Word: motif
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Lopez's art is not just about appearance. Its essential subject is time--how to use it, how to slow its passage, how to testify about a fugitive world that changes as he looks. The impressionist view--a motif, or the approximation of one, seen and completed in a few hours--is not for Lopez. His paintings come out of the most patient scrutiny in contemporary art. The panoramic view of downtown Madrid that is the show's centerpiece took eight years to finish, from 1974 to 1982. Muted and austere, almost palpably grimy and smoggy, it sets forth miles...
When Daniel and Monika Crotta decided to spice up their San Diego pizza business in 1983, they settled on a police motif. They decorated the store to look like a precinct house and called it the New York Pizza Department, or NYPD, since Monika got her recipes from an uncle in Manhattan. For orders to go, the Crottas hit on the notion of delivering in two white "squad cars." Daniel cleared the idea with the San Diego police. Says he: "They didn't endorse us, but they didn't discourage...
...trailers at the movies, you know that the only real question facing a potential audience member is whether The Hitcher is a "good" B-rate flick or a "bad" B-rate flick. Another slasher film could have taken the urban legend style, Riders on the Storm hitchiker killer motif and made a palatable product for the sanguinary tastes of the nation's youth. But though its premise is good, The Hitcher fails to deliver, and the audience is tediously dragged over the desert highways of this misdesigned film...
...elementary-school graduation, a rite of passage that, she remembers tartly, called for "light rejoicing." Mother buys her a rose; Father gives her the withering news that she can go to high school for only one year of secretarial courses. The 13- year-old's response introduces the principal motif of the book, if not the dominant theme of her life: "Here I stand, hobbled in a sack of doom, determined to tear out of it, knowing that I will...
...atrium lobby at the Equitable Life Assurance Society's New York City headquarters. Finished in a month of work and ready for a gala formal unveiling next week, the 68-ft. by 32-ft. painting has Lichtenstein's trademark comic-book dot matrix and Swiss-cheese motif. Working for a major corporation for the first time "did not present any problems," says the iconoclastic artist. "Anyone who commissions a work of art has to get the money from somewhere. This was no different...