When I paint, I am taken into a different place that is boundless, without limits and constraints. Paint, brush, canvas or wood mix to reveal what may have been overlooked and left unnoticed. I paint to leave an imprint, a record of my time here. The colours are an archive of memory to be deciphered by others. I blend the poetic word with the mute witness of paint. It records my struggle to keep death away and yet I notice…
Perhaps the first post-modernist painting, well before the period assigned to that name. Pespective. Multiple perspectives. Meta. About painting. About the act of painting. Velasquez paints Velasquez. This is not a pipe. This is not Velasquez. Are we, the audience, looking at the painter painting us? Or, does our vanity blind us and prevent us from seeing that it is the king and queen of Spain in that mirror, not you? Or eye. Too easy, that one. Mirrors. Pictures within…
All art is paradox. But Rothko, perhaps more than any other modern painter, embraced the paradox and threw it profoundly in our faces. The canvas is flat. You can’t enter it. You can’t go through it, if it’s hanging on the wall. At least without injury and perhaps a heavy bill from the gallery. But Rothko continuously tells the audience to do just that. Embrace the painting, enter it, walk into it, let it engulf you and torture you and…
Artemisia Gentileschi lived a stormy life, to say the least. A lightning rod of sorts in her day (1593-1653) and at present, her tragically violent existence creates alternate realities for some. Years ago, I watched the movie, Artemisia, which I thought good, though inaccurate historically. Some of the inaccuracies can be forgiven, for they added beauty to the story, to the look and flow of the film. But one change is unforgivable, possibly unconscionable: the movie depicts a passionate love…
Reading a very interesting book by Ross King, The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism. About 70 pages in, the book concentrates primarily (so far) on Edouard Manet and Ernest Meissonier, the future and the recent past for art in France, cerca 1863. The pivot point being that year’s Salon and its Salon des Refuses, which Napoleon III helps insure. It’s detailed, without getting bogged down, and general enough to cover the ground necessary to…