There was a really excellent blog - written by an evangelical Christian, actually - that took great pains to go through the first Left Behind novel chapter by chapter, explaining precisely why it was so excruciatingly badly written. I’ll try to dig up the link.
I’m with you. Pollack is fucking amazing. Fucking amazing. There are few painters than move me as much as him. Kandinsky speaks to me a bit more than Pollack, but Pollack’s work is peerless. You do have to see it in person to really appreciate it, though.
While will not take a second seat to anyone in deprecating Thomas Kincaid and all his works, I must rise to the defense of Norman Rockwell and Maxfield Parish.
Rockwell was an illustrator – a painter for hire whose purpose was to explain and exemplify a story. He never claimed to be anything else. He was also a superb technician and craftsman with an artist‘s vision. You can’t look at his painting of the US Marshals escorting a Black child or his view of a brass band practicing in the back room of a two chair barbershop or the soldier returning home to a tenement community or the multiple humorous portraits in his “flight of the rumor” pieces without conceding his mastery and artistry. He, however, came to the public eye with maybe 40 years of Saturday Evening Post covers just as the avant guard was departing from representational easel painting. That alone earned him the derision of the opinion makers in the New York City art biz and the fat cats in the art education racket.
Parish’s problem was just the opposite of Rockwell’s. He was doing something new that the old stogies in the fine arts biz didn’t care for or understand. They could accept representation, even impressionist representation, but things like the Nude Descending the Staircase in the 1913 Armory Exhibition, and Parish’s design and electric colors just drove them nuts.
Both Rockwell and Parish got a bad rap. Kinkaid has everything he gets coming to him.
Slacktivist. Thisis the best way to start out at the beginning, and get your bearings. He’s still at it, having done the movie and started on the second book. Love, love, love Fred Clark.
Anyway, more to the point, if Kincaid painted zombies, one thing is for sure - their eyes would be blazing brighter than the presumably-full hell which spawned them.
Oh, the ones from Andy Thomas (mainly a Western Art painter) are fun in their own way. (And in the Democrats’ poker game, is Bill Clinton holding most of the chips?)
Pollock was indeed a visionary at the start with his drippings much like Robert Rauschenberg was with his White Paintings series. But unlike Rauschenberg, Pollock never moved on. He continued painting the same thing over and over for the next ten years to support alcoholic lifestyle. Robert Rauschenberg continued to innovate new styles and variants thereof. I appreciate Pollock be really in the end he was a hack and a one trick pony, imo.
On a brighter note, as a fan of Pollock you might find this documentary quite entertaining: Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock? I came away not being able to decide.
I am an artist. A real one. I don’t do anything obscene or even controversial, and people like to have my work hanging on their walls. But my paintings take a long time to create, and i’m basically working for less than minimum wage. I wish I could get 1/10 of a percent of what Kinkade gets for his dreck.
I have to say, I love the one of the Republican presidents playing pool, in a sort of dogs playing poker and Elvis, Marilyn Monroe and James Dean in the Nighthawks diner sort of way.