Word: afflatus
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Ensor drew lessons in form and color from Turner, Courbet and Manet, but the spirit of his work, the mad afflatus of his gift, owes more to the Germans. His devils are inherited from Bosch and Brueghel. His taste for the grotesque traces back to Grünewald. He, in turn, would hand on his caustic vision of humanity to the German Expressionists, younger artists like Emil Nolde and Ernst Kirchner who saw the possibilities in his combination of sour disposition and strident palette...
...Widow Douglas, Huckâs adoptive mother and owner from whom Jim has fled, shows up sporadically, but the one direct reference to the eponymous rapscallion appears only on the 132nd of 161 pages. Jim himself seems more like a ghost of inspiration, a whiff of poetic afflatus, than a flesh-and-blood character, for all his occasional poignancy...
...most methodical artist that ever lived in America. He goes at the canvas with all the afflatus of a silkworm eating its phlegmatic way across a mulberry leaf...
Chuck Close has to be the most methodical artist that ever lived in America. He goes at the canvas with all the afflatus of a silkworm eating its phlegmatic way across a mulberry leaf. His way of painting, once set up, becomes an effort of pure transcription that relocates the acts of imagination way back in the roots of its system, and spends months on it. Essentially, what he does is copy faces large from small photographs. "Large" means enormous--canvases 8 ft. or 9 ft. high, filled with the staring face of someone you probably don't know...
Those who believe an artist ought to be a creature of inspiration are likely to have difficulties with Close. There is no more phlegmatic temperament in American art, or so one might think; the divine afflatus is reduced, in his paintings, to metered squirts from an air brush. His procedure for the big portraits that made his name in the 1970s never varied. First Close photographed the sitter, with a depth of field so short that there are blurs of focus in the distance from the eyeball to the tip of the nose, or from the edge...