Word: painterly
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...Always distrust professed honesty," says Scumbler, an aging, defiantly bohemian American painter in Paris. "It's the ultimate con job." This seems an odd assertion from a character whose narrative is one long profession of emotional candor, sensitivity, creativity and individuality. William Wharton's novel is no con job, however, but something perhaps harder to take: a credo of total, devout and sometimes excruciating sincerity...
Scumbler's name is borrowed from the technical term for texturing over one color with another; usually he shortens it to Scum, for scum of the earth. A self-proclaimed people's painter, he roams the streets on his battered motorcycle, white beard flying, paintbox strapped on his back, searching for subjects. He relishes getting caught up fitfully in the lives of the students, prostitutes, policemen and tourists who gather around his easel. He goes where the flow carries him, down to explore unused tunnels under Paris or off to join some young Americans on an outing...
...Eminent Victorians (among others) and one of the central figures in that most prominent and influential of this century's literary circles, the Bloomsbury group. He was also a homosexual who was incapable of sustaining an intimate relationship with any of his male lovers. Carrington was a painter of modest gifts who gave him constancy despite having, as Strachey's biographer Michael Holroyd put it, a "solitary and promiscuous nature, like that of a cat." Indeed, so intense was her necessarily platonic devotion that she committed suicide shortly after he died in 1932 rather than go on without...
...Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and his own favorite, Lonely Are the Brave, the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City inducted Kirk Douglas, 67, as its newest celluloid cowpoke, joining the legendary likes of John Wayne. The Duke might have been amused. After Douglas portrayed the eccentric painter Vincent Van Gogh. Wayne asked him, "Why did you play that weak, sniveling character?" Replied Douglas: "I'm an actor." Warned the Duke: "Yeah, well, don't let me catch you playing a role like that again...
...basic skills came from Bai's father, a photographer who was employed in a state-owned studio. Bai worked at odd jobs as a laborer and a painter until 1979, when the government began to encourage people to go into business for themselves. His assets were meager: some photographic equipment and furniture from the 1950s left to him by his father. But the state made things click by offering a three-year tax exemption. "I was nervous whether I could make money or not," Bai said. "People don't like to start things on their own." Although...