Feb 13, 2025
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Another Green World, 2015, Nicole Eisenman, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.
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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.
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