Is Painting Small the Next Big Thing? --The New York Times

This article published April 19, 2008.

"But what is marginalized can also become a form of dissent, a way to counter the prevailing arguments and sidestep their pitfalls. It is hard, for example, to work small and indulge in the mind-boggling degree of spectacle that afflicts so much art today. In a time of glut and waste on every front, compression and economy have undeniable appeal. And if a great work of art is one that is essential in all its parts, that has nothing superfluous or that can be subtracted, working small may improve the odds."

After Jackson Pollock, big size painting was fashion among painters. As an indigent young artist, this article gives me a smile.

Jacques Henri Lartigue

Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986)
French photographer and painter.
He is obsessive with cathing time as it pass.
His photographs were seen in 1962 by John Szarkowski, directer of Museum of Modern Art in New York when Lartigue was in his seventies.
Such subjects as automobile races, fashionable ladies at the seashore and the park, and kite flying, these photographs with every day subjects reveal his free spirit and love of life. Specially, those photographs capturing a sense of movement made me feel a sense of humor.

The meaning of Art

The meaning of art from "Creature Comforts" claymation.

White Angel Breadline

Dorothea Lange's "White Angel Breadline" showed the desperate conditions of jobless men during the Great Depression.

Near Lange’s studio a rich woman who was called the White Angel had set up a breadline for the hungry. A man in worn out clothes and hat was leaning against a wooden barrier and looking down. His hands were folded on top of a fence and there was a tin cup between his arms.

When she took the photograph, she had no idea what to do with it. Then more and more she gave herself to do this documentary. It turned out to be the beginning of a new phase in her career. From a protrait photorapher for rich people to a documantary photographer.

Un Chien Andalou

The famous opening scene, the full moon and a woman’s eye being cut shocked me again.

But the most intersting scene was the one with ants at this time. In Dali’s painting, "The Persistence of Memory," ants were on the pocket watch. The pocket watch with ants was not meting but the other of clocks were melting away. The ants show immortality.

In the film, another scene, a male's hand caught and was being pushed in a door. The hand waved to come out of the door, and ants in the hand began to move away from the center of the palm. Here in this part of the film, the characters looked at the ants curiously with questioning eyes. It seems to me the ants show human being's struggles about life and searching the meaning of life.

Influenced by

1.Kunisada’s print, the Series of Famous restaurants of the present day, Untitled 15x9.75,1820

2.Whistler’s painting, Arrangement in Grey and Black N.1:
The Artist’s Mother, 1872

3.White’s photograph, The Mirror, 1912

The pictures have similarities in their works.
Using the perspective of Japanese prints suggests limited depth to emphasize the position of the subject in relation to the background. All of them have picture frames or windows at the top of the work and minimized pictorial elements.

Clarence H. White was an Amerian photographer and he was a member of Photo-Secession which was the name of a group of photographers that promoted the Pictorialism, a fine-art approach to photograph. Clarence White's The Mirrior chracterized by his use of light and nonphotographic effects - tried to make a photograph look like a painting.

Whistler was influenced by Japanese prints. White was influenced by both.
Artists are always aware of other artists and inspired by them and in turn inspire others.

Alice

Here is a film "Alice" which is depressing, helpless, dark and not very cheerful by a Czech film maker, Jan Svankmajer. It presents Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in a different way. Alice is exploring a creepy, confusing and bizarre environment. The environment could be the dark place in our mind or the place where we live now.



Another film by Jan Svankmajer, "Darkness/Light/Darkness"