Word: paint
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Martin Edmund's poems in The High Road to Taos invite comparison to the celebrated prehistoric paintings of the Lascaux caves in France. Both include images on a huge scale, natural subjects, an undercurrent of strange spirituality, But they also leave the viewer with the sensation that the scenes and emotions they illustrate have long been dry. The reader is forced to wonder, "Has the passion, like the paint, faded with time, or is the artist receiving too much credit...
...pristine condition, apparently undisturbed for up to 20,000 years, as was other evidence of the ancient artists' presence: flint knives, mounds of clay used for making paint, and charred fire pits...
...black-and-white style was a real invention, but its roots are not hard to see. If one was illustration, another was the black-and-white paintings of de Kooning in the late '40s. An early Kline like Ninth Street, 1951, with its traces of looping body shapes, makes that clear. Where it did not come from, though, was where it was often said to have come from: Oriental calligraphy. Of course, there is a superficial likeness between Kline's structures and ideograms in sumi ink on silk, especially in reproduction, when the particular qualities of paint and surface...
Sometimes the speed of the brush is important -- it leaves frayed edges, something like the speed lines in cartoons, but in other paintings, like the impressive Wotan, 1950, nothing moves or is meant to. The big rectangle anchored by one edge to the top of the canvas has a massive presence and thickness of paint, and its blunt authority looks forward to what American minimalists would be doing a generation later...
...same. Doctors and staffers at women's health clinics are ruthlessly killed while anti-choice leaders condemn the violence, attempting to distance themselves from the killers. They could no longer call themselves "pro-life" if any of this violence could be linked to them. So they try to paint Griffin, Hill and Salvi as extremists, radicals, and deranged lunatics, acting in isolation...