Post 43 of my favorite works of art

going to Picasso again
1908 Picasso
i remember being at the University of Kansas, getting my BFA, and there was this guy, a student, talking to a professor about a coke can on the table, how the mere presence of the object was something remarkable to him. this was beyond me, but it still registered on some level. I get it more better now, i am still more practical than metaphysical (if that’s the right word) than that, but this painting by Picasso, his simple use of simple objects as the vehicle for being and thinking and trying to wrestle with something bigger than their mere selves, but still being their mere selves, well, that’s in there, and it’s what’s in the coke can on the table. Lots of things are possible to be more than the mere plain thing they are. It doesn’t have to be the afternoon raking light that elevates them, or the fact that it was the last coke can that your lover drank from before he she left, that makes them important. more than the sugar and artificial coloring that is now in your blood.

oh stop please
it’s just a cup and bottle

maybe it’s time to start to include my own work rather than the rich and famous, the untouchable distant and or dead masterful workers. So i will pick something that seems to mirror that distance, a small thing that has little to do with mastery, beauty or skill.
near the edge of a brick wall where sticky grime collects, the smokers take a break, flick away their butts and go back inside. with a putty knife i clear a rectangle of grime away and put the used cigarettes in order; taking a worthless thing, the detritus of pleasure with a cancerous lining and frame it. I don’t know who the smokers are, they may not see the arrangement, but i like the idea of the unknown person, the non museum going person, to pause and for that brief moment, be suspended.

oldenberg
i like this because it is another example of what art can be, it pushes along the idea that art can take forms other than beautiful paintings of beautiful women. here oldenberg makes a proposal on a piece of paper and it, not the sculpture itself, is the art. the proposal for an enormous sculpture to be on the Thames River in London. He knows it will never happen, but the idea of it existing is enough.
and, there are not a lot of examples where there is humor in art
if you can’t tell, the large orbs in the water are those floating things inside the tank of a toilet

soldier and laughing girl
vermeer
17th century Dutch/Holland/Netherlands
there in the seeming quiet
the room uninterrupted sitting
the woman and the man, she smiling, emotional and engaging
up front and forward
he, the black hat and back and soldier imposing
she the inside , he the outside
the window/map, the room
the window as outside, as that which is unseen and dreamed of
the room as soft and understandable, the here and now
the dutch as merchant force and pressing out into the commerce of the world
she, as ever present and worth loving
all this quietly
and understated

14/43
something about this painting moves me
it’s the subject matter I suppose, that boat, the rowboat that is going, where? and a row boat seems so elemental these days,
who goes in a row boat? row boats are, for most of us, not about doing business, even canoes and now kayaks turn the art of “being out there” into a precise and expensive leisure activity. And this boat is out into the big expanse and makes it seem worldly.
bellows paint is thick peanut butter, the sky and water are not friendly but there is a sense of light and clearing skies that might be to our back and possibly approaching as the storm recedes??
none the less, those boaters are doing some bouncing

13/43
Drawings; you get to feel a little closer to the maker. In a drawing, the hand is nearer to you, nearer to the making time, you get the sense of it being made. And there is something about a pencil or charcoal or ink wash and guache that feels accessable and makes me feel a little bit a part of it.
and..
when there is a drawing that you see as different than you know the artists other art to be, well, there too you get a glimpse behind the curtain and a little nudge into what the artist is really like.
We usually know Seraut as the dot guy, here you see him as artist looking at things and representing them on a piece of paper, deceptively simple and intimate.

12/43
aw just cause

related to the Archipenko but
11/43
Lachaise makes the woman ,,large oversized bulky not really sensuous, but there is a powerfullness within her sex, takes off her hair, gives her strength,,, and then elevates her, rests her in a position that is not of her own support, floats her-—gives her a lightness that accompanies her robustness, she is peaceful, content in what she is, not pushing what it is she looks like—and again, I take that as something other than just the thing that i am looking at and say, yes, now that’s a woman,,,to have those qualities

10/43
it’s elegant and a blend of the geometric and the organic
it’s curvy and sexy and rather removed at the same time
a different take on idealism than a Venus

9/43
the one hundred years ago Kandinsky Kandinsky
the juicy, colorful, less than careful, not the geometric Kandinsky, the synesthetic, the Kandinsky who hears color Kandinsky, who starts making compostions because they are music,
the Kandinsky who still lingers with the representational, though without is fine as long as it isn’t that tight stuff he did