Lisa Krivacka - Reviews

The New York Times August 1, 2004 REAL ESTATE AS AN ART FORM By Penelope Green
Chicago Sun Times December 17, 2004 BE THEY EVER SO HUMBLE… Painter’s playfulness at home in paintings of houses By Margaret Hawkins
Antiques and the Arts Weekly June 18, 2004
The Chicago Reader December, 1999 THE KITSCH PITCH by Fred Camper

The New York Times
August 1, 2004

REAL ESTATE AS AN ART FORM
By Penelope Green

Like the Hudson River Valley painters of the 19th century, Lisa Krivacka is fascinated by the views of her new ‘hood in Columbia County, NY. But it is points of view that grab her—landscapes filtered and framed by the human eye—rather than just raw, unadulterated nature.

In the past, she has made paintings from postcards, her starting point a place of wonderment at what makes an attraction attractive: “Why, for instance, would you make a photograph of the State Highway Building of Columbia South Carolina?” she said, explaining a piece from a series called “Wish You Were Here.”

This year, Ms Krivacka, has been making paintings inspired by local real estate ads, piqued by the homespun language and poignantly bizarre mages of the owner-created come –ons she found on eBay when she and her husband, Bill McCahey, were hunting for a house.

While investigating what her own “Dream home” might be, she collided with other notions of what constitutes domestic nirvana. “I loved the fact that the owners took the pictures themselves,” Ms. Krivacka said, “and I loved the homey and loving way they described their properties. A home is so personal, it’s like the clothes you choose.”

One eBay entry Ms. Krivacka has memorialized in oils carries this enthusiastic description of a white clapboard, raised ranch house: “The only thing better than Shingri-La”—Ms. Krivacka has honored the author’s spelling and punctuation in her painting—“is more Shingri-La!!”

Her tiny canvases of double-wide trailers, folksy cabins and ranch houses glow with Hopperesque skies and carry piquant titles in curly, kindergarten-teacher letters, like “When only new will do!”” or “Spotless Ranch!” Last month, they were collected in a show called “Open House,” at the Kerrigan Campbell gallery on East ninth Street in Manhattan; in November, the show travels to the Aron Packer Gallery in Chicago.

Ms. Krivacka and Mr. McCahey’s own “Shingri-La” turned out to be a black-painted, rough cut pine, loftlike house with a separate barn on 53 acres of scrub and pine woods in Germantown, NY. With an open layout of 3,000 square feet and a wild vast site, it is a total contrast to Ms. Krivacka and Mr. McCahey’s former life.

They had been living in a one-bedroom apartment in Chelsea—an Art Deco treasure with a sunken living room and a terrazzo floor that they bought for $120,000 in 1991.

Mr McCahey, a filmmaker turned computer geek, as Ms. Krivacka described him, is a New Business Development Executive at I.B.M.

Ms. Krivacka, who is also an art and production associate at Forbes magazine had been painting in their Chelsea bedroom for 13 years; the room was small, and so was her work, which stayed lapsize, like their dogs, two frenetic Jack Russells named Rosie and Dinky.

Six years ago, they bought a little cottage in Clermont, a town a few miles from Germantown, also in Columbia County. Built in 1850, the farmhouse was as folksy—and diminutive—as one of Ms. Krivacka’s paintings.

They spent every weekend there, and before long the Sunday—it is, to put a name to that familiar sinking feeling-the end-of-the-weekend dread—grew so strong they began hatching a plan to move to the country full-time.

The cottage was too small for year-round living, Ms. Krivacka said. Also, it was a finished canvas, inside and out, complete with a meandering stone wall built by Mr. McCahey with rocks from a now-closed Catskill mine and a perennial garden.

“We wanted a house that would be our art project,” Ms. Krivacka said, echoing the sentiment of another Hudson River Valley painter, Frederic Church, whose own house, Olana, a Moorish fantasy in nearby Hudson, may have been his greatest work of art. Through last summer and fall, they looked at schoolhouses, churches and even a mill. They learned to parse the difference between art project and hopeless case—that phrases like “Handyman special” or “restorer’s delight”, for instance, were red flags for hopeless, Ms. Krivacka said, “which meant we would feel like we were in a bad rerun of ‘Green Acres’”

If your home, like your clothes, is a story you tell the world about yourself, then your real estate ad might be the abridged version, the digested form. By early fall, Ms. Krivacka was sick of all the stories. She stayed home most weekends, and Mr McCahey kept looking.

Last summer, this property was on the market for $650,000. By fall, it had slipped to $550,000. Mr. McCahey drove up one Saturday, took in the unruly acreage, the airy house and barn, and bid instantly, with an offer of $500,000. Ms. Krivacka came the next week, “though I arrived with cold cold feet,” she said. Still, they sweetened their offer by $25,000, and by November, they had a contract.

The Chelsea apartment had its own open house the weekend after Thanksgiving, in a blizzard. A bidding war brought its sale price from $595,000 to $610,000. The cottage, bought for $130.000, has been listed at $269,000.

Four months ago, they made Germantown their home. Mr. McCahey works three days each week in Manhattan, catching the 5:35 a.m. train from Hudson and returning home on the 4:30 p.m.

“We get up at 4:30 those days,” Ms. Krivacka said, “when we’re in deep, deep REM sleep.” She works until noon in the barn, with the dogs snoozing behind her on the concrete floor. Rosie and Dinky have been joined by Hurricane, a 6-month-old Jack Russell whose personality matches his name.

“In the city our day is never over”, Ms Krivacka said. “But here, when Bill comes home, that’s it.” She still works Thursday, Friday and Monday evenings at Forbes and spends those nights at a friend’s house.

This summer, they’ve surrounded the house on two sides with a wide pine deck that’s as blank and open as the deck of an aircraft carrier. There’ll be a screened in porch at the short end soon and a stone wall covering the foundation below, built by Mr. McCahey. He has given the house glinting sculptural cotter gutters and drainpipes.

Inside, it’s sparsely furnished, the white walls windowed by Ms. Krivacka’s paintings and a sly little canvas by Dottie Attie, a six-inch square of Caravaggio’s “Bacchus” that zeros in on the sleepy eyelids and full red lips. What matters, Ms. Krivacka said, is seeing the woods outside. In the early Spring, when the trees were still bare, they watched deer and wild turkeys race through the pines.

Ms. Krivacka said she is stretching out in her big barn, working on larger paintings now, with a kind of David Lynchian or Grimm take on the natural world, playing on the menace implicit in the woods.

“It’s man versus nature up here,” she said. “We’re battling carpenter ants, bees, and bears. I was thinking of titles like ‘Man Versus Nature’,’ or maybe ‘Cabin Fever.’ I was thinking of doing paintings of nature with just traces of man in them, where nature seems to be winning.” She pointed out that in the city, of course, the story is man versus man.

“I prefer nature,’ she said sweetly, “because if it annoys you enough you can kill it.”

Chicago Sun Times
November, 2004

BE THEY EVER SO HUMBLE…
Painter’s playfulness at home in paintings of houses
By Margaret Hawkins

Anybody whose ever bought a house knows what a nightmare of roller-coaster emotion that can be, one that goes way deeper than a mere real estate transaction might indicate. It forces us to think about money, security, aspiration, self-image, illusion, family expectations and commitment, just to name a few hot buttons, not to mention compromise if there’s more than one party involved. It’s one of the biggest decisions a person ever makes, yet a large part of this life-altering choice is based on first impressions, on how something looks.

So it is that the process of buying a house, especially the first one, turns out to be an ideal subject for a painter. “Open House”, Lisa Krivacka’s series of 20 or so little paintings now on view at Aron Packer Gallery, explores this topic from the perspective of personal experience and gets surprisingly close to the bone of this delicate but sometimes very funny subject.

The paintings are based on real estate ads and include those outrageous taglines meant to seduce a buyer out of his or her life savings in 10 words or less. “When Only New Will Do.” “Your Own Private Oasis.” “Own the American Dream.” The titles say it all, yet these are the flimsy promises, combined with fuzzy pictures that lure us to the homes we end up buying.

The paintings capture the inevitable absurdity of pinning all one’s hopes and fantasies on little photos of oddly spruced-up houses as pictured in freebie real estate magazines and on Internet sites. The work is funny because of how faithfully Krivacka replicates the look of these ads, so plain and plainly overstated, but it is touching too. Each little house is more humble than the last--these are modest starter homes--but each one was once somebody’s dream house. They’re not fancy places here, no sprawling Victorians or three car McMansions. This is life as it’s mostly lived, paycheck to paycheck with no money down.

There are tight little bungalows, oddly painted ranches, suburban row houses, charming cottages at best, stark pre-fabs at worst. But each represents the possibility of a new life.

These paintings could be simply ironic, and they come dangerously close to being mean-spirited. After all, somebody lives in these places she makes look so shabby, and irony is a mainstay of painting these days. But fortunately, because Krivacka manages to stop short of that, the paintings are more nuanced with a glimmer of something else-could it be sincerity?

Krivacka seems to recognize having lived through the process, that buying a house is a risky exercise in bravery and optimism. However dissonant the real estate agent’s claims are from the actual houses, there is a shred of truth in the claims the ads promote. Nobody is just shopping for a house, they’re imagining a home, a life. The house may not be an oasis, but the idea of the life that will be lived there, that is the oasis. That’s what these paintings slyly point to, with no romance or soft lighting or forgiving features. Still, they sum up all the emotional freight we load on to the purchase of a house.

Alongside these paintings is “Into the Woods,” another series Krivacka painted after her move from city to rural life. The artist moved from Manhattan to upstate New York, but she might just as well have moved to Wisconsin. These paintings have a nostalgic, lodgelike feel, with hunting scenes and a classic view of an old red car driving through the woods with a Christmas tree tied to the top.

More clearly than the real estate paintings, there is a post ironic longing for authenticity. The great outdoors, rural life, fishing, hunting--these concepts might seem quaint at first to city folk but also have the appeal of community and tradition. She may spoof the weirdness of hanging up dead deer, but she also captures nice details like the shape of the 1940’s-style national park sign alongside the road that says everything about the appeal of a place where things change more slowly than they do in the city.

Krivacka’s work has the feeling of old postcards. Partly because the paintings are small, but it’s also because they have a kitschy kind of old-fashioned optimism, a having-a-great-time-wish-you-were-here American style friendliness. When she allows a little of that sentiment to mix with her sense of irony, Krivacka is at her best.

Antiques and the Arts Weekly
June 18, 2004

Kerrigan Campbell art+projects is presenting “Open House Gallery of Unique Properties”, an exhibition of oil paintings on board by New York artist Lisa Krivacka, through July 18 at 317 East 9th street. The exhibit explores the surreal world of the real estate hunt; the false promises, boasts and half truths—often innocently transparent— typical of real estate advertising.

Krivacka recently sold two properties and bought one—all in a period of six months. She turned this grueling time period into a source of inspiration by gathering a collection of quirky newspaper and website advertisements to recycle in her paintings. The work captures the earnestness of the listings and points to their humor without poking fun; rather, it celebrates the anything-goes tradition of American-style hucksterism.

In selecting her source material she was attracted to particularly idiosyncratic sales pitches as well as photographs of properties that display the compelling awkwardness of vernacular photography. Her work is an homage to this genre of photography. Krivacka’s paintings have always been concerned with American popular culture. Past series have been based on old travel postcards and snapshots.

The Chicago Reader
December, 1999

THE KITSCH PITCH
by Fred Camper

Not that many decades ago high art and kitsch were thought of as irreconcilable opposites. Now, however, it almost seems as if art imitating kitsch were the norm among young artists. The less interesting work in this vein simply replicates the superficial effects of mass-culture objects, but the best of it, dating back at least to pop art but also including the panel paintings of young New Yorker Lisa Krivacka, manages to negotiate a subtle balance between distance and belief. Copying her pictures from yearbook photos, anonymous snapshots, and old postcards, Krivacka makes visible her genuine affection for these samples of kitschy “art”.

Still it is hard not to chuckle at her Most Likely to Succeed, one of 22 works—all single-or multiple panel paintings—now at Ann Nathan Gallery. The toothy smiles, somewhat goofy expressions, and bad hairdos in these 12 portraits copied from her junior high yearbook seem to contradict the title. Yet Krivacka’s careful use of paint—she applies it in layers to give her colors a three-dimensional feel—creates a physical presence for each subject more compelling than that in a yearbook photo. And ultimately these hopeful kids about to be thrown into the world leave one a bit sad.

Born in 1963 and raised in rural Tennessee, Krivacka bases her other paintings on snapshots and postcards. For the latter she favors decades-old styles, graphically elegant designs of the 40’s and 50’s that celebrated newly built highways, buildings, and even motels with a naïve optimism not unlike that of the kids in Most Likely to Succeed. Pennsylvania Turnpike shows our country’s first great superhighway from above: it makes a graceful S curve before vanishing behind a hill. No other development is visible, and the road is free of traffic—a path to freedom through a perfect arcadia. Indeed, Krivacka’s highway is painted to blend with the trees and foliage, its gray well integrated with the land. This depiction is in utter contrast with our view of highways today as choked with traffic and surrounded by buildings and parking lots-part of Krivacka’s point. We’re looking at a false dream of the future.

In this way Krivacka’s paintings play with time. All her images seem decades old, and she reinforces our sense of pastness by covering her paintings with layers of varnish. These make the surfaces almost mirror-smooth and highly reflective—the viewer can see himself—and render the paintings more like objects in themselves than windows into another world, turning these views into “things” one might possess. The varnish also imparts a yellowish tan tint: there are reds and blues and greens here, but all seem filtered through the slightly gooey yellowish tan, a color that suggests the sepia of old photographs.

Krivacka emphasizes the object-like quality of many of these pictures by making old-fashioned “tramp art” three-dimensional frames: the picture then seems one plane among many. That sense of the paintings an object is also foregrounded in some unframed pictures that Krivacka has cut to unusual shapes: one painting is shaped like a plate, and there are four that follow the outlines of the motor vehicle depicted-right down to the wheels. Tina and Lisa in the Smokey Mountains shows a brightly colored car angled aggressively forward and up; inserted in the car’s midsection is a painting of two little girls (copied Krivacka told me, from a snapshot of her and her sister on a family trip). They look a bit awkward—one girl’s pant leg rides higher than the other—but the picture also suggests a homemade postcard of family members showing off their car. At the same time it’s a bit like a toy car—a cutout substitute for the real thing.

One element that distinguishes Krivacka’s work from other art about nostalgia is its excess—she takes her subjects and approaches to carefully calculated extremes that mime the extravagance of kitsch yet go beyond it. 20th Century Postcards is a set of six panel paintings on thin boards connected in the manner of folding souvenir postcards. But these are views that don’t go together—of a motel, an anonymous building housing a small radio station, a suspension bridge seen from above. All are painted with subtlety and care—the colors are far more resonant and forceful than those of a real postcard. And while the views Krivacka chooses are even more random and ordinary than a postcard’s, they offer something much more beautiful—genuinely sensual paintings. Like most of Krivacka’s works, 20th Century Postcards suggests a handmade gift.

Paradise has an even quirkier form. Nine disconnected panels take the shapes of various letters to sell out “Paradise”; within each one (except the dot of the i), Krivacka has painted a copy of a tourist photograph—a guy standing under a power line, vacationing couples wearing sunglasses. If these were images of fabulous monuments and exotic locales, the effect might be simple irony, but Krivacka has chosen anonymous, unspectacular views with lackluster compositions. That choice combined with her careful treatment of these scenes takes her work beyond the usual pomo mockery of kitsch. The point is not that most destinations aren’t Eden but that even randomly chosen places can have a sensuous, almost paradisial beauty. This point is even clearer in A good Place to Eat, two paintings based on postcard photos of a restaurant. One shows the exterior, with a sign that reads “a good place to eat”. The other is an interior with pink seating and a lone couple dining; Krivacka copies the perspective of a wide-angle lens in the original, making the space look larger than it is and giving the sense it’s being offered to the viewer.

Much of her imagery has an autobiographical source, Krivacka told me. She grew up in a family without much money, and the rare vacations they took were to visit grandparents. As a child her main exposure to art was a board game the family owned, Masterpiece, many of whose paintings were taken from the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago; she chose to alttend the School of the Art Institute later partly because of her love of the reproductions in this game. Her father, she says, is an “amazing” outsider artist who makes cardboard reproductions of old coins-over 12,000 of them, according to Krivacka. Retired from the army, he now works in a motel in Clarksville, Tennessee. Only as an adult did she realize that her family “hardly ever traveled. That’s why I became interested in the travel postcards when I was older, because we never had vacations other than family visits—the whole concept was foreign to me.” Her subjects also represent in part the “cultural vacuum” she grew up in.

Motel Quilt is a superb example of the way Krivacka both remains true to her subjects and redeems them. Based on traditional quilts designs, this grid of 30 panels includes 18 motel scenes and 12 paintied in solid colors. Among the views are one of a woman by a pool, another of two beds with bedspreads reading “Magnolia Court” and a third showing a room with pink plaid bedspreads. Like the pictures in A Good Place to Eat, these offer themselves in the manner of advertising images, seemingly laid out for one’s pleasure. But the solid colors Krivacka chooses unify her piece in another more profound way; the greens and tans are all found within the pictures too, heightening the sensuality of the postcard images by suggesting that everything can be seen as pure color. It’s as if the artist were suggesting, as she does in Paradise, that what’s important is not where you travel, but how you see whatever place you’re in.