Love, death and remembrance
The Resurrection of the Soldiers, 1929, Sir Stanley Spencer (Sandham Memorial Chapel) How Sir Stanley Spencer’s gentle, ascetic, visionary soul endured the infantry experience beggars one’s imagination. “When I left the Slade and went back to Cookham, I entered a kind of earthly paradise. Everything seemed fresh and to belong to the morning. My ideas …
Give it to me, baby… for free!
Rye’s Painters on Location is a well-run art fundraiser, one which I’m honored to participate in. Recently, Tim Kreider wrote a screedin the New York Times about a problem every artist experiences: the endless requests for donations of work to non-profits. Having a bit of the Blue-Haired Church Lady in my makeup, I’m pretty free …
Embracing imperfection
Seneb with his wife Senites and their children, c. 2520 BC A photographyesterday of Pope Francis blessing a disfigured man has gone viral on social media. The photo shows the man with his head on the Pope’s chest, his many facial tumors from neurofibromatosis clearly visible. We live in a world where disfiguring genetic disorders …
Sounds like a spiritual problem to me
A possible Matisse among the paintings exhibited at a press conference in Munich (from AFP/Getty Images via the Telegraph website). As the entire world knows by now, a cache of 1400 Nazi-looted artworks was found in 2012 in the apartment of an elderly man in Munich. The pensioner first came under the suspicion of customs …
Redefining Kinkade
War on Kinkade 02, by Jeff Bennett. The late Thomas Kinkade took romanticism to absurd levels. His glowing highlights look like barn fires and his pastel peachy highlights are as hyper-saturated as a 1970s album cover. One generally shrinks from discussing him, because he was what he was—a painter of kitsch. There’s certainly no point …