#416

#416
24×30″ Acrylic on press board. Color study. Left panel, inverse color and tone of right panel

#277

Three Who Saw Truth. Oil stick, acrylic, dirt & sparkles on weathered plywood.

This was my first post on this blog, January 23, 2015. Windows 10 changed how it handled pictures–which led to some confusion, and my deleting almost 400 images added since that first post. With much cursing and hair pulling, I’ve begun to restore the images.

I found this piece of plywood put out for trash. I liked the textures, the large knot-rings suggested eyes. I worked it over with oil sticks and these three–or are there four? — faces emerged. Two of them seenm to share one of the eyes. Not the kind of ‘beautiful’ piece most people want to have in their home, but I think this would look awesome on a well lit wall.

#414 color study

#414 watercolor, ink
View GALLERY HERE.

#413

33×41″ (including frame) Acrylic on press board–painted over a flea market reproduction. What I do when I don’t have the $100-150 for 2 or 3 yards of canvas and stretchers–find paintings and reproductions in flea markets or thrift stores to paint over. Anything that the paint will stick to and not peel off. And if wood, and I can glue and nail things on, all the better.

Here, using compliments and split compliments (violet, red-violet and blue-violet) to intensify the yellow. Color as light and color as pigments play with our perception: compliments in balance are dissonant, giving your eyes no rest–like flashing Xmas lights (red & green); mixed as pigments, they make grays or browns–but they can also bring out maximum intensity, jarring, disturbing when equal surface areas are covered, but with one color dominant, and the addition of split compliments, all the colors leap out as though back lit and glowing. Fun to use crayons to explore these combinations–even if you don’t paint. Try it!

View GALLERY HERE.

Anselm Kiefer: Negative Worship of the Capitalist State

He likes Merkel? …and calls himself ‘underground?” I guess, like Weiwei, it takes millions to be underground. I like Weiwei’s politics better. For all the brooding spectre of his work… smeared with the soot of German history. Art that only exists by the largess of power and wealth, cannot but stand as a monument to the glory of the Capitalist State–is a kind of kitsch. Like the architecture of Speers he admires.

Anselm Kiefer: ‘Art is Difficult, it is not entertainment’ An interview in the Guardian.