Judith Scott at Rolland Garros

This is a re-post from 2014. I stumbled upon it today and thought to celebrate this last day of the 31st of May, 2025, a day soon to be lost forever. It a reminder that flies by, and when a day whisks by us, no matter what we thought of us, whether it was a 'good' or 'difficult' one, it was a day rich with possibilities. 

This also reminds me that 'Art', in all its forms, is still one of the greatest obsessions to possess. Unlike Sports, another wonderful obsession, it is not constrained by one's age nor one's physical condition. It's an endless voyage of self-discovery that offers the adherent profound pleasure. 

Just a reminder of how Art and Culture take the back seat to the world consumerism, I was watching a brief Court-side interview with the winner of a match at Rolland Garros tonight when the winner of the match (an American) was asked by a French man, no less, if she would go shopping in Paris on her days off from the tournament? She replied, "Yes, of course I will go shopping in Paris".

There you have it ladies and gentlemen. 

In Paris, the capital of culture with more museums and exhibits than almost anywhere else in the world, the guy doesn't ask what museums she might visit while here for a few days off?  

Alas, the life of human beings has been reduced to going shopping instead of visiting a museum. I understand it, but it's an awful damn shame, as we used to say back in Kentucky.      

But anyway, here is the 'produce' of such an adventurer in the world of art.  

I had never heard of this incredible story of woman who died a few years ago. Her acceptance and success in the Art world asks many to think hard about what it means to 'be an artist' or 'to live creatively'. I haven't a clue, but I love that she made these strange and personal pieces, and I am moved by her. There is so much 'Art' made by so many 'overly-educated' yet, under-cultured and eager people wishing either to make a buck or find meaning for themselves in a complicated world. Judith was shielded by all those complications.

Robert Motherwell,,,, oh well....

I cannot even remember how I came across this painting by Robert Motherwell but it has found a discreet place on my desktop and there it has lain like an old flag for months now and has continually drawn my attention.

I am surprised by my own attraction to this picture to be very honest. But I am. There is something that pierces through all my ideas about what I think defines a painting and it goes straight into my taste buds. Maybe it proves that I really shouldn't have any bright ideas about what defines a painting in the first place. But hey! Everyone else has ideas about painting; the artists, the critics, the galleries (though it's purely about bling), the public, the everyday Joe at home with a few pictures hanging about on the walls of his home. Art engenders ideas in fact, and isn't that cool enough? But it also shocks and enrages, as well as it reassures, especially those lucky ones who own expensive pieces hanging on walls in large homes around the world.

So, what is it with this picture? And why does it have a hold over me? Am I superficial enough to just like it because of its Ultramarine blue, a colour of which I am extremely partial? I have only a slight idea of what the context is around this picture from looking through the Google's collection of Robert Motherwell. He appears to have made numerous works that vaguely resemble boats and sails so it seems likely that this is one of those. 

Honestly, any frequent reader in these pages will recognise that I have pretty discerning taste when it comes to looking at Art, so they wouldn't be surprised that I'm not crazy about the oeuvre of Robert Motherwell. He was an early Non-Figurative American Expressionist who had big ideas about a lot of big things just like so many of us arty types. They say he was an intellectual and wrote a great deal.

He was an experimenter, like all from the American Expressionist School, because they were up to something pretty novel in a way. They wanted to explore non-figuration as an art form. I call their attempt 'pretty novel' because they were bucking several thousand years of artistic traditions concerning Form and Content. But hey! Why not? This was the Post-Freudian world of analysis after all. It was an epoch that  put everything up on the chopping block for both investigation and self-examination.   

But like we see in this the current political upheaval in America, if you want to break things of value, it behooves you to have a replacement for it because as we all know, Nature abhors a vacuum. And I know it's not fashionable to harbour this idea but honestly, I'm not really convinced that the American Expressionist school left much of a legible legacy for those of us who came afterward to surf the next set of waves.

Judging from what I saw on Google I found Robert Motherwell's legacy to be untidy, unspooled, arbitrary, and lacking in much cohesion. 

Sooooo, why am I crazy about this picture above? I am happy to say that I learned a long time ago to judge the artwork, not the artist. Picasso, for instance, made lots of junk over his lifetime and he squandered his enormous talents by making kitsch. Yet nonetheless, he painted Guernica, an iconic masterpiece. I'll take back for saying this but only  5% of his oeuvre was truly great. So, when someone asks me "what do you think of so and so, I'll respond; What work are you specifically asking about?"

This is how I've come to navigate the tricky pathway into art criticism. This is just my own way, one that suits my own intellectual and aesthetic disposition.

In the end, all painters make duds here and there. I've made many but like Tennis, it's all about the statistics; the more matches one wins, the better one's ranking but that doesn't mean that the thousands of magnificent points over a career, now long forgotten, were not magnificent on their own. 

 

So, I haven't even answered my own question about why I feel something so intimately strong about Motherwell's picture. Maybe next time.

 

Thomas J Price and his lovely-looking black woman in Times Square

The City of New York, through the Times Square Alliance, regularly presents contemporary artists an opportunity to present their work. This 12 foot tall sculpture by the British artist Thomas J. Price was recently installed in April and will remain till June 17th.

These photos are from the NYT and for further info one might go directly to they story printed March 18th 2025.

I haven't seen a photo of Thomas J Price but I would eat my hat if he weren't a black artist. His premise is certainly a contemporary one and is that we are not used to seeing black figures of historical consequence exhibited in public spaces. it's that simple, and he's right. 

As Art now generally does, it asks us, the public, to engage with it. It wants and needs a response. This is the essence of Contemporary Art since Surrealism back in France in the fist half of the 20th century when a page of history was turned, and a new chapter of interactive Art was born. 

That said, this 12 foot sculpture of an Afro-American woman standing the middle of Times Square has drawn fierce blowback from the American Right Wing.  

An outspoken Fox television personality, a perfidious  creature whose name I won't mention, said of it; “If you work hard you can be overweight and anonymous?” “It’s a D.E.I. statue.”

The Federalist, an ultra-conservative political organisation also described the work as “leftist cultural warfare.”

But equally, there are also admirers of the piece. (from NYT) 

"Elma Blint, a jewelry designer from Brooklyn, who visited the work on Friday, offered an opposing view, saying the figure looked like every Black woman in my family” and suggesting its detractors were uncomfortable with the idea of a Black woman taking up space."

Another woman pointed out that the arts have been progressively fazed out of curriculums in both in High School and in Universities, so because of this, young people don't really know how to look at art these days. Fair point.

But for me, I really like it, and I find it an extremely moving sculpture. For me, her expression seems to convey a sense of quiet discretion, perhaps due to an old fearful feeling of speaking out. I think it even speaks for all of us in America at this moment when racism has erupted like a volcano from old violent fractures embedded deeply with our country. 

That this sculpture has created so much animosity among so many should be a surprise to anybody. Would be easy to point fingers. I cannot even blame Trump either because he is but fissure that was opened up by this giant already damaged landscape. In this small space, I will give the last word to an Atlanta-based TK Smith.

“He definitely struck a vein,...we are dealing with wounds that are not healed. And we can’t heal them if they’re not spoken about.” 

Just last year in Times Square another pair of artists presented a giant hotdog as a work of art which spewed confetti out one end. It was a big hit and very popular with the public. This makes me wonder if we Americans haven't just turned into cultural idiots that prefer Wrestling to Art? 

Airplane! The hit comedy!

So, Trump wants a new aeroplane! As everyone around the world has now heard it would be a gift from the Qatari royal family. It has been dubbed 'the Palace in the Sky' and indeed, photos of its sumptuous interior reveal a suite that easily rivals a penthouse at Caesars palace in Las Vegas. "It's exceptionally Gold", as quoted by a Trump staffer. And of course this excites our own wannabe King Chump. 

So apparently, as the story goes, he was offered a tour of its interior at Palm Beach airport back in January of this year and he was immediately smitten.  So now, he refers to Air Force One as '.. a flying shit box..', according to reports from insiders. Ha Ha. Poor guy! Isn't it tough always trying to keep up with the Jones?

I will not comment on all the moral or legal outrage over it but because I'm an aesthetic in all things, what interests me is just how beautiful this plane looks from the outside.

If I had another career in me I think it might be as a design consultant for aviation companies. I've always been sensitive to the way jets have been painted. I'm almost always disappointed when I look out at the planes on the tarmac or overhead. American carriers are often the worst-looking planes with some of the ugliest designs in the world. But hey!   

But here is a svelte and aerodynamic design to the problem of the 747 because its hump at the front half of the fuselage has always been a bit wonky-looking. Though we've all grown to love it, it's still kind of awkward.  Most designs have rarely found a solution to it.

 

But here is an aeroplane that really works eye-pleasingly well! It's those air-streamed stripes that resemble air vortices that divert the eye quickly towards the rear tail rudder of fluid design pushes everything out the back of the plane at 500 MPH. Nice!  

Below, below, are ideas that Pan Am worked through. The first one (the earliest design back in the 1970's)  used a small font logo that gave the 747 a large balloon like feeling of friendliness, hence the nickname Jumbo Jet. The second one with extra extra large blue font takes our attention away from the hump. Nice solution!

Starry night revisited

 

Every few so often the New York Times presents to its viewers this 10-Minute Challenge to spend a few valued moments in front of a work of Art. The other day they proposed Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night. Here (below) are a few details I liked. Little to say about it except that in this crazy news cycle it's a 10 minute oasis of calm.

If you are not a subscriber to the NYT they generally allow one or two free peeks at articles during a month. If you are a subscriber then it's just a quick click into a wonderful image that b.t.w. was completely invented by the artist while living in the asylum his small room in the asylum in Saint-Rémy. And b.t.w. (encore) When I visited the asylum back in the early 1970's, I managed to find my way into his old run-down room which was not at all difficult nor even forbidden. It was a run-down building at that point in time and watched over by a friendly guard, long before the commercial renaissance of Vincent Van Gogh. I remember the bars on the windows and the view of the field below, Les Alpilles beyond. 

Unlike so many of his large late pictures which were almost always finished quickly in one or two sessions, this was laboured and one can see the dry thick paint underneath later layers. I wonder if it's because when he was in front of Nature on the motif he 'saw' everything he needed at that moment to complete his vision? But without the motif at hand, he struggled to get everything 'right', thus the subsequent layers? 

Rain, rain, rain

 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 April 2025, oil on canvas, 30 X 25 cm

Rain Rain, go away, please come back so I can paint today! "Well, what can ya do?" As my Uncle Morty in the Bronx used to all the time. Every morning when I see the clear sky I'm given hope but by afternoon, the sky plugs up like my bathwater after a day of cleaning out the hog house. 

So, both the Summer and Autumn have been wet. Hopefully it will be a drier Winter here Down-Under. But last week I did manage to get out a few times and work. One recent evening I came home with these three studies so I was appropriately grateful. They are shown in the order of execution.

The first one reveals a gentle-looking sea when I arrived at the dunes. It was placid and easy to get into. Looking at it now it seems that I wanted to channel Monet (which I regret, but hey!) I like it anyway. 

Truthfully, I really accept everything that comes out of a session, the good, the bad, and the ugly. But in this one I rather appreciate its delicate feeling and that's because I can sometimes be so brutal with my brushwork. In the end though, I am really just amenable to whatever the sea and the sky offer up to me on any given day. Not only any day, but any moment as twilight begins to cycle through the stormy stages of the colour wheel. Like the logic of harmonic laws regarding the circle of fifths, the colour wheel shows me how the chromatic changes proceed in a logical fashion. One can watch it unfold easily at dusk when everything has sped up.  

So the first study (above) was a warm-up. Then came this one (below) which of the three, is my preferred. I think it's because I really struggled with it and it only 'came right' through a serendipitous accident that I was able to exploit at the last minute, then bingo! "Never give up on a picture". I wish I had learned that adage decades ago and my road would have been far easier.

 

 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 April 2025, oil on canvas, 30 X 25 cm

This last one was really an afterthought because the sky was so exquisite right up until nightfall. I would have kept working had I been able to see the palette clearly. It was one of those rare evenings when the luminosity felt turbo-charged and was enriched right up to the edge of night.   

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 April 2025, oil on canvas, 30 X 25 cm