Word: gray
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Such stories raise a basic question: Is the waking life actually worth living--or does it feel like a miserable, gray limbo of red eyes, dragging limbs and foggy thoughts? My own experience with Provigil, which I took for several weeks a few years ago during a season of heavy deadlines, convinced me that simple wakefulness is no replacement for genuine restedness. After two or three 18-hour days of writing, the quality of my work collapsed even as my fingers kept on typing. Though some switch deep inside my brain was stuck on "on," my soul and spirit...
There’s a new painting up in the modern and contemporary gallery of the Fogg. Or perhaps “painting” is too strong a word. The 2001 work, Dorian Gray by the American artist Martin Kline, at first glance looks remarkably like a gigantic black mud splat. Kline used encaustic, a pasty wax-based paint, to make this work, and the result is a highly textured oval mound of pigment, roughly the shape and convexity of a shield, that juts forward close to three inches from the center of the board. The board itself...
...first time I saw Dorian Gray in that gallery, I couldn’t even look at No. 2 afterward. In comparison, the Pollock just seemed compleltely unstimulating: flat, bland, tame. I remember being very angry about this. I knew that the Pollock was a good painting, but I felt that Kline had somehow spoiled it for me. It was as if I had snacked on too much salty junk food and couldn’t taste anymore when I sat down to eat a nice meal...
...refreshingly spare, more delicate and calligraphic than I remembered. Looking back at the Kline after realizing this about the Pollock, I noticed something I had completely missed before; the encaustic wasn’t all black, but was split into two zones, one of black and one of dark gray. Where the two tones met, the knobby protrusions of paint had a dark top and lighter bottom as if they had been carefully shaded to emphasize their three-dimensionality, and this lent the piece a shimmering, optical quality that presented an intruiging and suprisingly subtle contrast to the fugus-like...
Telling camerawork by cinematographer Xavier Pérez Grobet (Tortilla Soup) provides another revealing contrast, with scenes in and around Walter’s apartment and at his job appearing drab and gray, while scenes in the park with Robin are filled with color. The supporting cast skillfully depicts the various attitudes of outsiders toward Walter’s sickness. And though the screenplay (written by Kassell and Steven Fechter) occasionally overreaches with a few contrived lines and overwrought symbols, it seamlessly crafts the complex, raw story and invites an audience reaction as conflicted as the emotions of the characters...