So, I was tagging along on a bookstore trip with the roomates and wandered into the art section and looked up and, like Galahad and the vision of the Grail, saw a book with a painting on it's cover which I recognised as the painting I would most like to have painted if I had any visual art skill whatsoever. The artist is Sean Scully. Now, by saying "new" favorite artist, you lose the sense of the fact that his work is me, I am his paintings. there is nothing "new" about my loving his work- it's like I've always known but just had never seen it. Yes, I do love to be hyperbolic, but anyone who knew me during my wheatfield obsession of 1999 or my "aesthetic of the barn door" period of 2001, should be able to instatnly recognize me in this guy's work. It's all windows, doors, peeling paint, blocks of mostly neutral but occasionally bold colors, heavy, wood-grain-like brush strokes and even actual photography of doors, windows, portals, peeling paint and old stone walls, etc. I mean, he's practically typed "Kj" in bold letters across every piece!
I finally managed to upload some images. And here's a quote from an article on Scully- says it all for me.
"I think what Scully does is restore poetry to geometrical abstraction. He makes it unexpectedly romantic, in the good old-fashioned sense of Romanticism. "Romanticism," Baudelaire wrote in The Salon of 1846, "is precisely situated neither in choice of subjects nor in exact truth, but in a mode of feeling." More particularly, Romanticism means "intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite." "Romanticism is a child of the North," Baudelaire adds, "and the North is all for color.""
-Donald Kuspit, 'Sacred Sadness' artnet.com
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