Word: artistically
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Some major artists create popular stereotypes that last for decades; others never reach into popular culture at all. Winslow Homer was a painter of the first kind. Even today, 150 years after his birth, one sees his echoes on half the magazine racks of America. Just as John James Audubon becomes, by dilution, the common duck stamp, so one detects the vestiges of Homer's watercolors in every outdoor-magazine cover that has a dead whitetail draped over a log or a largemouth bass, like an enraged Edward G. Robinson with fins, jumping from dark swamp water. Homer...
...will see, in the future I will live by my watercolors," Homer once remarked, and he was almost right. He came to the medium late: he was 37 and a mature artist. A distinct air of the salon, of the desire for a "major" utterance that leads to an overworked surface, clings to some of the early watercolors--in particular, the paintings of fisherfolk he did during a 20-month stay in the northern English coastal village of Cullercoats in 1881-82. Those robust girls, simple, natural, windbeaten and enduring, planted in big boots with arms akimbo against the elemental...
Though Homer exhibitions up to now have tended to treat his watercolors as ancillary to his oils, mere preparations, it is clear from this one that Homer did not think that way himself and that he did more than any other 19th century American artist to establish watercolor as an important medium in the U.S. In structure and intensity, his best watercolors yield nothing to his larger paintings. Homer had great powers of visual analysis; he could hardly look at a scene without breaking it down and resolving it as structure, and some of his paintings of the Adirondack woods...
...knows what Jesus looked like. Painters and sculptors have tended to give him idealized features. He may have had a big nose or a receding chin. Even when enhanced by an artist, the photograph of the image on a rusty soybean-oil storage tank in Ohio could be taken to represent a hooded hangman, a Ku Klux Klan member or even a Russian woman in a babushka. When things as ridiculous as this make news, we become a silly society. William David Perkins Ann Arbor, Mich...
...guess from the very beginning we decided we didn't want to get in any trouble," said Editor Marrietta Standridge. "In a town this size you can't afford to lose half your business," said Peggy Ohler, who is the paper's artist and Betty Jane's daughter...