OK, what can you say about Goya that has not been said? His etchings are incredible, its even hard to experience them first hand because as an artist you have seen them reproduced hundreds of times before you can examine them in real life.
The AGO has tried to help you! They present a folio of the "Los Caprichos which has been hand tinted by a collector, seriously? WTF. This is just silly. It chromatically works better with Gillray but that is not the idea here. The work is changed and it is hard to appreciate the fine line work and Aquatints when they are presented like Ted Turner has caca'd all over the damn things.
Gillray's work is really terrific, he shows you the other side of how the United Kingdom saw the narrative of the French Revolution, instead of the shirking off the oppression of the Monarchy, you have a sense of the fear of the reign of terror.
And then there is Larry the mensch, beset by demons on all sides.
Anne Hathaway is getting the over zealous nerd-jock role down pat, James Franco is just seeming invisible. We caught a glimpse of Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin dancing together but the Academy switched screens to focus on Penelope Cruz for a super long shot. And lastly, everyone is kissing the Academy's ass.
What happened to the days of a native woman saying Marlon Brando cannot accept this award.
Man, people do something interesting!!!
Look at Roger Moore, how the hell was anyone to believe he was James Bond? he has no idea idea what to do, what a lame duck.
As a result, here we are loading some pictures onto my blog, the Oscars are just too painful, where the hell is Ricky Gervais? He should have been flown in to save the day after the painful opening scene.
Billy Crystal came out for a bit and you could hear the collective sigh of relief, everyone could at least have a few laughs.
So here is a couple of sketches from some work that is on the sketchbook at the moment.
As you can see with the above image, it plays off of Goya's print, Wonderful Heroism! Against Dead Men! from his series, Disasters of War. I was thinking about heroism and the ideas of manhood. As with previous work, I am using the GI Joe dolls of the 1970s as a representation of the aging adult male. Contrasted to this paragon of self doubt are female characters drawn from Penthouse magazines from the same era, I have quite a stack of mint issues from the early to late 70s.
Anyways, here is the print from the Disasters of War by Goya, this series is powerful and macabre as, well really, most of his later work. I am reading Robert Hughes book on him right now.
This a version by those tools, the chapman brothers. These 2 Brits are called bad boys, but bad only if you consider making horribly obvious work that beats you over the head and makes you think Oliver Stone is subtle. Then these to ponces are radical. They made this stupid sculpture back in the late 1990s which was dreadful and I was so happy to read it was consumed in a fire when a warehouse belonging to Saatchi went up. Good riddance!
These watercolours sketches are studies for my upcoming show at Loop Gallery with Larry Eisenstein, the amazing artist. Right now I'm working out the details of this imagery.
Man, I look up at the Oscars, it bombs full stop!
By the way, here is the website of Sacheen Littlefeather, the woman who spoke on Brando's behalf. No one knows what happened to that Oscar award by the way.
I'm a Toronto based visual artist, painting and photography is what I'm about these days. My posts are about my ongoing work, what inspires me and reflections on our culture.
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