(An Appropriate Distance)

 

FROM THE MAYOR'S DOORSTEP

Jul 22, 2021 9:30 AM EDT

My own recollections might prompt Piri Halasz to add more to her excellent words about the stunning " Nightroot ".
The Viennese abstract painter Gottfried Mairerwöger (1951-2003), took me to the St. Florians Monastery Church in Wien (where Anton Bruckner had been organist), to look at the frescos by Franz Anton Maulbertsch the great Rococco ceiling and cupola painter . As Dzubas had taken Maierwöger to look up high to these frescos by lying on the pews , he pointed out how Maulbertsch used a method to blend figures,forms,passages into each other. This is achieved with the fresco method where wet paint is applied to wet plaster. Dzubas adapted this method using a water and turpentine based acrylic paint called Magna onto wet canvas this blending which Piri calls "feathering". It is surely original in abstract art and more needs to be known about his methods and technique.

- David Evison

Jul 22, 2021 12:30 PM EDT

David has said it all so beautifully that I don't see how I could possibly add more! This is only a review after all, not a whole book. But I am sure that there is a lot more about Dzubas's tools and materials in the excellent monograph on Dzubas by Patricia L. Lew.y, published two years ago and reviewed by me at artcritical.com

- Piri

Dec 03, 2019 2:57 PM EST

On a visit to Vienna in 1995, my friend the painter Gottfried Mairwöger (1951-2003) took me to the Church where Bruckner had been organist, not to listen to the organ but to lie on the pews and look up at the ceiling frescos. He was a friend of Dzubas and knew how much he admired the Austro/ Hungarian Baroque painter, Franz Anton Maulpertsch who had made them. Coming later than Tiepolo and Pozzo, he was much freer and physical with his brush technique than they were.
Fresco is made one square metre at a time before the damp plaster sets and Dzubas used Magna paint thinned with turpentine on damp canvas. This enabled him to bleed and blend his colour areas into each other, similar to the Baroque fresco painters who avoided hard delineation of their forms.
Dzubas' little known admiration of this Old Master is an exiting aspect of his art, which furthers "American type painting" by this berlin born American painter who exhibited in Germany and vistied middle Europe all his life.
David Evison Berlin den 3.12.19

- David Evison