Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Nevermore...





Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December...Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven

This flaxen haired model and her gilted painting provided the grist for the portrait making mill in my most recent Mixed Media Portraiture class at MECA.
(...and after today, this November will be nevermore...can you believe it??)

Sunday, November 28, 2010

At November's End






























With a dusting of snow on the ground, things are looking and feeling wintery even though the calender says that we still have 3 weeks left of Autumn. Some pics from September through November.
Hope that you are all enjoying the long holiday weekend!

Friday, November 26, 2010

Why Not Say What Happened?

Women and Men, 1991-3.
Father Reading Tom Sawyer To His Son, 1994.
The First Time (Havana, 1949), 1990.
The Green Blanket, 1978
Mary-Ann, 1980.
The Neo-Cubist, 1976-87.
The Listener (Joe Singer in Hiding), 1980.
The Sculptor, 1992.
R.B.Kitaj and cat.

Gentlemen never explain. ~ Jowett
Yet why not say what happened? ~ Robert Lowell

Some images from the book Kitaj by Marco Livingstone, and excerpts on the topic of making art personal from Kitaj's preface to his paintings:

Hemingway told Fitzgerald we're all bitched from the start and that we have to use that hurt: ... I think the modern term is identity, and its art can be the examined life, which is not very heretical after all. There are even a few strong voices around, such as that of I.B. Singer, who say that good art springs from one's tribe. He once wrote: 'Only dilettantes try to be universal; a real artist knows that he's connected with a certain people...'

My idea of art is to make picture-studies, to act upon what can be learnt about the world (according to one's sensations) in these 'studies'. My idea of art is that even though you stay in your own room alot, you still find out about the world; you find, like Picasso said, disguises of things learnt which become new and discrete (paintings) in a changeful history of subjectivity. My idea of art is that it conceals and reveals one's life and that what it confesses, is as Kafka called, 'a rumour of things'...

My pictures and their evidences are not everyone's cup of tea; I know that. But our sainted Emerson spoke for me as I could never do when he said in his Divinity School Address: 'That is always best which gives me to myself. The sublime is excited in me by the great stoical doctrine, obey thyself.'