Word: colorations
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Agents of Innocence contains all the detailed local color and technical arcana that the thriller genre demands. Ignatius can convey the terror even an experienced spy feels when approaching isolated border crossings and potentially murderous guards. He can explain how to construct a remote-control detonator and how to gauge the damage of a terrorist blast by sight alone: "White smoke meant a very large explosion. A bomb that detonated so powerfully and quickly that it sucked the oxygen out of the air, leaving a white plume of smoke." The author also occasionally strains a little too hard to keep...
DESCRIPTION: Color illustration: Uncle Sam lying down on sharp peaks showing U.S. Prime Rate, U.S. Dollar, Trade Deficit and Budget Deficit, 1980-1987 and being stabbed by graph showing Dow Jones' ups and downs through the week of the 1987 crash...
...Stella now took the minimalist obsession with fabrication (as distinct from handmaking) and used it to carry all that was maximal: sweeping gestures, textural scribbles, hot collisions of color, a romantic sense of barely sustained cohesion. But Stella's "new look" of spontaneity was itself a kind of theatrical fiction. The pragmatic essence of the early paintings lies not far below the gesticular surface of his work after 1975. Nevertheless he was putting himself at some risk. His new paintings, as they got loopier and more & baroque, looked like a critique of the high cool and decorous lyricism that...
...late '70s his reliefs had stretched the conventions of relief without really departing from them: they had a flat solid background plane from which the bright templates sprouted as figures on a ground, and however "wild" the color seemed, it was always anchored within the coordinates of collage or, at least, given the enormous size of pieces like Inaccessible Island rail, 1976, of screw-bolt-and-bracketage. Stella's 3-D paintings all descend from constructivism, and one soon realizes that they mark the end of its tradition with a barrage of fireworks: there is something funereal as well...
Stella had to kick free of the literal basis of color-field painting; the flat color on a flat plane, the "dictatorship of the medium," had killed off the project of making abstract forms that, by moving in deep pictorial space, reawakened one's sense of the body. His way of doing this, in paintings from the Indian Birds series like Ram gangra, 1978, was to get rid of the solid back plane and replace it with a mesh support, so that the shapes seemed to hang in the air. The relatively sedate movement of form in Stella's earlier...