Big Picture, Big Draw

Jenny Saville with her painting "Plan" taken by Glynn Griffiths in 1994.

People by the thousands have been visiting my blog recently. On September 9 I had 5,164 visits to the blog. In the four days from the 8th to the 11th I had 8,624 visitors.

For a blog that gets a respectable 200 or 250 on a good day, these numbers are sensational.

Suddenly my art had been discovered by the masses? After all my last two posts were about my current show in downtown Pittsfield.

No such luck, according to the statistics generated daily for my site. The big draw was Glynn Griffiths' 1994 portrait of the British artist Jenny Saville, her painting Plan towering over the artist then in her early 20s.

Someone - actually lots of someones - was looking for that photo. And if you Google Jenny Saville and go to "images" you'll find that my site is the only place you could find it. (Of course you can find it on other sites if you add the photographers name and the title of the painting.

I used the photo with my post about Saville on July 19, 2006.

The lines that look like a topographic map here, I learned today, are derived instead from her study of liposuction and plastic surgery. I thought then and think now that Saville is one of the best contemporary painters. 

The self portrait above is extraordinary. From the moment I saw it, this piece was one of my favorites. The way she applies paint is masterful. The composition is spectacular. The wet, open mouth is arresting and disturbing. The painting, like many of hers, is confrontational, demanding, sensational.

Above and below are two of her recent paintings. She is now 42 and I like the stuff she was doing 20 years ago better. But she will be painting for a long time. I'm anxious to see what she comes up with.

Here's one of those earlier works, a commanding painting.

Here's a current photo of Saville, the mother of two children, in her studio in Oxford, England.

"It feels as if Saville is the lovechild of Willem de Kooning's violent misogyny and Lucian Freud's carnal hunger who, somehow, popped out as kind of a feminist," writes Priscilla Frank in the Huffington Post. I think Frank has it right.

Frank had another great line in her profile: "Her paintings are tender, not as in tender feelings but more like tender meat."

In an article in The Guardian by Rachel Cooke, I learned that it was while Saville was at Cincinnati University she was captivated by the sight of obese women at shopping malls. They became the subject of her 1992 graduate show at Glasgow University, a show that captivated Charles Saatchi - the British collector who introduced the crop of "Young British Artists" in the Sensation show, which seemed to have shifted the center of the art world from New York to Boston.

"I want to be a painter of modern life, and modern bodies..." Saville told the Guardian.

"In Britain, there has been a drive in art schools to describe and to rationalise what it is that you're making, and that is a death knell to painting," Saville said in regard to conceptual art.

America is more attuned to painting than England, she said, suggesting that might be because New York was the center of the last period of great painting - the Abstract Expressionists.

The Eyes of My Mother

Photo by Riley Nichols/All Rights Reserved

There are things I forgot to say when I gave my artist's talk at the BCC gallery. Two important things in any in depth conversation about her life and death.

One: She lived past infancy only because her mother saved her when their house burned in Calgary, Alberta. Her mother threw her from an upper story window in their house into the arms of someone below. Her mother, however, was unable to save herself.

Two: When my family moved to Tarrytown after my father was discharged from the Army Air Corps following World War II, he had a job in advertising in New York City that paid very well. After he lost that job, my mother, who was a nurse, returned to work and saved us from financial ruin. And she continued working for years as a private-duty nurse, often for 12-hour shifts for months without a day off.

Photo by Riley Nichols/All Rights Reserved

Other things I might have talked about was the once rocky course of their marriage. Of my mother's bout with TB when I was an infant. Of my mother when she was trying to fight off severe disappointment or deep depression singing to herself:

When you walk through a storm

Hold your head up high

And don't be afraid of the dark.

At he end of the storm

Is a golden sky

And the sweet silver song of a lark.*

I did talk about her manic depression and the electric shock treatments she was given. If you read One Flew Over the Cockoo's Nest you know what a toll they could take. I used the reds and yellows and purples in the large print because to me those were the colors of electric shock.

Photo by Susan Geller/All Rights Reserved

 But there were so many things to say about her. In a 15-minute talk you can't fit in everything**.

 Additionally it was extemporaneous. If I were doing it over, I'd make some notes. Those aren't notes in my hand in Susan Geller's photo above. They're photos (like the two below) I had printed to show people during the talks, which attracted more than 30 people combined.

My mother does a handstand.

My mother was able to do hand stands and walk on her hands. In a sympathy note to my father, a friend said she had done handstands at the YMCA even at 58, the age at which she died.

My mother and a friend.

This is one of the photos in our family album of a trip my mother took to Cuba with several friends when she was young.

Photo by Riley Nichols/All Rights Reserved

In this shot my granddaughter Riley, I have just been introduced by Lisa Griffith, the head of the Art Department at BCC.

I am tremendously grateful to her for asking me to do this show - my third for the community college - and for the insightful way she hung it. I took several studio art classes with Lisa when I was in my 60s.

Riley, by the way, has been my show photographer for about five years. She will be 13 next month.

*You'll Never Walk Alone by Rogers and Hammerstein from Carousel.

**I also forgot to say how very much I love her and my father. Maybe that's obvious.

(Visiting hours for my show at Berkshire Community College's downtown gallery on Columbus Avenue are from 2 to 5 on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays.)

Battlefield Angel

                  A majestic angel tops the State of Pennsylvania monument on the battlefield at Gettysburg.
                   I took the shots of the angel, carrying an olive branch in one hand and a sword in the other, from the observation platform, reached by a winding, claustrophobic staircase.
                   She was sculpted by Samuel Murray of Philadelphia, along with the monument's eight additional sculptures of Lincoln and significant Union generals in the battle, all on a heroic scale.
                    The photo of the monument itself was taken by Andrew Neil Dierks in 2005.

                             

DRIVE THRU

I think you can probably read  what it says on the driveway of this lakeside donut shop in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. But in case you're having trouble, it says:

DRIVE THRU

The arrow points straight ahead. If you drove straight ahead your car would bowl over the warning cones and start filling with fish.

But as far as I know, no car has ended up in the drink.

Change of Address

To view Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man, which is posted every other day, go to http://www.grierhorner.com/blog.html

This self portrait of the artist and blogger was taken by computer yesterday as he was talking with his son and grandson in Louisiana. That's what put the smile on his face.

Golden Gown

Photo by Grier Horner/All Rights Reserved

This is a work in progress, the latest in my Runway series. It is oil over acrylic. Not too much more work until it's done. 

It's the first time in a long time that I've worked in oil, which used to be my standard paint, and I've been having fun. The figure has been done with pallet knives and my fingers so far.

The painting is six feet by four feet.

From Greylock

Photo by Grier Horner/All Rights Reserved

We drove up Mount Greylock the other evening and I got this shot of the setting sun. At 3,492 feet it is Massachusetts' highest peak.

It's eight miles up its twisting road - eight luxuriously smooth miles since its reconstruction several years ago.

It was our first ascent this year. It's a place of such beauty we wondered why we don't go up more often.

I used to climb it on my bike. I wish I still could. The ride up was work but the ride down was exhilarating. Once I pedaled up on January 1 on a day when the snow was only about an inch deep. 

On another winter descent I skidded in a patch of snow and landed on the side of my head. Those were the days before I wore a helmet. Almost knocked myself out.

It is a rare winter when you can ride up. Usually the snow comes early there, piles deep and stays until spring.

Grier Horner | One Life Photos 2011

VOTE for me. If you like the pictures I've entered in this contest - One Life Photos 2011. To vote, and see the pictures, click here. The winner gets $10,000. There's still time to enter. Thanks.

The Vote Count: at 10 a.m. , Aug. 19, - 25.

By the way, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man is back on its original spot - one that had been eaten and spit out by Lion.

When I bought Lion, Mac's new operating system to replace the beast had carried my burden previously - was it  Snow Leopard? - Lion killed Contribute, the software I use to do my blog.

Contribute is made by Adobe and that firm's Loveesh Kumar, exercising the patience of Job, talked this non techie through the harrowing procedure of installing the software on my iMac, which seemed to fight us every inch of the way.

Although my sites up and running again - I have a new post on it now - I may stick with blogspot for a while to see if I can built some readership here.

(Photo by Grier Horner/All Rights Reserved)

Faces 2

On the subject of faces I've painted over the years, here are some more. Some of them are details of paintings and some are the full painting. A number are self portraits.

Faces

In my painting life I have created a lot of faces. Here are a few. Well, more than a few.

dddd

El Anatsui, the African phenominal African artist, demonstrates why he has catapulted into fame in a show at Stone Hill Center at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown.

While exhibiting for more than 30 years, Anatsui didn't come to international attention until 2004 when his work was part of Africa Remox, an exhibit seen in Dusseldorf, London, Paris Tokyo and Stockholm.

Anatsui has a local connection. He is represented by the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. Jack is the son of Erwin and Florence Shainman of Williamstown. He father is a professor emeritus at Williams College.

The hangings are made of recycled metal bottle caps recycled from liquor  bottles. He strings them together with copper wire.

All this began about 10 years ago when he found a big bag of cast off  caps along a roadside.

When Gary Tinterow, the curator of modern art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, first saw them in 2007 he told the New York Times, "I was blown away."

According to the Times, Tinterow arranged for the Met to buy one that day.


Liquor was part of the slave trade, so the caps give the work a symbolic quality that I gathered from material from the Clark rather than my own brilliant analysis.

I love the way these works are hung - you might say drapped - the folds contributing to their beauty.

Anatsui was born in Ghana in 1944 and works The show will be up through October 16.

El Anatsui

El Anatsui, an African artist who has created a splash in America, has some spectacular hangings at the Stone Hill Center of the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown.

Jeanne d'Arc and Me

A couple years ago I did 35 paintings about Joan of Arc. Big, bold - at least I thought so - paintings. They were exhibited once and three were sold. But there are 32 stacked up in my house. This is a house in which 450 are stored.

Me, I love them. But someday I think they're going to be tossed in the back yard and go up in a burst of flames - like the flames this one portrays.











http:grierhorner.com/blog

Work in progress (2)

More work has gone into my painting of the Angel of Incineration about to firebomb Dresden. This is what it looks like now.

See my December 12 post for an earlier view. Some work remains to be done.

Work in progress

Here's the Angel of Incineration diving to deliver her fireball to the prone city of Dresden. This is a work in progress. Still looking amateurish at this point.

I'm painting it for a show on the Dresden firebombing I'm having at the at Bard College at Simon's Rock January 18 to February 12. It will be in the Great Barrington college's Atrium Gallery.

After 1 1/2 years working with acrylics, I've switched back to oils for this one to keep it in sync with the other paintings in the series I did several years ago.

My painting is derived from William Blake's Pity show below.

Ornithologically speaking, my wings are in the wrong position, unless she's putting down her flaps to slow down for a landing. Also, I have to tone  the gold down.

The painting is 4' x 5' and the bodies are cut-outs of canvas that I gessoed to the painting. The face of the prone woman, in my painting, is a blowup taken from Blake's. I also collaged a print of the horsewoman's face on the angel.

But it lost too much of the detail in the enlargement. And what you see instead is yesterday's effort to paint a reasonable facsimile of the Blake face. It isn't there yet.
Click on photos to enlarge.

Street joy

 During my gallery quests in New York, I shot lots of pictures. Last Friday I took more than 200.

One of my favorites from that haul was this one.

  Photo by Grier Horner/All rights reserved

Click on photo to enlarge.

Work on the wild side

Photos by Grier Horner

If you want to take a walk on the wild side, hit the Paul Kasmin Gallery in Manhattan and feast your eyes on Walton Ford's allegorical nature paintings.

It doesn't take you long to realize that the subjects in the Great Barrington artist's monumental watercolors would just as soon feast on you.

As these wolves are doing on the body of a dead soldier killed at the Battle of Borodino in 1812. This is where Napoleon won the battle but lost his quest to conquer Russia because he failed to pursue the retreating Russian Army.

 

 In this detail from that painting, you can see how brilliantly Ford depicts the wolves' ferocity and aspects of his painting style. The works are watercolor, gouache, pencil and ink on paper. These are not timid paintings either in subject or scope. This one is 60" x 119".

Below is a detail from another painting, The Royal Menagerie at the Tower of London - 3 December 1830.

These are photos of the paintings as you see them in the gallery, glare and reflections included. They were taken December - 179 years and one day after the incident in which two tigers mauled a lion.

My shot of Ford's painting, An Encounter with Du Chaillu, includes not only the marauding gorilla, but refections of me taking the picture and a truck passing by on the street.

Paul du Chaillu was an anthropologist, explorer, hunter and author who confirmed the existence of gorillas on a trip to West Africa during the 1860s.

In a nice twist, the gorilla, not du Chaillu, comes away with the trophy in this painting. And it leaves you wondering if the animal is going to manage to kill itself with the gun despite its twisted barrel.

Ford, who was born in Larchmont, New York, in 1960 is in the art world's bigtime. Museums give him shows. Critics give him raves. Collectors buy his work. The New York Times writes feature articles about him, as do other publications.

In a January 2009 New Yorker profile, he told writer Calvin Tomkins, "Before Fay Wray comes to Skull Island, King Kong isn't doing anything. There's no story until she shows up...What I'm doing, I think, is a sort of cultural history of the way animals live in the human imagination."

He may be giving the human imagination too much credit.

What he's doing is the way animals and events live in his imagination. And he does it powerfully.

Ford's show will be up through December 23. The Paul Kasmin Gallery is located at 293 Tenth Avenue at the corner of 27th Street.

Gallery Quest 5

 In my ongoing Gallery Quest, I hit 27th Street on Friday. I was lucky. If I'd put the trip to Manhattan off or gone back to 23rd Street as I'd planned, I would have missed Andrea Mastrovito's wild and wonderful show at the Foley Gallery. It closed yesterday.

His large paintings were butted together forming a single work of art that must have been 75 feet long as it circled three walls of the gallery at 547 West 27th Street.

I couldn't find any reviews, but New York Magazine gave it this squib:

"An exquisite show composed almost entirely of paper and exploring the edgiest theme of all: love. Imagine if Van Gogh had had a child who became a genius in the art of origami."

I think I'd slice a little Kara Walker and James Bond to that mix as well. And a pinch of Edward Scissorhands.

Here are a two details of the diptych show at the top to give you a better idea what this young Italian artist is doing.

 

Lights. Cameras. Action. Color. Drama. Humor. Figures formed of cutout letters. Animals copulating. Adam and Eve. Origami. Well, not exactly origami, because that's the art of folding paper. I think Mastrovito's is the art of cutting and layering paper as he builds his collages.

And here's a closeup from another painting. It gives added insight into Mastrovito's technique.

How's the Gallery Quest going? Stay tuned.

Photos by Grier Horner/Click to enlarge