Source: Paintings | helenawurzel

Putting this here for future reference. Great brilliant color.

If I sat there and said, “I’m going to make the most beautiful painting I’ve ever painted in my life,” it’s going to be horrible. I did a lecture at the Frick in 2019 and somebody asked me: “How do you make a distinction between what’s a good painting or a bad painting.” For me, it’s like the desert question: If you had to take one painting with you to a desert island, which one would it be? But it’s not a question of what you can live with. When it comes to art: it’s what can you die with? What’s the last thing you want to see before you go?

 

The pencil-and-watercolor methods of a master.

Source: How to Paint Like Hayao Miyazaki – Animation Obsessive

I fell in love with Bontacou’s work in 2004 when I saw a retrospective at MOMA. She died yesterday at age 91. What a life she had. Some quotes from a couple of nice articles about her below.

And though, Bontecou’s art may have directly referenced the world as she saw it around her, she never wanted to strictly define what it was about. That was up to the viewer. As she told the Chicago Reader when asked, “Do people ever ask you, ‘What does this mean?’ What do you say?”, she coolly replied, “I don’t answer at all. It’s what you see in it. What I see in it is something else. I don’t get caught up in that.”

Although Bontecou generally avoided discussing the meaning of her images, in a rare statement for the catalogue of the Museum of Modern Art exhibition “Americans 1963,” she suggested that her goal was to “build things that express our relation to this country—to other coun­tries—to this world-to other worlds-in terms of myself.”5 The precise meaning of this relationship was explained only years later when Bontecou admitted that the iconography of these early projects was in part political, a response to the menacing specter of war and global destruction that she felt in the early ’60s.6

Beautiful work.

Matt Roussel carves intricate strokes into wood engravings of surreal flora and fauna and transforms them into paintings.

Source: Delicately Carved Wood Engravings Are Transformed into Dreamlike Paintings by Matt Roussel — Colossal

Karsten Creightney’s familiar yet uncanny landscapes transport, disrupt, and open possibilities for new worlds.

Source: Once Upon a Time in Albuquerque

A series about mothers by Massachusetts-born, New York-based photographer Rosemary Haynes. Drawn to the way photographs entangle the personal archive and the “present moment,” Haynes creates images that explore ideas of lore and memory. In this particular project, Haynes takes on the theme of family, coming-of-age, and missing our mothers. As she states, it’s a project about how social reproductive labor is nothing without birth, and how birth leads to death, sometimes more quickly than other times:

“This series can be described as a ballad which my late stepmother, Heather, didn’t have the chance to finish. A storybook for my brother, of the mother he longs to know. A family album for us all, where our present can find abundance with the past. Arnica explores notions of maternal labor and care, the imperfections in showing up, and a family motto, never don’t swim. Submerged in the security and uncertainty of water, much like a womb.”

See more images from “Arnica” below.