If it weren't for videos of Manhattan size ice sheets calving into the Atlantic Ocean off of Greenland, there could not have been a more beautiful day to be walking around Manhattan.
Would that it were March 19 not February. I long for just one more real snow fall. As it is my tulips are already starting to come up.
Today I was out early and walked west from 14th Street toward the Highline and the new Whitney Museum. On exhibit are "Fast Forward: Painting from the 80's" and "Human Interest: Portraits from the Collection." Both offer fantastic opportunities to view figurative painting.
There is such quiet drama in each image. Silent though the figures appear the tension is enormous.
Of course Fischl's is most dramatic with the contrasts between naked tourists at an island resort and naked Haitians fleeing a hurricane and washing up half dead on the Florida coast.
Fairfield Porter depicts his family at his studio in Maine. His two young daughters with the poet James Schuyler with whom Porter was having an affair and Porter's wife on the outside just peering in or about to intrude on the scene. No little tension in that picture.
Then Robert Bechtle's painting of a California family in front of a classic 1960's car is rendered so accurately, but just soft enough so that you know it is a painting of a Kodachrome photograph. I could smell and touch those people. They are from my childhood. Total strangers yet completely familiar. Their story is my story. We ate the same breakfast cereal, watched the same cartoons and worried about pollution and the Vietnam War. Then again it is not, but somehow this picture brings to mind our current climate - as do all three I've chosen. It makes me realize the power of human figurative painting to tell a story of history. Though I've been working more abstractly - weaving really - and now making woven paintings, these two shows make me nostalgic to work this way again. Fischl's and Porter's figures are rendered in softened brush strokes with enough strategic gesture to convey visual integrity, the same quality I admire in John Singer Sargeant. I'm thinking painting this way again may be a good way to respond the current anxious political climate. Capturing the human story through the protean unspoken quality of gesture rather than trying to put words to the pure insanity of the day.
Would that it were March 19 not February. I long for just one more real snow fall. As it is my tulips are already starting to come up.
Today I was out early and walked west from 14th Street toward the Highline and the new Whitney Museum. On exhibit are "Fast Forward: Painting from the 80's" and "Human Interest: Portraits from the Collection." Both offer fantastic opportunities to view figurative painting.
There is such quiet drama in each image. Silent though the figures appear the tension is enormous.
Of course Fischl's is most dramatic with the contrasts between naked tourists at an island resort and naked Haitians fleeing a hurricane and washing up half dead on the Florida coast.
 |
| Eric Fischl's Visit to and From the Island 1983 |
Fairfield Porter depicts his family at his studio in Maine. His two young daughters with the poet James Schuyler with whom Porter was having an affair and Porter's wife on the outside just peering in or about to intrude on the scene. No little tension in that picture.
 |
| The Screened Porch - Fairfield Porter |
 |
| Robert Bechtel - Car Painting |
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please tell me what good thing you encountered today.