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: