Paint to Reality

From Arles, to Vienna, to Auschwitz

The Neue Gallerie in New York has an exhibition entitled: Van Gogh and Expressionism. German expressionism has always struck me as a narcissistic resignation to the evils of the world. And for all of Van Gogh's earnestness, he certainly showed a more restrained resignation that surely influenced the expressionists, who let it escape uninhibitedly.

I couldn't help but make these juxtapositions. Or better yet, the logical conclusion.


Van Gogh's Bedroom at Arles (detail), Vincent Van Gogh, 1889


Schiele's Room in Neulengbach (detail), Egon Schiele, 1911


Auschwitz Barracks

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Optical Art

Viewer Participation

Bridget Riley, To a summer's day, 1980

Unlike Conceptual Art, Optical Art, or Op Art, is really concerned about engaging the viewer. Various straight, concentric and undulating lines are used to create various types of illusions, the most important of which is movement. Color is also often used to manipulate these illusions.

A. Kitaoka, Brownian Motion, 2004

I don't think Op Art creators are as pretentious as Conceptual Artists. Firstly, there is quite a high degree of skill and knowledge required to make Op Art. Secondly, the goal is really to amuse, or at least to engage, the viewer. Unlike Conceptual Artists, who really work in their own vacuum and dogged seriousness, an Op Art piece only works if the viewer responds accordingly, and usually with surprise and pleasure.

The charm of Op Art is that it also is used often in fabrics.


Success has a real concrete definition.

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Imaginary Space

The Paintings of Christian Artist Thomas Kinkade

The Evangelical Outpost Blog has a very interesting post on famous Christian artist Thomas Kinkade.

While browsing through the links (and further comments) this post describes what I've identified as the problem with imagined space.

There is a new crop of painters who use a variety of images, many of which they don't draw or paint 100% (I suspect there is a lot of tracing going on and that copy machines and computer downloads are quite active), to create these non-existent places.

I think Kandinsky was aiming for such non-existent places in his vaguely familiar, abstracted paintings. They remind us of something (an animal, a plant, a city?) but we're at a loss to say what.


Kandinsky, Compostition VIII, 1923

Of course, these artists forfeit the long-established perspective drawings, proportions, realistic colorings, and even coherent themes and stories in order to bring us their utopias (or dystopias).


Kristine Moran, Checkpoint, 2005

From a commenter called 'Lizzie' on Kindade's art posted at Hollywood Jesus News Blog:

At first glance, [Kinkade's]subjects look well drawn, realistically rendered, and believably three-dimensional--what one would expect from any art school graduate…I found misaligned perspectives, awkward proportions, inexplicable light sources, and strange juxtapositions of architecture and landscape. His scenery has no relationship to geographical reality…His churches are buried in deep forests and hover at the edge of swamps, without paths, their front doors, blocked by streams that in any remotely real geography would immediately flood the buildings… I find it especially telling in the painting of the nature churches, where there seems to be no way for any human to access the church itself. One is cut off by dense forests, giant mountains, and rivers… Where people are depicted they are awkward, stick-like and blurred: unspecific, faceless figures, barely three dimensional and lacking the color, depth, weight, movement, that he gives inanimate objects…Professional artists spend years trying to capture the human body... In almost all of his paintings the parts do not fit together naturally… This general mismatching is patched over with the stippled points of light and deliberately brilliant colors to create an artificially uniform effect.

Thomas Kinkade, Streams of Living Water

Now, an interesting question would be: "Why would a 'Christian' artist spend so much time creating his utopia (heaven, paradise?) on earth?"

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