Sometimes, when I am a bit confused I go on Pinterest and see where my curiousity leads. Going online is no substitute for visiting museums, of course. The dramatic loss of scale, as well as the distortions in colour and disappearance of texture make online a very secondary way to experience art. But it's what I can do at the moment.
Here are four artists whose work I feel a strong kinship with. Alas, I don't have the dimensions of any nor full title information on Murphy or Schwartz, though the former is a contemporary Australian, and the latter from St Petersburg and was probably mostly active in the seventies. Tuymans and Smith are both well known, the former a Belgian, and still going strong.
All are quite bold. The brushmarks are evident, the effect somewhat ragged with textures: a rustic, unpretentious. I love the bright, dense colours. And I like the sense, most obvious in Schwartz's portrait, of caricature and wry humour. In all, the artist is very present, and joyfully even in Tuyman's more withdrawn work.
Also, I'd speculate, without knowing the working processes of these artists, that these painters have produced works which are "lucky". I mean, they teeter: they could be very unsuccessful amateurish paintings but they seem to succeed, to pull them off. I like that sense of risk.
*
.jpg)
