Previous: That formal vs. concpetual thing (39)
To Do List, post-Courbet show
Post #1158 • April 16, 2008, 3:42 PM • 12 Comments
Try a seascape. I live in coastal Southern California, for crying out loud.
Paint pretty girls in a landscape.
Make that half-naked pretty girls in a landscape. Coastal. Southern. California.
Try some histrionic self-portraits. You know, maybe not.
Go nuts. Yeah. Also, acquire rich Turkish patron.
2.
April 16, 2008, 4:47 PM
Now, Courbet had a damn fine goatee...
3.
April 16, 2008, 5:30 PM
Picking up a brush after seeing those badass paintings would be task enough for me.
4.
April 16, 2008, 5:33 PM
Re: #3 - It's the damn truth. You'll notice that TMFOM has made no progress lately.
5.
April 16, 2008, 6:15 PM
Well, Marc, regardless of what may have gone on before, eventually people do go to sleep, you know. Besides, this is still a 19th century Frenchman, not Koons and his porn-star wife.
6.
April 16, 2008, 6:18 PM
Re #4, Franklin, you might wish to avoid Turner seascapes.
7.
April 16, 2008, 7:02 PM
I honestly thought Courbet's seascapes were terrible. They look to me like he had someone sculpt some waves really poorly and then painted those in his studio because he was afraid of getting his goatee wet. As far as his half-naked pretty girls in the landscape, you forgot an adverb and adjective: half-naked pretty grossly obese girls in a landscape. I mean, I love fat chicks, but come on.
"Sleep" was pretty okay. I didn't come away all that impressed. You'd be much better off getting inspired by Matisse or Kandinsky, or Klimt or Van Gogh. Not only are they closer to the heart of your style, Franklin, they each have more life and heart and soul than Courbet's most ambitious masterpiece.
Also, seascapes are hard.
8.
April 16, 2008, 10:39 PM
Hokusai did some fine 'seascapes'. Pattern counts when it comes to riffing on nature.
9.
April 17, 2008, 12:12 PM
We East Germans have long tradition in hailing Courbet. One painting we met often in our schoolbooks (4th-5th form and later too) as a very good example for a "progressive Realism", which is situated on the workers side of the social pyramid, was the "Stonebreakers" (burned in Dresden in WWII)
I found it fascinating for myself to try to re-paint this work in 1993 in Berlin, in it's original size, but thats approx. 2.40 m wide, so I scaled it down to 1.40 m. A problem was, that every reproduction I could get looked much different in colors, so I took as base one, which overall impression I liked most.
Big, big problems I got with painting the many stones at the feet of the workers, with the handling of shirts and wests and clothes, with the play of the light. The deeper I went, the bigger the problems raised... I figured out for myself, that our age and our art lost the capability to do such works.
In the End, I gave up, and finished it just "good looking". I learned a lot. Two month later, I had a show of my works in the Bar "Schönhauser 5" (the place where Feeling B and Rammstein came, when still not widely known) and on the evening booze of the opening a strange looking young Banker bought it for 1963,00 German Marks. I wanted to have 2000, but we agreed on the amount of his birthday (1963) and he went down to Schönhauser and directly took the cash from an ATM ;-))
I told him, that it was a "failed" copy from a reproduction of a lost work by Courbet, but he bought it mainly because it reminded him on a Holiday Journey with his Girl friend to Southern France a year before.
Courbet gives me always a lot, I like best his "Trouts", "The Quarry" and the "Waves"
Try to make a copy, it's very hard..., if not impossible...
Best regards Hans
10.
April 18, 2008, 12:25 PM
Franklin, try some erotica. You know you want to, and it can be a great way to relax when a person is feeling Shadowed by the Past, by an artist whose style isn't really one's own, anyway.
Also, that stuff sells really well on eBay, if you've got the right marketing links. ;-)
11.
April 18, 2008, 1:28 PM
For the record, PL, I love "Crush". I'm listening to it right now -- not a coincidence, since I put it on because of your page.
Also love "Crash Into Me". To prove I'm not just saying it, either, I offer up my original post from eight years ago.
12.
April 19, 2008, 10:54 AM
That's it, Chris, you're obviously not fully male.;-)
1.
Marc Country
April 16, 2008, 4:39 PM
"Sleep", my ass.
I suppose Johnny Depp will play him in the film?...