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Chaim Soutine (1893-1943) Le Bœuf signed 'Soutine' (lower right) oil on canvas 31 7/8 x 23 5/8 in. (81 x 60 cm.) Painted circa 1923.

A Single Man - Tom Ford

Just Get Through the Goddamn Day...

Fuck Yeah!  Meiko Kaji  梶 芽衣子

Fuck Yeah!  Lisbeth Salander

Fuck Yeah!  Meiko Kaji  梶 芽衣子

Fuck Yeah!  Meiko Kaji  梶 芽衣子

Clyfford Still PH-960, 1960 Oil on canvas 112 x 144 in New York, New York

“Still makes the rest of us look academic”… - Jackson Pollock

Clyfford Still  :  Still is considered one of the foremost Color Field painters — his non-figurative paintings are non-objective, and largely concerned with juxtaposing different colors and surfaces in a variety of formations.

Unlike Mark Rothko or Barnett Newman, who organized their colors in a relatively simple way (Rothko in the form of nebulous rectangles, Newman in thin lines on vast fields of color), Still’s arrangements are less regular. His jagged flashes of color give the impression that one layer of color has been “torn” off the painting, revealing the colors underneath.

Another point of departure with Newman and Rothko is the way the paint is laid on the canvas; while Rothko and Newman used fairly flat colors and relatively thin paint, Still uses a thick impasto, causing subtle variety and shades that shimmer across the painting surfaces. His large mature works recall natural forms and natural phenomena at their most intense and mysterious; ancient stalagmites, caverns, foliage, seen both in darkness and in light lend poetic richness and depth to his work.

By 1947, he had begun working in the format that he would intensify and refine throughout the rest of his career — a large-scale color field applied with palette knives.

Still’s reputation as one of the giants of Abstract Expressionism is built upon this mastery of the painterly process. Unique among his contemporaries, Still built up his richly textured surface by painting layer upon layer of richly pigmented oil paint carefully sculpting and applying each brush stroke.

Still would often scrape away the surface only to rebuild it again, resulting in a surface both densely layered with color or often transcendent, conveying deep, mystical space. The spatial relationships created from this process and Still’s vision, result in a composition that is dynamic, almost topographical, and what ultimately defined Still’s mastery of the canvas and set him apart from his colleagues such as Pollock, Newman and Rothko.