Posts Tagged ‘Trendy’

Optimista bez otce – The Fatherless Optimist

May 19, 2020
Optimista bez otce / Der vaterlose Optimist / The Fatherless Optimist,
Optimista bez otce / Der vaterlose Optimist / The Fatherless Optimist (2020) Oil on canvas on wood, 43,2 x 30,2 cm / 17 x 11.9 inches

From the Czech-titled exhibition: Nové trendy v územním plánování (New Directions in Space Planning) – – – Please note: functionality of presentation assembly on this blog has changed. The author has stopped going with the times. If this painting is a self portrait, it depicts the author much younger and richer and happier than he ever was. Colors are not well reproduced, also, the details of how the paint was applied (loosely, rather thin, on canvas primed with the addition of lots of chalk, thick enough for the canvas structure to be neutralized) are not easily discernible. A detail view of just the face will show how much more interesting it would be to look at that painting in nature, and getting as close to it as no museum would allow for.

The Fatherless Optimist, detail

Note how lips look like either result of a bodged lip job, or as if befallen by herpes simplex and badly swollen. It means that what appears light hearted and almost cartoonish in character is actually realist, or rather, naturalist in nature, trying hard to depict the nature and the rot of actual human flesh. At the same time you find touches of graphics art or the art of illustration, like the hair, scratched in with the end tip of the brush’s handle. Is this painterly?

The 2020 painting is based on a drawing from ≈ 1994. Please see that drawing here: https://sites.google.com/site/wwwdrawings/home

© 2027 by Torsten Slama and The Optimist Society for Czech Heritage

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