DAVID GIBSON WRITING

    When Tom Fruin was first on the scene, with his installed collages of drug paraphernalia, I remember the excitement that these works incited. Here was an artist whose work was about introducing elements of the depraved, anarchic, and malevolent into contemporary art. The drug bags were a new element in contemporary mixed media art because they were not only an extremely marginalized detritus, but that they were also representative of the substantive presence of drug use within the art world. In some commons, the use of drugs is synonymous with success: the ability to acquire illegal substances being in some way a measure of the power of the user, and the freedom to use, or abuse them, proof of the legitimacy of the role of the artist, who will always exist in some way at the edge of society.  At some point after 9/11 (the tragedy of which made all lesser attempts to pay lip service to the melodramatic role of the madman artist seem like caricatures), Fruin grew up. H

MARTIN WEINSTEIN There are a few specific concepts that are made comprehensible through art. These are endemic to the basic process of creative vision, and they tend to construct a bias, or force the flow of a specific passion, so that one can become devoted to one choice over another. In the world of traditional painting, the divergence begins in school, where classes are taught in either body or landscape painting. Or to put it in other terms, a choice between depicting the intimacy of bodies in all their brick and mortar realness or the intimacy of the living environment which envelops us. No painting can put another’s flesh in our hands, or present us with the experience of standing upon a mountaintop or running barefoot through the grass. But art can both depict and enact a quality of perception that allows us to live beyond the banality of the moment. The image of a landscape is what we think about when we hear the word itself. Yet what is attempted, and in many ways achieved by