Painting Post

'And malice toward none', 55"(width) X 85"(height), Oil on unstretched canvas

Painting Post and a little note…

It has been a while since I completed a proper painting. Four months to be exact. While I still enjoy the process immensely, I do not feel as motivated as I used to over the last three years as I indulged in my little amateur experiments in painting our faces. I know Chuck C. has spent his lifetime doing just that, but I do not seem to have the wellspring of optimism and creativity that seems to sustain and nurture his craft. As a result, this will be my last ‘face’ painting for the immediate future. A lot of options, ideas and avenues have been floating inside my head – the trick is to bring the art behind some of these ideas to fruition – practically and meaningfully. I have not figured out an optimum process/technique to channel output appropriately under the happy circumstances surrounding the balance of work, family, sleep etc. and when I do I will let you know (in the meantime if you have any tips, do let me know). Yesterday night, I did create a couple of preparatory sketches on paper as a precursor to develop something as yet undefined. I am not too sure where this new direction is going to take me, but I feel confident that I will discover something new.

Perspectives in abstraction

Artist Robert Rauschenberg died 82 years old Monday this week. His art under the aegis of postwar modernism was different (to put it mildly). Though I am not a big fan of his artwork, the following quote helps us understand the way he looked at art and provides us a better perspective in reacting to art.

Mr. Rauschenberg, describing to writer Calvin Tomkins an encounter with a woman who had reacted skeptically to “Monogram” and “Bed” in his 1963 retrospective at the Jewish Museum:

“To her, all my decisions seemed absolutely arbitrary — as though I could just as well have selected anything at all — and therefore there was no meaning, and that made it ugly. So I told her that if I were to describe the way she was dressed, it might sound very much like what she’d been saying. For instance, she had feathers on her head. And she had this enamel brooch with a picture of ‘The Blue Boy’ on it pinned to her breast. And around her neck she had on what she would call mink but what could also be described as the skin of a dead animal. Well, at first she was a little offended by this, I think, but then later she came back and said she was beginning to understand.”

Of course, the New Republic has an interesting point (His art stank in the 1950s and it doesn't look any better today. "De mortuis nil nisi bonum." Of the dead, speak no evil. But of the works of the dead, it seems to me that we have a perfect right to say whatever we think. And the fact is that Robert Rauschenberg's work has been protected by a sort of critical silence for many years now--at least what little negative comment there has been is more or less ignored. The merest suggestion that the juxtapositions of objects and images in Rauschenberg's paintings, sculptures, and prints are nothing more than arbitrary has left one open to the accusation of being a conservative or a reactionary. And once you have been called those names, you are out of the discussion).

Chuck Close, 'Robert Rauschenberg', 1996, Color digital pigment print, 140 x 112 cm

Painting

Sunil, 'Untitled_120907', Latex based house paint and wet gesso on dricore board, 24" X 24"

Painting

Sunil, 'Untitled', Acrylic paint, wood stain and latex based paint on gessoed masonite, 24" X 24"

Weekend experiments

Sunil, 'Untitled', Acrylic based house paint, red wood stain, oil paint and varnish on masonite, 24" X 24"

Landscape

Anselm Kiefer, 'Nuremberg', Acrylic, emulsion, and straw on canvas, 110" x 149", 1982

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Every time I hear the word quagmire, this powerful images dances in my head.