Luc Tuymans – PopWars

December 10, 2010December 11, 2010

Art Onslaught

The third dvd of “Breaking Bad” arrived in mail today with only one episode. Guess there was a writer’s strike going on back then. We toyed with watching it right away and getting it back the same day’s mail but work got in the way.

Work seems to be getting in the way of NYC trip too. We were planning to take the train down, visit our nephew who’s going to Columbia Law School and then stay with our friend, Duane, in Brooklyn. I called Duane today to tell him it was looking like weren’t going to be able to get away for a few weeks because of work. Ugg.

I had already planned a few art stops. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye has show up in Harlem at the Studio Museum near where our nephew lives. She does portraits of fiction characters and I love the way she paints. Another great paint handler, Luc Tuymans, who just had a retrospective at SFMoMA, has a show of recent paintings at the David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea and of course once you get down there there is no holding back with the art onslaught.

We’ve been following the “Steve Martin art lecture at the Y” story and read Steve’s letter to the editor in last Sunday’s paper and I was excited to hear Colbert had Steve Martin on his show last night. I might have to buy his book.

You Can’t Complain

Peggi dreamed she was a contestant on “Dancing With The Stars” and then woke up to “Reality 4D“. We have been behind in couple of big jobs and we can’t seem to put them behind us. You can’t really complain when you don’t have to set the alarm or drive to work but every once in a while you get roped into doing a job that wasn’t defined properly in the beginning. So the scope of the job grows while you’re doing it and the client feels entitled to unlimited rounds of revisions while you’re stuck with the price you quoted. Like I said, you can’t complain.

I starred at a reproduction of a Luc Tuymans painting last night for about twenty minutes. It’s called “Lamproom” and it is deceptively simple looking but rich in wonder. I would love to see the painting in person at SFMOMA where Tuymans has a retrospective but I don’t think I’ll be out there before May 2nd. I only have the book which I ordered from Amazon and I finally had a chance to spend some time with it last night. I flipped through the whole book and can’t say I like all of his work. In fact I only liked about ten percent of it but the paintings I like just knock me out. So maybe I will warm up to the rest and maybe I won’t. Some artists only hit home runs like 300 . . . I started to use a baseball analogy but I’m confused. When a hitter has a batting average of 300 that means he gets on 30 percent of the time, right? So why do they call it 300 and not 30? Anyway, if the guy has a 300 average he probably only hits a home run 3 percent of the time? And that’s considered really good. So Luc Tuymans is a great artist. It’s not easy to paint like he does even though his paintings can look tossed off.

We celebrated my father’s birthday tonight. I picked up some Nino’s pizza and Peggi’s mom and we sat around my parents table for most of the evening. My brother, who works for Xerox, argued that “print is not dead”. I told him I like paying my bills online. I can’t imagine printing another photo because they look so good on my monitor. We plan to order an iPad on March 12th when they start taking orders and I’m looking forward to canceling a few magazine subscriptions. But I still like art books.

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October 15, 2009August 23, 2019

Considering The Space

In painting class last week our teacher, Fred Lipp, was discussing his painting that was recently on display in the faculty show. It is a tour de force and it was a pleasure to hear him discuss it. He talked about his approach to creating this work and coincidentally it overlapped with the way he teaches us to think about our work.

Fred guides us by constantly reminding us to address the worst first and the whole trick is to be able to identify the “the worst.”. And if you don’t start a piece by throwing down a whole lot of “worst” you will have a lot less headaches. It is important to consider the space, the white rectangle, the whole, right from the onset.

Fred strives to achieve maximum results from minimal information so that very first mark must work with the space. “Always address the whole”. Fred says he knows what he is after but he doesn’t know how he will do it. That is the adventure. And he has the confidence to know he can pull it off. He thrives on improvisation and each move is a dialog with the whole.

The Little Theater has a promo display of free New Yorker magazines and I grabbed one between sets at last night’s Margaret Explosion gig. Peter Schjeldahl reviewed a retrospective of the Flemish artist, Luc Tuymans, on display in Columbus, Ohio. Although I had never hear of him, Schjeldahl described him as “the most challenging painter in the recent history of the art.” Tuymans was quoted as saying, “untill I get to the middle of the process — its horific. It’s like I don’t know what I’m doing but I know how to do it, and it’s very strange.” Schjeldahl says this, “— uncertain ends, confident means is as good a general definition of creativity as I know.

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