Gesture, Extended Seeing, Line, and Life

Summer flies and with it, time. I leave it feeling as if I've lost something important. I circle my studio,... my home and family, wanting what is past, while simultaneously plunging on ahead.
Gestural work implies time lost, that tension of wanting what is leaving, savoring what can't be held, and loving the moment. It is a drawing filled with life, energy, need...the grabbing hold of something before it changes and saying, 'look here, now, this is significant, worthy of your attention!'
I can't say I've proceeded with any logical intent in the following, they are images that asked something of me and gave in return.

Rembrandt:

Rembrandt:

Rico Lebrun:

Peter Paul Rubens:

Kent Williams:

There's urgency present in the handling of marks, the speed of line, the delicacy of varied weights and values and above all, there's life...there's a meeting space between solid form and air. These works are intuitive, the communication visual and felt.

Isabel Bishop:

Carracci:

Frank Auerbach:

Jacob Jordaens:

Degas:

Other images posted here hold the speed and longing of a gesture within a field of greater time. They search and re-search with the wonder of a child gazing into treasure and recognizing its worth. Moods are more complex, layered, intense. They move well beyond the time of a gesture but hold the life of that mark, connecting both parties, the viewer and the viewed within the boundaries of the work made, and across boundaries into themes and series that settle somewhere inside us. These images breathe.
Giacometti:

Kathe Kollwitz:

Jerome Witkin:

Paula Rego:

Edward Hopper:

Henry Moore:

Toulouse Lautrec:

Boccioni:

Will Kentridge:

Rubens:

Michelangelo:

Kollwitz:

Jenny Seville:

Paul Cadmus:

Lucian Freud:

If I were to take it a stretch further beyond the drawn line but including it in the abstracted and represented mark, painted and carved, etched, and sewn format, the pieces below would also fall somewhere between the gesture and extended gaze. Life sits here with its worries and fears, silliness and humor, anger and frustration, ...its sorrow and abiding faith in humanity calling out to you in the form of open narrative.

Jenny Seville:

Eva Hesse:

Magdalena Abakanowicz:

Balthus:

Antony Gormley:

Alice Neel:

Ann Gale:

Antonio Lopez Garcia:

Anselm Keifer:

Kitaj:

Beckmann:

Lucian Freud:

Kollwitz:

Ron Mueck:

Rubens:

Paula Rego:

Andrew Wyeth:

Kiki Smith:

Giotto:

Robert Bauer:

Jim Dine:

Picasso:

Rembrandt:

In my enthusiasm for this connection of us to each other through the visual, I'd keep going... but for the sake of your patience and to prevent me from creating an even longer run-on sentence, I'll wait. Check out the Cretara You tube link and keep looking! Another day then to wonder and join artists who have also slowed with hand and heart to wonder, and try, and see.