Tag Archives: art

Rochelle Feinstein: ‘I Don’t Want to Make Work That’s Beautiful’

Posted on January 31, 2022 by JMN

By the time [Rochelle Feinstein] arrived at Pratt, she knew she wanted to make art — an awareness inspired in large part by reading Marguerite Yourcenar’s 1951 “Memoirs of Hadrian,” a fictionalized autobiography of the Roman emperor. “I realized that … Continue reading →

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Wayne Thiebaud: ‘Deadpan Style of Figuration’

Posted on January 13, 2022 by JMN

Wayne Thiebaud (1920-2021) is said to have painted daily to the end. He described himself as driven by “this almost neurotic fixation of trying to learn to paint.” “It has never ceased to thrill and amaze me,” he said, “the … Continue reading →

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Paula Rego Likes to Work

Posted on December 22, 2021 by JMN

Portuguese-born artist Paula Rego (b. 1935) studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. She lives in the UK. Quotable saying: “Doing work, that is to say, drawing, is an erotic activity.” Anna Russell writes that the urgency of … Continue reading →

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Kafka’s Drawing Isn’t Kafkaesque!

Posted on December 19, 2021 by JMN

A trove of drawings by Franz Kafka was brought to light in 2019. They share, says Philip Oltermann, features with paintings Kafka describes in his fiction: “… men riding flying buckets, singing mice and creatures made of household detritus… dream-like … Continue reading →

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‘Carmen Mola’ Is Three Men

Posted on November 21, 2021 by JMN

¡Me cachis en diez! Nadie está en su sitio. “Hell and damn! No one is in his place”; that was my father-in-law’s take on the hanky panky of a popular soap opera in late-Franco Spain. In post-Franco Spain what’s to … Continue reading →

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Marlene Dumas: ‘Art Is Not a Mirror’

Posted on November 7, 2021 by JMN

This article gives a stimulating sample of Marlene Dumas’ painting. Here’s a whiff of its curatorial patter: “She is a master, in the classical sense: she makes masterpieces”… Dumas [takes] us somewhere beyond prosaic materiality… “[Faces and portraits by Dumas … Continue reading →

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‘mee-HIGH CHEEK-sent-me-HIGH-ee

Posted on November 4, 2021 by JMN

My title is how the NYTimes represents the pronunciation of the name of Hungarian-born psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who died recently in Claremont, California. He coined and popularized the term “flow” to describe a state of focused contentment in which time … Continue reading →

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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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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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‘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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