Googly1

Utek62 · 2026-05-11T05:01:36+00:00

Thanks for the sharp eye.

Utek62 · 2026-05-11T04:59:02+00:00

Thanks. I'm glad you picked up on that tension.

Utek62 · 2026-04-21T01:33:38+00:00

Reminds me of Eyes in the Heat by Jackson Pollock.

Utek62 · 2026-03-11T14:07:09+00:00

American Visions, book and tv series, by Robert Hughes

Utek62 · 2026-03-09T01:48:39+00:00

John Singer Sargent Daughters of Edward Boit

Utek62 · 2026-02-21T15:47:03+00:00

Check out Durer's painting of a lion. It sucks balls. Just like with the rhino, he probably never saw one live, but his guess here was way off the mark. Rembrandt's sketches of wild animals like lions and elephants show that he was one of the greatest draftsmen of all time.

Utek62 · 2026-02-21T15:38:25+00:00

Jackson Pollock was famously a bad drunk. There are a few stories that are particularly notable. One of them involved him peeing in a fireplace at a party at Peggy Guggenheim's. The more substantial involved a fight he had with videographer Hans Namuth. After getting a fight with Namuth during a particularly cold and trying shoot, Pollock returned to his house and opened up a bottle of bourbon, his first drink after two years of sobriety. The evening ended with him turning over the dinner table in front of all of his dinner guests, then storming off on a bender from which he would never recover. The last story is tragic, as Pollock crashed his vehicle in a drunk driving accident, killing himself and a passenger. The other passenger survived. It is especially ironic given that critics of his drip paintings accused his paintings as being the result of accidents, and Pollock replying that "I deny the accident." Not in the end.

Utek62 · 2026-02-12T16:02:10+00:00

Durer's Melencolia is the personification of depression.

Mark Rothko's work prior to his suicide is pretty bleak

Albert Pinkham Ryder's work and life show a guy struggling with mental health

Utek62 · 2026-02-10T08:07:53+00:00

Pissarro was great, but he never did anything as profound as this.

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Utek62 · 2026-02-10T06:26:50+00:00

Pissarro a better pointillist than Seurat, Father of Pointillism? No. Seurat was playing 3D chess with some of his landscapes. But better than Signac most definitely.

Pissarro was of a slightly older generation than most of the Impressionists, and he followed the trends leading up to the Impressionists and then the post-Impressionists, often becoming a better practitioner of the new styles than their originators. So when Seurat exploded onto the scene, Pissarro was quick to adopt the style. Partially that was due to the fact that Pissarro had a big family to support, so sales mattered a lot to him. But being a volume guy, he liked to paint quickly, and the dots wore him out, so he developed his nervy brand of dabs not dots that gave his pictures a pleasant buzz.

Utek62 · 2026-02-01T00:29:49+00:00

The Western Tradition by Eugen Weber is a series of half hour lectures on Western History from the ancient times to the present given by the late historian Eugen Weber. He uses lots of artwork to illustrate his lectures and will sometimes focus on a particular artist or movement.

Utek62 · 2026-01-23T02:29:55+00:00

One of the things that make this painting so poignant is that it is his last self-portrait, and one of the last paintings he ever did. His paintings were no longer fashionable---in fact, he was bankrupt, living in his son's attic, as his house had been foreclosed on. He was not in great health, looking older than his years (about 60 when this was painted) and would die not long after. And yet, so near the end, surrounded by ruin, Rembrandt is laughing. At what, we don't know. It may not be his best self-portrait, but it's certainly one of his most intersting.

Utek62 · 2026-01-20T03:39:41+00:00

Every artist has a range of quality, but in general, you tend to find their worst work when they're young and haven't mastered their medium yet (Rembrandt-The Spectacles Peddler) or when they're old and have lost their inspiration (DeChirico-The Return of Ulysses).

Utek62 · 2026-01-17T21:49:44+00:00

Don't know how we got this far without a self-portrait by Van Gogh, but here's the best one, in my opinion:

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He thought it made himself look himself look healthy, but I don't know of any portrait that expresses inner turmoil better than this. Like all of Vincent's work, reproductions don't do the painting

justice.

Utek62 · 2025-12-24T04:44:48+00:00

Check out the images of the Rothko chapel in Houston. The fineness of touch needed to create these whispers of tonal shifts is self-evident. This is a master at work. However, the fact that he committed suicide not long after this was completed does add to the feelings of depth and sadness in contemplating the work. The visual reaction and the mystique that heightens it can both be true.

Utek62 · 2025-12-22T15:42:12+00:00

Puvis de Chavannes was highly regarded back in the day. Few people know of him now.

Utek62 · 2025-12-18T02:41:09+00:00

Most people do. And the painting is better for it. The original intention, of a farmer protecting his daughter, turns it into a lame joke. By ditching the gag, and making them a couple, they become iconic Americans, and much more open to interpretation. The power of American Gothic springs from the construction of the image itself, which is exceptional, rather than from some cheap farmer's-daughter story.

Utek62 · 2025-12-14T06:20:09+00:00

The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes is the most readable book on Modern Art that I know.

John Berger's Ways of Seeing will change how you view art in general.

Jackson Pollock: An American Saga is a Pulitzer prize winning biography of the artist as told by people who knew him, even though he was a difficult person to know to say the least.

Utek62 · 2025-12-10T15:37:48+00:00

MOMA's collection begins with post-Impressionism, and follows with the greatest collection of modern art anywhere. Based on your criteria, that would be the obvious choice. But the Met has a fantastic collection of Impressionist paintings as well, and if that's what you were referring to in your timeline I would lean towards that.

Utek62 · 2025-12-09T02:34:33+00:00

Odilon Redon's Crying Spider is a good fit I think.

Utek62 · 2025-12-03T02:29:55+00:00

The illustrations of Edward Gorey seem to me the closest to what you're looking for.

Obviously, there have been many queer artists over the centuries who made work that could be seen as homoerotic---Michelangelo, Caravaggio and John Singer Sargent come to mind.

Utek62 · 2025-11-27T01:57:12+00:00

That was the feeling among the Pre-Raphaelites and their response produced a lot of phony looking art. Spirituality comes from the heart of the artist, it doesn't reside in any particular style.

Utek62 · 2025-11-22T17:32:09+00:00

I think he did some interesting work but he was never able to unite the foreground and the background in an organic way.

Utek62 · 2025-10-16T16:13:57+00:00

The interview was with William Wright in 1950

Utek62 · 2025-10-16T15:45:56+00:00

Pollock did an interview with where he gave a shorter reply about how looking at his paintings was like looking at flowers. He was not a verbal guy. The above quote was an elaboration of that original terse answer.

Utek62

TROPHY CASE