Word: painterly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...times, in his copious letters, one senses the veerings and fragile boastfulness of a manic-depressive. He was not a sociable painter, which at least saved him from being a society artist; he disliked painting people, though he turned out quite a few routine portraits of country-seats. In his emotional uncertainty and fear of change, he was the stuff of which rank-and-file Tories are made. He did not so much idealize stability as worship it, and as a result his entire view of rural England presents Arcadia in a new guise. One could never imagine, looking...
...wonder that, in a painter with so pronounced a taste for the specific, there was a constant argument between stereotypes and things seen. Constable loved his masters: Claude Lorrain, Ruisdael, Gaspard Poussin. Some of his most delectable paintings, such as The Cornfield, 1826, rely on the Claudean use of dark repoussoir trees framing a view of bright space at the center, and this can make them too charming to a modern eye. Constable himself remarked that The Cornfield "has certainly got a little more eyesalve than I usually condescend to give." But the great fact of nature, as Benjamin West...
Constable was a painter of substance, not fantasy; but imagination rises through the substance. His earliest childhood memories, the elements of his genetic code as a painter, were all about the weight and noise and feel of things he grew up with as a well-off son of a watermill owner in Suffolk, on the River Stour. "The sound of water escaping from Mill dams . . . willows, Old rotten Banks, slimy posts, and brickwork. I love such things," he wrote to a friend. "They made me a painter (and I am grateful) . . . I had often thought of pictures of them before...
...also happily managed, without a hint of the domestic turbulence that made so many headlines during some of Mailer's earlier marriages. Friends give much of the credit for this newly found tranquillity to Norris, 34, a statuesque beauty and talented painter from Arkansas, whom Mailer met in 1975 and married five years later. Says Author E.L. Doctorow (Ragtime), who once served as Mailer's editor before his own writing career prospered: "My feeling is that since he's married Norris he's been happier than he's ever been." Torres views the success...
...women must find-new places for themselves and each other. It is a challenge eagerly faced by the five young people in A Weekend Near Madison. Four of them-David (William Mesnik), a psychotherapist; his wife Doe (Robin Groves), a short-story writer; his brother Jim (Randle Mell), a painter; and Jim's former girlfriend Nessa (Mary McDonnell), a singer-shared a giddy faith in revolution while at the University of Wisconsin in the early '70s. When they meet again it is 1979; time and events have tamped down their political ardor. But Nessa has become a radical...