It's complex, ...conceptually difficult to think about solid mass and air simultaneously when talking about the figure. Some manage this through transparency and layers, others through fragments and shifts in perspective, and still others through their marks and erasures.
Eric Fischl:
Giacometti:
Chuck Close:
The artists shown differ tremendously in thought processes and reasoning, but the search for something meaningful in their day to day existence whether through observation or an extension of that idea seems relevant to each.
Francisco Goya:
Viewpoint, positioning in space, the picture plane's relationship to all internal marks are considered, weighed, balanced or disrupted in relationship to content,... promoted or quieted. Stillness is considered while motion is entertained.
Lennart Andersen:
Jack Levine:
Choices are made both intuitively and alertly, with ideas of light, speed, amount of detail, questions of completion, all connected with time, and vision. Thoughts and wishes unfold, dreams and nightmares are voiced.
Andrew Wyeth:
Jim Dine:
Antonio Lopez Garcia:
Effective proportion requiring carefully observed form is seen in many of these works but not at the expense of energy and intuition.
Wyeth:
Arthur Polonsky:
Ann Gale:
Tiepelo:
Rico Lebrun:
Jon Imber:
Karl Zerbe:
William Kentridge:
David Hockney:
Some perhaps, are more intellectually planned, formally devised and crafted, while others appear more random and evocative, ... as if the image could crawl inside you and stay.
Philip Pearlstein:
Degas:
Louise Bourgeois:
Edwin Dickinson:
Hyman Bloom:
Hung Lui:
Tiepelo:
Kiki Smith:
But it is you, the viewer connecting with either of these approaches, and you, also the artist, who might decide to linger inside the image, stay longer, pursue further, try to understand through your marks and proximity, your color and greys, your connectedness or divisiveness, what it was your hand told you to say because somewhere deeper you felt but could not hear the words but needed to share them anyway.
William Kentridge:
Antonio Lopez Garcia:
The artist tries to get closest to whatever this is that makes us who we are in mind and heart, and it seems to me both a concentrated effort, and a letting go, a finding of such solid mass it would sit and weigh one down and we would know we exist...the joy of that weight! But still, an allowing for air, not squeezing so hard one can't find a way out into the vast unknown where spirit exists and there is no solid form, a place for both.
Ann Gale:
Louise Bourgeois:
Perhaps the two extremes of formal and existential converge in the listening and use of materials, becoming a way of song, poetry not quite confirmed by words, but felt and understood through lingering.
Kiki Smith:
Eva Hesse:
Ana Mendieta:
Lennart Andersen:
