Eleven

Looking at Jenny Saville's book I look at her paintings and one of the things that leaps in my head doing a little tap-dance is the thought of Francis Bacon, and that eventually leads to Picasso. Nearly everyone has heard of Picasso. It is safe to say that Pablito is probably the most influential artist that ever lived, if not the greatest, and while he was a contradictory childish asshole, he was also ferociously intelligent and viciously driven to make art. This dichotomy reverberates, I believe through the past few decades and will continue to do so long after I'm dead. There are richer artists now sure, but I don't believe they'll last despite what Charles Saatchi thinks.



The only other artist equally gigantic in my eyes is Kandinsky. The only reason Kandinsky has not and is not lauded on is that he died (1944) before our modern era began whereas Picasso died in 1973. Kandinsky's output was nowhere near Picasso's. And Kandinsky wasn't the showman Picasso was. Shoot me, but I'd much prefer to look at a Kandinsky than a Pollock.

Jenny Saville:



Francis Bacon:



Picasso:



Kandinsky:



Pollock:



That's all for now. Good night.

10 Part 2

I go through phases of concentration. For a week, two weeks, a month, I'll be focused on reading a particular author or subject and I'll read voraciously; a book a week, depending. Other times, it'll be an artist, or two or three. Presently I'm focusing on Paul Klee and Antonio Lopez Garcia.

I split ten into two parts, which perhaps to the Pythagoreans might have been sacrilegious but I intended to write the second part immediately. A little more than a week later, the thoughts have flown the coup, so here I am with little to say except that Klee both these painters are remarkable though in completely different ways. Klee lived and painted during the WWI around the time Lopez was born. Klee was an abstract painter unlike anyone you'll ever see. Lopez is still alive and painting and sculpting though very slowly. Lopez is a hyper-realist or magic realist, whatever the hell that means. I know these are insufficient explanations but for now they'll have to do. Needless to say they're both extremely relevant and great artists. Klee being an abstract expressionist (thirty years before Pollock and the NY expressionists burst into the art world) has colors that radiate and pop off the canvas whereas Lopez' colors are much more subtle and harder to see. Abstraction has one weakness, because it is so obvious it's subtlety, it's meaning is harder to see. Figurative painting's has the same weakness but in a different manner. Figurative painting more often than not is admired not for it's meaning but for the artists ability to paint an object or a person. Both meanings become lost then.

Here's Klee:



Here's Lopez:

Ten, Part 1

Ten. Deka. On the recently finished detective series Monk, Monk wanted everything symmetrical, even, his favorite number was ten. In ancient Greece some say Pythagoras or the Pythagoreans who followed him believed the number ten was mystical. The Pythagoreans used the tetractys for ten.




If you add the number of dots in the tetractys it comes out to ten. The point of this? This is my tenth post. So this is my tenth post, whoopty doo. So what. Have I got something to write about? How am I passing my days? my nights? Well it's the same boring mundane life. This weekend was the Armory Show in NYC. For those who have no idea what the Armory Show is, it is an annual event gathering galleries from all over the world, Franch, England, Germany, the U.S., China, Japan and they show art in two huge piers over by the water on 12th avenue. In any case, what there is is thousands of works of art, and even more visitors, artists, sellers, buyers and press. So you have a few hundred galleries. Each gallery varies with what they show. A gallery may show one artist while another gallery might show two or more. If a gallery shows one artist, chances are that the work will be stylistically homogeneous. If it shows many artists, you can probably wager that the work won't be. This varies of course. The art on display, I would guess varies in date from the early 20th century up to the present. So you had Picasso all the way up to Bottero, encompassing not only painting and sculpture, but video, installation, and performance as well. Anyone could find some kind of art that they liked there. Of course with so much art, you had to sift through things you absolutely loathed as well, which is not so enjoyable. Some artists of (my) note were

Ivan Navarro



Oda Jaune



Derrick Guilde




Daniel Ludwig



Derrick Guilde



Guillermo Munoz Vera





Horace Pippin



I walked around for about three hours. One of the things that happens to you inevitably during an event like this is that you experience visual overload, especially if you want to see as much as you can. I mean this quite literally, your eyes begin to revolt against you, it takes effort to focus. You cannot help but look, you are there to look and observe after all.