Gustave Morea

"But I now leave my Cetological System standing thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing everything."

Moby Dick
pg.149

Apotheosis

divinity is the attempt to escape our biological enslavement

William-Adolphe Bouguereau

 

  Intensity building toward a central climax.

"I've always worked under the notion that the world around me is unknowable . . . and through the gradual distribution of marks and modulation of color . . . and process - scraping and dragging - I can distill something concrete from something transient."

-Brian Rutenberg


Some reflection on Rutenberg's videos, centered compositions, and frames:

Ripples billowing inward (as alternating levels of intensity - empty and full, empty and full...) from outside in the surrounding space to the center of an ordered frame of reference. The same ripples are simultaneously billowing outward. Rhythms are frozen in a painting, therefore this paradox can occur. The viewer is being pulled through, into the deep. In the deep you are further away from yourself and closer toward the center of everything. The painting lets you inside and lets you out, billowing in one frozen moment over the course of many.

Stanton Macdonald-Wright // Synchromist

"I strive to divest my art of all anecdote and illustration and to purify it to the point where the emotions of the spectator will be wholly aesthetic, as when listening to good music....I cast aside as nugatory all natural representation in my art. However, I still adhered to the fundamental laws of composition (placements and displacements of mass, as in the human body in movement) and created my pictures by means of color-form, which, by its organization in three dimensions, resulted in rhythm." -Stanton Macdonald-Wright

In western naturalism there are infinitely dividing vortices - a maelstrom of folds and organic inversions in the monadic cloth of the world. In eastern naturalism there are varying forms of matter following universal patterns, the same substance as solid, liquid, and gas, preceded and permeated by emptiness. They share depth in common, and also the repetition of like forms on different scales and in distinguishable transmutations.

Timmy Payungka Tjapangati

Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri

Geoffrey Bardon came to Papunya in the early 1970s and encouraged the Aboriginal people to put their dreaming stories on canvas, stories which had previously been depicted ephemerally on the ground. Clifford Possum emerged as one of the leaders in this school of painting, which has come to be called Papunya Tula.

Australian Aboriginal Art

 I wasn't able to find the names of these artists (the internet seems to regard Australian Aboriginal categorically); but they are spectacular.




I was reading this  NY Times article about the art of Australian Aboriginal children confined at the Carrolup River Native Settlement, a government institution in Western Australia in the 50's. Its incredibly sophisticated, and clear what it has to do with Cézanne. In fact Cézanne might have taken these over a Picasso. Here are a couple pieces.

 Parnell Dempster. Age 14

Reynold Hart. Age 13

James Turrell

"A friend of mine sometimes says, 'when confronted with any situation find what it has to do with Cézanne.'"
-Brian Rutenberg


puddles and pools of color - Romaticism
sharp identification - Classical



Looking at looking.
Painting about the process of seeing.

-Notes from Rutenberg videos