Aleksandra Waliszewska used to do large, more traditional oil paintings, but she abruptly changed to start doing 1-2 of these small gouache paintings a day. In that Deb Sokolow pod cast we listened to in class, she mentioned how she was frustrated with how no one was really taking a stand in her class. That is why these paintings are so powerful to me. I don't always like to look at them. They are dangerous, disturbing, hard to look at, but they seem genuine. Aleksandra doesn't seem like she's doing this just to be hip and edgy artist. I think they talk about a shadowy side of childhood that maybe we all can relate to. I don't know. Here is a link to a page that describes her work better than I can:

http://womenfiredangerousthings.blogspot.com/2010/05/aleksandra-waliszewska.html

Gerhard Richter, Andrew Wyeth, Antonio Lopez-Garcia. These are three of my favorite realistic paintings, I actually just recently discovered all three of these artists. Wyeth in particular is one whose work I had seen a lot, and so I never looked at it enough to be knocked out by it like I am now. I read an interview with Caleb Weintraub where he said that he always felt that he and Edward Hopper shared the same heart. That is how I feel about Andrew Wyeth- I think he painted my heart a long time ago. So many things that I feel a need to say have already been said so well, I just hope to study his work to find if there is anything I can add so I don't just try to repeat what he did. Its kind of the same thing with Lopez- Garcia and Richter.

Dario Robleto. This is another artist that I was introduced to by a band. Yo La Tengo used some of his work as album artwork their new record. I was unable to find them online, but Dario has also done some sort of "fake album cover" pieces that are really cool. At any rate, I think all of his work is deals closely with the music that he loves; for example, he uses like T Rex or Nina Simone records that he'll melt down into workable plastic that he then uses to build parts of his sculptures. The information encoded on the record that gave it its original value is completely lost, but Robleto is counting on the idea that there is some kind of spirit in the materials that survives that destructive process. He is battling materialism with art; our ignorance of the history and meaning of all of the materials that surround us and that is the kind of thing that I have been looking for in art my whole life. I don't think I've ever seen someone do it so clearly and straightforwardly. I think all of his sculptures are really attractive on their own, but you really get his work when you read the title of it and the materials used to make it. Then you find out that there is this really meaningful story in the materials, this long history that may have began centuries ago, and this makes me want to investigate the make up of any of the objects around me. There is surely a story that is just as enlightening in my 4 dollar toaster or the shoes I'm wearing.

Korin Faught is an artist from LA who's paintings feature a single model painted several times in different poses in a single painting, interacting with each other, as if they are twins or triplets. They are posed inside mostly plain white interiors, bathed in natural daylight. Perhaps she is saying something about the multiple personalities that we all have, the way that we interact with ourselves when we are alone. They are just painted so beautifully and realistically. What I really am interested in is the way she paints the natural light that fills the rooms and interacts with the white walls. There are so many subtle and beautiful color shifts that happen to white when it interacts with light, and for me this is the real subject of her paintings. The top two images here are stills from the movie Silent Light, directed by Carlos Reygadas. I included them because Faught's paintings just reminded me of Reygadas's films so much. I see his films more as a sequence of slowly moving paintings than movies. Again, this movie really focuses on how daylight colors white walls and white clothing. Some of the scenes are so slow and still that the daylight seems to change within a single scene; you can see just how different the people in his movies are from moment to moment. I actually became aware of Korin's work from an interview with Adam Jones from the band Tool. Rock music has really been the gateway for me into the visual arts. I found out about a lot of the artists I like from bands like Yo La Tengo, Stereolab, Tool, Sonic Youth, etc. mentioning them in interviews or using their work as album art.

I want to talk about the Ryan Schneider lecture a bit. First of all, I can really see the influences that he mentioned in his paintings: Bonnard, Hockney, Cezanne, Matisse. I also am glad to hear an artist who is successful and much more advanced than I remark that he wants to see more expressionism, less intellectualizing/ reasoning about

every formal decision a painter has made. That validates some feelings that I have had lately at shows or just looking at stuff online. His paintings do invite me to fill in the blanks, as he said he hopes they do. I want to bring all of my own emotional baggage into them to flesh out the characters.My favorites were the outdoors ones he did, I think it's because they remind me less of Matisse or Bonnard; the indoor ones look pretty familiar to me. He talked about how insecure he was with modeling forms and painting the figure when he resumed painting after college, and that gives me hope when I see how successful his paintings are regardless.

Jenny Saville- I have been admiring her paintings ever since you showed one of them in class. I look at them almost every day. They are really exciting, beautifully made, hard to look at, but you can't stop looking at them. I'm not sure what motivates her to paint these. My initial interpretation is that they are dealing with violence against women,the human body as object, plastic surgery, images of beauty that we push on each other, etc. But I don't know, maybe they are about much more.
If they are trying to make a moral point, or to make us more conscious of this kind of physical and psychological violence (violence that I think is very real and should be exposed for what it is)
then there is something that disturbs me about how attractive she has made the surface of these paintings. Oil paint is beautiful when it is mastered by an artist, when you can see all the little blobs of goo individually, but at the same time see how they are orchestrated into a living human form that exists in light. It is a beautiful trick. It's luxurious. I'm afraid that it might make these images attractive on a deeper level, past the point where they have a critical or consciousness raising function. These works have obviously really moved me and made me think. I feel like when we start dealing with these kinds of issues, I stop caring about art. We should just motivate people to do something to change their world, and stop drooling over luxurious oil paintings so much.

These are two portraits by Lucian Freud. I like the visible brushwork, and the attention to the details of the flesh- the blues, reds, and greens. They remind me of photographs, but the environment is painted in a way that makes it feel alive. Everything has vitality, even the furniture and wood floor.

This is Drunken Silenus by Peter Paul Rubens. He was a pioneer in the art of painting living flesh, bodies that don't look like they are made of marble. He uses adjacent pairs of desaturated complimentary colors to paint how light falls across skin more realistically. His figures' bodies look full of blood, the way fat and muscle is distributed beneath the skin is painted really realistically in his work. I think his work is relevant to what I am trying to do in class right now. I have tried to paint in layers of glaze as Rubens did, but it hasn't worked. I think I'm making progress with the alla prima technique, though.

These are paintings by Tom Laduke, and they were one of the initial inspirations for me to try to use the tracing paper to layer information in my current drawing. I believe I first saw these paintings on "The Flog" - an art blog thats updated like once every ten years. He takes these really desaturated photographic images from movies-I don't know if he paints them or prints them or what-and then paints on top of them in really pure colors. The surface paintings are usually fragments of old masterpieces... one that really struck a chord with me was a still from David Lynch's Blue Velvet with fragments of Bruegel's Return of the Hunters painted on the surface. Those two works have always been two of my absolute favorite works of art. Maybe his paintings are kind of formulaic or predictable, sometimes I feel like I can digest it all too quickly. But they are very beautiful and dreamy- more so when I don't recognize which movie or painting are being quoted, and just look at it as some landscape or interior from another world

It's been quite awhile since i've added anything to this journal, but I thought I would put some things here that have been informing my current drawing project- drawing from data- as well as some figure paintings that I've been looking at.
First is Robert Rauschenberg. My art history teacher in Richmond worked for him in his studio for many years. Understandably he talked about his work a lot, and made me really familiar with it. His work responds to advertising and mass production in the 20th century, and the way in which people received new information. Part of his response is to layer many silk screened and stenciled images on top of each other. I am always blown away by how carefully composed and layered all of his works are, while still looking like they happened accidentally over time, like graffiti on a wall that has been added to repeatedly throughout a decade. His layering of text to create areas of high and low density, deep and shallow space, contrast, etc. is what I have been paying attention to while working on the drawing from data project.