Category Archives: Art

Monet’s Poplars

Source: Monet’s Poplars

 

Monet’s Poplars series 


Apparently, Monet was at work on three different groups of the same trees (in the end, there were 23 paintings in all) each group with its own compositional format, when he learned the trees were going to be cut down. So, he did what any self-respecting art god would do – he bought them.


Monet made most of the Poplars paintings in the summer and fall of 1891. He saw them while rowing toward the “floating studio” he kept moored further up river. They stood single file along an “s-curve” in the river, and you just have to look at the paintings to see why he fell hard for them. 

The trees, which belonged to the commune of Limetz, were indeed auctioned off for lumber. Monet therefore was forced into buying the trees to keep them standing long enough to finish painting them. Once he’d completed the series, he sold the trees back to the lumber merchant who wanted them.


Thus the world still has that graceful, elliptical geometry of light, leaf, breeze and branch, and we have one very focused and very successful never-say-die painter to thank for it.

Monday Musings — 11DEC23

As promised last week, the inks for that page.

And a fun video.

A video from Winsor McCay the artist on Little Nemo in Slumberland

A Canadian study gave $7,500 to homeless people. Here’s how they spent it.

Because they were participating in a randomized controlled trial, their outcomes were compared to those of a control group: 65 homeless people who didn’t receive any cash. Both cash recipients and people in the control group got access to workshops and coaching focused on developing life skills and plans.

Separately, the research team conducted a survey, asking 1,100 people to predict how recipients of an unconditional $7,500 transfer would spend the cash. They predicted that recipients would spend 81 percent more on “temptation goods” like alcohol, drugs, or tobacco if they were homeless than if they were not.

The results proved that prediction wrong. The recipients of the cash transfers did not increase spending on drugs, tobacco, and alcohol, but did increase spending on food, clothes, and rent, according to self-reports. What’s more, they moved into stable housing faster and saved enough money to maintain financial security over the year of follow-up.

That’s it for this Monday. Remember to pull your pants up so you don’t trip over your legs.

Juxtapoz Magazine – Review: Everything is Boldness with Emilio Villalba @ Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco

San Francisco based painter Emilio Villalba exhibits a series of twenty-five new paintings (oil on canvas works dated 2023) at Dolby Chadwick Gallery, along with a series of acrylic paintings primarily on canvas paper. Many of the works feature his wife Michelle Fernandez Villalba (a recurring subject for the artist), and various associates including his close friend Jason Crase, along with self portraits in various poses, often holding a cigarette in his hand. Sensuous qualities of thick paint characterize the body of work, revealing an artist looking for new ways to convey the human experience and its varied emotions. Many of the pictures include vernacular settings, filled with elements of domesticity and immersed with familiarity. Ordinary objects like a coffee mug, toothbrush, fixed-line telephone, and bowl of fruit are among the many things depicted.

Although painted thickly, the resulting colorful pictures explore how to render the human figure with bold gestures and deceptively simple brush work. There is an acceptance, near synthesis, of the language of abstraction, specifically Expressionism, as Villalba alternates between thick swathes of impasto and carefully considered figural and spatial design. Evincing a sense of acute presence and awareness, viewers can imagine themselves in dialogue with the various personages depicted; life-size and bold renderings are the exhibitions’ hallmark. The gestural qualities of these paintings, comprising headshots, nudes, and semi-abstract faces and torsos, is apparent. Though applied abundantly, the economy of broad brush strokes interplays with unusual perspective and lines highlighting Villalba’s painterly intentionality. The exhibition at Dolby Chadwick invokes, and is in dialogue with, the work of other artists versed in this terrain, especially David Park and Joan Brown, who both utilized impasto to make brash and confident paintings. 

Source: Juxtapoz Magazine – Review: Everything is Boldness with Emilio Villalba @ Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco