It’s been a runaround week so I have nothing new to show. So, here’s a 5 year-old painting from my Homage period. Not quite fromage, but stinky/tasty in its own right. I was spending a lot of time revisiting & putting a spin on great paintings and painters I had admired. This is an interpretation of a Velasquez painting concerning a gentleman named Gazpar de Guzmán, the Count Duke of Olivares, Prime Minister of Spain under King Philip. I dropped a few pounds from him and his pony.
After Velasquez: Count Duke of Olivares, 2007, oil on board, 30″ x 50″
The original by Diego:
At the Davis Art Museum at Wellesley College is Radcliffe Bailey’s “Memory as Medicine” installation. quite extraordinary!!! breathtaking and deeply moving. i sat in the gallery for a long time immersing myself in this piece. truly moving. if ever it comes to your area … go! also this video is from the High Art Museum in Atlanta and they’ve many more vids about this show. i recommend having a look
radcliffe bailey ”memory as medicine” at the high art museum in atlanta
One of the many themes I’ve worked on over the years is the male figure; in particular the male back, often inspired by classical painting and sculpture. I find The heightened muscular forms and volumes of figures created by renaissance and baroque artists like Michelangelo, Bandinelli and Caravaggio great subjects for abstraction and distortion. Many of the details of figures from antiquity, when looked at with an open perspective create vast conceptual worlds of abstracted landscape and space.
Here I’m making loose color studies as an exploration for larger finished pieces. Its an exercise in balancing control and accident on the way to discovering expressive formal, emotive and metaphysical paths. I’ve included an older oil painting I created years ago in Spain as one of the first forays into this area. It was based on sketches and watercolors I had done from a sculpture of Neptune in the Piazza Signoria in Florence.
Herc, mixed media on paper, 12″ x 9″
Signoria, mixed media, 12″ x 9″
Barcelona Neptune, 1986, oil on canvas, 48″ x 36″
I’m spending a week care-taking my parents. My father Harry painted through memorial day weekend.
Harry was a reconnaissance officer in the south pacific throughout World War 2. Rarely talks about it nor his bronze star medal for bravery. He is a very special man.
His painting above. oil on board, 16″ x 20″ He may still want to tweak it a little. I think he should call it Memorial Day.
Mom and Dad.
I realized how much I miss talking painting with him and his thoughtful insight. He took a look at a painting I started months ago and gave me some valuable input on design and rhythm.
This is it:
Daughters (revise) oil on glue gesso board, 20″ x 26″
Tityus was the Greek mythological character who was put to death for assaulting a daughter of Zeus and sentenced to be eternally chained in the great pit of Tartarus, a greek version of hell, while his liver (thought to hold passionate emotion, ie, anger) was gnawed at by vultures and snakes. This story of eternal struggle and retribution is similar to the Prometheus myth and in ways to the narrative of Sisyphus. Titian apparently loved this line of metaphor; he made paintings of all of these subjects. Last year I made a monotype based on his Sisyphus.
I see existential analogies between ancient myth and the contemporary human condition and have always been intrigued by the dark gothic drama of baroque allegorical art. Here I’ve taken multiple images from allegorical paintings and overlapped them, searching for some kind of combination of grace, jaggedness and abstracted puzzlement.
As with any just completed piece I post, I’m still pondering adjustments.
Considering the connection to sclerosis and retribution, I’ve invented a new drink, The Bin Laden: 2 shots and a splash of water. (apologies to the ultra sensitive)
Thanks, I’ll be here all week. Enjoy the veal.
Tom Bennett
Weekend at Tartarus, oil on panel, 28″ x 48″
detail
detail
I haven’t been in my printshop in weeks so when I found myself with some time the other night I crawled into my basement, where the etching press is located and made some images. I used some lower grade oil paint along with the professional grade inks and came up with an almost realized print. When it was dry I went back into it with oil sticks. I’m placing it into the series of nudes I started a couple of months ago.
The Old Ruling Class 4, monotype, 20″ x16″
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Art of The Northeast
The annual regional survey “Art of the Northeast”, representing artists from New England, New York and New Jersey, is up again at The Silvermine Arts Center in New Canaan, CT. http://www.silvermineart.org/about-silvermine/directions.cfm
I have this painting in the show. It’s a take on Caravaggio’s The Crucifixion of St. Peter.
The juror this year is Tom Eccles, Executive director, Bard College, Curatorial Studies Program.
The opening is this Saturday, 4PM to 7PM
Pete’s Going Away, 2011, oil on panel, 40″ x 30″
Rubens’s Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus confronts the viewer with an interpretative dilemna. The composition illustrates the story recounted by Theocritus and Ovid of how the twin brothers Castor and Pollux (called the Dioscuri) forcibly abducted and later married the daughters of King Leucippus. Rubens’s depiction of the abduction is marked by some striking ambiguities: an equivocation between violence and solicitude in the demeanor of the brothers, and an equivocation between resistance and gratification in the response of the sisters. The energized ebullience and sensual appeal of the group work to override our darker thoughts about the coercive nature of the abduction.
I’ve decided to take this painting and place it in another ambiguous and disconnected space, distorting much of the narrative and for lack of a better cliché, recontextualizing. At this late stage it still needs some tweeking and resolution of various passages.
Tom Bennett
Sisters, oil on panel, 24″ x 30″
I’m continuing with the deconstruction and reconstruction of antique allegorical paintings. This was initially influenced by Tiepolo’s The Martyrdom of St Bartholomew. I’m concerned here with the relationship of process and the subconscious; finding the ambiguous spaces between the concrete and the obscure. At this stage it simply looks like a semi cubist painting, so I’m unsure of my feelings about it.
The support for this painting is a ready-made cradled hardboard with a texture I’m not entirely happy with. The acrylic gessoed, evenly patterned surface seems to absorb the medium too fast and too much, and the texture isn’t quite responding to the tools I’m using for mark-making. I think I’ll be returning to a little more resistant surface.
Tom Bennett
Bartholemew 3-11, 2011, oil on panel, 24″ x 18″
This week I’m posting a current stage in an ongoing metamorphosis of a painting influenced by Caravaggio’s Crucifixion of St Peter. I’m trying to find the place where the abstract marks camoflage any overt figurative narrative. I’ve been working here with oil, oil stick; a 3 part medium made of damar, turps and stand oil; and black oil medium, made with litharge. The black oil creates a really beautiful, deep and strong paint film and glaze.
I’ll be the first to admit this is a mediocre photo.
Pete’s Going Away, oil on panel, 40″ x 30″
Detail
Here’s the original Caravaggio, so he doesn’t sue me:
I left my camera down south and can’t photograph what I am currently working on. That’s just as well. So here is a piece from two years ago. It was accepted into an upcoming show at the Zullo Gallery in Medford, MA, organized by the Monotype Guild of New England.
Its a monotype inspired by André Kertész, who I’ve talked about before, and who’s beautifully distorted photographs of the female nude excited me as a young man. He used distorted mirrors to achieve the twisted form. His work subtly refers to the classic aesthetic and the same time reflects the then current developments of avant-garde thinking.
The paper was accidentally torn as the print was pulled. Here you can see it (on the bulbous hip) before I repaired it with an archival paper adhesive.
Elegy to Kertesz 2, 2009, monotype, image:12″ x 18″, framed: 23″ x 28″
I know that posting unfinished works might be seen as a tad unprofessional, a bit unheroic or at the very least a teensy weensy questionable for any number of reasons. But I don’t give a rat’s ass. I have no new finished work this week and rather than posting old stuff I’ll do the clumsy yet fun and exciting thing and put up an example of an unresolved question mark in the form of oil on board.
I apologize for the mediocre photo, but then again it is a W.I.P.
The image is informed by a Caravaggio.
At this stage the form is too narrative. I think broader abstraction will be brought in.
As a representative of the tail-ass-end of the post war natal boom cycle, I have a touch of guilt about the fact that the “me” generation sort of selfishly consumed its way toward the recent economic downturn. This painting may be about that shame. Or at the very least, the fear of not being able to consume more stuff because you’re about to get nailed to a cross.
oil on enameled board with oil stick and graphite, 30″ x 40″
Someone recently suggested these were disturbing in a Tracey Emin kind of a way. Peculiar. That is scary. I don’t know.
These may have some autobiographical connections. The first is loosely based on a Van Dyke.
Mixed media: india ink, letraset ink, graphite
Drunken Silenus 1
Drunken Silenus 2
Hermits are weirdos and kinda fun to think about. I’ve been living like one on and off for the last few weeks, that is, when I’m not being excessively extroverted. When I’m working, painting, designing, or illustrating – I’m in my hermit head.
These are two one-off prints inspired by a typically odd Rubens: “Hermit and Angelica.” The symbolism and allegory in the original is ripe with sex, potential violence and redemption. In my versions the hermit is such a cypher he’s really not there at all.
Hermit and Angelica #1, monotype, 12″ x 18″
Hermit and Angelica #2, monotype, 12′ x 18″
The Rubens:
Another homage to the classic old geniuses of antiquity. Titian was a profound influence on his contemporaries of the Italian Renaissance as well as future generations of western painters. His fluid painterly approach to mark making in oil is wonderful.
Sisyphus is of course a well-known mythological symbol of hubris being punished by eternal frustration. The constant rock carrying uphill only to see it tumble back down may be an apt sign of the current political climate in this country. I’m happily sisyphus-free myself.
Sisyphus (after Titian), monotype, 9″ x 12″
click here for the original by the old Italian:
Titian
I’m just going to continue to post both failed and successful pieces, for the essence of my process in making monotypes is aggressive but controlled experiment. These are takes on two art-historical allegorical paintings: Union of Earth and Water by Rubens, and Allegory of Fertility by Jacob Jordaens.
I ran over to MOMA ( the Museum of Modern Art, for all those neophytes) the other night and zipped right in with a membership card through the thousands of tourists and what seems like -every friday night at MOMA- a holiday weekend at JFK. I visited a great show from their Contemporary collection, and a mind-blowingly large retrospective of Henri Matisse. Among the intense range of his paintings and drawings from his years in Paris, Morocco and Nice were some monotypes which he obsessively did for several months in 1914. He made 70 that year, 10% of his lifetime total. The simple, rich, heavy, flat yet deep black with contours drawn to reveal stark white lines against said black were powerfully elegant.
I came home and played around with the black that I had drifted away from. Here is a figure I made using tools like a screwdriver, pencil, knife and razor blade. I’m also including a related but tonally very different image, one from a series made with india ink, pencil and letraset ink on paper.
Neverland 2, 2008,monotype, 14″ x 10″
Neverland 1, 2008, mixed media, ink, pencil, 11″ x 8″
I’m really sick. Some virus thing or food poisoning. Here’s a small work on paper. I call t homage to Harry, because I think there’s something about the stylization of the figure. Ok, I’m going back to sleep.
and for Michelangelo Merisi, the painter who was known as Caravaggio. His life, like his painting was big and brilliant and desperate. Filled with myth and mystery. I’m a big fan of his. Here are some studies I’ve done as homages.
Enjoy. Or if not, have a scotch.
Tom Bennett
John in the Wild #1, 2010, monotype, 12″ x 12″
The Entombment, 2010, monotype, 12″ x 12″
Father Time Overcome by Love, Hope and Beauty, after Simon Vouet. monotype, 12 ” x 12″
The first decade of the century is done, and I’m Overcome by Love, Hope and Beauty. Well, that would be a change of pace anyway. I’m deep down a sentimental romantic but I’m not looking back. Here’s a monotype based on a painting by Simon Vouet of Old Father Time himself, or Saturn as some would call him, having his self-deluding ass kicked by the symbols of power, yes, women.
A couple of more monotypes after the jump.
Agora Gallery - the proud sponsor of the Chelsea International Fine Art Competition, which offers contemporary artists the opportunity to show their original art at one the most acclaimed juried art shows in Chelsea, New York’s art galleries district.
Tom Bennett
darteboard
galinatodorova
Jason Gray
jdhastings
laelia e. mitchell
probrucer
ssstephg
Toni Tiller
