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{ Category Archives } Art

Hotfoot – acrylic – 2010

Hair Flair – Ink on Paper

Melville Sisters – Pencil & leafs

Terra Cotta-UofW – Crow Quill Drawing

Stealing Lunches – Learning History

An artist must use recent and distant achievements in their art for education and inspiration.  You must know the work of your precursors on as many levels as possible.  You cannot not know the history of your art.  Imagine your art as an arena or as a schoolyard.  This schoolyard is full of upperclassmen and [...]

Anxiety of Influence – de Kooning / Picasso

Willem de Kooning’s access to Cezanne was blocked during his formative years, the 1930s and 1940s, by the feverish cult of Picasso thus he never saw Cubism for what it is, Cezanne shorthand, not some cosmic invention from whole cloth.  Jackson Pollock also suffered from this myopia. These two painters banged their heads silly against [...]

Excellence vs Banality

In creative endeavors like architecture and painting one is continually at risk of perpetuating the banal.  Banality is disappointing and avoiding it is getting more difficult.  Perhaps this is a function of getting older (everyone is a poet at twenty).  All of the usual excuses for not delivering excellence are so reasonable and understandable to [...]

Bliss and Fear in Art

Bliss may be small in its manifestation and large in its effect.  If one examines the drawings of the masters, one sees a quality of line that radiates the presence of bliss.  This line quality is that of assurance, grace, truth and so -  beauty.  Without this quality of bliss there is no mastery.  A [...]

War and Art

The epochal (500 year) paradigm shift of 1912 which affected all art,  science and politics was deeply affected by black emancipation penetrating the lapsed Enlightenment project in Europe i.e. the U.S. Civil War, six hundred thousand white men and thousands of black men die in order to acknowledge a non-white culture as citizens rather than [...]

Matisse – Once Again

Henri Matisse is underestimated by almost everyone and commonly viewed as Picasso’s inferior when discussing paradigm shifting innovations in painting during the early years of the twentieth century.  This is a shame and it is not at all accurate.  This misconstrue comes from Gertrude Stein who bore a grudge toward Matisse for remaining socially, emotionally [...]