Word: gesso
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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While the avant-garde captures the limelight by madly mixing media, a hardy band of painters are quite content to set down their vision of reality with meticulous draftsmanship. Such is George Tooker, 46, who works painstakingly in the 14th century Florentine medium of egg tempera on gesso panels. He is unabashedly proud of being called a traditionalist and a craftsman...
Some new graphics treat paper itself like a sculptor's bas-relief. Colombian-born Omar Rayo, 36, makes an inkless intaglio, such as From My Zoo, by building up patterned layers of cardboard coated with rabbit glue and gesso, then pressing wet paper under hundreds of pounds of pressure to emboss a white-on-white print. Boris Margo, 62, similarly makes a "cellocut" by carving into celluloid, coating it with copper, and stamping it into uninked paper...
...artist's famous "Parrish blue," a highly glazed ultramarine over sleek gesso, still glows with an outer-space beauty. His overly graceful figures, like fashion models, strut and stretch, as clearly defined against grainy color backdrops as if they were modern hardedge images given fingers and toes. Only the brooding golden backlighting that makes theaters out of Parrish's scenar ios bespeaks a pre-neon sensibility...