----- Forwarded Message ---- From: William Conger <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wednesday, September 9, 2009 9:56:27 AM Subject: Re: dead photos- alive paintings
One reason David is a better painter than Kincade is in David's facture, In one of his versions of the death of Marat, the one we've seen reproduced everywhere, David painted the hanging arm of Marat by simply touching the underpainting with the most translucent film of paint. From a slight distance the art looks meaty, fully modeled by paint but in fact it is scarcely wiped with paint. So, too, is the wooden box at the side of the tub. It is essentially made up with negative space; that is, it is the underpainting smears of brown, jumping into relief by the paint around the box and by the detailed lettering. An amazing feat of virtuosity that astonishes us by making us aware of how we "fill-in" or see-in with the scantiest of information. this is not trickery as such because David does not "hide" his trick as a magician does. With David you can see what the visual evidence is -- just a swipe of water-thin paint -- and yet you perceive a fleshy image, an old and brittle wooden box, etc. With his paint David portrays a metaphor of death, wherein Marat's life and world transforms to a vapor of paint as if before our eyes. Velasquez did this better, and maybe Rubens, too. Goya did it in a more subtle way, psychologically. He twirled the paint just so, building it up here and there like clumps of bloody mud in sunlight, to let you imagine the quagmire of emotions at war with themselves in the people he painted. Kincade lights candles in woodsy cottages. He reminds you of Goldilocks but there's no wolf anywhere. Yet everybody has a wolf that can't be ignored. The other artists, like David, didn't ignore anything. (Incidentally, I still don't think David was as "moral" as his genius suggested. Like most artists of any worth, he outdid himself). wc ________________________________ From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wednesday, September 9, 2009 7:38:26 AM Subject: Re: dead photos- alive paintings In a message dated 9/8/09 11:45:05 PM, [email protected] writes: Yeah, it is. Forget facture. > Call it facture and it could get discussed. Call it marks and it'll just be that old thing.
