Distilled Life

“When you pick up one piece of dust, the entire world comes with it.”  -Zen saying

A selection of still-life paintings, mostly contemporary.

“There are four elements that ultimately determine quality and meaning in painting. One, the color you choose and how much. Two, where you put it; three, in what manner. The fourth is outside you, and that is life.”  -Larry Rivers.

Contemporary Figure Paintings

Every decade or so an article appears in the press proclaiming the return of the figure in art, implying that it somehow “went away.” In fact, the figure as a subject for painting never went away, and never will until the human race itself disappears. In a symposium on drawing several years ago at Randolph-Macon Womans College (now Randolph College) in Lynchburg, Virginia, I heard Janet Fish say, “Isms come and isms go, and the realists just keep painting.” (Or something to that effect.) Her statement could, I think, be applied accurately to the state of figure painting.  Whatever the current obsession of the so-called art world, artists just keep painting the figure. Below is an album of some of the most compelling figure artists working today.

Phil Geiger, figure study, oil on panel, 14″ x 10.” Collection of Frank Hobbs

Scott Noel: Art as Epiphany

“…right now, right here, every day has the distinct possibility of a kind of epiphany, and that epiphany is the wholeness, the beauty, the majesty of experience, right there. I don’t think necessarily that you start with a belief like that that then becomes affirmed or confirmed in the art; I think it’s the other way around. I think your art leads you to that. The more you work as an artist the more you adopt certain principles, like… at any point something very terrific can happen in a painting if you stay solidly in the moment of the work and you commit to it in a completely open way without premeditation, without manipulation – just go for it.”

– video courtesy of Painting Perceptions