This painting is a bit like ‘choose your own adventure’ but with colors and shapes. You know it’s meant to be goats and you know it’s meant to be mountains, but everything else is subjective.
Tag: 20th century
Wednesday
This is like the precursor still life to all of those random still lives we saw in the 1980s that ended up in washrooms all over the USA. It’s like the Golden Girls of still lives: and I don’t mean that in a bad way. It’s just a very specific style that’s been reused so many times over the years.
Tuesday
My artistic relationship with Max Beckmann is complicated. Some of his work is good, some of it makes me crazy. This is one of the pieces I don’t mind at all. In fact, I do rather like it. There’s a boldness about it that is refreshing and it’s not taken too seriously.
Monday
This may simply look like a bunch of squares and rectangles in a circle, but it’s really so much more than that. I’ve spent a long time trying to understand the compositional balance between the placement of the colors and the sizes of the forms and there’s just some bloody piece I’m missing. But regardless, it’s a beautiful piece of art.
Sunday
So, this particular piece speaks to me not of jazz and boogie-woogie, so much as the days of Art Deco and of the smooth lines of the Empire State building, the Chrysler Building, and so on – those paragons of delicious modernity from the late 20s and mid 30s that still loom high in the skies and make us think of better times.
Saturday
This painting is a masterclass in composition and execution. *mic drop*
Friday
This work reminds me of cuneiform writing, or perhaps calligraphy, stark ink against bright canvases. It’s a very visceral feeling in my gut when I see this painting, a feeling of solidarity.
Thursday
This multi-layered optical illusion reminds me of a flock of migrating birds. As such, rather than chaotic, I find it rather peaceful.
Wednesday
My love of all things Bauhaus-inspired stems from a deep love of modern unconventionalism and bringing a sense of shaking up the order of things that have been the same for a very long time. In this case, Albers has taken a geometric design that was similar to ones that were used often in Bauhaus textiles and has spun it around and turned it into something deeply alluring and unsettling at the same time. It is fascinating to see what the difference in print medium v. fabric medium can do to affect the feel of a design.
Thursday
This is another University City pottery piece, again, deceptively simple in its design but devilishly complicated in its execution. It literally gleams in the light from the gilt and it’s the kind of vase you’d imagine them sourcing to use on the set of Downton Abbey or something of that ilk.