Author Archives: JMN

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About JMN

I live in Texas and devote much of my time to easel painting on an amateur basis. I stream a lot of music, mostly jazz, throughout the day. I like to read and memorize poetry.

Fabulousness and Traps

Posted on October 21, 2021 by JMN

Here’s a vibrant pulverization of Smith-song around the paintings of Beauford Delaney (1901-1979): Robust impasto surfaces… startling colors… visionary buzz… new kind of painterly fabulousness… sturdy realism overloaded with color… something of an Egyptian immobility… crisis-crossing strokes [sic: Is “criss-crossing” … Continue reading →

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Where Noise Is Canceled and Air Is Free

Posted on October 17, 2021 by JMN

(Continued from https://ethicaldative.com/2021/10/10/know-your-place-said-the-boot-to-the-sock/) Within the close confines of Isthmia, what shielded the better sort from the dusky effluvia and clangor of the inducèdly frugal, besides walls, was a massive noise-whitening system. These two feats of segregation and filtration were tributes … Continue reading →

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Jenny Saville: ‘Humans Are Just Drawn to Eyes’

Posted on October 14, 2021 by JMN

Jenny Saville speaks in all the quotes here. Italy is a country of figuration, so I feel very at home here — but it was intimidating. I got through by really looking at Michelangelo… I started to do direct studies … Continue reading →

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‘Know Your Place,’ Said the Boot to the Sock

Posted on October 10, 2021 by JMN

(Continued from https://ethicaldative.com/2021/10/03/claw-hammer/) Claw Hammer studied a handful of prehistoric photographs preserved in the Museum of Ancient Technology. “Why do barbs ape-grin in the pografs?” Siddhartha Huff processed the uppity punk’s patois for a moment. “Where did you learn about … Continue reading →

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‘A Gloriously Unsatisfied Painter’

Posted on October 7, 2021 by JMN

Brobdingnagian ocular hubbub. Colossus of hue and scream. Tympanic boom. These phrases leapt to mind — of course they did! — as I eyed Sarah Cain’s work. Confession though: Cain owns me for rejecting the term “murals” in favor of … Continue reading →

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Claw Hammer

Posted on October 3, 2021 by JMN

(Continued from https://ethicaldative.com/2021/09/28/ballin-the-jack/) When Siddhartha Huff’s adopted ding learned he was suspended from the organ donor pool, the saucy rogue promptly gave himself a name: Claw Hammer. Sidd put Claw Hammer on a regimen of slenderizing drugs and commenced tutoring … Continue reading →

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Sean Scully: ‘Backs and Fronts’

Posted on September 29, 2021 by JMN

“Here’s another thing that I don’t agree with,” Scully says to me – the last comment he makes in our conversations for On the Line – “and that’s when Picasso said that art is war. Art is not war. War … Continue reading →

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Ballin’ the Jack

Posted on September 28, 2021 by JMN

(Continued from https://ethicaldative.com/2021/09/21/its-not-over-until-its-celebrated/) On the runways of the Hall of Fenestration slenderness was next to godliness. The frescos of the Gilt Tabernacle of Mar-a-Gogo depict Museolini, god of the catwalk, being draped in sumptuous crinolines by wingèd benitos whose sheer … Continue reading →

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Remedios Varo (1908 – 1963)

Posted on September 27, 2021 by JMN

“Armonía (Autorretrato Sugerente)”/“Harmony (Suggestive Self-Portrait)” 1956. Credit… Remedios Varo, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VEGAP, Madrid, New York; Sotheby’s, via Associated Press. Her father, Rodrigo Varo y Zejalvo, a hydraulic engineer, taught her mechanical drawing and encouraged her interest in … Continue reading →

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‘Jasper Johns: Divide and Conquer’ — Review by Holland Cotter

Posted on September 25, 2021 by JMN

Flags, maps and numbers were among the artist’s earliest repeating motifs. In “Map” (1961), the artist blurs the boundaries of states and strikes a line through the name South Carolina. Credit…Jasper Johns/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Charlie … Continue reading →

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