Word: impasto
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...really nail painting until he starts using a lot less paint. As we move into his more well-known work of the Blue and Rose Periods, we find that the surfaces become far more controlled, flatter and less overtly "painterly." Only when Picasso retreats from the heavily textured impasto of his earlier canvases do we feel his work becoming more assured and less self-conscious. Somewhere along the way he realizes that he doesn't need to prove he's a painter by giving the viewer countless energetic strokes and layers of thick paint...
...chalky emanation from the grainy whites and subtle grays that seems to bathe and lift the whole image. Substance is light. Such paintings, and others like Here Comes the Diesel, 1987 (a train passing through a cutting in North London), connect Kossoff back to late Constable, with their flickering impasto, their palpable joy in light and freshness embodied in substance. In his effort to squeeze so much from the world, Kossoff is a wholly traditional painter; only his anxiety about whether it can be done makes him a late-modern...
Zurbaran's version comes right from the rhetorical heart of the Counter- Reformation. Dark, admonitory and raw, it seems overwhelmingly real in every detail, from the coarse weave of the woolen habit (with a frayed hole at the elbow, emblematic of poverty, brilliantly accentuated with a few impasto flicks of white light on the dangling threads to give a hint of contrast to * the massive carving of the rest of the forms) to the shrouded face whose eyes Zurbaran loses in blackness to suggest the hermetic nature of the saint's vision. His gaping mouth is doubled in the gaping...
...body was raised to the empyrean in 4 minutes 30 seconds, a rate of climb of $147,700 per second. And third, the Eucharistic Feast. After the sale, Christie's brought out a savory cake in the form of Sunflowers, the frame made of flaky pastry, the colors rendered impasto furioso in various hues of saffron-tinted cream cheese, the green bits done in spinach, and detail added with studdings of seeds. It was cut up and eaten by the worshipers. No doubt when and if a major Van Gogh self-portrait comes on the block, there will...
Among the few respectable things in that stew of American vanguard kitsch, the 1985 Whitney Biennial, was a large painting by a 36-year-old artist named Terry Winters. Done in a thick, ocherous impasto, which produced a paint surface that looked both lavish and summarily abbreviated, the image suggested (of all unlikely things) mushrooms: swollen glands like morels, crinkled and cellular, standing up in ranks like an array of mysterious brown balloons. It was odd to find any painting in such a show that addressed itself--however obliquely or eccentrically--to nature. But its relation to nature...