Notes on Some Paintings

My favorite app on my phone currently is called Daily Art. As the name states, the app delivers a work of art---usually paintings, but occasionally a sculpture, craft, piece of jewelry, or former ceremonial object---with a brief story about either the work or the artist or both.

Most days I look at the piece and exclaim my usual response: "WHOA!", but I am both easily impressed (with art) and have new, more practical, considerations when I approach a new work. Over the last few years of enjoying this app, my understanding of art criticism and art appreciation has grown.

Anyway, sometimes when I see the painting I find myself dumbstruck. Sometimes I find the work so compelling that I struggle to put it into words. Corrie has the same app, and sometimes one of us will say, "Oh, hey, did you see..." and the other usually responds, "Oh my goodness, yes..." It's corny, but so are we.

Sure, art is subjective, but maybe you'll be gripped like I was with some of the paintings I'm sharing today. I'd like to write more about each of them, but I've said that phrase so many times over the years ("I'll come back and write more about these (insert multiple objects of the same media here) later/soon") that...let's just be optimistic.

But JUST LOOK AT THIS:

This is titled "Afterglow" and is a view of New York painted by Swedish painter Jonas Lie. This was one of the more recent "Didja see..." talks between Corrie and me, and likely it speaks to us in ways it may not speak to everyone. The misty glow of lower Manhattan...my skin can feel the air, and it can can do that for all of the possible seasons, since to me this is an indeterminate time of year. Foggy summer evening after a rain? Icy confluence of the Hudson and East Rivers with building steam filing the low sky? It's all good for me...

This next one got me right away, but then also creeped and burrowed itself into my consciousness:

This is called "In the Northland" and was painted by Canadian national treasure Tom Thomson. The color balance, the composition, the difference between how it looks from a distance to what it looks like at the brushstroke level...the naturalistic scene exudes a crisp autumn whiff of beech leaf and lake air. I can't really explain the hold it has on me.

Not everything that really gets me is a play on Impressionism or a natural landscape. Check out the following attempt to induce anxiety:

This is titled "Vertigo" and was painted by Belgian graphic designer and painter Leon Spilliaert. This isn't a horror painting, but it definitely isn't designed to make you calm down. Spilliaert played with this motif repeatedly, the stark alternating color blocks, or blacks and whites, to great effect, speaking to the shared horror that the new modern world was bringing to the masses.

As I spend the occasional block of time trying to make things on canvas out of lifeless goop, I'm building my perspective on works like these; not just the subject matter interests me, but the way in which the composition was settled upon and how the execution was performed are equally important.