You did this wrong. You have to start the thread, let the rest of us put up some shitty garbage we have on our walls, then put us all to shame.
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That’s great! Love it.
Edit: posted before reading any of your family personal stuff. I just love the painting.
I grew up in a fishing village off west of Scotland. As teenagers, my brother and I would deliberately go sailing in a 15’ dinghy (half ton old thing tho’, so fairly stable) when the gales came through. The sea would look like that. Gotta get kicks somehow when you’re a kid in the remote boring nowhere.
You’re paintings totally evocative of that!
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Good idea for a thread. My wife loves to hang art and our walls have a ton of it so when I get a chance I’ll post some of it (I also like art but don’t mind bare walls).
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Nah, there is no shitty garbage so long as you care about what you hang. … The only thing I really don’t like is when people hang something just to fill the space, just because it matches something else.
I’m really curious about how people decide what to put on their walls, how they found the pieces that really speak to them.
I was really just giving you props, you have good taste. So do a lot of others, but yours was interesting and unique.
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Occasionally I see something and think that looks cool, other times I see something and think that is gross but most of the time I see a painting or picture I don’t have any thoughts about it at all. I guess the ones I think look cool are speaking to me?
My wife likes to paint so we have a few of her paintings up in our main room and as a joke I put up a picture in the hallway that I painted when we did a drink wine and paint class but that’s about it for the house.
Like someone else said I don’t mind bare walls, we have a very minimalist vibe in our house, neither of us like clutter and random stuff sitting all over shelves and tables.
I think it’s awesome when people hang their own work up. It’s this sign they reallt find joy in it, and that is has value for them. … And hey, wine-painting stuff included? Clearly some good vibes came out of the class.
I think, on the idea of art “speaking” to us, what you descrive seems right. Maybe we all have wider ranges of different responses.
Thanks a lot, she would appreciate that a lot. She was actually a great artist and could have probably made a career of it (she never worked afaicr). Later in her life she switched to watercolor as a medium, which is insanely difficult. But she’d make these super realistic landscape portraits using it. I let my sisters have those - I like this darker painting because it’s so different than her other stuff.
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A couple of years ago, Steadman released a large print of another image from Fear and Loathing, priced at $5,000. It seemed like they had trouble selling, based on ebay listings. This artist proof came up for a pure auction and sold for $2,750 this week, so that’s an interesting data point.
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I have this one:
I like raw Miro art because I use it to judge people when they say stuff like “my kid could paint that.”
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I’m not trying to be facetious, this is a genuine question by an ignorant person. What is interesting about that painting? What distinguishes it from something a child would do? Is there some crazy technique involved or is it more cerebral than that? I often just don’t get it.
Yeah good question. The biggest thing to me is that a child didn’t do it. Miro did it. Karens say stuff like “my kids could have painted that” but her kids didn’t paint that, and even if they did, no one would see it or put it in a museum or pay $26,000,000 for it. Karen’s kids don’t have a body of work that was deemed to be a significant piece of art history by their contemporaries and historians. Her kids aren’t part of a movement. They aren’t exploring theoretical ideas like gas sculpture and 4D painting or receiving honorary doctorates in art. Also, her kids are late to the party because he did most of this shit from 50 to 100 years ago.
When you watch the NBA Finals, if you think to yourself “I could have made that free throw” you would be absolutely correct. But you didn’t and never will because one does not simply teleport into the game and shoot one free throw–it takes decades of training and performance to even get into that situation. So Miro was in that situation, and he could have Xeroxed his ass and sold out the edition. LeBron has made tens of thousands of free throws in his lifetime. Here’s the same thing but with printmaking:
If the Spanish artist is remembered principally as a painter, it’s worth pointing out that his artistic curiosity wasn’t satisfied by oil on canvas alone. Over a seven-decade career, he also worked in sculpture, ceramics, tapestry and, most prolifically, prints.
Like Pablo Picasso, his compatriot and peer, Miró had an unwavering commitment to printmaking. Also like Picasso, he created more than 2,000 works in the medium. It’s often said that Miró’s fondness for calligraphic lines — such a distinctive feature of his paintings — lent itself naturally to graphic work.
‘In terms of both the quality and quantity of his output, Joan Miró was one of the most important printmakers of the 20th century,’ says Murray Macaulay, Head of Prints at Christie’s in London.
I like to say that talent in modern art is invisible to a lot of people. It’s true in other areas too (e.g., business, music, politics) but definitely in art where the end result isn’t something that would obviously require a ton of technical ability and training like the classical paintings. That’s not to say all modern art is good (it isn’t). However, people seem to incorrectly associate artistic talent with the ability to render realism. If you look through Miro’s portfolio though, it should be fairly obvious that he wasn’t just some hack doing crayon scribbles. For example, these are some early works:
As for the prints that look like scribbles on white paper, they have a few things going on that I can see. First, it’s sort of like that particular style is its own universe. He made a lot of works like that and they look like part of a series or collection that follow the same rules. Second, I can clearly see these stylistic elements (in this order): abstract expressionism, dadaism, fauvism, surrealism. Like pretty much all great art, his work is all of his influences mixed in a blender and served as a delicious art smoothie.
He had this to say:
The spectacle of the sky overwhelms me. I’m overwhelmed when I see, in an immense sky, the crescent of the moon, or the sun. There, in my pictures, tiny forms in huge empty spaces. Empty spaces, empty horizons, empty plains – everything which is bare has always greatly impressed me.
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Awesome post! Thanks so much for making it.
There’s something about printmaking that I love. Maybe the accessability. Or that interesting space between “one of a kind” and “mass produced.” In 2005 I saw this exhibit of Toulouse-Lautrec work at the National Gallery in D.C. The show was fantastic overall but it ended in this circular room where multiple prints of one image were displayed.
I think there were 14 in total, brought together from collections all over the world. The image is “Miss Loïe Fuller,” 1893, a color lithograph. It was fantastic to see the subtle and not-subtle differences in the prints, and to think they’d all come from the same place, spread out, and then come back together for that show.
The catalog is here.
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This massive woodblock was done by a friend of mine. It’s about 50 inches wide. I try to support local artists and people I know. … this thing is so big and heavy I’m afraid to hang it on the walls.
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Thanks for making this post and taking the time to explain it. I was mostly talking about the scribble paintings. I was reading about that kind of style and read they actually do just kind of scribble mindlessly. I guess I just don’t understand the appeal, but if it makes you feel something, then I suppose that’s good art. It doesn’t do much for me though. The paintings you linked, I really like and think are cool.
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Sounds like abstract expressionism. It really is just trying to express emotion spontaneously through form and color. Color field painting (Rothko) is very similar in that regard, i.e., expression through color without depictions of objects or scenes. The best analogy I can think of is probably improvisational jazz, especially bebop. Not only are they aligned contemporaneously but also philosophically: from emotion directly and spontaneously to sound; from emotion directly and spontaneously to visual form and color.
A lot of it is scribble but I find artistic value in some of it. For example, here are some more Miro scribbles:
I really dig these above. They are simply pleasing to me and have slightly different attitudes or personalities for lack of a better explanation. They are chaotic in linework yet balanced in overall form and harmonious in color down to the warm tone of the paper. If I had to convert bebop from sound to a 2D visual image, this would be a good translation. I find them less intense than the ones below with harder geometry and more contrasty color:
https://www.bukowskis.com/en/auctions/612/597-joan-miro-portfolio-je-travaille-comme-un-jardinier-9
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Also, if you ever want to dig deep into the mind of one of these abstract expressionists, I recommend this absolutely wacko book I have here next to me:
Kandinsky develops his theory in a peculiar language, where geometrical, physical, aesthetic, and spiritual concepts coexist naturally. This so-called synesthetic text is not just academic theorization, but observations and conclusions supported by experience of a reputable artist. Kandinsky reflects on creating “the science of art” or “artistic science”. As for practical application, the artist’s paintings displayed today in museums are his true scientific experiments.
Allocating art as an independent world existing along with nature, Kandinsky expresses his confidence that these two worlds will eventually find common rules of the “world composition”, elaborating the great world order of the external and the internal.
This is exactly what I meant before when I said:
I see these works sort of like fictional universes with their own rules and world physics, not unlike other creative works of fiction like The Simpsons or whatever. I mean you would never mistake The Simpsons for Aeon Flux just like you wouldn’t mistake classic Miro for Jackson Pollock.
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Do you guys like space art? I really like space but I’m having trouble finding some good pieces worth hanging up.
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