Word: paintbrushes
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...more complicated than that. It is true that Van Gogh applied the formal system he preferred to the Provencal landscape: the rapid, shifting notation of dots, speckles and slashes in the drawings, with the white paper burning like noon light behind the sepia ink; the characteristic spirals of the paintbrush, which link back to the decorative line work of Edo Japanese screens and point forward to the whiplash rhythms of art nouveau. But this handwriting was not mechanically stamped on the landscape, as the style marks of mere obsessives tend to be. On the contrary, it was infinitely responsive...
...phrase as memorable for its injustice as its vividness, he once remarked that "photography is all right if you don't mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops -- for a split second." But between 1981 and 1983 Hockney scarcely touched a paintbrush; irked by painter's block, he turned to photography to shake it loose, first with a Polaroid SX-70 and then with various popular automatic 35- mm cameras. He would take a motif -- a friend smoking and talking, people around a table, a swimmer in the blue light-dappled water...
...Keeffe always rejected the idea that her scenes of New Mexico were meant as symbols or allegories. But it is hard to see their contrasts of image -- an Indian paintbrush or a wild daisy put against the bleached bone of a ram's skull, and that bone repeating the ancient permanence of mountain line -- without grasping that some transaction beyond the simply formal or factual is afoot. This is particularly true with her flower paintings: magnified closeups, filling the whole surface, of a black iris, a jack-in-the-pulpit, or a calla lily. Almost from the moment that they...
...revenge. Although the setting remains British, Help the Poor Struggler is rather an American novel, with brooding and cynical overtones of Raymond Chandler ("It wasn't the pale skin of a man who'd not seen enough of the sun. It was more as if one had put a paintbrush to an emotion -- despair, desolation, whatever -- and tinged it in that sickly whitishgray"). Depth of characterization is not Grimes' strong suit, but she produces vital word pictures and manipulates her plot cleverly for maximal suspense and surprise...
...slight thing to have painted The Sleeping Gypsy, by now perhaps the most famous dream image in Western art. The silhouette of a sniffing lion, with one unwinking yellow eye and a tail stiffly outstretched, its tip erect as though charged with static electricity, quivering like Rousseau's own paintbrush; the swollen, white Melies moon; the black nomad like a toppled statue, her feet with their pink toenails gravely sticking up; the djellaba, with its rippling stripes of coral, Naples yellow, cerulean; and the lute, like a pale lunar egg, hanging on the brown sand as the moon hangs...