Word: wax
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Marden admired Jasper Johns -- a critic in the '70s brusquely but memorably wrote off an abstract twin-canvas picture by Marden as "Jasper's Painting with Two Balls, without the balls." And like Johns, he worked in a mixture of oil paint and wax, a false encaustic that gave his surfaces both substance and an inner glow, as if light were working its way through layers of slightly dusty translucency. You thought of it as skin. Marden was a brilliant colorist, in a very tuned-down way. His warm grays and brick reds, his low thick blues and his blocks...
...prevalent hue of the gray-to-silver monochrome seems to change from canvas to canvas, emitting different tints of light. Marden scrapes back and sandpapers the canvas, leaving the ghosts of one layer of paint behind the other; this subtlety (the equivalent of the nuances inside the coats of wax in his earlier work) plays off against the roughness of the lines. Sometimes a whole web of dark line gets canceled, whited out, but roughly -- on those thin grounds nothing can be concealed, anyway -- so that it forms a counterpart to the drawn structure, a sort of ghost image behind...
...panelists wax indignant for a few seconds each on some topic that rankled them during the past seven days. This week, I have my own outrages...
After lunch, a Dorm Crew bigwig--I think it was the "Generalissimo," but it could just as easily have been the "Czar" or "Grand Poobah"--taught my crew how to wax floors. To wax correctly, one must saturate one's mop with wax and then squeeze exactly 70 percent of the wax back into the bucket. There is no other correct method...
...make Americans charming and unreasonable and shallow, is part of their formula for success. But it has led Americans into absurdities and discontents that others who know life better might never think of. The frontiersman's self-sufficiency and stoicism in the face of pain belong now in some wax museum of lost American self- images...