Venetians 2007
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About the time
 About the painting

FASHION VICTIM
Oil on Canvas 24x36" 2007

The figures in Venetian painting are constantly pushing at the edges of the picture plane. It gives the feeling that we are included in the visual spaces of the picture. Veronese was a master at weird angles and flowing movements. This in combination with Matisse's pared down forms allows a fast combination of these visual experiences in the same painting.
 I've been working to heighten the color values - much as the Venetians did. By creating depth in the colors it makes the forms pop. This pushes the forms against the flat graphic drawing techniques. I wanted to enhance the feeling of many viewpoints by turning the figure through the wrapping of fabric - what one experiences as one gets dressed -the tangling and untangling - the body beneath the fabric - the strangeness of an outer skin. In the end we are all victims of fashion.

FASHIONABLE MONARCH
Oil on Canvas 24x36" 2007

I had read a blog by Edward Winkleman about his love of opulence in painting - he compared two portraits by Ingres - one of Napoleon and one of a physician. The professional looked the part, black suit, gray face and gray hair, serious expression. Napoleon was having a Liberace moment - color, hair and nails, fine silks and a rock star sneer. Attitude versus rectitude. In art - I'm all for attitude!
 This painting was the first of the Venetians series. I wanted the figurative elements to become even more abstract, and I determined that quick visual snatches of form and color would give the feeling of a peripheral glimpse of color and movement. In the electronic world packets of information are stored in many different places and coded to reform in your computer. I wanted to combine the "peripheral glimpse" with the visual experience of electronic storage digitization in one activated space. This is the digitized Napoleon.

INSTANT PARDON
Oil on Canvas 24x 36" 2007

Picasso's later paintings are important to understanding the Neo Expressionists' reaction against institutional Abstract Expressionism and the 80s resurgence of European figurative expressionism. In a new century it makes no sense to repeat the slashing strokes and loose painting once again. What is interesting is how the forms, colors and compositions found in Picasso's late paintings are very close to the breaks and packeting of electronic coded information. This is a form of 21st century expressionism that doesn't rely on sloppy materiality to enhance painterliness.

I had been looking at a Tintoretto painting in the Church next door to the Scuola. It was about healing the sick and there were some fantastic examples of studio figuration pushing across the wide screen format painting. It's always apparent when he was using a model - he achieved a convincing naturalism. He would then combine this with a figurative shorthand that painters develop when they have nothing in front of them. It is a personal canon of form that we all carry in our heads. You can see this in the different the poses, forms and groupings. It is the mixture of both eye and mind that warps the spaces and heightens the movements.

TRAGIC OVERLOAD
Oil on Canvas 24x36" 2007
The 21st Century is all about speed and movement. Nothing is stabilized and everything is in flux. For art it means computerization and digitization - and progressive technological art work looks more like movies. Tintoretto's paintings exist through time showing us many cinematic moments at once. He collapses space and overlaps forms in order to put the movie in one frame. Rather than a picture - they are downloads of real time videos on one flash screen - only painted! By using this16th Century painterly technique we can transform the academic 21st Century Postmodern billboard composition that painting has become into something new and exciting.
  As I type this I am sitting in an apartment opposite the Thames - watching one river flow by in real time. While another - the Mekong - in Laos - flows by on a television screen broadcasting a travel show in electronic time. The irony is not lost on me. When this is uploaded it will become part of the river of information that flows on the internet. The melding of interior and exterior, objective and subjective all leading to information overload. Whether or not it's tragic - well - that's visual poetic license. In any event - we swim with the flow.

TREADING WATER
Oil on Canvas 24x36" 2007

What more could painters want than the situation we find ourselves in at this time? The academy is strong - Postmodern painting is an institutionalized force - and we face an uncertain future. Change is happening. New visual ideas are never easy - they happen because change is inevitable. No artist of real note ever stayed locked into one idea for their whole career. Both Matisse and Picasso showed us how to push a radical generation's visual ideas into new territories even after they were considered "old" masters. Compared to the conservative, reactionary careerists of today they were wild men - Fuaves! We too can be just as wild!
  Picasso again is in my thoughts. His classical phase reintroduced the volume, space and history of Western painting into the flat, broken spaces of cubism. Frank Stella discusses the unsatisfying nature of Modernism's space. He conjectures that Picasso felt this and reworked his ideas to create a fuller visual experience - one that takes Modernism in a different, more real experience of space and form - one connected to the Italian Renaissance. This painting is a little tribute to that classicism.

TREASONOUS WHISPERING
Oil on Canvas 24x36" 2007
Abstract Expression may have introduced American painters to the world, but it was the last gasp of European Modernism. America's first homegrown movements were Pop and Minimalism - Warhol and Lichtenstein and Stella and Judd - quintessential American artists combining intellectual simplicity, endless reproduction and overwhelming resources. It changed the rhetoric and the visual experiences at the end of the last century - hardening into a vast international institutional style. The torrent of images that bombards us everyday and the overflow of industrial materiality that we store in warehouses has come to define the typical visual experience in the early 21st Century.
I am very aware of the importance of Pop painting. Pop irrevocably tied painting to lens reproduction - both in the image sense and graphic sense. It was the beginning of Postmodern sensibility - and along with Minimalism - laid the groundwork for the conundrum that painting faces at this moment - materiality and reproduction. I am reaching further back to use classic drawing and painting techniques. Cross hatching and shading - hue, value and composition. The reproducing lens tends to isolate, the eye to differentiate and it's this clash between the eye and the lens that I synthesize by using old visual techniques to enhance and define a new form of abstract composition.
 

 

 © Mark Stone 2007