P U S H

Blue Period/Last Summer

Tokyo Love: Spring Fever 1994 by Nobuyoshi Araki and Nan Goldin

James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903, United States/England)

Nocturnes

Whistler was an American artist, active during the American Gilded Age and based primarily in England. He was averse to sentimentality and moral allusion in painting, and was a leading proponent of the credo “art for art’s sake”. His signature on many of his paintings was in the shape of a stylized butterfly possessing a long stinger for a tail.

Auguste Renoir

1841-1919

I’d be curious  to ask Renoir  if he thought he mastered what he did. I love his work.yet, I see unresolved areas in his paintings. Some paintings are tighter, others are looser. art books would say he  chose to paint this way. I believed that. I believed that artist needed to be kung fu masters of the brush, that they had a ten step plan for every dab. But now I realize Renoir, Monet, Degas, all of them were much more like any of us. They tried,  they experimented. They flubbed their eyes and redid them. They worked fast to stop them from overthinking. They were impatient at times . They wandered and lost themselves and came back. Like a lot of us, they were passionate about their explorations. They were probably proud of some of their work and disdainful of others. And these also hang in museums. Renoir, out of all the Impressionists, holds a special place in my life. I was a kid then and interested in comics. My step Dad, Guy ( another great unsung hero I should make a post about) suggested I look at classic paintings, work on drawing crowds.  That’s life he would say. Pointing at this weird drawing of a bunch of people hanging around, dancing.  I remember looking at this painting with my ten year old eyes and mind and noticing the complete absence of muscles, capes, drama and word balloons. I instantly classified it as poorly drawn art.

I'm older, slower now but wiser. Looking back, I see richness reached through effort. An effort Renoir wasn’t always capable of doing.  

I am not even sure he knew where he was going before he got there and eventually, wasn’t able to make that journey.

He turned toward the nudes he would do toward the later part of his life, but the curious, deliberate energy powering his use of color, tangraming them into fields of flowers, boaters on an island or dappled lit ladies was gone.

I like thinking of Renoir this way because I understand the master we see only appeared in moments. Every one of us is a Renoir in a way. We work with  abandon hoping to get somewhere.

When we do, we are proud but not happy because our happiness comes from the doing, not the result.

#AugusteRenoir

AugusteRenoir

Oh. Well. Here's a top ten.

Sun in an Empty Room (Edward Hopper)