🖼️
Sonja Sekula has been absolutely neglected in my opinion. & it has a lot to do with her particular intersection as a queer & mentally ill woman in the crowd of abstract expressionists. I adore this painting and I will never forgive the MoMA for taking it off view.
It's essentially a landscape of collaged and colliding interiors and exteriors, full of faces and people and one very charming little mouse carrying a snack. Every time I look at it I find a color or figure that I didn't see before.
Here’s a link to an essay about it just months into the pandemic.
Jul 28, 2024
Related Recs
Milton Avery, Bathers, Coney Island, 1934, oil on canvas
the first time i saw this painting in the Portland art museum, walking through the American art section with my free student ticket, i think i hated it a little. it was weird and the colors were queasy and i probably could have painted it myself.
well, i guess it grew on me over the next dozen of visits, because now i have to pay $20 to enter the museum and this is one of my favorite paintings ever. there’s something so unconsciously skillful about it to me, and extremely funny, as if the painter put me in on a joke. i even bought a museum postcard of it from eBay and framed it on my wall. on a particularly bad day in San Francisco i found myself in the de Young museum in Golden Gate Park, and the sight of another Milton Avery painting brought me to tears like i had encountered a close friend. Avery lived a fairly quiet life; he didn’t find success as a painter until later in life. when he did, he wasn’t particularly financially successful. but he created art every day and taught his daughter to do the same, he used color and shape in strange and oddly transformative ways, and he had a friendship with Mark Rothko, a fellow Portland native who i admire very much, that consisted of long nights of tea and talking.
how does any of this relate to how much i love this painting? maybe i just saw it enough times during a transformative period of my life. but i love it for its vague impressions of hot dog vendors, and tough but tender hearted italian dudes, and a working class new-york dream, and imperfect people enjoying themselves at the beach regardless of the queasiness and horrors of everyday life, regardless of strange shadows and monkey people. i love it for being so weird and progressive for 1930 and kind of goth and surreal. i hope you love strange paintings too, but if you don’t, that’s alright.
Jan 30, 2025
cutieful painting i saw by dana schutz ::
Schutz painted this emotionally charged composition as part of a group of subjects she called "self-eaters," imaginary characters who have the power to regenerate by consuming portions of their own bodies. In part, such a hallucinatory narrative might represent an analogue or allegory of painting itself, a practice that artists continue to reimagine through both regurgitation and reinvention. Here, Schutz brings into being two subjects with mask-like heads who, in her words, are "sort of consoling each other," or else "trying to feel what the other one is doing." Evoking touch rather than sight might contradict the notion that painting is a purely visual medium, but Schutz’s work appears both optically charged and sculpturally formed, constructed of worlds within worlds.
Jan 30, 2024
Just read this essay by Olivia Laing in her book "Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency"about the painter Sargy Mann. He progressively lost his sight towards the end of his life, and when he couldn't barely see anymore he produced these beautiful set of paintings of people in between leaving the pool and going inside this little sitting room. His debilitated sight made him focus a lot more on the blocks of colour, that are so vibrant they scream on the paintings, even when seeing them through a computer screen.
Jan 25, 2024
Top Recs from @florinegrassenhopper
⏰
No screen Sundays. If I want to listen to music its CDs or radio. If I want to watch a movie, no I don’t. If I want to see a friend, I will make plans with them on Friday or Saturday to meet up. As a result, I read more, write more, and sit with questions like “did Citizen Kane‘s 50 year winning streak in the Sight and Sound critics choice survey end in 2012 or 2022? When did Stephen Merritt come out? Whats the etymology of Whitsun?“
This is something that I have practiced off and on for many years but I’ve been doing it every week since December and I love the way that it just allows me one day of true freedom and rest.
Jan 22, 2025
Mar 3, 2025
My calendar this year has 52 of these week at a glance pages but I don’t think that way. So, I've been inspired by Ross Gay’s Book of Delighs to start recording the little moments and sensations that bring me joy throughout the day. An analog pi.fyi, if you will.
heres some of what I have so far:
- Waking up to the sound of my upstairs neighbor‘s footstep. It sounded nostalgic. Felt like company.
- Strawberry jam
- feeling tender for strangers: their lips, nail colors, their small wrists. Thinking of all the lives we hold gently.
- A young girl bought an LP at the bookstore just before I left. She stroked its cover with love
- Green tiles —the mint shade always makes me think of Jancie
- Charlie’s little bop and punch dancing to some German language punk
- lunch with Katherine, curry Brussels sprouts
- small talk at the photo studio. The photographer's brother was named after their dad, stole his identity, bought jet skis.
Jan 13, 2025