Word: darrel
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Possibly because he comes from Portland, Ore., where the winters are rainy, Darrel Austin paints an imaginary world of endless oozy swamps and puddles, peopled with perky-looking animals and wraithlike beings half submerged in pools of water. His colors, laid on the canvas with a palette knife instead of a brush, are notable for their limpid transparency and eerie phosphorescence...
...ancients, art had two functions: to instruct and to give pleasure. Much of today's art is instructive: it selects details of the actual world and invites contemplation of them. Another kind of modern art gives pleasure by the sheer wit, fantasy and exuberance of its forms. Darrel Austin's paintings are of this sort, and the infectious charm of his queer, metallic-sheened amphibian fairyland has recently made him one of the most popular of contemporary U.S. artists...
Styles ranged from the rugged realism of painters like Kansas City's Fletcher Martin (TIME, Nov. 25, 1940) and Chicago's Francis Chapin to flat, geometric abstractions and surrealist fantasies. Top-notchers whose work had already drawn plaudits included Portland, Ore.'s Darrel Austin (who paints dank, dripping green landscapes swarming with wide-eyed animals and ghostlike humans), Boston's Jack Levine (whose red-faced politicians and gangsters appear to be seen through a glass of water...
housewives swing their washing high over city courtyards, that U.S. farmers use four wheels instead of two for their wagons. Darrel Austin's stalking Puma was a popular favorite. Bullring patrons fancied Fletcher Martin's rousing Embrace-a cowboy being tossed by a steer...
This sentiment seldom cloys because Ernest Truex gives the most serious, tender performance of his career and Marda Vanne as the wife never forgets restraint. Certain episodes exhibit flagrancies of aste. But when the daughter (Maisie Darrel) confesses her troubles to a stalwart boy who wants her love (Robert Douglas), the scene trembles with tragedy and gallantry. And a parody of court procedure is introduced which provides peerless comic relief...