Painting

[Corpsey]

'Sea of Ice' is possibly my favourite. I like the ones focused on landscapes and environments. The people, if there are any, are in the corner, off in the distance, or just gazing into it.

Reef by the Seashore - Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe

www.kunsthalle-karlsruhe.de

This painting (from about the same time) has the same jagged formation in it

"In the winter of 1820–21, Friedrich made extensive oil studies of ice floes on the river Elbe, near Dresden. These were probably incorporated into The Sea of Ice."

 

[mvuent]

I want to talk about Thomas Kincaid. Do they have a real power. Why do they sell so well. Can we redeem them?

to me they do. not for any clever hidden reason—i just find that some of them (particularly the cottages and gazebos) straightforwardly accomplish what they're supposed to: conjuring up a utopian world of safety and serenity and prettiness. the bible belt kitschiness makes them uncanny, too. but not enough to negate the coziness. (if anything, maybe the combination is what draws me in.) eons ago i was going to write something called "when imagination takes the path of least resistance, where does it end up?" that was going to explore that sort of hyper-idealized landscape. it's a vast canon extending way before and after kinkade, one that i guess i first became aware of through /comfy/ threads on 4chan. contrary to what critics are trained to say, that sort of thing offers as important a window into the psyche as any dark, angsty, confrontational art. it's uncompromising in the opposite way. but back to kinkade specifically, from even bare minimum of research it's obvious that a) he was a troubled guy, which eventually led to his death, and b) he had a genuine appreciation for art (franz kline, for example, was one of his favs). so as much as his output can be seen as a calculated business enterprise, i do think the origins of what he was doing lay in genuine longing.

 

[IdleRich]

Interesting—what is it that's so vulgar and disgusting about this?

Is it the garish colours?

Thomas Kinkade, the Painter Art Critics Hated but America Loved

Kinkade fanned the flames of a cultural rift between the art world elite and the working class, and made millions in the process.

www.artsy.net

I prefer this one cos it's so batshit OTT, it's like a bad drug trip

Interesting how his stuff looks like AI art.

Looks like the kinda overloaded illustrations you would get accompanying stories about pixies or whatever as a kid.

Again, that doesn't make it bad, but that is what it looks like.

 

[IdleRich]

to me they do. not for any clever hidden reason—i just find that some of them (particularly the cottages and gazebos) straightforwardly accomplish what they're supposed to: conjuring up a utopian world of safety and serenity and prettiness. the bible belt kitschiness makes them uncanny, too. but not enough to negate the coziness. (if anything, maybe the combination is what draws me in.) eons ago i was going to write something called "when imagination takes the path of least resistance, where does it end up?" that was going to explore that sort of hyper-idealized landscape. it's a vast canon extending way before and after kinkade, one that i guess i first became aware of through /comfy/ threads on 4chan. contrary to what critics are trained to say, that sort of thing offers as important a window into the psyche as any dark, angsty, confrontational art. it's compromising in the opposite way. but back to kinkade specifically, from even bare minimum of research it's obvious that a) he was a troubled guy, which eventually led to his death, and b) he had a genuine appreciation for art (franz kline, for example, was one of his favs). so as much as his output can be seen as a calculated business enterprise, i do think the origins of what he was doing lay in genuine longing

yes, this I agree with, much more interesting than pretending it's not what it is.

what makes a Monet like this so superior?

I think before that you gotta recognise that they are different, they set out to do different things in different ways. They are different categories of thing and Monet's category is deemed a better one... but is it?

 

[Corpsey]

I suppose it's like comparing BIlly Ray Cyrus to Beethoven. One is obviously better but some people just don't like Billy Ray Cyrus.

Interesting little article on kinkade

 

[sus]

We're talking about a painting... basically it's a rehashing of what you said the other day about how Gus doesn't understand art but just makes something up and then tries to fit the artwork into his theory. Kinda like you but he does at least watch/read/whatever the work to provide a tiny figleaf of justification for his interesting but ultimately barren intellectual games.

I'm honored to have an adversary

 

[sus]

Corpsey is cooking!

 

[sus]

Yes and what about those roccocos.

Can we establish a tradition of heightened garishness redeemable

 

[sus]

Reef by the Seashore - Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe

www.kunsthalle-karlsruhe.de

This painting (from about the same time) has the same jagged formation in it

"In the winter of 1820–21, Friedrich made extensive oil studies of ice floes on the river Elbe, near Dresden. These were probably incorporated into The Sea of Ice."

They're kinda like stone ruins

They are jagged like a knife, their crystalline forms tear up organic timber. But they are also wrecked remnants themselves, cut up, sliced and weathered

 

[sus]

Both the destroyer of Structure and destroyed Structure

 

[sus]

We could compare to Lisa Frank

 

[sus]

I like the way the splotches of the seal and the coral and the schools of fish all echo one another

 

[IdleRich]

It's the classic contradiction between theorist and practical guy - I'm used to it in the sciences but this is the cultural version.

Theorist (eg @sus) wants to get a result to fit his model

Practical type (@vershy versh or @shakahislop for example) want to get a model to fit their results.

Dirty bastard (eg @woops) merely wants a result with a fit model

 

[sus]

Obviously this is children's art but if we discovered an uncontacted tribe that exclusively made work like this, what would we say about its cosmology and its colors

 

[sus]

I think I'm doing a little more than that, I'm trying to attribute intentionality and sophistication, as a premise, and then reason from there, as an experiment

 

[sus]

There is this demonstrably powerful Creator in the world.

Millions of people have been captivated by his Totemic objects

Can we be anthropologists and try to understand its source of power, its mechanisms and symbolic encodings, rather than adjudicate (problematic) notions of taste and sensibility

 

[sus]

What I believe is that even "naive" creators can capture, stumble upon, evolve toward, channel powerful cultural spirits. That people like Cameron or Kincade demonstrably have. Even if they aren't our Gods we worship—and aesthetics are very theological—can we still understand and appreciate their powers?

 

[Corpsey]

"Essayist Joan Didion is a representative critic of Kinkade's style:[11]

A Kinkade painting was typically rendered in slightly surreal pastels. It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire."

This is what I feel, a sense of something sinister in its idealism...

But clearly the people who buy his paintings don't see that.

I actually watched the Super Mario Bros film the other day and was thinking about how, as an adult, the world of Super Mario Bros is somehow sinister and dead, because it has no credibility, and you wonder what do these things do in this world, these mushrooms and so on? (It's more egregious in this case cos the world has power ups in it for some reason).

And I know as a child I'd have not given a damn about that and thought "THIS IS AWESOME".

 

[version]

puts me in mind of le corbusier's less appealing plan for Paris

'Ballardian architecture'

 

[Corpsey]

We don't seek realism in a van gogh painting, for example, but then again, on some level do we? We seek a sense of a real world transmuted into paint... Or a real emotional reaction. Everything about kinkade's paintings seems fake