Word: artists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...minority of airbrush realists do explore one important problem of naturalism: how much information can a painted surface carry, and when does it start usurping the denseness of reality itself? California Artist Richard McLean's Rustler Charger (done from a black-and-white photo in a horse magazine) contains an unassimilable welter of detail, from the pebbles on the ground to the stitching on the girl's pants to the last speckle on the horse's coat. But, says McLean, 37, "it's not just a blown-up photo. I try to get a more heightened...
...weighty probity that Courbet would have approved. Nothing is fudged or romanticized; all the attention is focused on an absolute truth of contour, the precise sensation of bunched, knotted or slack muscle, the laconic interplay between the cold skin and the darting, vivid pat terns of the fabric. No artist of Pearlstein's generation has so brave ly confronted the basic issues of realism-how to hold the utmost concreteness of three-dimensional volume within the strongest two-dimensional pattern. The vigorously modeled limbs and trunks of his subjects create a pictorial energy that, like the black scaffolding...
...would be pleasant to report that all rumors of the maestro's decline are greatly exaggerated. But they are not. No 20th century artist - not even Dali - went down so fast. The homage at the Cultural Center is a lugubrious affair, but an interesting one nevertheless; for it records in great detail how one gifted painter went backward under pressure, like an irritated crab, into a historical impasse - and has stuck there ever since, snapping his crusty pincers at every stir in the water...
Sheer Will. Ironically, the decline set in when De Chirico resolved to be a Great Artist in the traditional, Italian sense of the word. "I have been tormented by one problem for almost three years now-the problem of craftsmanship," he wrote to Breton in 1922. The gulf between the early work and De Chirico's St. George Killing the Dragon, 1940, can only be explained in terms of this problem. St. George, with its glutinous, worried paint, its muddily incoherent color and its torpid drawing, would hardly pass as a student academy piece; it is recognizable, though only...
...pieces, but efforts to inhabit the dream and be a one-man Renaissance. His interminable pairs of Bambi-eyed horses prancing on a marble-littered beach have the same intention. The sum effect is, inevitably, absurd: for De Chirico has no more talent for illusionism than the average calendar artist. It becomes parody-and when De Chirico is not parodying Rubens, Tintoretto or Rembrandt, he parodies himself, as in The Sadness of Springtime, 1970, producing stiff, cluttered repaints of his "metaphysical" period. But the tension has gone. One has seen the originals-except when the "originals" are recent products...