Nothing has changed besides giving him a new hat
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At Five in the Afternoon - Robert Motherwell
Lamentation and Elegy - The Poetry of Robert Motherwell’s Elegies of the Spanish Republic
"At five in the afternoon
At the stroke of five
The boy brought the white sheet
at five o’clock
A basket of lime all ready
at five o’clock
The rest was death and only death
at five o’clock" - Federico Garcia Lorca
Robert Motherwell was twenty one when the Spanish Civil War broke out, he was in university having just gotten his father, a higher up at Wells Fargo, to agree on him pursuing an artistic education (so long as he went to get a “real degree”). It had a profound influence on his body of work almost as much influence as the Literature degree he was working on at the time would have. This painting is the first in a series of hundreds of similar paintings done over several decades, each one is roughly the same as this first one, undulating series of rectangles and ovals on fields of white (though some have coloured fields)
The painting itself as well as the subsequent series that followed was an attempt at applying the ideas of Stéphane Mallarmé, a French Symbolist poet who famously proposed the idea of poetry representing not what is or defining a concept but rather for poetry to be an earnest attempt at conveying the feeling of something emotively and broadly.
In this instance the painting takes its name and themes from Lamentation of Ignacio Sanchez Mejias by Frederico Garcia Lorca. Lorca was a big poet in his native Spain and he was one of its most famous victims, assassinated by one of the many far-right groups active at the time. Motherwell’s first Spanish Elegy is an attempt to capture something in Lorca’s poem, his very Spanish view on death. Something Lorca conveys in his poem with great passion and persuasiveness yet it is very pensive and austere towards the end you can even see a penitent mood in Lorca’s words.
Beyond all of that the Elegies are symbols of the cycle of death and rebirth but there is no fixed definition on which shape represents which, the only definitive meaning in this painting and following series is that white equates to life and death is conveyed in black. And even that can be contested as many have compared the ovals to something alive (the testicles of a bull, which makes it both a symbol of life and death in the context of Lorca’s poem) and death (a simple hole in the ground like the one Lorca is believed to have been carelessly thrown into).
In its simplicity “At Five in the Afternoon” manages to be complex, in the broadness of its scope it manages to somehow also be personal, rooted in history and steeped in literary tradition, and in its austerity it manages to be something truly remarkable.
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The story behind it is pretty cool and in depth, but personally I’m not a fan of the picture itself to be honest. No offence.
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I mean I am never offended, it is simply a difference of opinion after all.
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They released a new furret costume for Pokemon cafe remix today so after giving him a drink a little helmet Im probably not going to change this until they release something new for him or next April fools I was going to use this one with a plain purple background but he looks more content in a little forest so I’ll post both
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Omg 
202020202020
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The first one looks like its taken from one of the “Mana” Games 
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Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles - Faith Ringgold
Originally I wanted to do a work by Helen Frankenthaller since she was married to my previous artist Robert Motherwell however I found out looking up on the art news sites today that Faith Ringgold has passed away at the age of 93. I will forgo a piece specific write-up and instead leave you with the New York Times obituary since it is a quite comprehensive account of her life and body of work, The Times is very good at obituaries.
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Tomlinson Park Court - Frank Stella
Well I was going to finally move on to Helen Frankenthaler but I saw that Frank Stella has passed away, in honour of the tragic painting of a radical artist I have used one his famous “Black Paintings”, kinda fitting that one of his “Black Paintings” is being used as a black armband.
Here is his obituary from the NYT for further reading.
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Desert Pass - Helen Frankenthaler
Colouration, Saturation and Fields
Helen Frankenthaler was perhaps one of the leading female figures in the fields of Abstract Expressionism and in Colour Field painting (a genre many credit her with inventing alongside Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland). Frankenthaler’s work is also a fantastic synthesis of landscape subject and abstract technique with her works that strips the natural world to its bare essentials through colours while giving it an almost alien shape through its use of abstract fields.
Originally this effect was something she derived from using oil paints that had been mixed with turpentine based paint-thinners, the result was you could effectively “stain” the canvas with no loss of colour. Desert Pass however comes from her acrylic period where she switched from turps thinned oils to water thinned acrlyic paints (acrylics are usually brighter than oil paints but turpentine doesn’t thin acrylic). This series of paintings was done just after her mature period including a demonstration of her work at a World’s Fair (Montreal '67)and based on the scenic, open vistas of the American South-West a journey she took after divorcing her husband Robert Motherwell.
You can see the three basic colours with the huge expanse of a very arid yellowish beige colour that looks like both a huge sandy mass as well as the arid evening skies, the cool blackish-blue that almost seems to mimic what few shade you find in the desert and the stark red common in geological formations in this region of America.
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After the many months since December of not having a seasonal Tux, I now have binux_pengbin to offer probably until halloween.
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Hey it’s my anniversary here apparently! And it’s Pride Month! I think it’s time for a new celebratory profile picture! 
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LOVE - Robert Indiana (Born Robert Clark)
And LOVE is All You Need - Robert Indiana’s Love the World Over
Robert Indiana liked to leave little parts of himself in all of his works no matter how simple they were and with over 50 renditions of LOVE on almost every continent it is safe to say a part of the man who became such a recluse is still felt.
This is a later version of the LOVE motif Indiana would use repeatedly and perhaps one of its most recognisable versions the Love Park iteration if you are a huge Tony Hawk fan like me where a version of the statue using the letters THPS are used. The original made out of Cor-Ten steel is on display in the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields in Indiana.
Indiana’s work in both sculpture and in painting revolved extensively in incorporating type and words into it often very simple ones that had universal applicability and could be understood by everyone something that would fit in with the minimalist and Pop Art sects he would fall into. Love as a concept was something Indiana had been doing since the early Sixties albeit in a more spiritualist sense appropriating a line from his childhood as a Christian Scientist that being “God is Love” it also helped that one of his benefactors had his gallery in a former Christian Science church.
The exact LOVE sculpture as we know it today is a long story that begins when Indiana was commissioned by Larry Aldrich on behalf of the Museum of Modern Art (the one in New York) to design a Christmas card. Indiana already had a habit of drawing sketches for his postcards including the famous variant you see here, these cards were usually sent to his partner (romantic and artistic) Ellsworth Kelley who he had met when Kelley bought art supplies at a store Indiana was working at before moving in with him at a flat in Coenties Slip a part of New York that was home to a lot of Modernist artists. Though they had been falling out at the time, still Indiana used the serif font LOVE with the oblong O and had it stenciled then began taking that image and blowing it up into sculpture.
Some say the later decision to use red, blue and green is also a homage to Kelley’s works and certain print versions of the sculpture such as the 1973 USPS stamp version of the sculpture almost take on the same sort of hard-edge composition and vibrant colourisation as Kelley’s works although I take the side that says these colours were always important to Indiana’s work since he practically grew up in a Phillips’ Service Station in the care of his father until his divorce. (Phillips uses red and green, the blue comes from the wide open sky)
The bold colours also stand in contrast to other Minimalist sculptures at the time while serving to highlight the sculpture itself making it a visual keystone wherever it is. Like this one in JFK Plaza in Philly which is now basically renamed to Love park because it is so visually distinct in its own area. The beauty of minimalist approaches can best be described by the always great but new late Frank Stella “What you see is exactly what you see” and it turns alout Love is all you see.
And before you ask me, no. That story about John Lennon getting inspire to write All You Need Is Love from an exhibition on Indiana’s work is most likely apocryphal like most things the Beatles said or did.
Sadly Indiana actually hated Love the fact that he refused to copyright the sculpture gave anyone and everyone an excuse to use this work to make more money from it than what he was paid to do some of the earliest versions (flat 1000 dollar fee). He essentially moved to a remote island in Maine, bought the fanciest house there and turned it into a studio space, gallery and home where he proceeded to become a near total recluse.
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Flag - Jasper Johns
Minding Your Own Beeswax - The Encaustic Wit of Jasper Johns
A twofer, I get to highlight an LGBT artist (Johns had a relationship with Robert Rauschenberg) and you Americans have something to salute on the 4th. (I will be doing the opposite, I am looking at doing an Australian artist for July).
As the title implies Flag is a collage made up of newspaper and magazine shreds that were painted over with encaustic, melted wax mixed with pigments, usually used in religious icons during the Renaissance. Something to keep in mind when you think about the work itself. The result is a replica of the 48 Star Flag with no artist’s intent. The encaustic paint allows snippets of those fragments to be seen and gives the painting a very painterly texture despite it being a collage. What you get is a focus on technique, brushstroke and texture that Abstract Expressionist used in Johns time but given a representational form even as it is used as a figurative symbol. it is both a painted flag and a flag painted.
The work itself is exactly what you get, Johns himself says he works with “things that people already know”. Paintings like this are a fact to him and interpretation is completely up to the viewer in a way that mimics the “Readymades” of the original Dada artists. Some people see it as a nationalist statement simply leaving it in its most basic statement, some people like me will see it as a critique of American nationalism and some people (also me again) would also say it is a commentary on the power the written word has had on America’s actions as it drags itself headfirst into the Cold War.
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I changed my profile pic to an Arthur that more accurately reflects my current mood.
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Today I learned that after careful examination of @/Rimland’s profile pic, it is NOT in fact a badger, but of a guy in a black shirt holding a gun. 
Ya gotta admit, from afar, it looks a little badger-y.
(Also if ever I take a trip to Japan (one of my dream vacation spots) I should hit this guy up)
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Et tu, Gallus?!
But wait, are you telling me you came to this realisation independently of last month´s discussion on this very topic in the “Ask HMF anything” thread which even resulted in a poll? 
According to which 2/3 people somehow thought it was a badger. I guess I should consider changing my profile pic to spare you all the confusion then? 
Not sure if I´d go for an actual badger though - the only one I find worthy is the drunken vengeful honey badger from the second The Gods Must be Crazy movie, of which there aren´t any good enough pics 
Well, just in case you´re wondering, it´s from the cover of the 2005 game Chameleon. A largely unknown and therefore overlooked stealth-action gem and one of my favourites.
You definitely should! (provided I´m still living here)
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Uhhhh… Yeah, I guess I did! 
(I don’t visit the Ask HMF thread all that much)
Hooray for me! ?
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I really liked your old orson welles pfp, just sayin.
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