She’s off on one again
Jun.28, 2006, filed under Miscellany
One of the things that we have always lacked, Frood and I, is art. We actually have a lot of art, mostly mine, collected over the years, but mostly it’s of theRodney Matthews and fantasy Neo-Pagan style because that’s what I liked when I was about 18. Recently I’ve developed a thing for Gabriele Dell’Otto but it’s damn difficult to get hold of the stuff he does that I like (it’s a flash site: click on the navigation link at the bottom, hit ‘comics’ and click on the ‘next’ arrow 10 times where you will see a picture of Wolverine walking along the street in the rain — the first time I saw that picture I was stunned).
Last weekend I was reading a Sunday Times Magazine article about Modigliani and suddenly discovered a painter other than Turner I like. Normally I’m bowled over by use of light — that’s why Dell’Otto makes me go weak at the knees. It’s not so much what he paints but the shapes he implies with the light.
Modigliani is not my usual artistic bent. He can’t do faces. All his models look the same. But his use of texture on paintings such as this Reclining Nude and this one is exquisite. It makes me want to reach out and touch the skin.
I’m not good with faces at the best of times, and I don’t really like representations of people. Dell’Otto is so good because he just happens to be painting people I feel I recognise from Elsewhere, and so I stop trying to work out what the person should look like because I feel I know already and I can get on with enjoying the picture. Modigliani’s faces are so crude that they don’t look like people. They look like women wearing masks. Such attention has been paid to the flesh and the skin and every other aspect of their beauty, but their faces are sketched. It’s realism from the neck down.
The colours are beautiful as well. They delight my synaesthetic palette.
Hmmm. Looking through the catalogue on that poster shop it would appear that it is the reclining nudes that interest me. I don’t really like his portraits. Other than this one, which plays the same tricks with space using representations of light and colour.
Funny, really, how sometimes it seems as if, for me, sight and smell and sound are just there to create doorways into internal three-dimensional representation. Even a two dimensional piece of art ends up as an internal space that I experience by crawling around inside it and exploring its shapes and curves.
I haven’t been able to see in 3D since I was 15 months old.
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Singularity
~something that is singular as (a) a separate unit, or (b) unusual or distinctive manner or behavior; PECULIARITY;
~the quality or state of being singular;
~a point at which the derivative of a given function of a complex variable does not exist but every neighborhood of which contains points for which the derivative exists;
~a point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces and which is held to be the final state of matter falling into a black hole. Sight
