Word: painterly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...face for movies. He's Tobey Maguire with 'tude. When Toronto movies couldn't find heroes, they searched for villains. Hitler, for instance: a documentary (Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary) and a fiction film (Max, about a Jewish art dealer who befriended young Adolf the aspiring painter) plumbed the cinema's inexhaustible fascination with Mr. Bad. And when you can't blame one person, blame the culture. Among the festival's most praised films were two parables of hypocrisy set in the 1950s and '60s: Todd Haynes' Far from Heaven and Peter Mullan's The Magdalene Sisters. Far from Heaven...
...cannot copy nature in a servile way; I am forced to interpret nature and submit it to the spirit of the picture," wrote the French painter Henri Matisse in 1908, looking back on a decade in which he and his friends had revolutionized image making. Many of the results of that revolution can be seen at the Royal Academy in London, where 86 paintings and seven sculptures from the collection of Gabrielle and Werner Merzbacher are on show until mid-November. The Merzbachers, both German-born, moved from the U.S. in 1964 to Switzerland, where Werner, then 36, joined...
...different silly creation myths, written out with such overcooked prose as "Time, a leaf, a life, a cloud, was forgotten." Skip them and go right to the comix. Here McKean's visual prowess justifies the metaphysical themes. "Cages" mostly takes place in an apartment building that Leo Sabarsky, a painter, has just moved into. There he meets Jonathan Rush, a secretive, Salman Rushdie-like writer whose latest book incites riots. Completing the traditional arts, Angel, a musician who can make stones sing, lives there too. Mixing Ingmar Bergman with Monty Python, strange, vaguely metaphorical characters pop in and out. Pudgy...
...like the woman who cooks dinner for her five-years-late-from-work husband, then moving on to the next. A black cat's wanderings serve as the narrative link between them all. Other connections, less obvious, also slowly appear. A mysterious, cog-filled glass ball appears on the painter's table and again in another character's dream. Most brilliantly, some connections come as a result of matching visual styles - just as it should be for a smart, sophisticated, "graphic" novel. One explosion of color in this otherwise, black, white and soft blue book depicts the destructive rage...
...Visually, the book is stunning. Going through it, you come to realize how much sense it makes to have it printed in the same way as a western art course book. McKean hits all the styles, from fuzzy iconic images like cave drawings, to representational pen and ink, to painterly abstract expressionism, up through photography and digital effects. But most important, it's all done at the service of a linear narrative, the definition of comix. When the painter meets a woman at a bar the graphics are laid out in clear rows of careful panels. As the couple relaxes...