or the use of the phrase "not of this world", I withdraw from alot of the work after reading the accompanying essay by Nick Stillman. It's about eight pages long, consisting mostly of dropped references and quotes, which for me, is circumventing the REAL purpose at hand, which is what, I'm not sure - something along the lines of a commentary on hippie culture? I'm going to go ahead and pass this along to my friend Jacob Tillman, who was just here a minute ago.

We don't actually carry any of these books, but they can be found in a myriad of ways, most easily from the DAP website. Until then, go to our website for stuff we DO carry. I do hope to begin to carry DAP's Painting People: Figure Painting Today soon. Thanks for reading!