Figurative art, a style that goes all the way back to the old cave days, seems to be making a comeback. Over the ages, the figure has symbolized everything from ancient Greek gods to R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural and the archetypal Americans now seen in Tom Tomorrow’s cartoons.
The fascinating work of acclaimed figurative artist Douglas Bourgeois is the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Georgia through February 15, 2004.
Just as the recently renovated Renaissance Arts Hotel makes a strong statement about the relevance of preservation in New Orleans so too does Luis Cruz Azaceta’s mesmerizing Yellow Wall 2 that hangs in the lobby. Composed of 565 photos taken on and around Tchoupitoulas Street, the montage reveals the fortitude that is demanded in order to preserve New Orleans’ heritage.
Luis Azaceta, a warm and rational Cuban exile, doesn’t strike you as a man who would ever hold a gun or a knife to his own head or the head of anyone else. But he has done this. He tells the very funny story of posing before a mirror in his New York apartment with a gun and then a knife held to his head to get the right image for a painting dealing with urban violence. A woman in a nearby apartment in his Italian neighborhood observed him through the window and sent someone rushing to the rescue. It’s an amusing tale, but behind the humor is the ever-present specter of loss, chaos and alienation that has defined his work for the last thirty years.
It was like meeting an old friend in a new and unfamiliar place. In this case, the old friend was Ida Kohlmeyer, or, rather, her paintings and sculpture. When she died six years ago at 84, she was probably New Orleans’ best- known artist, having been shown routinely here as well as New York, London and other world culture capitals for several decades.
Gene Koss sits in his glass studio in New Orleans, working on vast glass sculptures and wondering how he ever got this far from the farm.
Renowned American figurative painter Robert Colescott died on June 4, 2009 at his home in Tuscon, Arizona at the age of 83.
I appreciated Stephen Sollins’s recent works at Brian Gross Fine Art for their sense of discovering poetry in everyday sources – and the artist’s labor-intensive techniques.
While John Alexander’s achievement as a painter continues to win accolades, his prowess as a consummate draftsmen has only recently emerged. This latent recognition should come as no surprise. Invariably, painters resort to paper to record an impression, producing works that make up in spontaneity what by intention they lack in finish.
The ancient cities of Italy and Greece were built around a center, the mundus, which was a pit covered by a great stone, called a “soul stone.” On certain days, the stone was removed, and the spirits of the dead rose from the pit which established the city’s relationship to its ancestral spirits.