dig this painter
July 20, 2008
Ann Gale
Originally uploaded by visualinventory.blogspot.com
This year I’ve discovered some new painters who I find quite moving. The first one I wanna share is Ann Gale. I saw her show in Portland this winter. Her portraits almost seem to capture something about the model’s interior. I wanna say she’s painting them from the inside out, because it all feels so unguarded.
thanks for linking to gale’s work. i’ve long been drawn to paintings that remake the world in rough pieces. partly it’s the way they can play with our perception of reality, so that i can see something as random, a cloud of noise that can also portray a person or object. squint and the underlying reality comes through – so you get this multiple layers of perception.
it helps get past the sense of unconscious familiarity in our visual world that often leads us to a type of blindness. and seeing the world through fresh eyes is one of art’s most valuable functions, in my view.
interesting that the next images on the flickr site are jenny saville – i was thinking the texture of gale’s work reminded a bit of saville’s brushstrokes.
ever seen chuck close‘s work?
i can really relate to your sense of not being where you feel you need to be, yet still working out where that is. corny phrases come to mind about the ‘end’ (as if there were such a thing) being all the more meaningful for the struggle come to mind. there’s some truth to that, i suppose. all i know is it’s a process. i resist the magical thinking i was instilled with as a kid (the idea of our lives as on some meaningful course), yet i come back to it over and over. perhaps it’s just that we are meaning-making machines after our long species level evolution, but whatever the cosmic truth, getting there will make you the person you need to be to appreciate it. the randomness of the world tells me that’s an illusion, but my experience tells me it’s one of the truest things i know in life.
man, that was some excellent commentary, pep. i’ve been so hungry for serious and grown up art (and i know these are not the best terms). finding gale and saville, plus this other guy i’m going to link to tomorrow, has been incredibly gratifying. i’d love to see saville in person in aprt b/c she works on such a grand scale.
funny you should ask about close b/c i saw a show on his process the same day i saw the gale exhibit. i think his process is fascinating for sure, but i’m not moved by his work. whereas, i had to sit with gale for a while. something about the humanity she captures nearly made me cry.
bring on all the corny phrases you can can. i’m so grateful for the thoughts and insight. we both know there’s not an ‘end’, but at the same times some places fit better. i do agree about the process of getting there, wherever that is, and how it’s meaningful. of course, once there, then it will be the process of being there, staying there. never easy. i dunno that randomness is mutually exclusive to making meaning and the journeys we take to do that. i love that human beings are meaning making machines, even if it’s often all a big ass mess. i love that we talk about ideas like cosmic truth. i love the aspirational part of it all as long i can remember it’s all practice. there is no there there.
thanks
– looking at what i wrote again i see mainly a thicket of trying to cover every base, plus repetition (‘come to mind’). commenting, too, is practice.