February Notes - 2024
It’s February and I wish I were in Florida thawing out, but no such luck. Instead, I am in the studio in the midst of making sausage. New work is bubbling up, but it hasn’t quite gelled yet.
Last month I mentioned that my paintings were informed by photographs and now that process has reversed. As my paintings became more and more abstract, so did my photographs. What I was looking for was an image that was of something real, but looked and felt like a painting. Here is the evolution of the work in images:
See the full collection of photographs here.
Circles started to appear in my photographs long before they did in my paintings.
HISTORY SPOTLIGHT: PAIRINGS - Follower of Velasquez and Ribera
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My question remains, how do you make something that is quite large (ie the image on the canvas) appear to be small? In the painting by the follower of Velasquez, he manages it by placing his model next to a dog, whose size we can guess. He had other reasons for adding the dog, but I am just interested in the scale question.
With the Ribera, it is another thing all together. I feel that it is the crutch that creates the appearance of small stature. Were he to place the crutch on the ground it would be as high as his teeth. But absolutely everything else that Ribera does with this picture makes the painting and his model monumental.
It’s a fairly large canvas. When you are physically in front of the painting, you approach it from below. Ribera doubles down on this effect by painting his subject as if he too were seeing him from below.
When I saw a retrospective of Ribera’s work at the Met, what overwhelmed me about it was his humanity. With Velasquez you often feel as though you are entering a house of mirrors, where every turn is a trick. With Ribera, you feel as though you have stopped by the side of the road and the person you encounter is sharing their last piece of bread with you.
FROM THE LIBRARY : THE LOST MUSEUM
The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World’s Greatest Works of Art, by Hector Feliciano reveals the story of the systematic pillaging of Jewish-owned artwork during World War II.
It focuses on the fate of the private collections of five families, including Rothschild, Rosenberg, and Berheim-Jeune as they are passed through the hands of top German officials, unscrupulous art dealers, unwitting auction houses, and those in the museum community who turned a blind eye.
I highly recommend that you follow up this book with the novel Address Unknown, by Katherine Kressmann Taylor, which brings to life the insidious spread of Nazism through a series of letters between Max, a Jewish art dealer in San Francisco, and Martin, his friend and former business partner, who has returned to Germany in 1932, just as Hitler has come to power.
Not since Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, have I read something so well-constructed and so chill-worthy.
ART SPOTLIGHT: DIFFERENT AS
Different As, 48 inches x 48 inches, oil on canvas, 2019.
When I said my paintings were informed by photographs, this is a case in point. The Thread Series was a group of paintings I did by “drawing” with threads on colored paper, photographing them, and then making paintings from the photographs. So, in effect, these are representational paintings.