Word: abstract
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...teaching, Ellis tries to emphasize the fact that “there’s both a contradiction and a sympathy between representing something as a symbol and perceiving it in the world.” His large, abstract paintings blend geometry with hints of natural form just beyond recognition. In an untitled work from 2000, Ellis plays with the colors and repetitive rectangles iconic of Piet Mondrian. Strict, opaque rectangles become wavy, transparent lines, black shows through beneath white, and the canvas retains brush strokes, paint drips and slips of the palette knife as a residue of the artist?...
...began an education that lasted 10 years. While doing these odd jobs, I immersed myself in the incredible artistic renaissance that was the Village in the 1950s--the Abstract Expressionist painters, the Beat Generation, the avant-garde playwrights. At the Cedar Tavern we'd meet up with Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. At the Carnegie Tavern we'd sit around with Aaron Copland and Elliott Carter and talk music. Seeing my first Beckett play, my first Genet play--they were revelatory. They showed me that theater didn't have to be what I had known thus far. They opened...
...generation of comix creators. Tom Hart's fat, almost crude lines perfectly match the brutal ecstasy of his superb "Sandra Brown," a story of lust and mud. In one of the several non-fiction entries, Canadian David Collier boldly finds a parallel between himself and an Islamic fundamentalist. More abstract work keeps the book from being too didactic. Tobias Schalken, half of the experimental "Eiland" duo, contributes a story whose images complement each other when holding the page up to a bright light. The overt theme of "Rosetta" may a bit vague - the word appears in several entries, particularly...
...German Franz Marc and the circle around their one-issue journal, Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). As the journal's name hints, this artist group was concerned with the romantic and mystical. The collection's seven paintings by Kandinsky show him unshackling color from objects as he invents abstract art. But before quite doing so, he painted Angel of the Last Judgment (1911), in which we can make out a glorious, multicolored archangel lifting the last trumpet. Kandinsky is perhaps suggesting the confusion, delight and anxiety we might feel on encountering such a being. Alexei von Jawlensky, another Blaue...
...bands have taken as much abuse for what they are not as Coldplay. The British foursome sold 5 million copies of its very good first album, 2000's Parachutes, but was slagged on both sides of the Atlantic because its abstract, lovelorn pop was neither abstract enough to be Radiohead nor pop enough to be Oasis. This middle existence between the brains and the brawn of British rock led Alan McGee, the manager who discovered Oasis, to dismiss Coldplay as "music for bed wetters...