Profile picture thread? Nah, son, free modern art analysis and history by accidental kills
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Christmas ferret also I made a Halloween one in advance
I was bored so I made another one I think I will replace the old one with this one maybe
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A change to go with the season.
And before anybody tries to go off of recent discussions and jokingly tell me that this is not a Christmas hat, let me preemptively say that I already know that. 
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merry christmas, although i think my hat’s been chopped off (i’d love for Discourse to allow for zooming in/resizing when setting a profile picture, I’d rather not have to recapture the same image 10 times with different amounts of background)
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When in doubt, cut it into a square, imagine a circle in it and it will work out. 
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I’m Mister White Christmas, I’m Mister Snow…
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For the Christmas season, I’ve changed my profile pic to a nice Christmas drawing of Whisper from the IDW Sonic comics by IDW writer and artist Evan Stanley. I love her artwork, and she’s done alot of Christmas designs for the cast and is going to do a few more this year which will be lovely to see.
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Niiice.
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Creation of the Birds - Remedios Varo
The Mystic Maiden of La Roma: Mexico and Mysticism With Remedios Varo
Born to a Catholic housewife and a hydraulic engineer Remedios Varo is one of the many Surrealists who wound up residing in Mexico when the movement was just leaving its apex of artistic relevancy. Varos work would strive towards finding a balance between the mystic, the rational and the metaphysical. The Creation of Birds is unique in that scientifically we are seeing a chemical/alchemical process, usually various would incorporate scientific imagery using machinery and engineering principles going back to her first “art” transcribing her father’s schematics for hydraulic engineering but here we see the utilisation of liquid gold as a transformative element reaching back to the missions of alchemy. Something Ramos also strongly believed in going so far as to take a voyage to the Orinoco River to find a source of alchemical gold.
Varos also positions this bird figure in a solitary and austere room which calls back to religious imagery especially associations of Saint Jerome in his study or of the theologians and monks of old going over the scripture. There is also a relation to the tower imagery prevalent in a lot of her work as well as the visuals of confinement something Varo perpetually experienced being a mystic universalist in a Catholic world, being a surrealist in a world still favouring representational work and most pertinent a woman in a man’s world both artistically and socially. Mystically the tarot states that the tower is also a symbol of great change, sudden upheaval and loss but not without the transformational power of those things. Thus we see the creation of the birds as something that, even when cut off from a living breathing world, is still contributing to the wider world around it.
The owl itself also has feminine features and Varo often depicted the transformative power of womanhood and during her time in Mexico she became fast friends with a lot of the other exiled Mexican surrealists especially with Leonora Cunningham who she practiced magic with as well as working collaboratively on several storybooks (Cunningham also loved the mystic but preferred children’s fairy tales over Varo’s own preferred genre fiction), the notion of woman as being the creator of life is a powerful one and her Varo shows it in a distinctly more masculine light appropriating the imagery of the lone man sequestering himself in his room madly and furtively.
Oh yeah and owls are symbols of knowledge but also seen as bad omens in several cultures which again shows paradoxical imagery this work is rife with. It plays well with how The Witches (Varo, Cunningham, Alice Rahon, et al.) would often use animals as symbols for themselves and would often incorporate themselves into their work.
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Not bad.
To me, owls, some species of them anyway, look a lot like the classical depiction of the Grey aliens, which is why the trailer for the movie The Fourth Kind scared the hell out of me, with the implication that these people recalling their nightmares about an owl aren’t really seeing an owl, but are remembering an abduction and having the image of an owl overlaying their memories because of the resemblance. The movie itself was meh, but the trailer was spooky. Haven’t looked at owls the same way since.
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Alien encounters as owl attacks is nothing new and it is the most rational explanation for the “seeing an alien in the forest” and the “some alien divebombed me in the woods” encounter archetypes.
Owls are larger than most people know, are quiet in flight, can get around in the dark and have a tendency to swoop people but not be aggressively so which means people don’t make a visual connection with the owl especially if you are just a stupid kid like the case of the Flatwoods Monster perhaps the most famous instance of an owl attack being misconstrued as an alien sighting.
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You have to ask one of the mods, they will be able to help you. Just make sure to provide a good enough reason.
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Woman I - Willem de Kooning
Man Painting Women: The Figurative Abstractions of Willem de Kooning
The first painting in a series simply and plainly titled Women painted by the artist during the height of his career as a noted Ab-Ex painter. Uniquely known for neither abandoning figuration nor for forfeiting references to the Surrealists Willem de Kooning was know for works like this. The distortion of the bodily proportions and the angular nature of the face are very Cubist in inspiration but there are also far more primitive inspirations, the distinctly plump figure refers back to the oldest fertility totems like the Willendorf Venus with the contrasting angular face of the woman however harkens back to Cykladian sculpture.
The painting is not without de Kooning’s own style though, the woman though distorted is distorted on a very single flat plane instead of the Cubist multi-focal figurative style. Much like the women of his time, the women of De Kooning seemingly disappear into the background or what certain art critics call his “no-environments” yet at the same time there is a celebration of the woman’s figure as well also highlighting her fashionable clothing. The thick discernible brush strokes, sporadic use of sketching tools like charcoal and pencils also give the painting a very hectic and unfinished feeling to it typical of the so called Action Painters of his time and social circle.
The cool flatness of the painting and its focus on fashionable and glamorous people also predates the Pop Art movement by nearly a decade technically two since the Women series.
On The Artist
Born in Rotterdam to an absentee father and bartender and bar owner for a mother Willem de Kooning or Bill to his friends wanted to be an artist from an early age dropping formal education at age twelve to do apprentice work for a commercial design firm before getting a formal arts education at an arts school in Rotterdam. Early on he showed an attraction to De Stijl (The Style, Netherlands’ big avant-garde art movement) with its focus on the artist as a craftsman as well as experiments in form and colour. This experience in a formal art academy also makes de Kooning the most formally trained of the abstract expressionists save for perhaps Robert Motherwell who had a broad liberal arts education at Stanford and Harvard and Helen Frankthaler who also had an extensive collegiate education.
Bill decided to make the very brave decision to stowaway on a sailing ship in 1924 to gain access to America, working his way up from Virginia all the way to the current cultural hub of America, New York. Willem took jobs as commercial artist, windowdresser and work in fashion magazines. It was tough going but in his own words “he would rather be poor in New York than rich in Philadelphia” (said after rejecting a paying commission job).
Fortunately things picked up, the Works Progress Administration had provided opportunities for many artists, Bill included, to practice their art while also having their work subsidised through government programs and aid packages. It was at this time he developed a wide circle of artistic friends culminating in his friendship with art critic Harold Rosenberg, it was Rosenberg who dubbed Willem and his fellow abstract expressionists as “Action Painters” (the term emphasises the importance of the gestural techniques used in Abstract Expressionist and where their paintings derive their emotional power from).
He also met his future wife Elaine Fried during this time, she was a student of his as well as a model for his early and still defined figurative portrait work. Elaine herself became an art critic and prominent portrait artist whose work I will be covering next. Their relationship was rocky, very rocky as well as tempestuous and alcohol-fuelled. Though everything de Kooning did was alcohol-fuelled, he was prodigious in his consumption of liquor, it put Pollock to shame. Elaine and Bill separated but never divorced mostly due to their numerous extra-marital affairs between the both of them.
The post WWII years are widely regarded to be his most mature works beginning with a series of monochrome paintings (he couldn’t afford pigments, rationing and scarcity made the vivid artistic pigments as a luxury) using household acrylics in his signature biomorphic and abstract forms. Following that up is the Women series which was first displayed at the Charles Egan almost a decade after he started them and would continue for another two decades after. De Kooning’s friend the photographer Rudy Burckhardt took a series of photos of him at work for an article on his artistic process that ran in the papers.
Kooning also ran into controversy, his reintroduction of figurative elements to the world of abstract painting caused a stir with some of the Greenberg school “post-painterly abstraction” artists (Greenberg believed that art had evolved beyond the need for figure or even technique, he championed the colour field painters and the like) But he didn’t care, he continued to work the way he wanted because he just liked painting what he wanted to paint. He would eventually form a small group that would do the two things he loved, talk about art and drink, at the Cedar Tavern.
Eventually he moved upstate, he began a series of landscapes called the Parkway series where he painted abstract landscapes as though they were being watched from a moving car, he began experimenting with sculpture, developed a more vivid and gestural pure abstract body of work. Not as widely known but it was influential on the West Coast Ab-Ex painters. De Kooning however soon experienced the cognitive decline associated with the ravages of old age. It became the centre of a huge discussion on the nature of creativity mostly because it was about art retailers squabbling over how they could best keep the prices of his work high. Eventually the prevailing opinion became “Consciousness matters little, de Kooning never though of himself as a conscious painter neither did the other Ab-Ex painters.” He passed away at the age of 97 having left behind an extensive and varied body of art that defined several artistic movements, a few widely disseminated art theories and a definitive body of Abstract Expressionist works.
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Tldr yet a like for the effort and cool picture.
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Alright I said I would be back next week, that was a lie but what the hell better late than never.
John F. Kennedy - Elaine de Kooning
Woman Painting Men: Elaine de Kooning and the Ideal Men
The presidential portrait is a tradition as old as the government, ever since Gilbert Stuart first intentionally unfinished his famous Lansdowne Portrait. Almost every president after Washington has understood the need to project a certain appearance as well as performative posturing.
As a modern man and modern president for a modern America it was only fitting that he would hire the most modern woman in modern art in America to do his portrait. Elaine had been painting portraits ever since she did a series of portraits of her friend Joop Sanders (an Ab-Ex, known for dense paintings of amorphous shapes).
Perhaps the most unique thing about her paintings is she mostly chose male subjects, a reaction against the perception that it was proper that women paint women despite men being given the luxury of painting both sexes. Another is her unique form of painting, the use of the more virtuosic painting techniques that give her paintings a sense of hurried and manic energy that leaves her subjects only ever partially realised in full detail. Virtually all Ab-Ex painters did this in some way or another but Elaine really applied it to defined figures and it also closely mimics the effect it has on her husband’s semi-figurative works (see above).
In short Elaine painted man (then later woman and child) subjects in a way that projected the essence of who they are rather than capturing them in every single little detail. At a time when portraiture itself was a reactionary, near-dead artform to boot.
This piece was commissioned by Jack himself in 1962 and Elaine’s first big commission before this all her subjects were friends, family and her husband. With preliminary sketching done in Palm Beach before the sittings fell through. JFK would often do presidential duties during his sittings and when he wasn’t he was a fidgeter who couldn’t sit still. The sittings stopped by Elaine never did instead option to use Kennedy’s extensive media appearances as a frame of reference.
The result of this is one of the most modern presidential portraits in the history of the history of the tradition though it was never declared as an “official” one (his official portrait is posthumous by another artist). It captures the stentorian intensity of a sitting president but never diminishes Kennedy’s youthful handsomeness either alongside the abstract techniques giving the painting a sense of restless motion. Combined with the unpatriotic but extremely vibrant and tropical green and blue hues, its vivid and shining golds and complete lack of patriotic trappings makes this less of a painting of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and more a painting of JFK, the King Arthur of an American Camelot.
Oh here is the official portrait of JFK if you were curious or wanted a point of comparison with a more traditional portrait.
I am skipping the biographies from here on because extending the word count on these just turns me off from doing them more often.
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