Word: distantly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...great 19th century French realist Gustave Courbet once said that an artist ought to be able to render something--a distant pile of sticks, say, in a field--without actually knowing what it was. The hyperrealist Chuck Close has gone one better than that. In 1971 he painted the face of his father-in-law Nat Rose. The huge, minutely detailed likeness was bought by a Maryland collector who lent it to the Whitney Museum in New York City. There it was seen by an ophthalmologist who, not sure whether he was intruding or not, got a message to Close...
...rusty steel propped together. The paint Close applied was molecule-thin, spritzed on the painstakingly prepared gesso surface with an airbrush, in strict accordance with the grid to which Close enlarged the original photo. It suggested an obsessive involvement on the artist's part, but kept the viewer distant, with nothing sensuous to hook onto--unless you had a thing about freckles and wens. This idea of deadpan, photo-derived "objectivity" was much in the air at the time--a small movement, Photo-Realism, was one of the spin-offs from Pop Art--but nobody took...
...knew too that the Qin rulers had been both hated and feared and that their dynasty was soon toppled, despite its monopoly of force and efficient use of terror. But in his final years, Mao seems to have welcomed the association of his own name with these distant Qin precursors. The Qin, after all, had established a united state from a universe in chaos. They represented, like Mao, not the best that China had to offer, but something ruthless yet canny, with the power briefly to impose a single will on the scattered emotions of the errant multitude...
Travelers who drive far enough into the parched interior of Australia, taking care to lug extra fuel, water and minor spare parts, enter a region of outback so distant and featureless that it lies beyond the reassuring certitude of maps. So says Australian novelist Janette Turner Hospital at the outset of her grim, millennial novel Oyster (Norton; 400 pages; $25.95). Such travelers--an Australian father, say, and an American stepmother, joining forces to track down backpacking adult children who had disappeared months before--would soon become disoriented. Even in their car they would be dazed by heat and a pervading...
When they move up to the big cities, they make a farce of a Toronto heist and a near tragedy out of an Illinois train robbery. Linklater isn't quite skilled enough to make a virtue of these mood shifts and settles for a tone of wry, slightly distant amiability. The result is an agreeable movie, but one that is lacking the edge and intensity that films more self- consciously aware of their moral ambiguities sometimes generate...