sweasel.com

The house is a pubic attraction now. They’ll help you dress up for a parody photo, if you like.

Public? Or is your original word why they look so crabby?

Aiiiii! I made the bad typo!

It’s the art world’s equivalent of “Watch this sh*t!”

Or, “hold mah beer!”

Wyeth thought Christina’s World was a terrible flop. He painted it, there’s was an embarrassed silence from his family. He tucked it behind a sofa for a while.

I’m not a Wyeth fan, but people have overlaid all kinds of Meaning on that picture.

I will get on my soapbox now.

Sister Stoaty and all y’all minions. Politics aside, it is a great painting. Like the Mona Lisa and other portraiture defined masterworks , it speaks to so many different levels of what mankind is all about. It speaks to a specific time in American history, yet goes way beyond that clearly technical, masterful rendering. Truly great art “trancends” age or whatever spin the current cultural blathering art critic calls it.

I’ll have to tell you all the tale of one Denver native who went on to become a master at bringing art as a joy to be experienced and enjoyed by all folks. Gene Amole created a venue to make accessible. Like Leonard Bernstein….and Grant Wood and Norman Rockwell, Carl Sandburg and Thomas Hornsby Ferril, he took the ordinary about life and made it available, yet transcendental…extraordinary.

I won’t get into Methodist/Transcendentalist rant, I am way too much of liturgical mystic.

I will say that I am tired of the blatant and clearly political positioning of one Barry Sotero, aka: Barrack Hussein Obama, as the heir apparent to FDR and saviour of “Progressivism” in America.

That, my friends, is the other side of the coin of the “ARTS” which has been hijacked by the propaganda media machine here, in Britain, and on the Continent.

Off the soapbox now….need a huge glass of wine.

Both these paintings work on one’s head is some weird way that captures that “certain something” about the prairies in the mid west. My parents were conservative people from Iowa and South Dakota and my Dad’s father was a Scandinavian immigrant. I was born and raised on the West Coast – both these paintings hit me right in the midsection. I can’t put it into words, but they convey powerful images.

All I’ll say is, I just bought my first pair of overalls last month. And I love em.

Enjoy your wine Sven. 🙂

Yeah I keep hearing about how mean and dour and unfriendly they look, but they just look like old time farm people.

A recent issue of Mental Floss had a long article about this painting, actually. Seems the long article isn’t available online, but here’s some more fun facts: http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/22639

As an Olson, I have always approved of Christina’s World. It shows that you can’t stop an Olson, all you can hope to do is slow her down. YAY OLSONS!

Cowtitty, Iowa will be my hometown from now on.

What, no discussion of the Master, Thomas Kinkade? I know Weasel is errm, conflicted about Kinkade.

Hey, laugh all you want but Kinkade is worth $70 million.

[Celebritynetworth.com is my faaaavorite site these days. However, they did downgrade old Whitney from 80 million to 20 million to a mere 5 million in a week. Her baby girl better kick her coke habit, learn a skill, and get a job.]

Kincaid is OK if you have somebody follow him around and touch up his work with a little splash of light and color here and there.

As for the symbolism in painting I tend to believe that there generally wasn’t much (except for religious iconography ) until the modern art game started in the late 50’s. Failing to have the the skills of a Picasso or Dali essentially the only way for an artist to prove that he knew all the rules of classic composition (without spending years like the masters did) was to break them. This allowed him and his friends to have endless discussions over cigarettes and cheap wine. Then began the inside jokes apparent only to those who took a 3rd level course.

They began praising each other from their chairs at Liberal Arts schools
and shazaam! Painting was transformed into a talking sport, like baseball.

Reproduction of reality, particularly beautiful reality, became frowned upon because really a photograph does that so much better, and it doesn’t apparently leave much to say at a party.

Kinkade is fine, he’s no great artist, but then most aren’t. He paints better than I do, and I just don’t get the hate of the guy. I think a lot of it is jealousy, really.

“As for the symbolism in painting I tend to believe that there generally wasn’t much (except for religious iconography ) until the modern art game started in the late 50′s.”

Whaaaaa…? Early Renaissance painting is full of symbolism. Take a look at the iconography in Giotto, for example. Bosch, Breugel, they’re absolutely riddled with it. And Symbolism as a movement in its own right is a 19th C./early 20th C. thing e.g. Böcklin’s The Isle of the Dead, which inspired the Rachmaninov piece, or Salome, which is a play by Wilde, an opera by Strauss and a painting by Klimt.

The Great Circle of ART!
1) paintings that look like the subject
2) paintings that look like the artist’s impression of the subject.
3) paintings that look like somebody blew up the paint locker.
and finally, once again.
4) paintings that look like the subject.

Somebody said that modern art was born when artists quit painting women and decided they had a better idea.

Some Vegetable: Read The Painted Word by Tome Wolfe. It explains how 20th century “high art” devolved into pure art theory.

Christopher Taylor:Yeah I keep hearing about how mean and dour and unfriendly they look, but they just look like old time farm people.

That’s the point: old time American farm people are mean and unfriendly.

Most modern farm people ain’t to damn happy either.

Funny thing. If Wood had written a novel about a bank manager or store owner and his grown up spinster daughter, using his sister and dentist as the models for the personal attributes of the characters, noone would think twice about it. Nor would anyone in the 19th century (or any earlier century) have found anything in the least odd about the idea that the elements of that painting were not “authentic.” I mean. . .that’s how painting was done, yes? I wonder what it was, in the 20th century (possibly, only in the 20th century in the US) that engendered this thirst for authenticity in visual art?

Ooh, I am so stealing that, Rich.