sandr037

I have been busy cleaning out some cabinets, and happened upon a small wooden salad bowl.  Since it was not part of a set, and pretty much useless to me, I threw it into the trash.  A minute later I fished it out and took it downstairs where I had my painting palette still dirty with old oil paint.  I painted a face on the bottom of the wooden bowl, then thinking it needed something else, I took a pair of my old wirerimmed glasses, sniped the temples short, popped the lenses, and attached them to the face. Voila!  My friend Woody.   Of course this is nothing new.  Every human does it in one way or another.  My father was an engineer, and he would cobble together electronic gadgets all the time. Me, I twist up copper tubing, hang it on the wall, and call it ART. This one?  Obviously a self portrait. And then you have all the old equipment that is now obsolescent.  Below, the innards of an old video tape player ala Louise Nevelson. But the trut...

 John Singer Sargent (1886 - 1925) is best known for his portraits and his subtle compositions.   Madame X (1884) is his most famous portrait, and has enough drama and history behind it to have been the subject of a book, Strapless by Deborah Davis .   I’m not going to outline Sargent’s curious expatriate life here, so if you are interested and want a good read, get Strapless . His compositional skill is best illustrated by the painting Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1886), which straddles the line between pure reality and wild abstraction.   Two children are holding Japanese lanterns, but there is no horizon or ground plane, no sense of distance, and the general effect is of scattered confetti.   And yet, it has a real, almost commonplace feel about it; like a childhood memory. A third weapon (reflecting the surprising Spanish Inquisition) in Sargent’s arsenal is his brilliant brushwork.   He is capable of teasing reality out of a dab of paint, creating th...