Merrymaking Pt 2

Last night I went to the Arts House for Yaohong’s exhibition opening and it was cool to see him and other photographers getting their works exhibited. Go check it out. The reason why I mentioned that is that it ties in with this post nicely. On a certain bored day I got the great idea of listing down my favorite artists and the most memorable works I’ve seen, both in real life and in pictures. Which led to an exhausting search on the internet, as sometimes I didn’t even know the name of the painter. The search involved typing seemingly random descriptions into Google, such as “treacherous white snowy landscape”, and also translating words into French so that I could search the Louvre database. There are a lot more works of art that I identify with but my memory fails me. Anyways I’m going to sound like a real dick pretending I know about art (I don’t). But these pieces and people have inspired and affected me, and hopefully when I get down to doing whatever I was born to do some of these influences would come through.

Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights

If you look carefully through all my pictures you would notice that most of them have something in common:

1. Details: the more packed and crammed and the more things going on, the better. I have a short attention span and wandering around museums can easily cause brain numbness and indifference, so things have to really jump out at me.
2. Colors: I’m a big fan of technicolor. The Bosch painting strikes me with its generous use of pink.
3. Motion: I’m particularly drawn to movement.
4. Light: Being one of the trickiest things to master, light and its reflections and absence is one of the things I look out for.

The Garden stands in a corner of a gallery in the Museo del Prado. It opens like a book and is in fact made up of three panels; it tells the story of Eden from left to right. I was like “He is very Salvador Dali” and Estelle gave me a disapproving look and told me it’s the other way round.

The animals at first coexisted happily with the humans but depravity took over and then the animals enslaved the humans. I just think that they must have been having a good time at those orgies.

Henri Fantin-Latour

There isn’t exactly one of Fantin-Latour’s works that I really love–I just like them all. He’s extremely prolific and I kept seeing him around at various places. His still life flowers are just simply mesmerizing. Everytime I see them I feel like I could reach into the canvas and grab the bouquet. One of his paintings is featured on the cover of New Order’s Power, Corruption & Lies.

Monet’s Reflections of Clouds on the Water-lily Pond

This overwhelmingly large triptych drapes across an entire wall at the MOMA and is one out of the many depictions of the lily pond Monet did at his Giverny home. The full impact is really lost here in its reduced and divorced state. I can assure you though, that you could plant yourself in the couch in front of it and stare at its beauty for hours.

Hokusai’s Sunshu Ejiri

A gust of wind blows pages of paper into the air while villagers hold tight to their hats and belongings: out of Hokusai’s 36 Views of Mt Fuji, this is my favorite print. While not as famous as the Great Wave off Kanagawa, this one has its simple charms which stand in contrast to the hyper chaotic content I usually favor. What I like most is the surehanded line in the background that delineates Mt. Fuji. Very succinct and effective. While researching on this woodblock print I came across photographer Jeff Wall’s response to Sunshu Ejiri, a meticulous staged reenactment of the original print titled A Sudden Gust of Wind.

It isn’t clear to me if the photo’s setting is in Japan, but imagine looking at this photo without knowing what had inspired it!

Charles Cuisin’s la chaussée du Vouldy

The Lourve has tons of paintings and they all look the same after a while. I chanced upon a wall of smaller landscape paintings after walking about for hours. This one stood out the most as it was almost like looking at a postcard. The soft silhouette against the setting sun makes the scene even more bucolic and alluring. It was also by chance that I found this on the Louvre website; I almost contemplated looking for it room by room and was actually trying to find another painting when I saw this listed in the search results.

Picasso’s Guernica

Violence! War! Carnage! Picasso’s seminal work conveys the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and Wikipedia has a fairly detailed analysis of the painting, which is full of hidden symbols. I thought it was great that the Museo Reina Sofia also displayed the many preparatory drawings he did.

Odilon Redon’s The Buddha

Musée d’Orsay has an exceptional collection of pastels housed in a dimly lit room. The darkened room also gives the art a mystically quality, which suits this painting perfectly. I love Redon for his bold splashes of color and his dreamy images. For example, the flowers and plants that are often in his paintings are less for decoration and more like extensions of the subject’s psyche.

Roy Lichtenstein’s Whaam!

Pop art was one of my earliest influences. I trace it all the way back to secondary one. I can’t talk about pop art without mentioning Andy Warhol (I have to purchase Warhol’s Giant Size one day) but I got to admit, I love Whaam! more than the Campbell paintings. It elevates comic book art to a whole new level. The whole idea of taking a page from a comic and redrawing it on a much larger scale was an idea ahead of its time. The originality lies in having the balls to do something like that. It already has its modern counterpart: now you see movies that mimic graphic novels shot for shot.

Whaam! can be viewed at the Tate Modern.

Stanley Donwood

Stanley Donwood‘s London Views is also the cover art work for Thom Yorke’s The Eraser. It shows London burning and sinking under the River Thames.

You may also find his work on all Radiohead albums and singles after 1994. For me, this partnership between Donwood and Radiohead is truly symbiotic: I can’t listen to Kid A without picturing the fiery post apocalyptic landscape on the cover or look at Donwood’s art without having the accompanying soundtrack playing in my head. I recommend listening to Black Swan and It Rained All Night when looking at this one.

Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks

In Secondary Two we were supposed to take a painting and sketch them out again for art class. I chose this one. It is said to have been hanging in many a college dorm room in the past. It isn’t one to go to for respite; the bitterness hangs low in the gloaming. Chilling at the bar has never looked so lonely.

Andreas Gursky

That, my friend, is the most expensive photograph in the world. Extremely ironic if you think about its name– 99 cents.

Gursky is well known for his large format shots in which people and objects are found in large number, often forming an indistinguishable mass, while still retaining individual detail. He also uses his high vantage points and digital manipulation to his advantage. Not good old skool photography for sure, but nonetheless incredibly arresting. I found myself staring at this photo, titled Autosalon Paris, seeking out the faces of each person and wondering about what they must have been thinking at that precise moment.

Above, Singapore’s stock exchange.

David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash

Even if L.A. in reality is a mess of tar roads and suffocating smog, it still looks like this very picture of paradise in my fantasies. An utterly clear sky, ramrod straight palm trees, a deep pool into which I have dived into. Yeah, even though the painting’s perspective is of someone standing beside the pool, I have always imagined myself to be the one who had leapt off the diving pool and escaped from the Californian heat, disappearing into the womb of water. For the record, my absolute favorite painting of all time.

Oh, the rigors of capturing an ephemeral moment: “And I loved the idea of painting this thing that lasts for two seconds; it takes me two weeks to paint this event that lasts for two seconds.”