WELCOME DADDY-O

Below is a small first step toward inter-generational knowledge transfer. You can click on the images to see them (a little bit) larger. You can also follow the links to pages with much more depth about each artist.

This has been a fun first foray for me - I hope you enjoy it too.

This whole social web2.0 has spawned a lot of interesting ways to share. Let me know if you would like a little primer (and access) to makes some posts of your own - 'intellectual/artistic tennis', as they say. Maybe I'll get Danny in on this too - a virtual version of our trips to the CAC.

Happy painting. Love,K

KEHINDE WILEY

Zooming up to the present, Kehinde Wiley is a new darling of the art world. And he really has something - he paints portraits of black american men in an old masters' style. His patterned backgrounds are fabu (though he's beating the format like a drum seems) - aside from the old masters, his format reminds me of the renowned African portrait photographer Seydou Keita, from Mali.




Take-aways? Again, bold color. Background as equal partner. Real sense of the construction of an image - I guess that's what icon painters for centuries have been aiming toward.

FRANCIS BACON

Movement, portraits with real flesh, bodies.

Admirable intensity. Bacon really demonstrates what can be done with portraiture - he may indeed have been the torch-bearer for portrait painting, which has had a real resurgence lately.

Looking at Bacon, it seems more than worthwhile to look a bit further back to Picasso, and the troubled souls of his Guernica.

WAYNE THIEBAUD

From Cakes and Tie-Racks, Thiebaud's subjects run the gamut of Jim Moore's nightly dreamscapes. And he even has tons of beautifully warped SF/Bay area landscapes.

You would do well to copy his palette too - sooo vibrant. Who wouldn't want to live in Thiebauld land?

Here is SFMoMA's link for a little more WT.

GERHARD RICHTER

Gerhard Richter is amazing - dazzlingly talented painter, who easily shifts style while maintaining a real gravity to his work. (Ah, to talk like an art critic :) His was the first artist's monograph I ever bought.

Check out this good link to view his larger body of work.


Enjoy.