study of a youth

Study of a Youth 2012

110718-Head of a Man

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The Figure Less Immutable

I visited Vienna Art & Designat the National Gallery of Victoria today, and kept returning to the Schiele drawings - they have a physicality, emotion and psychological tension that lingers.

Yet it's a physical reaction too, the drawings so intense and well executed they compel responses to the sensory data that may have inspired Schiele himself. Auerbach once said he wanted to capture through his drawings the haptic and tangible in human experience, "what you feel when you touch somebody next to you in the dark". Seeing Schiele's work feels like that.

Klimt's Portrait of Johanna Staude 1917 drew me back to it several times. The attitude, the gesture of it all from barely tamed hair to that nebulous pout (lips never finished in the hope, of course, that she would return to the studio).

A quote from Godfrey's Painting Today:

"the continuance of figurative painting and its ongoing validity are a key aspect of contemporary practice....figurative work that seeks to deal with the body as it is understood now: more vulnerable, less immutable, still the seat of identity but an identity that is understood as problematic, not something to be thoughtlessly celebrated."

Not something to be thoughtlessly celebrated.

Below, some shots of development work and studies....

ruizstudio

inprogress_figure

Looming Shadows: Rick Amor

I remember seeing Amor's paintings for the first time at school. Much of his art, especially the urban and seascapes, have a way of arresting you with their silence and mystery; a way of compelling reflection and evoking memories - the blurred and barely discernible ones with little context and those redolent of childlike sensations and wonder.

I dream about my childhood in the same dark tonality of my paintings. The sky is always lowering in to the sea, the beach is deserted and something awful has happened or is about to happen. ~Rick Amor

thedog1989

You enter into Amor's world, his imagination, and it becomes your own for a time. You are left wondering where the long shadows will lead you, what (if anything) the cascades of light will disclose. Aside from being well constructed, his works embody and convey something of the unspeakable in the way great paintings that confront engima have always done - through vision, application and nuance. I see these works and am quietly reminded of the spaces and light in Balthus and Hopper.

celestiallane_3trees

It's not what Amor's painting compels me to think, but how it leave me feeling that continues to resonate with me some fifteen years after first seeing them. 

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Rick Amor - A Single Mind

This Unfinished Business

Inside the studio, April 2011. the studio is a place sanctuary and uncertainty. 

Drawing continues in between bouts of painting. These also undergo various states of transition, and the energy that comes from this feeds into painting.

studio drawing

drawing